Che the motorcyclist

For quite some time I wanted to read "The motorcycle diaries" by Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I am not a fan of Che, too many people were killed around him and by him, that I would like anything about him, but by an old Marxist maxime, it is good to know the enemy.

To be just, Che, or what he was involved in, I would not think the worst thing in the world, at his time. It was definitely more moral doing than what his opponents were doing. And, also, I respect the fact that he died the way he lived. He did not dodge, become worthless politycal shit-mouth only, but actually died doing what he considered right thing to do.

The book itself is a short text worth reading, as a first-hand raport from the places which at the time he visited them, were not exactly the touristic attraction.

The title is a bit misguiding, as he and Alberto made in fact less than half of the trip by motorcycle, the rest was ship, boats, a raft, lorries which they hitch-hiked...the title should be "A tramp's diary".

Thanks to the fact that they travelled with minimum finances, the trip became a school of life-there is no better school than getting to know the bottom of the ladder. Keen observer, Ernesto noticed things which would not be noticed by some fatty brain of some ordinary tourist.

He lived only 15 years after the trip, then he was killed.

Obviously what he saw, what he learned on this trip was important to him... important enough to go and invest his life (and lives of others) into the idea.

Who are we to judge? South America, Africa, were batttlefields at those days, battlefields of ideologies, visions... I am not certain that the taken course brought us closer to happiness for the peoples of both those continents, but my uncertainty is that of an armchair observer. Che was a participant and a creator of one viable option. Which, eventually, lost, and we got a rabies of rabbis, priests, imams and mullahs instead. In package with suicide bombers at age 7-77, refugee crises and USA becoming a 3rd world country. Russia becoming an agressor in wish to make others even poorer capitalists than they already are. China becoming the wealthiest communist party in the world, leading the largest rampant capitalistic economy in the world.

Really an advance?

In this book one can also see a child, like there is one in every of us. What becomes of a child, depends on so many things. But one is admirable: this child went for an adventure, lived it, learned from it. Parents of today should remember to relax their love-ties a bit, not to cripple the new generation.

Recommendable read, indeed.

A Small Courtyard

I wrote in http://mikidkolan.blogspot.com/2007/12/literature-without-borders-milan.html about a Serbian writer Milan Jovanović.

His recent book, from 2012, "Malo dvorište" ("A small courtyard") is an interesting historical detective story. Located on the mountainous Balkans, Serbia proper, at 13th century. Story happens in a small monastery in which are placed, in fact detained, daughters, wives or widows of Serbian royal families, which are for some reason unconvenient or dangerous for the family or the kingdom.

Jovanovic tells of escape of some of the detainees, and unexpected plots around seemingly static places and situations.

In the narrative method Jovanovic returned to the method of his debut, the novel with the similar topic, "Monk". In both novels the story is told through relations of the participants, building the story that way. Very successful, probably because such a narrative corresponds to the historical context, and evokes something of the slowness with which the information was transmitted in the Medieval times.

In an anthology edition, which Jovanovic's works will surely once obtain, "Monk" and "A small courtyard" will form a couple that would not shame any literature.

One does not often find stories told with so much genuine feeling ... it seems as if the writer spent decades in Hilandar, Serbian monastery at the Greek Holy mountain, Atos, that he would be able to tell the story in such a way.

Shortness - both novels are only about 100 pages - adds brevity resembling rather the Zen Buddhism than Orthodox eloquence and lavishness - but wisdom is transmitted in a short, not overflowing form, and Jovanovic knows this very well.

Je suis Charlie

"Will you please be quiet, please?" - more Carver

It is perfectly clear why this first of Carver's collection of short stories attracted attention. It is as mind-gripping as I described two posts back, when writing about "Cathedral", maybe even a bit more.

The titular story, which is the last in the collection, is really a masterpiece. It is a story about an ordinary couple. Everything was going maybe too smooth for them, and there is a problem with one outing of the wife few yeaars ago, which was an infidelity. It is obviously a thorn in the body of otherwise happy marriage, and it is revealed in a seemingly unnecessary manner, during a relaxed family day at home. Is it a call to sobriety, reminder that nothing in the world is as it seems? Or just a sign of rotting human flesh, which eats human happiness? I would not opt for this, as I think that such happiness is not real at all, that it is more often just a blindness, voluntary or involuntary. And I would not think what happened immoral or anything, rather a natural thing. But definitely not something what should happen, or be revealed, in a happy marriage.

Small scenes from life of ordinary people, which held me more tense than any chainsaw-massacre movie (I would leave such a performance, anyway) makes that I will probably not go deeper into Carver's writing soon. But I hail him as, indeed, a novel voice in American writing of the 2nd part of the XX ct. Almost every paragraph holds a screenplay for some Lynch' movie.

Through the writing I see, however, the writer being not only a spectator, but a participant of the show he is writing about: in his meek writing I find he is often humiliated, frightened, not at ease with the surrounding world. Also with the inside world of his heroes-no, characters, they are not possible to be described as heroes.

Carver taught me another dimension of writing. It still has to settle in me, but it is to stay, definitely. Thanks!

Henry Miller as a Technician of the Beautiful

In "The air-conditioned nightmare" Miller is giving us a disarray of his emotions and impressions when he returned to USA from Europe at the start of the WWII. From the very beginning he gives to know that the return was not an easy venture; he had to re-learn his own country.

Having made a similar comeback myself recently, from Asia to Europe, I could sympathize with this keen observer of a world. It is somewhat ironical fact that I did a shift an ocean eastwards, having in mind his idolatry of the Chinese and the East, but feelings are compatible. Not in content, but in reflections they awoke.

Most Millerian treat is that the book is NOT what it promised to be: he could not find anything worth recording during his trip. Everything disgusted him-and more so as he was ready to enjoy, feast on the Return, discovery...there was nothing to discover, only a vasteland of Humanity.

Yet, he produced a memorable tome of memories of America Lost, which is a pleasure to read, an agreeable companion to the Hemingway and Orwell impressions from Paris and London, which it followed in my readings.

I love his start with a citation from Vivekananda, which is setting the stage for the anonimity of his heros. Artists are the only recognizable patterns on the soil of America, and they are like rare birds, in danger of extinction. Others are regulars, tramps, or just an illusion: "The fat, puffy, wattle-faced man of forty-five who has turned assexual is the greatest monument to futility that America has created. He's a nymphomaniac of energy accomplishing nothing. He's a hallucination of the Paleolithic man." Or: "Most of the young men of talent whom I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented. Why shouldn't they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas, living with food and drink maniacs, success-mongers, gadget innovators, publicity hounds."

Sounds familiar? What would Henry Miller say about celebrity culture we suffer today? I think he would say nothing, he would follow Hemingway, and right so.

"The american way is to seduce a man by bribery and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into submission and make a hack of him."

There is a hope: only yesterday I heard from an American expat that maybe it is not so bad that USA is turning the 3rd world country, as maybe it will put the people there back to senses, turn them away from the utilitarian paradigm in which they are living. A refreshing thought, but it is painful to see it has to go through such transformations from the very times described by Miller.

The worse is that Europe is trotting, as usual, 10 years behind America. We still think digital watches (or, today, iWatches) are a good idea...

Carver: Cathedral of everyday life

Raymond Carver himself comes to me late. Not being a great fan of certain parts of American prose, his "Cathedral" needed 45 years to make it to me. Maybe better so, as after H. Miller and J. Kerouac I can appreciate it more.

When the two above mentioned writers worked for me by their description of a part of the population of States which seems more interesting to me, in a collection of short stories "Cathedral", Carver hits with his decription of a non-descript America. It seems at the beginning like writing a screenplay for "Barbie and Ken" animation, but after a few sentences, it starts to catch the attention by its ...pregnance.

Exactly this is the word, as he is able to make a story of something what could be a midwest scene: a perfectly normal home visit to a co-worker. Two couples meet at the home-ground of one of them. Really not promising great entertainment. But Carver holds the reader's attention by ...what, exactly? Nothing great is happening there, nothing bad, too. Just a bit edgy way of description, which almost forced me to put the book aside. I almost expected someone to pull the axe and make a mess in the living-room. It is obvious that I am not watching TV for decades, so I am out of habit to participate in other people's "normal" lives without feeling intimidated. Yes, the way Carver bite into it is alike to a (good) sitcom. Out of such staff came Lynch and alike.

I read somewhere that he'd had a following in Europe in 1970-ies, that many writers started seeing the word in his terms. Yes, I could imagine this, a deserved kick in the ass to overly "artistic" or "philosophical" Europe. Or, as R.M. Pirsig, another of Americans I really like, would say (in "Lila"): philosophying.

I will continue digging into this writer.

Orwell in Paris and London

In my reading through the experiences of people who touched down in Paris, I came to Orwell, who in his "Down and out in Paris and London" really touched the base. Of life, that is.

Poor fella' was so ripped of money in 1920-ies that he, unwillingly, had a chance to experience being among the debased, paupered citizens of those two urban molochs. Investigative, as he was, he made it into a learning experience, learning not about being poor, but about his human fellows.

Often he would offer his practical insight, which undoubtedly should be branded as a leftist one, but a real humanistic, not some brainwashed aparatchik leftist mind. Go you Marxists and learn!

When in Paris he was trying to earn his money by any job which he could find, in London he was waiting for a promised job and had to go penniless for weeks. In Paris he worked down to the cellars of a hotel as a dish-washer, and learned why we should not be frequenting in fancy restaurants, and in London he tried how it is to be a regular tramp, spending nights with the poor tribesmen of the city in a "spike" or any somilar place to which a common London tramp was forced by law. Orwell is not only critical, he gives a practical advise how the things should be improved.

Orwell wrote this text in a very plain writing. I saw recently some poor soul wasting electrons to prove Orwell was not a good writer, exactly because of this style. I ould not less agree with the critic. Enough is to say that I did not care to read, or want to read, any of the blood-sweated word of that poor critic, although he seemed to be a writer of some success. But to Orwell I myself, and in fact many, many people, return quite often with even larger admiration in repeated reading. It might be true he was not an "innovative" writer of a class of Miller or Carver, but then, he never wanted to be such. Orwell was giving a true picture of the world in most of his works, and when he ventured into imaginative world, he was not far from truism about some of the places on Earth at his time. And so much more about (all too) many countries a bit later after his time. If anything, his writings stand the test of time.

It was a shocking realization that many of the effects of being poor, underfed, hopeless about obtaining a job, and hopelessly outcast from the society, seemed so much familiar to me. If anything, I do know what he means by living on 2 slices of bread and a margarine, my comment was only "wow, rich were those Paris tramps, they had a margarine!". I slept on the train station floors or benches and spent not one winter night in search for a not too exposed corner to spend night in wait for a morning train, without money for any lodging. This was only a mild, passing experience... but enough to understand all too well what Orwell was writing about here. He did a fair, very fair job.

As I opened the next book to read, it was written 20 years later, and the writer just decided to travel around US after return from Europe which just started the WWII. He is also a pennyless writer, but he was donated some money and his experience (in Pittsburgh) is thoroughly different:

"I am in a small, supposedly comfortable room of a modern hotel equipped with all the last conveniences. The bed is clean and soft, the shower functions perfectly, the toilet seat has been sterilized since the last occupancym uf I am to believe what is printed on the paper band which garlands it; soap, towels, lights, stationery, everything is provided in abundance.

I am depressed, depressed beyond words. If I were to occupy this room for any length of time I would go mad-or commit suicide."

It is like a direct inversion of sickly dirty, unsanitary world described by Orwell. But he did not mention a word "depression" one, and there was no, in fact, any time when a tramp would have time to be "depressed". What a luxury! World really fared a lot in that 20 years from the shackles of the Great war to the Dawn of the Brave New World! We today are underestimating the power of Change. It is upon us even more than it was upon those guys. Beware, the world is spinning much faster nowadays!