Backland

A Personalized Autobiography and Some Notes to Oneself

My father, Milton Taylor, recently completed writing his autobiography and called it A 20th-Century (Jewish) Life: From Shepherd to Professor of Virology. (You can download it here.) Reading my own father’s memoir was very different from reading a memoir by someone I don’t know. For one thing, I’m in the book. For another, it was written for me—and for others whom he knows—not for a broad public. So it’s a personal communication rather than a general one, like a letter in a way.

My father has led an interesting life. He was born and raised a Glaswegian Jew, but dropped out of high school to join a Zionist Socialist youth movement and lived for a few years on a communal farm in England, where he was a shepherd. He emigrated to Israel, worked as a shepherd there, served in the army, then met my mother; they decided to go to the US, where my father would study poultry husbandry. After a year in New York City, he went to Cornell on an Ag School scholarship, where he became interested in microbiology and virology. He went on to become a professor. When I was born my parents were still planning to move back to Israel, which is why I have a Hebrew name and my first language was Hebrew. But the jobs were better in the States.

My father has a very direct way of writing. One of my favorite things about the book is how straightforwardly he regrets his mistakes and how clear-eyed he is about the past. For example, “When it came time to decide on a post-doctoral career, I chose to move into animal virology. Whether I went into the correct lab is something I often think about. I had wanted to join the lab of Renato Dulbecco at La Jolla. Charley, my advisor, persuaded me not to do so. He possibly thought the Dulbecco lab was too high-powered and that I was not up to it. His argument was that it was a large lab and I would not get personal attention from Dr. Dulbecco. I regret this decision to this day.” Or this, on being part of the Jewish youth movement in Glasgow: “When I think about it now, all of this seems very strange, growing up in Scotland and singing songs about water and work. I loved the singing although I did not know the words, just a jumble of sounds, and the dancing was fun. I suppose this was part of the indoctrination. Communal singing became an important part of life in Israel, reflecting in many cases nostalgia for times that never were and places long lost.” The book is full of sharp observations like that.

It seems appropriate that the next book I turned to was Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, which I read for the second time. Bresson was a French filmmaker who never used professional actors and avoided theatricality and pretense. There’s probably less chewing of the scenery in his films than in anyone else’s (unless you count Au hasard Balthazar, which is about a donkey who literally chews quite a bit of scenery). His films made a huge impression on me when I saw them in my twenties, though now some of them seem a bit stiff. His Notes are simply notes he made for his own use as he was directing, little bits of general wisdom. It seems almost as if my father, unknowingly, was following Bresson’s maxims as he wrote his book. Here are a few:

Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the ellipses.

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.

Two simplicities. The bad: simplicity as starting-point, sought too soon. The good: simplicity as end-product, recompense for years of effort.

Neither beautify nor uglify. Do not denature.

Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.

What Is Literature?

Karen and I went to see The Wife last night. It was a fun movie, with some nice plot twists. But there were a few things wrong with it, including the rather bizarre notion (spoiler alert!) that dead people are subject to libel law (or that there’s some other law that would permit a widow to sue a biographer of her late spouse for revealing the truth). Both Harry Lloyd and Jonathan Pryce are entirely unconvincing as Brooklyn-born Jews, and the clunky, melodramatic flashback scenes seem to have been shot by a different filmmaker.

After the movie, the conversation turned to the Nobel Prize in Literature, which has awarded a few prizes to writers (Svetlana Alexievich, Bob Dylan) who stretch the boundaries of what is called literature. Karen asked me what I think literature encompasses, and I replied that practically any writing can be considered literature. On the spur of the moment, I put the boundaries at street signs and advertising. Karen maintained that certain types of writing—history, philosophy, academic writing, and so on—should not be thought of as literature, and that the word be used only for fiction, poetry, essays, memoir, and drama. Being a literature professor, she was able to muster some strong arguments. Being a writer and editor of nonfiction, I was too.

This was more than a semantic debate for us. It came down to a defense of my purpose in life—as it did for Karen.

Karen is a professor of literature. Her students come into her class with the view that literature is “fluff.” History, philosophy, and journalism are not fluff, but for her students, fiction, poetry, and drama are. It is Karen’s purpose in life to teach them that literature is not fluff. The distinctions between what is literature and what is not are therefore vital to her.

As for me, I want my own work and the books I edit to have literary qualities, and those qualities should not be defined solely by the standards one sets for fiction, drama, and poetry. While lucid, clear, and limpid prose can make for good literature, that’s the minimal requirement. For me, literature is defined in large part by character. Characters can be ill-defined, stereotyped, or “cardboard” in both fiction and nonfiction. Making them come alive—making readers forget that they're reading and getting them involved in the narrative through rich character portrayal rather than through plot twists—is a very difficult art, both for fiction and nonfiction writers. In some respects, nonfiction writers have an easier task since the characters are real; the reader has less of a hurdle to jump in order to believe in them. In other respects, they have a harder task since they are limited to what has been documented about the people they write about (unless they’re writing about themselves), and they cannot invent telling details.

As for historians and philosophers, who are less interested in character, I’m afraid I don’t see why Herodotus, Plato, Kierkegaard, or Ann Douglas should have less claim to being “literature” than Kafka or Camus. They are all great writers.

Karen argued, essentially, that there are two entirely different meanings to the phrase “That’s not literature.” One is a putdown, the other is a simple statement of boundaries. Karen would never put down my writing because of its category.

But I want to be able to apply the same literary terms, devices, and fallacies to everything I read and write. I’m not in favor of removing distinctions—I like to keep fiction and nonfiction in their separate spaces, and I despise fictionalization in nonfiction books. But I believe in literature as a higher calling, I believe that there are distinctions to be made between good literature and bad literature, I believe that nonfiction can be as good as or better than fiction in every respect, I believe that the word “imaginative” can be applied to every kind of writing. In short, I’m proud of what I do, while recognizing that I’m not nearly as good at it as many others are.

My Bolivian diary, entry #40

April 11, 2014

On Sunday, March 30 we go with Biblioworks to Tomoroco, a small town about three hours away, to build a playground. There are fifteen of us: three Biblioworks staffers and twelve volunteers—three from Bolivia (including Carlos), four from the US (including Jacky, Thalia, and me), one from Germany, one from France (but who now lives here), and two from Argentina. The road is paved through Tarabuco, but at some point before it gets to Morada K’asa it turns cobblestoned; after Presto, it’s just dirt. Tomoroco is quite small, but big enough to have a central plaza (unlike Candelaria) and a large school, in which is the future playground. We’re a little distressed to see that two large molles (peppertrees) in that space have been sawn down—Zannah’s original plan for the playground was to have them provide shade. But we are told that this was necessary because the roots were undermining the nearby buildings.

Maritza, who runs Biblioworks, introduces us to fifteen high school senior boys, who are to help us, and splits us into teams to build each project. Thalia, Jacky, Carlos, and I are all on different teams. My team’s job is to build a climbing tree out of three truck tires and four seven- or eight-foot poles. It’s a lot harder than it looks. First we have to wash the truck tires and cut out the middle part on one side, which is done with a knife while the tire is wetted (it’s much easier to cut a tire when wet than when dry). Then we sand the poles. We drill holes in the tires and in the poles and fasten them together, which is not easy at all: the bolts to fasten them are usually a bit too narrow to accommodate the nuts inside the tire and go all the way through the poles, which means narrowing the poles with an ax. We use two bolts to join each tire to each pole, for a total of twenty-four bolts, and twenty-four holes to be drilled all the way through each pole, and twenty-four holes to be drilled through the tires too. Sometimes the latter are too big and the nut goes right through, so we cut pieces of tire to put behind the nuts. After we’ve joined the first pole to all three tires, we then have to put the six bolts through the next pole and lift the tires on top of it to maneuver the bolts into the holes and attach the nuts. The whole thing is awkward and time-consuming—it takes all day the first day and part of the second for our four-man team to assemble the tree, roll it onto the playground, dig holes for it, and set it into cement. Meanwhile, the other teams are building, out of tires and wood, various animals for the kids to climb on, an alphabet game, a tunnel, a car, and a little house. And a sixty-something-year-old man is chopping tree trunks, laying down rocks for a path, digging, and doing other intensely physical work with more energy and efficiency than anyone else there.

The seniors we work with amaze me. They’re all good-natured, never complaining; at mealtimes they take off their hats and sit in silence and eat with good manners; they joke around a bit but mostly work hard, contributing ideas to getting things done. I often find myself just watching them, since it’s hard for four of us to work on these things at once, and since they have so much more energy and strength than I have. If I had to work with senior boys in the States, they would complain, mouth off, take lots of breaks, tell dirty jokes, and even jump ship on occasion.

A few high school girls prepare our meals, which are very good—traditional Bolivian food, with soups and plenty of starches. We all sleep in one school room on thin, shabby mattresses on the floor, but nobody complains. Monday morning, Carlos and Mattias (the German) get up at 4:15 to go back to Sucre. Then, before we start work, Jacky and I explore the river next to the town and the opposite bank, which goes up a small hill and is quite wild.

The second day of work is less organized around teams; everyone pitches in to complete the various projects. After the tree has been set up, I mostly work around and in the small house, building walls out of (and sawing) logs and removing debris. Jacky and Thalia have everyone in stitches at the end of the day ribbing each other (in Spanish). Getting a ticket for the early-morning bus home isn’t easy; Caroline, the American volunteer coordinator, and I go to the bus office (unmarked), about four blocks from the school, but nobody’s there; we go back a second time with the son of the bus driver, who is one of the seniors, and he registers us; and a third time to actually purchase the tickets. We then get up at 4:15 Tuesday morning to meet the bus there. So many people get on that everyone is absolutely squished and then we all have to get off so that the bus can climb the hill that leads out of town; enough people disembark in Presto, though, so that we’re comfortable. Halfway back the bus stops for twenty minutes at the top of a hill to add brake fluid; we get out and wander around. It’s unutterably beautiful up there, with views in every direction, tiny ponds, a small wheat field, a path along a ridge, with the hills green and curved like the limbs of a sleeper.

Last Friday, a week ago, we attend a screening, on video, of an important 1969 Bolivian film called Blood of the Condor. A Marxist, anti-imperialist, and pro-indigenous movie, it caused quite a stir when it was released; in one part of the movie, Peace Corps members are caught sterilizing indigenous women. The movie is pure propaganda, with clear good people (indigenous) and bad (rich Bolivians and Americans), and because people believed it, the Corps was expelled in 1971 (it left Bolivia a second time in 2008). A discussion follows the movie, but nobody points out that the Peace Corps did not sterilize anyone and that instead it was promoting contraception. A few older audience members indulge in strong anti-American rhetoric, accusing America of continuing to try to keep the Bolivian population small. What bothers me most is that the large number of students there are going to believe that the Peace Corps actually did do those things.

Early Saturday morning Jacky, Philly, and I take a bus with a Turkish tourist and a Bolivian guide to an Inca trail about 90 minutes from Sucre. We hike downhill for two-and-a-half hours, then walk along a road towards Maragua. The scenery on the Inca trail is rocky and magnificent; we see cactuses called gardenias that will burst into flames when it gets too hot. But the walk that follows is even better, with Shangri-La-like valleys, blue-and-brown striped cliffs, and a river that runs through it. We eat lunch under eucalyptus trees with some wandering cattle, then cross the river and climb steeply to the top of a mountain. From there we follow a ridge overlooking a dramatic waterfall. At one point the trail narrows to about six inches around a curve with a steep drop on one side; the walls and trail are made entirely of purple pebbles. It’s the scariest moment of the trek. We arrive at Maragua at dusk. To the east, opposite the sunset, distinct white rays emanate from the horizon.
Maragua is in a “crater,” though it’s more like a giant depression; all around it are hills with arched rock formations, as if Maragua were the center of an enormous flower. The town itself is tiny—only about eighty or ninety families live there—and gullies run all through it, so that the houses are quite far apart. To get there we walk through corn and wheat fields and say hello to a family plowing with two oxen. Joaquin, our guide, offers coca leaves to everyone he meets, which is the common, friendly thing to do here. The community runs a beautiful set of cabañas, where we spend the night. Our legs and shoulders are terribly sore from hiking eight hours and carrying all our clothes and food. Unfortunately, Joaquin can’t find the key to the cabin at first, and then the propane tank for cooking is empty and he has to hunt down another one; in the end, all we have for dinner is some soup from a package.

The next morning we hike up out of the crater, a very difficult slog that takes about two hours. We continue going uphill over more fairy-tale countryside, green and rocky, with houses that look like they were built by Incas, with the walls made of unmortared rocks and the roofs of grass. Eventually we reach a huge rock slope on which are dozens of dinosaur footprints—petrified mud that looks like it just dried up yesterday. It is at this point that I finally completely run out of energy—my breathing is so labored that I feel like I can’t take another step. But I do, of course, and well up the hill from the footprints we finally relax and have a large lunch. I eat enough to get all my energy back, and then some.
The people in the area are Jalq’a, not Tarabuqueño, and their dress is somewhat different: their helmet-like hats are white rather than black, with colored borders; their white pants are longer and embroidered at the bottom. Little girls stop us and try to sell us homemade woolen, woven bracelets and spiral fossils that they’ve found.

Most of the time Jacky and Joaquin are in front, chatting easily in Spanish, while I bring up the rear (Philly a little ahead of me). I don’t mind. We hike the rest of the afternoon and arrive in Potolo at nightfall—another eight hours of hiking behind us. Three times larger than Maragua, Potolo is in a deep valley, with a plaza, a church, and a museum. The cabañas here are as nice as those in Maragua, and we all sleep soundly again.

In the morning we take a three-hour bus ride back to Sucre. The road at first follows a canyon as impressive as any I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some amazing canyons (especially in Utah). I get the impression that Bolivia has as many and as various natural wonders as any other country, if not more; we are continually stunned.

Film music, warped

Brad Mehldau Trio - Smile (2004)

Composed by Charlie Chaplin for his film Modern Times:

 

Sid Laverents - Nola (1970)

Felix Arndt's 1915 novelty song, here rendered even more noveltyish for the jawdropping short film Multiple Sidosis.

 

Jane Birkin - Quoi (1995)

Birkin sang some of this song, written by her ex-husband Serge Gainsbourg, in Alain Resnais's 1997 lip-sync musical On connait la chanson, one of my favorite films. The clip is at 4:27. This is the only moment in the entire film in which an actor lip-syncs to her own voice. 

Some thoughts on color

The leaves of the Japanese maple in the Japanese garden in Jackson Park are the color of the very heart of a fire. The white mulberries in the park are sweeter than the black ones, but also pack less flavor, just like white and yellow corn. Are all white fruits sweeter and milder than their colorful counterparts? I prefer the latter. What would Preston Sturges' Hail, the Conquering Hero, which I saw Friday night, be like if it had been shot in red, white, and blue rather than black and white? Would that have lent it more bite and cut down its sentimentality? At least half the appeal of William Eggleston's best photos lies in the saturation of the color--compare his dye imbibition prints to his chromogenic prints. This renders the images less real--or, perhaps, hyperreal. The same can be said for the color films of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray--not to mention David Lynch and Sofia Coppola. The Japanese maple is super-saturated too, at least in the sun. It's bursting with flavor.

Please Give

Friday night Karen and I went to see a disarmingly slight but quite charming movie called Please Give. I appreciated the quirkiness of its characters, the comedy of its situations; I didn't appreciate its resemblance to television--a series of short scenes, intertwined plots, no sensuality in the cinematography, no probing into a character's depth. Critics have compared it to Woody Allen's early movies, but those had more bite; and to Eric Rohmer's movies, but those had more passion.

The central conundrum of the movie is the impulse to be charitable, and its implicit message is that charity to strangers never works but charity to loved ones is what really matters. That may sound trite, but not as trite as the end of the movie, which implies that spoiling an already spoiled brat even more with an expensive yet casual gift will heal all rifts. But the movie is also about death, which is here painless and convenient; adultery, which is here equally painless and convenient; and, as an aside, the love of nature, which is here unnatural and inconvenient. It's also about making money, though, and what it says about that subject is more nuanced.