Edmondo De Amicis...

...writes on page 32 of his travel book Constantinople [published in 1877; I quote here from the 2005 Hesperus Edition, translated by Stephen Parkin], "to describe great things you must be at a distance from them, and to remember them well, you must have forgotten them a little first." The "great thing" that he is referring to here is Constantinople itself. De Amicis can't process his first sight of the Turkish city, let alone describe this first impression to the reader. He finds that not only can language not help him communicate what he sees, but he is unsure exactly what it is that he is seeing.

As his boat approaches the city, he is momentarily frustrated that his initial view will be spoiled by the fog that has enveloped the Sea of Marmara; but the fog slowly lifts, almost on cue, unveiling the city piecemeal to the eager eyes of De Amicis. So works the mechanism of fog...

Jules

Sometime toward the end of the nineteenth century, De Amicis traveled to Amien, France to visit the great Jules Verne, author of the fictional travel book Around the World in 80 Days and scores of other books. You can read De Amicis's account of his visit

here.

Despite their relative nearness in age -- De Amicis died in 1908 in his early 60s. Verne died in 1905 in his mid 70s -- De Amicis here seeks Verne out as an elder sage, and this trip is more of a pilgrimage than anything else. He unabashedly approaches Verne to elicit some creative secret, to gain some elixir of genius. And in an interesting way, he does.

When De Amicis first sees Verne, we get the conventional disorientation of the young enthusiast meeting their hero for the first time, as he tries to bring the fantasy of Verne the genius and the reality of Verne the man into focus. But that foggy disorientation passes as Verne talks about his writing habits. De Amicis writes:

Contrary to what I had thought, he does not first imagine the characters and facts of he novel he is to write, and then begin to make investigations into one or more countries for his scene of action. On the contrary he reads up the history and geography of the countries first, just as if he intended to do nothing else than describe them fully and minutely. His characters, the leading facts and episodes of his story, rise up in his mind during the reading, which is really an object in itself and not a mere means to acquire useful notes for his book.The reading of books on foreign countries is, it appears, Verne's true object, not the stories he creates about them. It's as if the stories serve no purpose but to knit the facts together in a useful way, so they won't be forgotten.

This may seem an odd description of Verne if you have read any of his globetrotting novels. Countries are often so much backdrop, as, for example with 80 Days, where characters have more important things on their minds then stopping off and going native, and where technology has as its main goal the eradication of space, trouble, and all but the most obvious differences between people.

But as De Amicis learns more about the man whom he knew only through books and reputation, he finds that even the reading of books on these countries was not Verne's true object as he had first guessed, but rather a means to a much more ambitious, and, in its way, poignant end:

In regard to the choice of countries which are to be the scenes of his romances he is guided by an idea I was very far from anticipating. His intention is to describe the whole earth in his books and he goes from region to region in a certain redetermined order, not retracing his steps unless through necessity, and then as quickly as possible. He still has many parts of the world left, and has estimated the number of stories he must still write in order to fill out his entire plan. “Shall I have time for them all?” he asked, smiling.

I once taught Verne's Around the World in 80 Days in a course on Cultural Studies, where I was focusing on the twentieth century travel book, in which these writers' goals were much more modest: to diagnose a particular political situation; to understand how the past overlays the present; to find out the cause of war... I thought it would be a lark to start with Verne, and I made some points about technology and fantasy, not realizing at the time the sheer scope of Verne's ambition.

I was in the book store the other day and I saw a new biography of Verne. I browsed through it while standing there and noted the lack of De Amicis's name in the index; but I may get it anyway, because I would like to learn more about Verne than I now know. It was interesting to see how De Amicis's thoughts of Verne were clarified as he talked with him and as Verne answered questions about the secret of his craft, as the fog of unknowing dispelled to reveal Verne's city-hungry mind.

The Brooklyn Book Festival

A few weeks ago at Borough Hall in downtown Brooklyn, right near where all the lettered subways hub into a jumbled commuter's alphabet-- the C, the R, the A, and M trains -- the Brooklyn Book Festival was held.

It occupied the space usually taken up by the weekly farmer's market, which found itself as a result amidst the diesel fumes of the nearby busstops.

All the Little Presses were hawking their latest titles through catalogues and business cards. Though the festival operated as much by word of mouth as by the printed word, as the news of books spread orally, through a campaign of "did you see that book with the...?"

Some of the Big Presses had their territory staked out too: St Martin's was there, as was Oxford. Those displays were glossier, their reps more knowing, and they attracted the biggest crowds. But this was nonetheless a day for the small guy.When I first heard of the Brooklyn Book Festival earlier that day, I assumed it would be a place where small bookstore owners or even the general public would be selling used books, and I kicked myself for having recently (and cavalierly) thrown out some of my own books in preparation for our move. But I preferred what this festival turned out to be, a kind of expo with all these small presses advertizing that they were still in business, that they hadn't been swallowed up by the Literature/Cappucino Industrial Complex.

We approached the fair from Atlantic Avenue and had the bridge in our sights. Its image tented Borough Hall like some Persian bazaar. And it had that energy, that diversity, that busy-ness, as well as the underlying desperation that spoke of a need to sell in order to live. But rather than gew gaws or fabrics, dates or nuts, there was litrachure on sale, spread out on tables, propped up for display. And as we approached nearer, we came under the magnetic infuence of the vendors of books.

We bought Lucy something from the very first stand we stopped at. It was for her, not for us, so that doesn't count as an impulse buy (we both agreed). It was some Russian Publisher and the book was a bilingual edition of two stories, Speckled Hen and The Little Goat Kids; or, KyPoCHKA PYABA and KOZLYATYSHKI. We will bring it to daycare so that Lucy can be read to in the proper accent.

Archipelego Publishers, our next stop, and coincidentally, immediately next to DomKnigi, had a table with boxes of books spread out, beautifully bound and oddly shaped books in that they were almost square. Gate of The Sun by Elias Khoury reproached me with its remaindered beauty, only $15.00 (They printed too many copies by mistake, the woman said. I wondered how many was too many...) I didn't buy it. I now regret it. I've had a small paperbound copy of one of Archipelago's other titles, Moscardino by Enrico Pea (translated by Ezra Pound) for a while now, though I thought the attractive binding was some publishing anomoly. But here were laid out book after book, each with its unique charm and yet with a similarity of binding that bespoke a deeper familial bond.

We continued on through crowds of Starbuck denizens released from their hazelnut-scented surroundings for this one one day a year. And at the next table, around behind the entrance for the C train, I bought The Man Who Walked to the Moon, by Howard McCord, a novella about an ex-marine sniper turned professional lone wolf.

Against a mountainous Nevada landscape and one peak in particular, The Moon, Gasper's [the lone wolf/sniper] menacing tale unravels of a life lived without illusions yet driven to the boundaries of mystical consciousness -- a gripping and disturbing indictment of the exigencies of civilization.

Is "exigencies" the right word here? I guess I'll have to read the book to find out. Anyway, it sounds good!

I also bought The Dream Sequence by Kate Hunter, a local writer, a novella (again) which bears the intriguing tag on the cover: "THE MOST DANGEROUS PERSON IS ALWAYS SOMEONE YOU KNOW." Five bucks never went so easily
.
CUNY's Feminist Press had a table, and there was more than one table with Afro-Centric titles, often (though not always) mixed in with Marxist books; though there were separate Marxist/Socialist tables too. Lucy tended to gravitate towards both the African and the Marxist tables because of the brightly colored materiel.

One table was selling t-shirts (as well as a magazine or pamphlets or something) that were all black with "FUCK LITERATURE" written in big white letters across the chest. I loved the idea of it, but couldn't think of an ocassion when I might wear it so I didn't buy it. Plus there is the off chance that these might be the first words that Lucy learns to read. She's pretty precocious. I wish they had mugs...

There were also people giving readings at various stands. One of the editors of Brooklyn: A State of Mind was there reading and dropping names like he was working for the Bush administration. Jonathan Lethem got more than one mention this day; he must have been in the crowd, browsing for FUCK LITERATUE t-shirts, no doubt.

Underneath the reconstructed dome of Borough Hall itself, in the shadow of the golden statue of justice wielding a bright and slicing sword, there was a reading of Richard Wright's Native Son, a passage I heard said something about how all the world is Bigger...

At one point Lucy got impatient in her stroller, so I picked her up and carried her around. She preferred that, looking at the life around her, smiling at the random people who entered her view. Though after a while, she became bored again and began to steadily raspberry. As I walked up to one table -- it was the Aragon Press I think -- she let loose a particularly distinct one, seemingly right on cue. I jokingly apologized to the man sitting there behind the table, but he just looked up wearily and replied, "Everyone's a critic..."

Lucy's Doubles

After daycare each day this past summer, I would take my daughter, Lucy, to this little park in Carroll Gardens where she would run out the day. A special section just for toddlers includes the usual equipment, with a bridge, an incline, a stone elephant, little swings, and a sprinkler (which Lucy loves) that is always crowded during hazy Brooklyn summers.

Before you get to the kiddie section, there is a basketball court and a baseball diamond in a different section, both on blacktop, that Lucy loves to traverse on her way to the sprinkler, and I can see her already sizing up the "big kids" for when she is ready to play with them.

One hot day in August, Lucy insisted on going under the sprinkler, gesturing wildly at it while imploring me "Dush! Dush!" (her word for "water" of all kinds), as I held her in one arm, pushing her stroller through the wrought iron gate with the other. So I changed her into her bathing suit, shod her with her pink crocs, and off she went.

Sprinkler-time is highly ritualistic or stylized, like those linguistic bee-dances. She first runs up to the sprinkler and puts one hand in front of the stream while leaning on the stone water source with the other. Then she runs back at me and throws what water she has grabbed all over my shirt and laughing runs away. Eventually she musters the courage to run straight through to the other side, where jets of water come from the facing pylons. Her courage stoked, she then runs in screaming circles through the gauntlet of jetstreams, dodging the other orbiting kids all the while. I don't know wht there aren't more kid-collisions in this toddler accelerator, especially during these peak summer hours.

This particular day, after having done her rounds, Lucy took interest in a puddle on the circumference of the sprinkler area. She splashed carefully in the water as she looked down at her pink feet. She loves to splash in puddles and sometimes does this little dance where she cocks her head up in the air and stomps her right foot emphatically while dragging her left. It's very atavistic (in a good way). Soon there were two other little girls, about Lucy's height (I've given up judging ages) and they too took to splashing in the curved narrow puddle. They were all aware of one another -- there was no competition for the splashiest part of the puddle or anything -- but they mostly kept to themselves as they splashed, sometimes looking up at their respective parent.

Suddenly one of the girls reached down to pick something up from the puddle, and the water that had just seemed so pure for the stomping suddenly seemed filthy now that it was reached into. The mother lurched. At the same moment, the other girl started to splash more emphatically, just as Lucy started to wander off. So we both reacted too. At once there was a chorus of parental shouting, all of us calling to our own: "Lulu!" "Lucy!" "Lucia!"

We all looked at one another; the three girls looked up at the parents not their own, then back to their own mommy or daddy. After a moment, it hit us. We had all named our daughters Lucia!

But rather than this being a moment of bonding or light, it turned things suddenly awkward. We all began to explain, to justify: "Yes," said one father, "We call her Lulu. She's named after her grandmother." "Strange, I've never met another Lucy," said the mother,"I thought it was unique." "She calls herself "Cia," I said dumbly.

Carroll Gardens Park is a place where children and parents come together and is most full as the day ends, and in it we find not just recreation but the beginnings of the social dynamics that shape all our lives so inexorably, like some ominous starsign. I guess that's why (we tell ourselves) we take Lucy there, why we see daycare itself as important, so that our Lucy can interact with others, so that she she can begin to be socialized, though I wish it would be with people who find coincidence to be a mark of revelation rather than a sign of having been out-thought.

As we strolled home after I dried Lucy off from her ablutions, we saw coming out of their brownstone not three doors down from ours, a fourth Lucia -- one also Lucy's age and one we knew already -- and her parents. This Lucia was born on the very same day as our Lucy, only a year earlier. The family was going out to the Hamptons for the weekend, seemingly glad to escape the hazy heat of Brooklyn. The girls smiled at one another, and I chatted amiably with the parents, who when we met them several months ago were as surprised and delighted as we were in the coincidence of naming, under similar stars.

Hurricane Dog

The strongest storm recorded in 1950 was a category 5 hurricane called Hurricane Dog. It started in the West Indies in late August of that year and strengthened as it made its way north. Its strongest winds were recorded in St John's...the capital of Antigua and Barbuda...with gusts reaching 145 mph.

Here's a link that leads you to a pdf file of a 1950 issue of the Kingston, Jamaica paper The Daily Gleaner that tells of the aftermath of the storm as well as providing information about a special fund that was set up to help the victims in Antigua.

"Hurricane Dog" seems like an odd name for a storm. The current system of named hurricanes wasn't actually put in place until 1952, and so before that, as with Hurricane Dog, these names weren't really used in published accounts. It's not, for instance, mentioned in The Daily Gleaner article at all. But it's not just some irreverent wordplay. Before 1952, the names came from the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet, and so Hurricane Dog is military-speak for Hurricane "D."

I don't know how long the 1950 hurricane season lasted. I don't know if it got as far as Hurricane Jig or Hurricane Nan or Hurricane Oboe. I sure hope not.