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My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things
Joseph Skibell October 3, 2012 | 2 8 min read
It all started about five years ago when I received a call from a colleague of mine. We'd done a bit of work together, planning a new major for the college where we teach, and we'd been compensated for this work with a small bonus to our travel-and-research accounts. My colleague was calling to alert me to the fact – something he'd only then discovered – that if these funds weren't spent by the end of that very day, they'd be forfeited and returned to the college.
I gathered up all the work-related receipts I could find, but when I totaled them up, I still had $177 dollars left. And so I did the only thing I could think to do, the only reasonable thing a person in my situation could do. I went down to my local Guitar Center, and I flagged down a salesman. I told him I had $177 to spend before midnight that night, and I asked him if he'd be willing to part with a Martin Backpacker for precisely amount, tax and case included.
The Martin Backpacker is a small broom-shaped guitar that's light enough to be carried out into the woods on a backpacking trip, if you were so inclined. It's also, according to the Martin catalog, the first guitar ever sent into outer space.
The sales dude told me he'd be delighted to sell me the guitar for that price, and he went into the back to get one.
Now, this made me extraordinarily happy for two reasons.
First, though I'd been playing since I was nine, I hadn't gotten a new guitar since I was 14. I'd been playing less and less over the years, and I was unprepared for the sense of a renewed love affair a new instrument brings with it.
Secondly, I retained in my memory a sharply etched image of my father, leaning the great bulk of his body against the counter of Harrod's Music Shop in Lubbock, Texas, bargaining with Clyde, the manager there, over the blue electric Fender Mustang he was buying to replace the clunky Fender acoustic he'd originally brought home for me when I'd mentioned to him that I thought I might like to learn how to play.
Big and cumbersome, this acoustic guitar was too difficult for me to play. The neck was thick and beefy, and the strings were so high, you could have hung laundry from them.
As a kid, I was mortified by my father's bargaining. Everywhere else, when you bought something, you paid what they asked for it. Dad was a businessman, he was a merchant, and he understood about mark-up. Still, I was afraid he might offend Clyde, that this back-and-forthing of theirs might end in a stalemate or, worse, an argument – Dad had an eruptive, unpredictable temper – and I'd lose not only the guitar, but Clyde's affection, which would mean having to go elsewhere for my lessons. My teacher at Harrod's was a lanky hippie iconoclast named Spider Johnson. He was an important, liberating presence in my young life, and I didn't want to lose contact with him.
I worried as well that all this haggling might seem too Jewish for Clyde or for Mr. Harrod, the patrician owner of the shop. The founding conductor of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Harrod saw to the violins, while Clyde handled the guitars.
But Clyde, it turned out, was happy for the sale. As was the guy at Guitar Center. As was I. I'm sure it had more to do with my father than with the money, but the forty or so bucks the Guitar Center guy was willing to knock off the Backpacker left me feeling inordinately potent as a man.
I brought the little Martin home, and for my birthday, Barbara, my wife, bought me a couple of songbooks containing hits from the 1920s and '30s. I loved nothing better than to sit at our kitchen table late into the night, playing my little broom-shaped guitar and singing songs like "Button Up Your Overcoat," "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" and "California, Here I Come!"
My father was hospitalized a year or so after I bought the little Backpacker. He was living in Oklahoma City at the time with his second wife – my mother had died years before – and my brother and sisters and I each received a call, telling us we'd better get up there to see him.
No one expected him to leave the hospital. His kidneys were shot, and he had a cascading host of other medical issues. "His organs are just plumb worn out," his nephrologist told me.
As soon as we'd all arrived, in fact, Dad went into a coma. At one point, there was even a Code Blue. The machines in his ICU room started whirring. The staff rushed in and pulled the curtains. The hospital chaplain even showed up, a fretful-looking woman in a boxy skirt-set.
"May I sit with you?" she asked each of us in turn, inflecting the verb somehow with overtones of Christian sodality.
"No thanks," we each said.
She seemed relieved. Clutching her files to her chest, she sat down and disappeared when no one was looking.
As for the rest of us, we braced ourselves and waited for our father to die.
But our father didn't die.
Contrary to all expectations, he came out of his coma. Well enough to leave the ICU eventually, he was furloughed to an ordinary hospital room, and though he would spend nearly 60 days as an in-patient, he was ultimately released.
During those 60 days, whenever I came to visit him, I bought the little Backpacker along.
We didn't have a lot of common interests, my father and I. Our conversations were often difficult and halting. But music was something we both loved, and I'd sit by his bed and play for him. It helped to pass the hours for both of us, and the odd-shaped guitar proved a useful conversation piece with the nurses.
I don't know what was going on in my father's marriage, but when he left the hospital, he was no longer welcome at home.
He ended up in Dallas, living in Mrs. Rudd's condominium.
Mrs. Rudd was my Uncle Richard's mother-in-law. Too frail at 90-something to travel from her home in Wichita, she no longer used the place, and my father moved in in a quiet, if no less flagrant violation of the condo board's rules, which forbade any and all forms of subletting.
I continued bringing the little Martin along whenever I visited – it was so light and easy to pack – and on one occasion, we all sat together as a family in Mrs. Rudd's living room, while my brother-in-law Alan and I took turns on the guitar. Dad joined in, singing old cowboy and Sammy songs. He seemed to enjoy himself, and one day, he told me he thought maybe he'd buy himself a guitar, take a few lessons. Why not? He was retired and living alone with a pair of alternating caregivers. He had the time, and he asked me for advice on what to buy.
I was quite proud of him, proud that at the age of 76, he was up for something new.
"And if, for some reason, I can't learn it," he said, "I'll give it to you and you'll keep it."
The next time I was in Dallas, we all sat around in Mrs. Rudd's living room again, singing and playing, and when I took a turn on my father's new guitar, I remember thinking, Whoa! This is a beautiful instrument! Curvier than most guitars, it was shaped like a figure-eight with the upper bouts, the shoulders, as wide and round as the lower bouts, the hips; and the top, sides and back were all a matching, handsome, dark nutty brown.
"That's a dreadnaught guitar," my friend Elbein told me when I described it to him later. "Big and round?" he said.
I nodded. He seemed to know what he was talking about.
"Those're called dreadnaughts, yeah," he said. "After the battleships, because they're so big and round, you have to play them standing up."
"Yeah, well, whatever," I said. "It's just a beautiful instrument, and whether my father gives it to me or it comes down to me years later, I might just hang it on a wall as a symbol of my father's will, you know, to keep learning and moving forward, and also because it's just so damned beautiful. I don't think I've ever seen a guitar quite like that before."
As it turned out, Dad's arthritis was too bad for him to pursue the guitar in earnest, and one day, when my daughter Arianna and I were in Dallas, he said to me, "Joseph, take that guitar. I'm never going to learn it."
"Really, Dad?" I said.
"Take it, take it!"
"Because it's just so beautiful, Dad. It's really such a beautiful guitar. Are you sure?"
"Sure, I'm sure."
Still, I was torn.
On the one hand, I hated to see him giving up on it. But on the other, I was thrilled to have the guitar. Either way, he was adamant, and when we said our goodbyes, Arianna carried the guitar out of Mrs. Rudd's condo, while I went to get the car. By the time I'd driven back to the porte-cochere, she had taken it out of its case and was standing on one foot, balancing it on a raised leg, strumming a few chords.
I pulled up and looked at the guitar, and I thought, Hey, that's not my father's guitar! It wasn't the guitar I remembered, the one shaped like an infinity sign with the nutty brown color. In fact, there was nothing special about this guitar at all.
It was nothing but a cheap blonde Alvarez!
"Hey, Dad," I said that night at dinner, "that's not the original guitar you bought, is it?"
I was sitting next to him, and I couldn't help asking him the question. He didn't quite seem to understand it, though, which wasn't surprising. The room was noisy, I was sitting on his bad side, and what I was asking him was utterly nonsensical.
"I mean, you didn't buy two guitars, did you?"
"No, no."
"Well, but then, I mean, what happened to the first guitar?"
"That is the first guitar," he said.
Maybe my brother-in-law stole it. This was my next thought. Maybe he swapped it out for the Alvarez when he thought no one was looking.
There were only two problems with this, of course. First, Alan would never have done such a thing; he was too honest; and second, if he had, he'd never have gotten away with it; eventually, I'd see the guitar at his house.
This was all very problematical for me.
Mostly because my sisters have always insisted, especially when it comes to family history, that my grasp upon reality is – how to put this kindly? – less than firm, that, for me, memory and imagination are like two rivers that converge, that I tend to misremember things or, more probably, make them up.
Even I will admit that the two of them seemed to have grown up in an entirely different household from mine. They were born 18 months apart and because they're close not only in age but in temperament, their versions of our family history are apt to match up, a fact I always attributed to a good dose of denial on their parts.
For the first time, though, I began to wonder if my sisters hadn't been right all along. I mean, if I could dream a guitar up out of thin air, what else, over the years, had I imagined?
The mystery of where this imaginary guitar came from persisted literally for years, until sometime after my father's death, when the realization struck me with absolute clarity: the first guitar my father had bought me, that clunky, nearly unplayable Fender acoustic – the one with strings so high you could have hung laundry from them – had been figure-eight in shape with a handsome nutty-brown color. I'd forgotten all about that guitar, and now I realized, in a mental move that was laughably Freudian, filled with wish-fulfillment and dreamlike distortions, I'd substituted the first guitar my father had given me with the last guitar he'd ever give me, hoping in this way, I suppose, to reverse time and keep him alive.
It didn't work, of course, but with a part of my inheritance, I bought a beautiful handmade acoustic arch top guitar, which I named Fig, partly because the figures in its maple back look like the inside of a fig, but also because Fig stands for F.ather's I.maginary G.uitar.
And these days, it's with Fig that I sit up late into the night at my kitchen table, singing those great old songs from the 1920s and the 1930s, songs like "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" and "Button Up Your Overcoat (You Belong To Me)."
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Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, including, A Blessing on the Moon, which received the prestigious Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and A Curable Romantic, which received many awards, most notably the Sami Rohr Award for Jewish Literature. Andy Teirstein's opera based on A Blessing on the Moon (libretto by Teirstein & Skibell) premiered in Vancouver in 2012. A recipient of a Halls Fellowship, a Michener Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Skibell has taught at the Universities of Texas and Wisconsin, the Humber School for Writers, the Taos Summer Writers Conference, and Bar-Ilan University. He is a professor of English at Emory University and the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.
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First published by New Directions as The Lazy Ones in 1949, the newly christened and reissued Laziness in the Fertile Valley by the Egyptian-born writer, Albert Cossery, will appear in bookstores this November in time for his centenary. New Directions has included a foreword by Henry Miller and this new afterword by the writer Anna Della Subin who uses Cossery's oeuvre as a guide to the Egyptian Revolution.
The lazybones attracts all the waves of the sea. "Let me sleep," he begs, "so nice and warm under my white sheets and blue blankets." And would you believe it? The sun's on his side.
— Edmond Jabès, 1945
Fasten a mast to the bed, let the sheets catch the wind. It is possible that, if you drift long enough on the waves of sleep, you will awaken into a world that has changed — though who can say for the better? The Greeks told of the boy Epimenides, who was searching for his father's stray sheep when he stopped for a noonday nap in a cave. When he awoke, fifty-seven years later, everything that he once knew had vanished. Across Crete, news spread that Epimenides must be particularly loved by the gods to have slept so long. For Aristotle, he was proof of the impossibility of the passage of time without the occurrence of change.
Christian martyrs have dozed longer still. The eighteenth chapter of the Quran — and an earlier Syriac legend — tells of a group of young Christian men who, fleeing the persecution of a Roman Emperor, escaped into a cave, where they slumbered for three hundred and nine years. Rising from their long sleep, they found their beards had grown long, Christ's name was openly spoken, and all of their loved ones were dead. In 1933, the Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim dramatized their swim through the oceanic night in The People of the Cave. Awakening into a world where they are hailed as saints, the stiff-limbed sleepers find they cannot live in this strange, undreamt future. "We are like fish, whose water has changed from sweet to salty," the saints protest, as they retreat into their cave.
Languishing in a French prison in 1883, Paul Lafargue observed that a strange mania had lately gripped mankind. It seemed everyone had begun to worship what their God had damned. In their canonization of work — that vampire sucking the blood of modern society — they had forgotten His sublime example. Did He not toil for six days, then rest forever after? In his treatise The Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue intoned a prayer: "O, Laziness, have thou mercy upon this eternal misery! O, Laziness, mother of the arts and the noble virtues, be thou balsam for the pains of mankind!"
Enter the catatonic heroes of Albert Cossery's Laziness in the Fertile Valley, exercising their right to do nothing. In a dilapidated villa in the Nile Delta, a family sleeps all day, rising only for meals. The cadaverous Galal, oldest of three brothers and friar of somnolence, staggers into the dining room in a dirty nightgown. Some say he is an artist. "Why are you awake?" he cries in abject horror. His uncle and brothers are gathered around a pot of lentils at the table. The youngest, Serag, secretly dreams with eyes half-closed of freeing himself from the familial inertia and doing the unthinkable — finding a job — perhaps in the factory being constructed nearby. But on his exploratory walks (he cannot help but fall asleep on the way), he finds the rusted heap forever unfinished. Their father, Old Hafez, never descends from his bedroom, yet hatches a controversial scheme to take a wife in his old age. Rafik, the middle son, must keep vigil during the siesta to kill the matchmaker conspiring to bring such an enemy of sleep into their den. Forced to stay awake, Rafik is fighting against the current in a dangerous river. "From time to time, in a supreme effort, he managed to free himself, he raised his head and breathed deeply," Cossery writes. "Then, again, he found himself plunged into the depths of an annihilating sweetness. The waves of an immense, seductive sleep covered him."
"I should tell you that this setting, this household, they were my family." On November 3, 1913, Albert Cossery was born in the Fagalla neighborhood of Cairo to a moderately wealthy Greek Orthodox family of Syro-Lebanese descent. "Certainly it's romanticized," Cossery said in an interview, "but my father didn't work, and so he slept until noon. My brothers didn't work either, nobody worked…. In truth, we were all sleeping. If someone heard a noise in the house, no one would move to go see what it was, even if there had been a thief." Laziness, Cossery claimed, was the only thing his father Salim had taught him. Born at the end of the nineteenth century in a village near Homs in Syria, Salim immigrated to Egypt, where he acquired farmland and properties in the fertile lands of the Delta. While the fields grew cotton, dates, and watermelons, Salim read the newspaper and took naps. Albert sprouted under the wing of his grandfather, who lived with them in Fagalla. One day the grandfather decreed he would no longer leave his bedroom — not because he wasn't able, but because he no longer felt like it. When Albert brought meals up to him, he would find him with a black cloth tied across his eyes, in order to obtain the perfect darkness. Sometimes, his grandfather forgot the blindfold was on his face.
Albert, the youngest, would awake alone at seven in the morning for school, first at the Jesuit Collège des Frères de la Salle, and later at the French Lycée. He began writing his first novel in French at age ten. At seventeen, he published a book of poems titled Les Morsures ("Bites"), which lifted heavily from his god, Baudelaire. "I am alone like a beautiful corpse," he wrote, in an ode to Nuit. "The first night of the tomb."
Cossery was sent to university in Paris in the 1930s, but claimed he studied nothing at all. Yet he had discovered that being a writer gave a respectable alibi to his inherited laziness. On his return to Cairo in 1938, he fell in with the Egyptian Surrealists — George Henein, Edmond Jabès, Anwar Kamil, and the painter Ramsès Younane, among others. Cossery joined their group Art et Liberté, and contributed short stories to their journal al-Tatawwur ("Evolution"). In 1938, observing the growing hostility of Europe's totalitarian regimes to the artistic spirit, the Egyptian Surrealists penned a manifesto: "Long Live Degenerate Art!" André Breton in a letter to Henein from Paris wrote, "The imp of the perverse, as he deigns to appear to me, seems to have one wing here, the other in Egypt."
At twenty-seven, Cossery published a collection of short stories, Les hommes oubliés de Dieu ("Men God Forgot"), which sketched the themes to which he would continuously return over the next sixty years: the misery of the poor, the absurdity of the all-powerful, the will to laugh — and to sleep through it all. In "The Postman Gets His Own Back," a neighborhood wages war against those who would disturb its slumber. To safeguard his countrymen's morning sleep, Radwan Aly, the poorest man in the world, fatally hurls his one and only piece of furniture, an earthenware chamberpot, out the window of his hovel at the noisy greengrocer hawking his wares. Even the police are dumbfounded at his sacrifice. Down the street, a washerman sleeps in his rusted laundromat, nary a soap bubble in sight. His head sinks into a basin of slumber, heavy as a stone slipping to the bottom of a pool. Then, "like a diver leaving a wave, the laundryman reappeared once more on the surface of life." He brings dreams up to the surface, like sea-creatures.
During the war, Cossery joined the merchant marines and worked as chief steward on a liner called El Nil, ferrying passengers — many of whom fleeing the Nazis — on the route from Port Said to New York. It was uncharacteristic of him, this job, yet he would say it opened his world a bit wider. Cutting an elegant figure in his uniform, he seduced the prettiest of his passengers, and ignored the rest. According to an apocryphal tale, it was on a crossing of the Atlantic that Cossery met Lawrence Durrell. When they arrived in New York, the two were arrested on charges of espionage; Durrell protested that it was impossible, as Cossery spent all his time in bed. Though Durrell, in fact, would not visit the United States for the first time until 1968, it was through him that the first translation of Cossery's stories reached an American readership. Dispatched by Durrell in Alexandria, Men God Forgot was published in Berkeley in 1946 by George Leite for Circle Editions. It was also through Durrell that Cossery met Henry Miller, who would become a lifelong champion. Miller so admired Cossery's collection of stories, that "terrible breviary," that when the translation failed to sell Miller bought up much of the stock — hundreds of copies — and peddled the book himself for decades. In Cairo in 1944, Cossery published his first novel, La maison de la mort certaine ("The House of Certain Death") about the inhabitants of a derelict tenement building on the verge of collapse. "He is heralding the coming of a new dawn," Henry Miller prophesied, "a mighty dawn from the Near, the Middle, and the Far East." Cossery characteristically responded, "Perhaps that is exaggerated."
As soon as the war ended, Albert Cossery left Cairo for Paris, where he would stay for thirty years without returning to Egypt. With a debonair look and an anarchist bent, he floated above the fray in a crowd of illustrious friends and admirers, such as Alberto Giacometti, Jean Genet, Tristan Tzara, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Raymond Queneau. At night, he went out dancing with Albert Camus, who introduced him to his French publisher, Edmund Charlot. Cossery lived in a flat in Montparnasse, but soon tired of the constant back-and-forth between his lodgings and the hotel in Saint-Germain-de-Prés where he brought girls. (Though he always maintained that women exhausted him, by the time he reached his eighties, Cossery was claiming more than 3,000 conquests.) In 1951, he moved permanently into the Hotel La Louisiane, that "grim old hostelry known to the bad boys of the Rue de Buci," as Miller described it in Tropic of Cancer.
One night in 1952, he met the actress Monique Chaumette over a bowl of peanuts; Cossery asked her to feed him some, she refused. Cossery gave her a copy of his latest novel, Les fainéants dans la vallée fertile, and she telephoned to say how beautiful she found it. Flattered, Cossery agreed to meet at his usual haunt, the Café de Flore. They shocked everyone by marrying in April of 1953. Yet married life did not agree with Cossery. She awoke too early. Her constant questioning as to what he would write next enervated him. And he refused to move from his austere hotel room. In a story from Men God Forgot, Cossery had described a hashish-addicted slacker named Mahmoud, who cannot shake the affections of the amorous Faiza. "He had wanted to teach her to sleep, to respect slumber, that brother to death which he himself loved so," Cossery wrote, "but alas! she understood nothing of it." Faiza asks Mahmoud how he can live this way. "'How do I live? And what does that matter to you?" Mahmoud tersely replies. "Yes, I dream all the time." Seven years later, Cossery and Chaumette divorced.
Impeccably dressed in a sport coat with a colored handkerchief in its pocket, Cossery would rise late each day, leaving the hotel only in the afternoons, perhaps to take in the sun and watch the girls of the Luxembourg gardens. He would sit for hours at the Flore doing nothing. To waiters who asked him if he was not bored, he replied: "I am never bored when I'm with Albert Cossery." He wrote only when he had absolutely nothing better to do, producing a new novel roughly every decade. And yet, to exercise the right to laziness had its own miseries. Forever broke, he relied on his royalties and income from translations of his novels to survive. In the late forties, New Directions published the English translation of The House of Certain Death, and commissioned the novelist William Goyen to translate Les fainéants. Cossery's letters to his American publisher James Laughlin reveal the underside of his elegant life of idleness: "My financial situation is totally desperate." "The rate of the franc is 270 to the dollar." "I am absolutely fucked." "I am appealing to you to help me." "Have you forgotten me?" "Send me a check as soon as possible." "I am always, and I continue to be, in extreme misery." Laughlin replied with detailed instructions on how to change money on the Parisian black market for a better rate. At a meeting at a Paris café in the late fifties, Cossery complained so bitterly about how badly his books had sold in the U.S. that Laughlin handed him money out of his wallet.
If he had little American readership, Cossery had even less of an Egyptian one. On a rare visit to Cairo in the nineties, his dogged Arabic translator Mahmud Qassim — who translated and published four of Cossery's novels — insisted on "a meeting of two monuments." He dragged Cossery to meet Naguib Mahfouz. The Nobel Laureate had no idea who he was. Although Cossery claimed to have always carried Egypt inside him, to Egyptians — those who knew of him — he had deserted it. As Qassim said in an interview, "They don't forgive him for having abandoned Arabic and emigrated to another language." Worse, the other language was French, the purview of a marginalized elite. Like a dreamer in a cave, Cossery had missed the revolution of 1952, which had branded French, once the language of bourgeois aspirations, as aristocratic and elitist. Moreover, Cossery admitted that after years in Paris, he had forgotten much of his Arabic. Beyond the language barrier, his celebration of laziness and his romanticization of Egypt's lowlife held little resonance for a readership actively trying to live in, and improve, the country, while often locked in battle against the state. While fellow writers such as Ahmed Fouad Negm and Abd al-Hakim Qasim were thrown in prison, or forced into exile like Jabès and Henein, Cossery sat idly at the Flore.
At the beginning of Cossery's 1975 novel A Splendid Conspiracy, Teymour, recently returned to Egypt with a fake engineering diploma bought after years of "studying" in Europe, sits dejectedly at a café newly renamed "The Awakening." He contemplates a statue in the center of the nearby square. Known as The Awakening of the Nation, it depicts a peasant woman with arms outstretched, "as if to denounce the torpor of the residents." In the scene, Cossery conjures the Nahdat Misr, the granite sculpture of "The Awakening of Egypt" that still stands near Cairo's Giza Zoo. Completed in 1928 by the renowned sculptor Mahmud Mukhtar, it portrays a peasant throwing back her veil and rousing a sleeping sphinx. The two symbols, of a storied past and a vital present, face east to a new dawn. The sculpture commemorated the events of 1919, in which hundreds of thousands of Egyptians across the country — students, peasants, civil servants, and the elite — had joined together in civil disobedience to reject the British occupation. Cossery was nine when the nation gained nominal independence in 1922. Everywhere it was said that, having fallen behind the times, Egypt, and the greater Arab world, was at last awakening — or must awake — from its long slumber into modernity. It was this obsession with the awakening that Tawfiq al-Hakim, a writer Cossery much admired, chose to play upon by reanimating the three-hundred-year-old sleepers from the Quran.
The awakening had at times seemed alloyed with the residue of a strange dream. To transform it into a profit-generating subsidiary of the Empire, the British had introduced new technologies to Egypt such as the railway, the telegraph, and electrical networks. In the early years of the development of the railway, until a steady supply of coal was secured, Egyptian trains, as well as Nile steamers, were occasionally fueled by the mummies frequently unearthed in the valleys. The embalming potions, it turned out, made for first-rate burning materials. A medical journal in 1859 reported: "It is a curious fact that the bodies of the most enlightened nation in its time, many years ago, are now made to aid in getting up steam in the present fast age." Mark Twain, on his trip to Egypt, joked, "Sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, 'D–n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent— pass out a King!'" The past, no longer able to rest in peace, collided with the effort to modernize.
The stereotype of Oriental indolence, which Cossery pushes to the absurd in Laziness in the Fertile Valley, was built into the very infrastructure of modernity itself. According to Egypt's retired colonial governor Lord Cromer in 1908, the typical Egyptian was "devoid of energy and initiative, stagnant in mind, wanting in curiosity about matters which are new to him, careless of waste of time, and patient under suffering." Egyptian laziness, in turn, determined railway timetables and management structures, and became a durable component of the system. It was thought that the Orient did not require the same standards of efficiency or reliability as the Occident, and so a different approximation of punctuality was enforced for British and Egyptian trains. As "Arab time" became institutionalized, the stereotype of idleness became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Egyptians would languish for hours in stations waiting for the capricious train.
If the trains reified laziness, it was the arrival of electricity that gave a jolt to the spirit. For some, electricity took the possibility of an "awakening" out of the realm of metaphor and into that of hard science, as it was understood at the time. In 1905, as discoveries were being made in the field of electromagnetism by Einstein and others, the journal Al-Sahafa ran an article on the phenomenon of tanwim magnatisi ("magnetic sleep inducement"), and the ways in which the electromagnetic current accounts for different flows of energy between the earth and the celestial bodies, and inside the human body and mind. It was followed by an article, "Are We Alive or Dead?" which argued that Egypt was still under a global electro-magnetically induced sleep, from which the West had been the first to awaken. Alert, the West had come to oppress the East. The writer then wondered when Egypt would rise from its own trance. During the rebellious months of 1919, riots targeted the electric streetlights, that technology which tames the night and ruins sleep. The British had constantly pointed to the technological advances they had introduced to Egypt as benefits of colonial rule. As streets fell into darkness, artificial illumination became a political symbol. Streetlamps were guarded by the police.
With the rousing of the nation had come the introduction, not unanimously welcomed, of the clock. (Perversely, though God Himself has idled ever since His six days' work, the first mechanical clocks were used by 14th century Benedictine monks hoping to keep their prayers on a rigorous schedule.) In 1830, Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, gave France the majestic obelisk that now stands in the Place de la Concorde in exchange for a clock, which some say never even worked. During the occupation, British Time was introduced into Egypt, with Egyptian "slave clocks" taking their orders from the Greenwich observatory. For Egypt to be profitable, it was essential that it function on a synchronized schedule. In the 1870s, the British began to impose the shift from the age-old lunar Hijri calendar to the solar Gregorian calendar. (It's April 45th, declared an advertisement, selling a wall calendar, in one Cairo newspaper.) Yet even after the confusion subsided, Egyptians could never fully accept the imposition of European timekeeping. Clock time was not neutral, or apolitical, or natural, as it might have seemed to a Parisian glancing at his watch. The memory of the lunar calendar, something traditional, authentic, and now lost, inflamed the nationalist spirit.
Although it had been introduced in order to further imperialist aims, the fixation on clock-time soon led to a popular obsession with "the value of time." Articles began appearing in the press that gently admonished the lazy Egyptian to "remember that time is money." Hassan al-Banna, the son of a watchmaker and the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, took issue with this equation, writing in a letter from the 1920s that time is even more precious than gold. Religious clerics made efforts to embed punctuality into the system of Islamic ethics. Though the railroads literally ran on laziness, managers introduced harsh penalties for its workers' indolence: half a day's wages would be withheld for five minutes' lateness to work. In Fagalla, catty neighbors gossiped about the Cossery family's idleness.
Against this monetization of time Albert Cossery stood firm. As monuments cheering Egypt's progress went up, Cossery chose in his novels to reveal the deep bedrock of sloth underlying it all. Sleep nibbles everything, he wrote, "like the teeth of invisible rats." In Laziness, retired civil servants grow moldy on the outskirts of the city, while in the center, workers in dusty corporate offices are asleep. There is the idleness that stands against work, and an idleness within work. There is the private and the public laziness. Abou Zeid, the peanut seller, naps in his empty shop; the factory that would threaten the countryside, eternally under construction, is a stage-set for Serag's torpor. In Cossery's novels, the only one who works hard is the prostitute. And yet, laziness goes beyond doing nothing. "The more you are idle, the more you have time to reflect," Cossery said in an interview in his eighties. Laziness is a critical position by which to judge the world — a perspective the salaried clock-puncher lacks. "The Orient is more philosophical than the Occident," Cossery declared. "Everyone's a philosopher because they wait, they think. Everyone in the West is after money. I have lived my life minute by minute," though it had meant dire financial straits. With idleness comes godliness. Away from the hourglass of the city, Cossery said, "the further one goes toward the South, toward the desert, there are more prophets, more magi — more people who have reflected on the world." After his death, the long-sleeping Epimenides was honored as a god in Crete.
In a cartoon published in 1921 in the journal al-Kashkul, the sculptor Mukhtar rides on top of a sphinx, with an alarm clock in each hand. "Did the alarm clock awake you to behold the Awakening statue?" asks a voice in the picture. "It gave me a headache," another voice replies, "all I see in the Awakening is noise, commotion, and discord." In A Splendid Conspiracy, as Teymour contemplates the statue of the Awakening, he observes, "she seemed to be lamenting the fact that she had been woken up to see this abomination." In Laziness, through the character of Serag, Cossery poses the question whether Egypt should slip back into its slumber, given the dissonance brought about by the attempt to catch up with modernity. Serag's name means "lamp," a beacon (or a nuisance) in the darkness of the family home. When he threatens to leave for the city to find work, Rafik attempts to rid him of his illusions. "Do you know, my dear Serag, that there are countries where men get up at four o'clock in the morning to work in the mines?" "Mines!" says Serag, "It isn't true; you want to frighten me." "I know men better than you do," Rafik replies. "They won't wait long, I tell you, to spoil this fertile valley and turn it into a hell. That's what they call progress. You've never heard that word? Well, when a man talks to you about progress, you can be sure that he wants to subjugate you."
As Teymour sits in the Café Awakening, a noisy caravan passes before him. It's Wataniya, the monstrous madame of the local brothel, showing off her coterie of hookers. Cossery's choice of name is striking, for the word "wataniya" means "nationalism." If the peasant woman of Mukhtar's Awakening statue had a name, she too would be Wataniya. The name plays on the tradition of metonymy in earlier Egyptian nationalist novels — such as Husayn Haykal's Zaynab, widely considered to be the first Egyptian novel, and al-Hakim's The Return of the Spirit, about the days leading up to the 1919 revolution — in which the main female character is used to represent the nation. And yet, in Cossery's version, the notables of the city keep disappearing into Wataniya's fatal brothel. As landowners and bureaucrats are mysteriously killed, the whore "Nationalism" emerges as a deadly trap. Better to sleep than risk her caresses.
Though the people might slave for the flourishing of this new imagined "Egypt," and sacrifice themselves to her, the entrenched powers did not want the nationalist spirit to get too far ahead. When Cossery left for Paris in 1945, the year he wrote Laziness, Cairo was in the midst of what would be nostalgically remembered as its gilded age. Money had flowed in from Europe during the two wars, enriching the aristocratic elite. Cinemas, opera houses and villas shot up along the boulevards, in styles that mixed Art Deco with Arabesque and Neo-Pharaonic, a craze that had struck Egypt since the discovery of King Tut's tomb in the twenties. Armenian studio photographers captured pasha's wives in the latest fashions from Paris. A cast of glamorous exiles sipped whiskey at the Gezira Sporting Club, while Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek convened at the foot of the Pyramids. In 1936, King Farouk took the reins of power from his father Fuad, who, along with Farouk's mother, Queen Nazli, had kept Breton's imp of the perverse well-fed. While Nazli performed nighttime séances, Fuad slept with a Circassian servant girl curled up on a rare Chinese carpet at the foot of his bed. Unbounded by means or appetite, the fattened Farouk rolled between his four palaces and yachts with his chief confidante, an Italian plumber, by his side.
Farouk was at best a puppet of the British: much of Egypt was foreign-owned, including its entire tramway and electrical networks. Under his reign, the veneer of "progress" belied the worsening misery of the poor. While the rich literary culture that first published Cossery and Jabès flourished, only one in seven Egyptians could read. Child labor, sixteen-hour workdays, and corruption were common. City sharks swindled the rural poor. As public health improved, the population exploded — Cairo began to grow so fast that it lost control of its own slums. In a short story from the thirties, Cossery described the march of the city lights across the Egyptian countryside: "Strange harlot's body: it spread in all directions, always venal, always interested. And the countryside fled before it, rapid and monotonous. The city chased it without respite. Accursed countryside, which went off to vomit its distress at the edges of the poorer quarters."
In their villa on the outskirts, Serag's father scares him from looking for a job in the city by telling him that the government has arrested rebels. "But was he a rebel? Was his desire to look for work and to mingle with working men a revolutionary act?" Cossery writes. "Serag didn't understand why his love of an active life should be considered by the government as an attempt at revolt against the established laws." In 1945 alone, thousands of workers were arrested during trade union strikes and government crackdowns. It was too dangerous to hope for better labor conditions, or to challenge the monarchy held up by strings. Instead, as Cossery wrote in Laziness, "the country slept in its snare."
On July 2, 1952, a few months before its publication date, a case of the New Directions edition of Goyen's translation of Les fainéants, then titled The Lazy Ones, was lost or "hijacked" off a truck somewhere in New England. On the 23rd of that month, a coalition of young Egyptian army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the regime in a coup d'état. With Farouk exiled, Nasser introduced socialist reforms, seized foreign businesses, and redistributed Egyptian wealth. "Arab nationalism is fully awakened to its new destiny," Nasser declared in 1956, as he pushed for the nationalization of the Suez Canal. And yet, as workers were killed by the police and intellectuals imprisoned, it became clear to many that the awakening had only replaced one bad dream with another. In Cossery's 1964 satire The Jokers, a mad old lady has a dream about her son's friend Heykal (perhaps named after the author of Zaynab, an opposition leader). A practical joker and an anti-authoritarian agitator, Heykal and his comrades set out to topple the regime by postering the city with embarrassingly effusive pro-government propaganda. In the dream, Heykal is riding on a white horse and slaying a dragon. Yet after each blow, the dragon is reborn and refuses to die. "And you, prince, you laughed and laughed," recounts the woman. "And I knew why you laughed. Deep down, you didn't want to kill the dragon; the dragon entertained you too much for you to want it dead."
Revolution is futile, yet Cossery's heroes do not mind. Were it to succeed, it would leave them with no one to laugh at. Though he had highly politicized friends, such as the Egyptian communist Henri Curiel, Cossery himself never joined any political parties. "I hate politics," he said in an interview, "but I cannot write a sentence which is not a rebellion." He understood that a mode of living, expressed in his novels and in his daily life, could be revolutionary. In conversation with Michel Mitrani, his interviewer, exasperated, remarked, "This dormancy, it's totally engulfing!" "But it's a symbol," Cossery replied, "of refusing a certain world." Whenever he was asked why he writes, he would reply, "So someone who just read me decides not to go to work." In Laziness, as Rafik attempts to dissuade Serag from undertaking such a thing, the slumberous Galal enters the scene. "Why are you awake!" he groans. His brother explains their predicament. "God help him," murmurs Galal. "God is with the lazy," Rafik declares. "He has nothing to do with the vampires who work." "You're right," echoes Galal. "Where can I sit down?"
Goyen's translation of Laziness in the Fertile Valley has been in a deep sleep for sixty years. At various intervals, the idea of rousing it was debated, but editors feared it had gone musty. In Cairo in early 2011, I had brought a few of Albert Cossery's books with me. Egypt was in a state of euphoria: by overthrowing Hosni Mubarak's thirty-year dictatorship, it had done what had seemed impossible. Reading his novels amid the exhilaration of the uprising, Cossery seemed irrelevant or, happily, wrong. Yet not long after, following the elections that installed the Muslim Brotherhood in power, the new rulers began to instate their vision for Egypt's future. They granted themselves sweeping powers, restricted civil liberties, and imprisoned dissenters, in the midst of economic crisis and electrical blackouts. They called their plan — unsurprisingly — the Nahda, or Awakening Project. But after the Egyptian army
stepped in to depose the new president, it was against Mukhtar's statue of the Awakening that his supporters turned their anger. They spray painted slogans and papered the failed leader's portrait over the faces of the peasant and the sphinx. In the military's attempt to disperse the demonstrators at the foot of the Awakening and elsewhere, over a thousand people were killed.
In an early short story, Cossery had imagined a battle between the city's streetlights and the moon. "The street was deserted," he wrote. "He saw only the poor street lamp, which was trying to show some signs of life in spite of the intense light of the moon. It looked like a human being, a humble person crushed down by the luxury and power of a tyrannical force against which it could do nothing. In this drama of the street, the moon personified the privileged minority in this world, and under its brilliance the poor street lamps died in their thousands." Rather than imagining the moon as a benevolent orb, friend of lovers and poets, shining above the streetlamp—that artificial, politicized star—the moon is the despotic elite. And yet what remains if we, the lazy ones, have an enemy even in the moon?
We could shut our eyes against the lights. Sleep is refusal, a protest, a weapon. "I am always indignant," said Cossery to an interviewer. "About what?" "Everything that I see." In his first novel, The House of Certain Death, the young Cossery had ended on a note of high prophecy: "The future is full of outcries; the future is full of revolt. How to confine this swelling river that will submerge entire cities?" And yet, by his last novel, The Colors of Infamy, published in 1999, he writes of the hero, a charming pickpocket, "Ossama's objective was not to have a bank account (the most dishonorable thing of all), but merely to survive in a society ruled by crooks, without waiting for the revolution, which was hypothetical and continually being put off until tomorrow." The future is full of revolution; the revolution is forever in the future. The two possibilities cancel each other out, and what are we left with? Cossery's philosophy of idleness emerges as a via negativa, a political mysticism of its own. All that's left is to dive into the annihilating sweetness.
By the time he wrote The Colors of Infamy, Albert Cossery had lost his voice. Forced to undergo a laryngectomy after years of smoking, he could only hiss. Yet he preserved his routine as ever. He escaped the hospital to go to a café, wearing the ward pajamas. Pushed in a wheelchair by a beautiful blonde, he was as striking a sight as ever. In place of speaking, Cossery would write on notecards in a shaky yet elegant hand, a mischievous look in his eyes. "The loss of my voice gives me relief because I don't have to respond to imbeciles." "To look at pretty girls, there is no need to speak." "I have nothing in common with the world." "I am nothing except what is contained in my books." "Read them, and you will know who I am. All I have to say is in my books." In 2008, Cossery was made a Chevalier in the Légion d'honneur by President Sarkozy. He refused to accept.
Tawfiq al-Hakim's three-hundred-year-old saints, having found they cannot live in this new world, retreat back into their cave. As they lay dying, delirious, they wonder whether it was all a dream. And whose dream was it — time's dream, or their own? "Time is dreaming us," one says to the other. "We dream Time," the other replies. "Didn't we live three hundred years in one night? I'm tired from the dream." Time it stopped. On June 22, 2008, at ninety-four, Albert Cossery died in the room at the Hotel Louisiane where he had resided for sixty years.
"Men are asleep," he wrote. "Time takes on a new dignity, relieved of men and their eternal wrangles." The moon continues to do as it pleases: ostentation one night, austerity a few weeks later. But the sun, sinking its heavy head into the horizon every evening, is on our side.
Author Note: This piece is indebted to On Barak for his work on the history of timekeeping in Egypt. To learn more, see his new book On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt.
Anna Della Subin | 1 21 min read
FBH says:
Thank you. This is the best piece I've seen on the site yet.
Bat ZenCohen says:
This piece is clearly the mark of an incredibly talented writer.
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Essays Prizes
Why Do We Care About Literary Awards?
Mark O'Connell August 3, 2011 | 16 6 min read
Will Kindle Worlds Commodify Fan Fiction?
Elizabeth Minkel June 3, 2013 | 1 6 min read
I learned about the unfathomable amount of cash that Yahoo planned to throw at Tumblr last month, when the news inevitably crept up on my Tumblr dashboard. The reactions were predictably negative, and the general sentiment was clear: "They are going to ruin all of what we've built." For the most part, they echoed the reactions of the press at large, questioning yet another one of these crazy big internet deals, the wisdom of banking so much on users as advertising targets, and the near-universal assertion that you "can't buy cool." Was there ever a more stark contrast than between the purple-and-white tabloid jumble of Yahoo's homepage and the stripped-down malleability of Tumblr? Yahoo went on record promising "not to screw it up," which was somehow less reassuring than it should have been.
But I lead a double life on Tumblr: I follow bookish people and things, posting my own work there, attached to my real name, but I also lurk around a number of interlocking fandoms — interlocking because one has inevitably led me to the next: as people whose taste I trust migrate towards new obsessions, I sometimes migrate in turn. They have begun to crowd my dash, the weight of a thousand animated gifs slowing the site's functionality to a crawl — and I love everything about them. There is a vernacular that links these communities, some of it held over from the time when LiveJournal ruled the fannish world, and some of it new and constantly evolving, borne on a blogging platform designed for sharing and speed and expansive warm-heartedness — I spend so much time smiling while scrolling around on Tumblr that it's kind of alarming. (I browse Twitter stony-faced, occasionally barking out a harsh laugh, which means I'm either doing it wrong or Twitter and I just aren't meant for each other.)
For the most part, fan communities seem to shy away from any organization that tries to insert itself from the top down. There is a sense that on Tumblr, fandom is planted and cultivated — grown, in a way that feels more palpable than LiveJournal ever did. It's in your average stack of reblogged posts, fanning out in a sideways pyramid, each subsequent comment riffing on the one before it — and then seeing it days later, the joke or the expression of sympathy of the series of gifs piling up exponentially. You go to "like" it and note, with some surprise, that you already have. You can literally build on an idea, and this is how fandoms blossom and thrive.
It is an organic space, which must be at the heart of what's made it such an unprofitable space, the sponsored posts unobtrusively tucked over to the far right, simple enough to train your eye away from, and subtle enough to even invite a curious click or two. But how would the intrusion of an organization as heavy-handed as Yahoo affect these communities? Rumors began to spread suggesting that content would soon be censored, and that advertisers would be given much more space within a matter of days. Nothing was confirmed, but a vague sense of foreboding persisted: would they know to leave well enough alone, or would all of this organic community building prove too tempting not to attempt to monetize, to control, to ruin?
The answer, of course, remains to be seen — it's far too early in the game. We woke up to a blogging platform that looked much the same as the day before; a week later, no discernible change. The site chugs onwards, a million little corners of the internet, perfect little microcosms of the world — or the world as we wish it could be. For now, anyway.
It is fitting, perhaps, that the same week as the Yahoo/Tumblr acquisition, Amazon announced a project entitled "Kindle Worlds." It feels like more of a broader trend than a coincidence, because the Kindle Worlds endeavor is about an organization inserting itself from the top down. "Worlds," we learn, are Amazon-ese for fandoms — individual universes constructed by books, movies, television shows, comics, etc. — and the program is a platform for publishing fan fiction — quoting myself here, from a year ago (I'm currently accepting my lot as The Millions' official fanfic correspondent): "fan fiction is original work with largely unoriginal foundations, in which writers take established fictional worlds and spin them into something else entirely." Yeah, I apparently used the term "worlds" as well, but at least I didn't capitalize it.
The Amazon deal was struck with Alloy Entertainment, the YA juggernaut behind Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Pretty Little Liars, amongst a number of other ubiquitous book-cum-television-show enterprises about teenage girls being cruel and/or sexy. These three are the official launch-point for Kindle Worlds: fanfic writers in these communities (and elsewhere eventually, Amazon promises, with "licenses for more Worlds on the way") will be able to digitally publish their stuff for Kindle via Amazon, exchanging full rights to their ideas for somewhere between 20-35% of the profits, based on the length of their stories. The first offerings when the store launches in June will be commissioned works, the Worlds homepage filled with cheerful testimonials from these writers beside a dusting of hard facts and figures.
Much has already been written on the financial and legal details of Kindle Worlds, and the interpretations tend to vary based on the source. With a few exceptions, fan fiction is written, disseminated, and consumed entirely for free: obvious legal reasons compel writers to mark each story with very clear disclaimers, crediting their source material, however far an interpretation strays from the original. In the extremely rare instance that a fan work is published for money, it is after the story has been transformed beyond recognition — the Fifty Shades trilogy is the most famous example, evolving from 100 chapters of Twilight fan fiction. To the casual observer, Kindle Worlds might seem like a vast step up for your average fanfic writer, the best of whom are paid in praise alone. There's actual money here, though, to be fair, not a whole lot of it, accompanied the establishment's stamp of approval, published by Amazon and sanctioned by the corporation that owns the source material.
The actual money leads to other financial questions, because with Alloy, we're not talking about borrowing the characters of a single author: these books, and the scripts of the accompanying shows, are written by a slew of work-for-hire writers. Book-industry types far more familiar with media tie-in writing than me have suggested that the Kindle Worlds move might be another Amazon attempt to circumvent traditional publishers and writing models. If this actually catches on, Alloy and other organizations may come out winners, because by publishing on this platform, a fan fiction writer gives up rights to the content of their stories — Alloy and Amazon will have full rights to original characters and ideas. Why hire a team of traditional writers when your fans can generate new ideas for you — at no cost beyond the few cents per Kindle single you're required to pay them?
The whole venture hints at broader questions that swirl around a lot of Amazon's recent projects as they attempt to knock traditional publishing models out of whack. If it didn't feel like such a fundamental and remotely insulting misunderstanding of fan culture, if it didn't feel like a prime chance for corporations to exploit rather than promote, I might even praise Amazon (praise Amazon, for Christ's sakes) for trying yet one more thing that deviates from the publishing status quo. If the barriers for entry are lowered, does publishing great fiction becomes a question of talent alone — even as something crucial is given up in the exchange? There are parallels with self-publishing and parallels with the broader Kindle Single platform. Who deserves to be published? Why isn't it simply the person whom people would most like to read?
Surely every person in the entire realm of fan fiction is tired of the monetization question by now. The simple answer is that it really, really isn't about the money. But people keep on asking anyway: how can so much time and energy and a sheer dizzying number of words be spent on something for no financial compensation? It's easy enough to say that the person who asks that question doesn't understand the idea of fan fiction, or doesn't fully grasp what it means to be a fan of something in general — but that feels dismissive and unhelpful. There is a disconnect here, though, and it's one that's tricky for me to articulate, between Amazon and Alloy and the fan fiction community, or between Tumblr and Yahoo and the people who look at 100,000 reblogs and can only see a missed opportunity for advertising.
Is a person who believes in the ultimate democratizing power of the internet bound to be disappointed sooner or later? That scrappy start-ups inevitably sell out — great ideas get acquired by big companies, then twisted beyond recognition? Of course, those great ideas can come from anywhere, right? Perhaps that's not enough to stem the disillusionment. So maybe that's one of the appeals of fan fiction, or of the exchange of images and ideas amongst fandoms on Tumblr and elsewhere: there is absolutely no endgame there, beyond the satisfaction of sharing something you like, obsess over, deeply love with other people who love it just as deeply.
There is an enormously freeing diversity in the world of fan fiction. I don't mean that the writers are diverse — they are mostly female, and surely there must be socioeconomic implications in the ability to sustain such a hobby. I mean that the whole point of it, beyond all that deep love and celebrating any given fandom, is taking a character or a setting or just the tiniest inkling of an idea and rolling with it. The possibilities spin off into exponentially increasing permutations, spurring weird stuff and beautiful stuff, quite often fiction that's better written than the source material that inspired it, creating fandoms that are so broad and varied and encompassing that a person can usually find whatever they're seeking within. If not, well, that person may as well just write it herself. If that's not the most accurate reflection of the rest of the internet — the organic, cultivated internet, grown from the bottom up, with no contracts, no exchanges of cash — then I don't know what is.
Elizabeth Minkel | 1 6 min read
Books: an inventory of life
Andrew Saikali October 12, 2005 | 4 min read
My life boxed and crated. Transient. Completely uprooting my existence and collapsing it into the family Honda. University in one town. Internships in another. Back and forth, ping-ponging along Ontario's highways every four months for about five years. Years ago, this was my life.I learned to adjust to my new surroundings very quickly. Whatever record albums I happened to own at the time would be the first things unpacked, sorted and shelved along with whatever stereo I could afford. Next would be books and the milk crates that passed for furniture.Once these were set up I would generally think of my apartment as being complete. Four walls became a home. Anything else is basically an afterthought, an extravagance that I might or might not indulge in, like, I suppose, a chair.Every four months the following could be witnessed on Highway 401: a suitcase full of clothes with me in the backseat, a trunk full of crated books and records, my father at the wheel of the Honda still shaking his head from the contents of the trunk, completely mystified as to how the quantity of books and records had somehow increased exponentially since four months previous, and my mother riding shotgun, snacks at the ready. And, oh yeah, a giant bed tethered precariously to the roof of the car, overhanging front and back, providing shade under the Southern Ontario sun.More than anything else could, my books and records anchored me to my new surroundings – re-connecting me with me. They defined my home. They still do. The milk crates disappeared when I discovered Ikea and I've made the necessary overtures to furniture dealers. But the core of my world is as it always has been.There's a passage in A History of Reading that leads me to believe that Alberto Manguel would understand, that we're cut from the same cloth. The son of a diplomat, Manguel moved around a great deal as a boy. "Books gave me a permanent home," he writes, "and one I could inhabit exactly as I felt like, at any time, no matter how strange the room."It is sentiments like that, moments of memoir, that give what could have been a dry cultural history run-through its spirit. In the end, A History of Reading is anything but dry, as Manguel, a wonderful storyteller, chronicles "reading" from ancient civilizations on up to the modern age.As a young man in Argentina, Manguel was honored to be a reader to the great Jorge Luis Borges, by then blind. Manguel looks back on these reading sessions as "happy captivity", reading aloud whatever Borges asked him to from his own library. In this way did Borges re-connect and rediscover a part of himself. Reading a book (or having it read to you) has a cumulative effect. Manguel writes that "every book has been engendered by long successions of other books." Borges was intimately familiar with each of the books that Manguel would read to him. Yet with each new reading, Borges' brain would have a new take on it. His mind would not only connect it with other books he's read, but with previous readings of the same book. Each would leave its imprint.And different people, imprinted by different attitudes can perceive the same text in different, often contradictory ways. And no single reading can be isolated as the one correct reading. Manguel writes of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis which has, by different readers, been called: humor, parable, a Bolshevik tract, a Bourgeois tract, an allegory. Some readings might be better informed, more lucid, more challenging. But "no reading can ever be final," Manguel writes. "This is not a failure of the process, but proof of our freedom as readers."Manguel, in addition to assessing theories of reading, also teaches us a bit of history. He charts the development of paper and its antecedents – tablets, codex, scrolls. He writes about how the type of surface determined both the type of storage and one's own reading space. (In my case, reclining on a futon in my den, away from the distractions of the TVs and stereos that are the centerpieces of both bedroom and living room. If no remote control is within arm's reach, my reading stands a chance.)One of my favorite chapters in the book deals with public readings in mid-1800s Cuba. A largely illiterate workforce was nevertheless one thirsty for stories. So, while people worked, while their bodies performed routine functions, their minds would be engaged by stories – they would be read to. Eventually, fearing intellectual subversion, a prohibition went into effect resulting, as prohibitions will, in "underground" clandestine work-time readings. These kinds of readings continued among the Cuban immigrant population of the US into the early 20th century.Manguel also tells us about how the increase in world travel cried out for a new kind of portable book. And a 'good book', beyond just the already-available populist or pulp fiction. The result – the founding of the iconic Penguin.The history of libraries, the history of cataloguing, censorship through the ages, and a great little aside about a noted life-long book-thief – they're all given due consideration in Manguel's book. He even explores the history of reading-glasses (perched on the nose of the "bespectacled book fool")Well, this bespectacled book-fool is a hoarder. That trunk full of books and records would now barely cover the A's. Manguel, my kindred spirit, he knows what it's like. He reckons that his books were brought into his home for a reason. Sure, he could attribute it to thoroughness, or scarcity, or scholarship. But Manguel knows the truth. He knows its just "voluptuous greed". "I enjoy the sight of my crowded bookshelves," he writes. "I delight in knowing that I'm surrounded by a sort of inventory of my life."
Andrew Saikali | 4 min read
The Asking is Both Graceful and Profound: On the Stories of Josephine Rowe
Emily St. John Mandel August 8, 2013 | 4 min read


text:
Heart of Stone is een nummer van de Engelse band The Rolling Stones. Het staat op de lp's Out of Our Heads (Verenigd Koninkrijk) en The Rolling Stones, Now! (Verenigde Staten). In de Verenigde Staten en Canada kwam het op 19 december 1964 ook uit als single, met What a Shame op de B-kant. Het nummer haalde het jaar daarop de 19e plaats in de Billboard Hot 100.

In verschillende landen, waaronder Nederland (Decca 457 066), Duitsland (Decca DX 2340) en Frankrijk (Decca 457.066) kwam Heart of Stone in 1965 uit op een ep, in combinatie met What a Shame, The Last Time en Play with Fire. In Nederland haalde de ep de zesde plaats in de hitparade.

In het Verenigd Koninkrijk is het nummer alleen op lp verschenen.

Opname
Het nummer is op 2 november 1964 opgenomen in de RCA Studios in Los Angeles. Het nummer was geschreven door Mick Jagger en Keith Richards, die ook de achterkant, What a Shame, voor hun rekening namen. De bezetting was:
 Mick Jagger, zang
 Keith Richards, gitaar
 Brian Jones, gitaar
 Bill Wyman, basgitaar
 Charlie Watts, drums
 Jack Nitzsche, piano, tamboerijn

De ik-figuur in het nummer heeft veel meisjes verleid en daarna aan het huilen gebracht. Maar omgekeerd is geen enkel meisje in staat zijn hart van steen te breken. Hij waarschuwt een meisje dat het ook haar niet gaat lukken.

Het nummer is in juli 1964 opnieuw opgenomen met Jimmy Page op gitaar en Clem Cattini op drums. Deze langere versie (3:47) staat op het album Metamorphosis uit 1975.

Radio 2 Top 2000

Coverversies
Er bestaan enkele coverversies van het nummer. De bekendste is die van The Allman Brothers Band op hun album Hittin' the Note uit 2003.

Externe links
 Richie Unterberger over het nummer
 Tekst van het nummer (gearchiveerd)

Compositie van Jagger-Richards
Nummer van The Rolling Stones
Single uit 1964

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Am I afraid of being rejected? - Damn straight Skippy
By doorik
December 4, 2003 in Relationship Advice
doorik
People always say that I have a negative outlook on love and relationships and that I will eventually find someone that will alter this outlook. The main explanation given by the fairer sex of my now "always say die attitude" is that i just have a fear of rejection. There is one simple response to that accusation.
Damn straight Skippy.
After asking countless girl after countless girl out on dates i have come to the conclusion that i have been brow-beaten into silence by constant rejection. Many guys will eagerly step into a ring against an opponent twice their size before they'll consider asking a girl they're attracted to out for dinner. A girl can put a guy in a world of hurt and no matter how fast or skilled he is, he'll never avoid it. Flesh and bones heal, blood is cheap and pain is free, but the heart is a different matter. There's nothing poetic or sappy about it; when a guy asks out a girl, especially one he is emotionally attracted to, he is peeling away his armour and forfeiting any sort of defence. When the blade sinks, it sinks deep.
I've witnessed guys the size of houses who were unafraid of rabid dogs take three hours to work up the nerve to talk to a girl, only to be humiliated right there while they're totally defenceless. It's almost comical watching guys that big wilt under the merciless tongue of a girl a third their size. But the looks on their faces, the ones you usually see morbidly frozen on road kill, aren't. I now realize that it too much to risk for such a small return
Babygirlbrit
Well. as a girl, i admit that we are interesting creatures. There is a rule book, and it's subject to change whenever we feel it needs to be changed, and men are hardly made aware of the change. Our logic isn't always rational, even though we believe it to be. We can be fickle, and moody, and when a girl is with her friends....eeeh.
So, being turned down by girl after girl says something about the girls for one. If a girl all high and mighty on her horse decides that because you look a certian way you are stricken from her dating book, well thats shallow. However, i do believe that there has to be some level of sexual attraction if your first meeting someone...
millions of women out there....just have to try and try again. it hurts, but, you know, even girls get turned down.
It doesnt take a FEW rejections by girls to feel depressed, it only takes one. Believe me, I know. You build up all this self confidence over YEARS and in an instant they tell you to F*** off and you feel like killing yourself. (Ya, and that's not the worst that can happen right?)
ameliamolly
Rejection, ahhh. Aren't we all afraid of it? As a female I know that we can be very unpredictable and sometimes might leave a guy saying "what?". It sounds like you have been hurt pretty badly.
Perhaps when you meet someone you are interested in it would be better to take it slowly instead of putting all of your hopes into it right away. If you come on too strong immediately, this could push a girl away. I know that it's hard to leave yourself open and vulnerable. But if you don't take some sort of a chance you could be passing up the opportunity to meet the person that is right for you. Listen to yourself when dating, you'll know after the first few dates if there is a common connection between you.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Five Minute Briefing - Information Management: February 16, 2010. A concise weekly report with key product news, market research and insight for data management professionals and IT executives.
To make it easier for application developers and data management professionals to access the software tools they need, while also reducing the cost and time associated with managing software tool licenses, Embarcadero today announced Embarcadero ToolCloud.
Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration software, has announced the "beta version" of the Informatica Marketplace for a community of buyers and sellers to share and leverage data integration solutions. Building upon the company's community of more than 52,000 developers on TechNet (Informatica Technology Network) and over 400 partners, the Informatica Marketplace will offer solutions for seven technology categories including: Enterprise Data Integration, Data Quality, B2B Data Exchange, Application Information Lifecycle Management, Complex Event Processing, Cloud Data Integration and Master Data Management.
Syncsort, a provider of data integration and recovery software, announced availability of its Clickstream Data Integration Solution. The solution is intended to reduce the time, cost and effort required for integrating large amounts of web data, and help simplify an organization's ability to analyze online visitor behavior via a clickstream data warehouse.
Have you ever read those inserts that your bank, credit card providers, insurance company, mutual fund company, and others slip inside your statements and bills? We all get them. You know, those flimsy pieces of paper, printed in small type and written in convoluted English.


The defending Russian champions, the Moscow Spartans, travel to Budapest, Hungary Saturday, April 13 to face the Budapest Cowbells in opening round action in the Central European Football League Cup play.
The Cowbells, Hungarian semifinalists in 2018, are making their third appearance in the CEFL Cup. They lost their only game in 2018 to Poland's Gdynia Seahawks and in 2016 they played in the regular CEFL tournament, winning two games and losing two.
The Moscow Spartans are participating in the CEFL Cup for the first time ever after capturing the Russian title for the first time ever.


Chicken stuffed with boursin cheese, wrapped in prosciutto.
Make it like it sounds. I bought Perdue thin sliced chicken breast, because I didn't want to deal with the pounding out. Spread about a tablespoon + of boursin on open face of chicken. Place a sheet that fits of the prosciutto under chicken. Roll the whole thing up, and place seam side down on a baking sheet sprayed with Pam. Repeat, for each individual roll. Drizzle a little melted butter over all. I ground some black pepper over it, it doesn't need any more salt or seasoning, since the boursin has garlic and herbs in it. Bake at 400 for 30 minutes.
Everyone loved it! I found the boursin cheese and the prosciutto in the deli section of the store, as they're specialty items.


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WIB Interview: Dudley Taft (Pt. 1)
September 13, 2019 September 21, 2020 Vincent Abbate Leave a comment
An interview with Dudley Taft
Words: Vincent Abbate
Last time I checked, Dudley Taft was still waiting to be invited on one of those fancy schmancy blues cruises. You know – those overblown guitar orgies at sea that seem to be popping up all over the place.* Six albums into his solo career, the singer/guitarist still hasn't become part of that exclusive back-patting mutual admiration society. And perhaps his "outside the box" approach means he never will. For now at least, he's a lone wolf – an outsider who may or may not be looking in.
(*Note to Joe: I'd be happy to accept your invitation to the next cruise. Anything from the "mid-ship balcony" category upward will do.)
Yet with each new release, a few more people do seem to be picking up on what the persevering, axe-wielding longbeard from Cincinnati is putting down. Among today's blues-rockers, Dudley Taft has a fairly unique skillset.
On the one hand, he boasts the sturdy chops and aggressive, rock-oriented attack fans love. He grafts that onto a strong blues foundation, as evidenced in the songs he chooses to cover: Johnny Winter's "Leland Mississippi Blues," Freddie King's "Palace of the King," Skip James's "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues."
What sets Taft apart from the vast majority of his contemporaries is his songwriter mentality. His background – which includes study at Boston's Berklee College of Music and successful stints in a pair of Seattle-based rock outfits during the grunge boom of the 1990s – has given him the tools to expand upon the rigid 1-4-5 of the blues. Rather than toss those skills overboard when he founded the Dudley Taft Band some twelve years ago, he has utilized them to create a fascinating blues-rock hybrid. Catchy choruses, layered vocal harmonies and unexpected chord changes make for a bracing, multicolored listening experience.
Those elements are in full display on his September 2019 release Simple Life. The album's twelve tunes celebrate the new beginnings of the past few years: With his youngest child now grown and out of the house, the 53-year-old Taft has doubled down on his musical efforts and rededicated himself to touring.
Moreover, the record is an ode to the domestic bliss he has found after navigating the turbulent waters of parenting.
Dudley and I sat down a few days prior to the release of Simple Life to talk about the album and assorted aspects of his personal journey. Joining us – and occasionally adding their voices to the conversation – were the members of his current road band: Hamilton, Ohio's Kasey Williams, the bassist on Simple Life and its predecessor Summer Rain, and drummer Darby Todd, who has also added his thump to the music of Robert Plant, Gary Moore and Jethro Tull-guitarist Martin Barre.
Who Is Blues: Are the musical traits we hear on Simple Life, the melodic element et cetera, merely a case of all your influences coming out? Or do you make a conscious effort to avoid the standard blues formula?
Dudley Taft: I try not to make any conscious efforts, if I can help it. I grew up listening to songwriters like David Bowie, Neil Young and Lou Reed. With them, it wasn't like, "I'm gonna play this pentatonic riff over and over and amaze all my friends." I love great guitar playing. But only if it's mixed with great songs. I love a lot of the soloing on Pink Floyd records. It's not shredding. It's melodic and it fits the song.
I think I've always tried to live up to those standards. Now that I'm doing more blues, it's a different space for me to put that kind of stuff. For me, going to the blues and the bluesier part of songs that I write is really just an attempt to get at the root of the bands I grew up listening to. That turned me on as much as the music of the Beatles or Zeppelin or the great southern rock bands. That whole boogie woogie thing I always thought was cool. When I was writing for those bands in Seattle in the 90s, there really wasn't any place for that. And I kinda missed that.
I love to play lead guitar and I set it up to play good lead guitar. But I think it needs to add to the song rather than the song being a vehicle for it. It's funny. I look at other blues players and I think, hey, they only have to play seven songs in an hour. I have to play twelve. This isn't fair!
WIB: Do you listen to other artists working in the blues-rock vein nowadays?
Dudley Taft: Not with much regularity. If Eric Gales comes out with a new album, I'll check that out. I like Gary Clark Jr. I love his new record. My favorite Pandora playlist is a mixture of Gary Clark Jr. and the Faces. So you kinda get a good cross-section of the blues with a smattering of the Black Keys. There will be some Tab Benoit in there, some Joe Bonamassa. So I do keep tabs on that. But I don't feverishly seek out their albums.
WIB: But you tend toward artists who are more eclectic, like Gary Clark Jr.?
Dudley Taft: Gary's just a very talented singer and guitar player. I like his phrasing. I'm drawn to guys like Joe Walsh and Billy Gibbons for their economy and for being lyrical and melodic when they're playing a solo instead of playing a million notes. I gravitate to guys who are really good at saying something cool without a million notes.
WIB: The opening track on Simple Life, "Give Me A Song," is a real earworm. Yesterday, all day, I could not get that song out of my head.
Dudley Taft: Cool! There's a funny story behind that song. It came about after I met a French musician named Manu Lanvin at the Satyr Blues Festival in Poland. He's a blues-rock guitarist, singer and songwriter who is huge in France. It was a few days before my wife was coming over to spend five days in Paris. I asked him if he knew anything about Paris. He said, "Yes, I live in Paris!" We kind of bonded over that, and I started listening to his music. He does stuff that works live. Big beats that get the crowd going. When I play my songs, people sit there and look at me and I have no idea if they're into it. I figured I needed a couple of songs like his. He had written a song called "Blues, Booze & Rock'n'Roll."
WIB: Sounds pretty straightforward.
Dudley Taft: Yes, but it was very catchy. I think he was inspired by the Black Keys' "Howlin' For You." I think it's fantastic. So I thought maybe I should give it a shot. I had demoed a melodic riff and I thought it could use this beat. I'm talking four on the floor with the kick drum, with the tom doing a shuffling "dung-diggity-dung" … I didn't have a song like that! I wanted people to get excited when I play.
Photo (c) Anatol Klinger
So when we recorded that song – and we recorded a lot of songs at my studio – with Kasey on bass and Chris Ellison on drums, everyone had a smile from ear to ear. They just loved playing that beat. The chords are simple.
And I just thought: This is a song about joy. So I followed it up with the lyrics. I can't just write a fucking happy song! I have to put the shit in about why are you happy? What happened? How did you get here? Well, when I met my wife I was going through a really shitty divorce. I was really having a tough time and was in a dark place. So that's the verse.
But what I found out was I wanted to celebrate. Give me a song. Give me something to believe in. Give me a reason to fight for someone. It was hard to condense that into the lyrics. Because I would like to say a lot more, you know?
So the lyrics just came out of the vibe of the music. As they often do. Every so often I'll have a lyrical idea and try to fit the music to it. But when I'm doing my songwriting thing, which usually involves having a nice bong hit or toke of weed at the end of the day when I've got all my shit done, I just open my mind and let it happen. The ideas come in and I grab them on my phone and I save them for later. That's how the whole process works.
I sent "Give Me A Song" to Manu and he loved it! He totally understood what was going on. So from the Black Keys to Manu to me, that particular chain of inspiration had a story to it. Whereas with other songs, I'll be in the basement with my dogs, nobody's home and I can crank the amp up and go crazy and come up with something.
WIB (to Kasey Williams): What are your recollections of recording "Give Me A Song"?
Kasey Williams: It was interesting, because you don't often hear those kinds of drum beats, where you can kind of lay down on it. You kinda get into this primal, jungle groove. It's a lot of fun. It's very easy to complicate something that can get by with being simple. Keep it simple! There's a tendency to want to put all these parts into a song. But when you start with that kind of a drum beat, you don't have to put much on top of it to make it work.
Dudley Taft: Some songs I like to work up with the band. But a song like "Death By Bliss" is just me with my acoustic guitar. When you have a rhythm section in the room, with some songs you think "oh, that's cool" and on others it's "no, that's not gonna work." When you work it up with humans in the room, it's really quite nice. It's sort of the Neil Young philosophy. Work up the song with the band, play it four times and then record it.
WIB: It stays fresher that way.
Dudley Taft: You can hear it in the track. Even if it's not perfect, there's more of a vibe to it. Why iron out all of the personality? We do a little bit of editing. But not much.
WIB: In the press notes to Simple Life, you mention how your youngest child had moved out of the house, which was a dramatic change for you. How many kids did you raise?
Dudley Taft: We have a blended family. My wife has two kids from her first marriage. I had a biological and a stepchild from my first marriage. So when we got together, we essentially had four kids, although my stepson moved in with his mother. We did okay! Then you start this new chapter of your life. When you're raising a family, it's a team effort, and it consumes everything. I really wanted to keep playing and everything, but I couldn't just take a job in some band and go out on tour, because I wanted to be there for my kids. Now that they're out on their own, we're travelling more. I'm putting more effort into playing with my band. I'm writing more music and looking for new territories to play. So it's a good place to be in. We're still somewhat young. No one has anything bad wrong with us.
WIB: How long have you and your wife been together?
Dudley Taft: Sixteen years. We've been married for 13.
WIB: I only ask because you kind of put it out there with Simple Life, saying how the album is about the personal circumstances that brought you to the good place you're now in.
Dudley Taft: I feel like it's worth bragging about. I'm happy now. The album is about happiness, for the most part. I feel more comfortable with what I'm doing. I already have a bunch of new songs for the next record. More in the same vein of honesty, writing about who I am and what I have going on.
WIB: Being somewhat unorthodox for a blues-rocker, how do you deal with the compartmentalization of music? Where are the opportunities for you?
Dudley Taft: I'll give you an example of what you're talking about. I didn't get any of the songs off my new album on the SiriusXM blues channel. The guy who programs it is a real nice guy. He said he liked "I Can't Live Without You" until the chorus.
WIB: Where it becomes more poppy.
Dudley Taft: Yeah. But I don't write music to fit in anybody's category. David Bowie had this little quote: Keep it weird. That was his advice to other bands. Keep it weird. Do your own thing. Being in Seattle, all the really creative bands that came up in the early 90s, after hearing how rock was dead and all that … independent music! Hey, actually that shit is pretty good. Bands like Dinosaur Jr. Weird bands that you may never have heard of. That's fucking cool! So just do your own thing.
The early 90s was such a special time. Being in Seattle at that moment in time, it was like – dude, pay attention, there's some seriously cool shit going down here.
WIB: You once told me how all the bands on that scene were very supportive of one another.
Dudley Taft: When I was playing with Sweet Water, Chris Cornell came up one time and said, "Hey man, I love your band." We heard that he would use a couple of songs off our record to warm up before a show. That was really cool. We were friends with all the guys from Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains. It was just a big warm, fuzzy community, really. It wasn't like L.A., where the bands would be going: "We brought more fans to the show! We sold more tickets! We have more hairspray than you do!"
WIB: You were in L.A. during the hair metal era?
Dudley Taft: I was. I did not have good hair.
In Part 2 of our interview, Dudley resumes talking about the making of Simple Life inside his basement studio, a state-of-the-art space he acquired from Peter Frampton.
In the meantime, here's the official video for "Give Me A Song."
WIB INTERVIEWS#blues-rock, #Dudley Taft, #European tour 2019, #hair metal, #kasey williams, #seattle, #Simple Life, #Who Is Blues, #WIB Interview
← WIB Live: Rockin The Blues 2019
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Home » Car Reviews » 2019 Mazda MX-5 RF in Malaysia – new 184 PS engine, telescopic steering, CarPlay, Android Auto, RM260k
2019 Mazda MX-5 RF in Malaysia – new 184 PS engine, telescopic steering, CarPlay, Android Auto, RM260k
Mazda's emblematic lightweight sports car, the MX-5, has been updated for the 2019 model year, and this latest model has just arrived in Malaysia. Available only in RF folding targa top form, the roadster sports a fair few updates, but for a fairly substantial premium.
Let's start with the engine, which is still a 2.0 litre naturally-aspirated SkyActiv-G four-cylinder petrol mill. Equipped with redesigned pistons, connecting rods, crankshaft, throttle body and intake valves, it now revs 700 rpm higher at 7,500 rpm, with an accompanying increase of outputs – 184 PS (up from 160 PS) at 7,000 rpm and 205 Nm (up from 200 Nm) of torque at 4,000 rpm.
That's not all, as it's claimed that torque has been increased across the entire rev range, with top-end torque in particular boosted by as much as 15%. Mazda has also made improvements to the sound of the engine, removing material from the muffler's internal structure and also tweaking it for less high-frequency noise. As before, you get an option between a six-speed automatic gearbox and a good old-fashioned manual.
Other minor tweaks include the addition of telescopic steering adjustment (previously omitted due to the extra weight) in addition to the existing tilt adjustment, along with cruise control and a 4.6-inch colour TFT LCD multi-info display. You also now get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto connectivity as standard through the Mazda Connect infotainment system and its seven-inch touchscreen.
All these updates come at a literal price, with the new models now costing up to nearly RM37,000 more than before. The MX-5 RF retails at RM259,154 with the manual transmission and RM260,354 with the automatic, on-the-road without insurance. Included in the price is a five-year/100,000 km warranty and a five-year/100,000 km free service package.
Standard equipment includes adaptive LED headlights with a matrix high beam, LED daytime running lights, 17-inch alloy wheels in a new black finish instead of gunmetal grey, reverse sensors, keyless entry with walk-away lock, push-button start, auto lights and wipers, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror, auto air-conditioning, leather upholstery and a nine-speaker Bose sound system (including headrest speakers).
Safety-wise, you get four airbags, ABS with EBD and brake assist, stability control, hill start assist and lane departure warning, but unfortunately we don't get autonomous emergency braking that was also introduced globally with this model year update, nor the reverse camera.
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