Someone shared with me today a nice review, published in the Spectator, by Boyd Tonkin of a new translation of the great work of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz.

In remote Soplicowo, its flower-filled meadows, ringed by deep woods where bears, auroch and bison — ‘the forest’s emperors’ — hold sway, family quarrels echo in miniature the convulsions of Europe. Young Master (‘Pan’) Tadeusz returns from his studies in Vilnius to the manor where his uncle, the Judge, runs the estate. The fate of Tadeusz’s absent father Jacek, a fabled hell-raiser, casts a long thread of suspense that Mickiewicz spins at the close into a deftly-managed coup.

As the callow heir falls first for the sophisticated Madame Telimena and then her teenage ward, the garden-loving Zosia, a Romeo-and-Juliet motif sounds. A match between the pair might ‘reunite two feuding houses’. For now, the Soplicas — Tadeusz’s lot — and their Horeszko neighbours, Zosia’s clan, remain at daggers (and cudgels, broadswords and muskets) drawn.

The rough-hewn gentry let off steam through hair-raising bouts of scrapping and drinking. In these parts, ‘lawsuits will always be superfluous’. Vodka-fuelled posses enforce court orders in ‘forays’. Think Henry Fielding’s rambunctious squire-archy, with a steeper body-count, and higher alcoholic proof.

Fred Lapides ripped off the commemorative screed from behind WaPo’s paywall for you and me.

[New Years Day was] J.D. Salinger’s 100th birthday, but Holden Caulfield is still 17. The iconic teenager of “The Catcher in the Rye” is forever suspended in the amber of our youthful alienation.

Although a few pious schools continue to ban Salinger’s only published novel, for millions of adults, a faded copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” is a sweet teenage treasure, as transgressive as a trophy from band camp. Ninth-graders who secretly read the book with a flashlight when it came out in 1951 are now in their 80s.

To read it again as an adult is to feel Holden’s pain lingering like a phantom limb. His righteous cynicism is adolescence distilled into a sweet liquor. But the novel also feels like revisiting your first house. The familiarity is enchanting but discombobulating. The story is smaller than you remember, and some details you had completely wrong. But what’s most striking is how common the novel’s tone has become over the intervening decades. Holden is Patient Zero for generations infected by his misanthropy. We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision.

We have met the phonies and they are us. …

it’s not clear how Salinger’s reputation will evolve in the new century. As usual, time helps, e.g. we can ignore Ernest Hemingway’s behavior; we can’t ignore Sherman Alexie’s. The biographies have tended to leave two impressions: Salinger’s fiction is even more autobiographical than we thought, and Salinger himself was even loonier than we suspected. Homeopathy! Acupuncture! Dianetics! In 2013, David Shields and Shane Salerno suggested that Salinger’s undescended testicle could help explain his entire life. “Surely,” they wrote, “one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare was to reduce the likelihood that this information about his anatomy would emerge.” (Someone asked on Twitter, “Why didn’t he just wear pants?”)

RTWT

She’s one of the most prominent undergraduate dancers in this currently-going-viral video promoting Boston University.

Republican officials should pay attention. What if we got some hot ultra-conservative GOP chick to run against a fat elderly greasy democrat in an inner city district? I bet we could pull off some surprise wins, too.

(photo is by Dorothea Lange–Bisbee, Arizona, 1939)

From Facebook:

The summer of 1972 found me in San Luis Potosí Mexico, trying to learn enough Spanish to get my final college credits for graduation. I had not been a stellar foreign language student up to that point, so I was a bit “under the gun”.

To get a better understanding of the culture, etc., blah-blah, we had a few travel days to see some sights. A couple of those days were spent in Mexico City.

My mother had traveled extensively in Mexico, and she “collected” people wherever she went. She “arranged” for my then-girlfriend (now my wife of 45 years standing) and me to meet a young woman she knew. We rode the Metro to the end of the line, south of Mexico City, and “Blanca” picked us up and took us to her home in Coyoacán for dinner. My Spanish was still sketchy at that time, and I don’t remember many details, except the following little tale.

We were visiting in the sala (the two young women were visiting–I was smiling, trying to look agreeable, and straining for a familiar word) when Blanca’s father came home from work. He entered through the back door that led into the kitchen. He was a stocky, mostly bald man of early middle-age with greying temples. He wore an oxford cloth blue shirt, open at the collar, and some nondescript pleated-front gray wool slacks. But he totally caught my attention when he pulled a 1911 from his waistband and deposited it in a drawer beside the back door!

Now, I had been reading Jeff Cooper for a few years at that point, and he often mentioned “Mexican carry”. Cooper had a well earned reputation as a teacher, BUT–he was not good about repeating his definitions for late comers (which was ME). When Blanca’s father hauled that old 1911 out of his waistband where it had been nestled just behind his hipbone, I KNEW EXACTLY what Mexican carry meant!

Ever slow on the uptake, I did not fully appreciate the significance of the father’s occupation until many years later, when I read Joaquin Jackson’s book, “One Ranger“, wherein he describes the singular power of being a Mexican general. Yep–that was Blanca’s father!

They had a moving sidewalk! Who knew?

Dasyurus viverrinus

I’d never even heard of them.

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