Halfway down the Danube

Tunnel vision

Another excerpt from the memoirs of an American poet, this time Andrei Codrescu. He's from New Orleans -- originally, from Sibiu -- and is probably best known in the US as a commenter on National Public Radio, although his writing has its charms too. (Was he the one who quipped how great it was to live in a country where those three words, "National Public Radio", symbolize boredom, not nationalism? Might have been Daniel Schorr.) This is from The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans The Hole in the Flag, his account of his trip back to Romania in December 1989:

The metro entrance gaped at our feet like a huge open mouth. We had read that the metro entrances of Bucharest were also entry points into Ceaucescu's maze of tunnels, a secret subterranean network constructed to outlast even nuclear war. There were reports of rooms stocked full of canned and frozen delicacies, armories containing missiles, communications centers gleaming with the latest technology. The underground network was reputed to be thousands of miles long, multilayered, a complicated nervous system whose exact shape and direction no one single person knew. Architects who had worked on portions of the system had been killed. [...]

The land of Romania is combed with the tunnels of various ages. When I was a kid, I could get from my school to my house via an old tunnel that began just under the wall adjoining our chemistry lab. It was one of many built to serve as escape routes during a Turkish assault. It connected to older tunnels that honeycombed the city and ended in the mountains. We could sink under the city at the blink of an eye, and often did, when we skipped history, which was taught by a horrible man with an eye patch named Comrade Rana. But the tunnels existed precisely because history was one subject the Romanian people had been unable to skip. [...]

A brief article, written in spare soldier's language by a certain Major Mihai Floca, described the tunnels under Bucharest being deactivated by his elite commando unit. He wrote of giant refrigerators stuffed with a variety of meats, stores of foods that "most people have forgotten the taste and color of," immense closets filled with quality clothes and shoes, comfortable dormitories, ultramodern workshops equipped with the latest electronic monitoring equipment and computers, caches of weapons, sophisticated bombs, germ warfare shells. The brightly lit "labyrinth" was vast, leading everywhere, under secret buildings, under the television and radio stations, under the Ceaucescu's many palaces and safe houses. "They were prepared to live forever in there," he concluded sternly.

You know, I might think that Major Floca might be indulging in a bit of post-Revolution urban legend, except now I've seen that damn Palace of the People. Now I wonder how well the tunnels' Ceaucescu-era concrete has dealt with the local water table and earthquake tremors. Codrescu continues:

What is it about Commies and tunnels? Harrison Salisbury reports in his book on Tiananmen Square that the Chinese troops that burst out of the Great Hall of the people and the historical museums ringing the square had slipped there secretly from tunnels under the Forbidden City. "There is even a branch railroad line with an underground station in Zhongnanhai," writes Salisbury. If one considers that the chief metaphor used in Communist propaganda is the "light of communism" or the "dawn of the new age," the tunnels become even more baffling. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense: A movement born and elaborated underground that came to light through violence and then ruled illegitimately must always make provisions to return to the darkness of its beginnings.

Sit on the bridge I'm trying to hit

I've been reading the memoirs of one of my favorite contemporary American poets, Charles Simic. Readers of Halfway Down the Danube with Balkan-dar may have noticed his last name; yes, he was born in Belgrade. But hey, being from somewhere else is the American condition; and even before I knew he once lived in Chicago, I thought his poetry had a very Chicago feel. Anyway, here's an extended passage from his A Fly in the Soup. Enjoy!

In 1972 I met one of the men who bombed me in 1944. I had just made my first trip back to Belgrade after almost twenty years. Upon my return to the States, I went to a literary gathering in San Francisco, where I ran into the poet Richard Hugo in a restaurant. We chatted, he asked me how I spent my summer, and I told him that I had just returned from Belgrade.

"Oh yes," he said, "I can see that city well."

Without knowing my background, he proceeded to draw on the tablecloth, among the breadcrumbs and wine stains, the location on the main post office, the bridges over the Danube and Sava, and a few other important landmarks. Without a clue as to what this all meant, supposing that he had visited the city as a tourist at one time, I inquired how much time he had spent in Belgrade.

"I was never there," he replied. "I only bombed it a few times."

When absolutely astonished, I blurted out that I was there at the time and that it was me he was bombing, Hugo became very upset. In fact, he was deeply shaken. After he stopped apologizing and calmed down a little, I hurried to assure him that I bore no grudges and asked him how is it that they never hit Gestapo headquarters or any other bulding where the Germans were holed up. Hugo explained that they made their bombing runs from Italy, going first after the Romanian oil fields, which had tremendous strategic importance for the Nazis and were heavily defended. They lost a plane or two on every raid, and with all that, on the way back, they were supposed to unload the rest of the bombs over Belgrade. Well, they didn't take any chances. They flew high and dropped the remaining payloads any way they could, anticipating already being back in Italy, spending the rest of the day on the beach in the company of some local girls.

I assured Hugo that this is exactly what I would have done myself, but he continued to plead for forgiveness and explain himself. He grew up in a tough neighborhood in Seattle, came from poor, working-class folk. His mother, a teenager, had to abandon him after his birth. We were two befuddled bit players in events beyond our control. He at least took responsibility for his acts, which of course is unheard of in today's risk-free war, where the fashion is to blame one's mistakes on technology.

Hugo was a man of integrity, one of the finest poets of his generation, and, strange as it may appear, it did not occur to me to blame him for what he had done. I probably would have spat in the face of the dimwit whose decision it was to go along with Tito's request and have the Allies bomb a city on Easter full of its own allies. Still, when Hugo later wrote a poem about what he did and dedicated it to me, I was surprised. How complicated it all was, how inadequate our joint attempt to make some sense of it in the face of the unspoken suspicion that none of it made a hell of a lot of sense.

Letter to Simic from Boulder

Dear Charles: And so we meet once in San Francisco and I learn
I bombed you long ago in Belgrade when you were five.
I remember. We were after a bridge on the Danube
hoping to cut the German armies off as they fled north
from Greece. We missed. Not unusual, considering I
was one of the bombardiers. I couldn't hit my ass if
I sat on the Norden or rode a bomb down singing
The Star Spangled Banner. I remember Belgrade opened
like a rose when we came in. Not much flak. I didn't know
about the daily hanging, the 80,000 Slav who dangled
from German ropes in the city, lessons to the rest.
I was interested mainly in staying alive, that moment
the plane jumped free from the weight of the bombs and we went home.
What did you speak then? Serb, I suppose. And what did your mind
do with the terrible howl of bombs? What is Serb for "fear"?
It must be the same as in English, one long primitive wail
of dying children, one child fixed forever in dead stare.
I don't apologize for the war, or what I was. I was
willingly confused by the times. I think I even believed
in heroics (for others, not for me). I believed the necessity
of that suffering world, hoping it would learn not to do
it again. But I was young. The world never learns. History
has a way of making the past palatable, the dead
a dream. Dear Charles, I'm glad you avoided the bombs, that you
live with us now and write poems. I must tell you though,
I felt funny that day in San Francisco. I kept saying
to myself, he was on the ground that day, the sky
eerie mustard and our engines roaring everything
out of the way. And the world comes clean in moments
like that for survivors. The world comes clean as clouds
in summer, the pure puffed white, soft birds careening
in and out, our lives with a chance to drift on slow
over the world, our bomb bays empty, the target forgotten,
the enemy ignored. Nice to meet you finally after
all the mindless hate. Next time, if you want to be sure
you survive, sit on the bridge I'm trying to hit and wave.
I'm coming in on course but nervous and my cross hairs flutter.
Wherever you are on earth, you are safe. I'm aiming but
my bombs are candy and I've lost the lead plane. Your friend, Dick.

When it rains, it pours

Hi all. Apologies for not posting more (and especially to Doug and Claudia, who expected a Carlos-content-rich week in their absence), but my landlord made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and I have spent the past holiday weekend moving stuff into storage. Those in the know know this is several K of books, so I am a little tired.

My goodness, my somatotype has changed. I used to look like a kind of pissed off, sort of Asian burgher. Now my Euro genes have really expressed themselves, and I look more like a brunette Rutger Hauer. I still resemble a Jack Kirby cariacture of myself, though. It's the head like a cinder block thing. And I have bruises all freaking over.

And the food cravings. For this first post-move breakfast I want: scrambled eggs, Mindanao tapas (red candied pork), a wedge of sharp Cheddar, some corned beef hash with four sorts of peppers, and a cup of coffee that could bring Ulysses S. Grant back from the dead. I'm eating a corn muffin. Ah well.

Breakdown

So it finally happened.

We were driving through Transylvania. Specifically, we were about halfway from Sibiu to Arad. A little bit past Deva, if you really want to know. Anyway, we were out of Sibiu judet.

That's a key piece of information because in Sibiu judet, the roads are pretty good. Oh, they're not highways -- there are no highways in Transylvania. But they're decent two-lane roads with a reasonably smooth surface and shoulders. We're not sure why. Does Sibiu have better government? More honest or diligent road engineers? Whatever the reason, once you drive on past Sibiu, the road gets a lot worse.

So we hit a pothole. It was maybe the twentieth time on this trip that we hit a pothole at speed. But it was one time too many. Bang: flat tire.

Our car had broken down. In Transylvania.

Oh, that's all. It wasn't dark. It wasn't even raining. There was no crumbling castle nearby. Not even a sinister manor house.

There was a construction site. We pulled into its parking lot and started messing around with the spare tire. Within a minute or two we had workmen from the site gathered around the car. They politely took over, removed the old tire -- it was completely destroyed -- popped on the spare, spun the nuts, and there we were. I gave them a couple of hundred thousand lei and we all shook hands and they waved us off.

They didn't even tell us how few strangers visited their village.

Okay, there was one interesting bit. The spare tire was what some people call a "doughnut" -- an old tire that's just there to get you to the next service station. So we drove on it slowly until we reached Arad, an hour or two later. Arad is a decent sized city, a couple of hundred thousand people, near the Hungarian border. We drove into the center and within fifteen minutes we found a place that had a tire: not a perfect match, but good enough.

Now, this place was a garage with a bunch of men hanging around out front. I mean, just hanging around... leaning, standing, chatting, just shooting the breeze. Two men detached themselves from the crowd and interacted with us, while the rest of them just continued to hang around.

The two men were Tall Quiet Guy and Short Guy Who Wouldn't Shut Up. Tall Quiet Guy had hands covered with grease and a general air of competence. Short Guy had clean hands, a nice leather jacket, and a general air of not shutting up. Short Guy didn't speak any English, but he did have a little, a very little German, and that was enough.

"Meister!" he said, gesturing at Tall Guy. "Kein problem! Meister! Meister!" Meanwhile Tall Guy was messing with the tire. Short guy waved his arms, emphasizing his point. "Ja! Meister! Sehr gut! Kein Problem! Meister!" Tall guy pounding on a difficult nut with a hammer.

"Um... thanks," I said to Short Guy, and then to Tall Guy, "uhh, eu pot sa ajut -- " I can help --

"That's OK," said Tall Guy in near perfect English. "What I really need is for that freak," flicking his wrench at Short Guy, "to go away, and that's not gonna happen."

I stood there dumbfounded for a moment while Tall Guy continued banging on the nut. Short Guy was still waving his arms and trying to catch my eye. "Ja, Meister! Kein Problem! Meister!"

"Uh, you speak English."

"Yeah." Tall Guy spun his wrench and a nut leaped free. "He doesn't, though." Snap, whirr, off came another nut. "He doesn't make sense in Romanian, either. But he's the boss. What can you do." He began walking around the car, tapping the other tires, checking for weaknesses.

"Er... you're sure he doesn't understand English?" Short Guy was waving after us, still emphasizing Tall Guy's Meister-ness.

"He lived in Austria for ten years, this... specimen... and see how much German he understands." Tall Guy grabbed the ruined tire and rolled it into the shop. "This'll just be a minute."

And so we stood there for a couple of minutes, while Short Guy repeated his eight or ten German words -- there was no problem, this guy was a master, really -- and then Tall Guy brought us back a new tire and popped it on.

"How much?"

"Half a million." Not very much. Especially not much for a foreigner. It's common in Romania that foreigners pay more, because we're all rich. I've become so used to it that I'm a little surprised now when it doesn't happen.

"Okay... Hey, thank you. Thanks a lot. Um, your English is really good."

"Yeah? Well, thanks."

And we got in the car and drove away. We waved. Short Guy waved wildly back. Tall guy raised a hand. Even the bunch of guys hanging around briefly looked up.

I'm sure there was a story there. I wonder what it was.

But anyhow, we can now check "car breakdown while driving through Transylvania" off the list.

Sponsor girls, won't you come out tonight

So, sponsor girls.

In Serbia, a sponsor girl is a young woman -- they're almost always between 18 and 25 -- who has devoted herself to finding a rich boyfriend. They tend to dress expensively, if not tastefully, which makes them fairly easy to spot. The Serbian language has developed a specific word for this: sponsorozhde.

Sponsor girls are pretty common in Belgrade. If you go to the nicer restaurants and cafes, you can't miss them. There are bars and nightclubs that are known as sponsorozhde hangouts.

Every society has girls who are looking for a sugar daddy, but they do seem particularly evident in post-Communist societies. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

One is the economic pain of transition. Unemployment in Serbia is high; youth unemployment, for the 18-25 age group, is especially high; unemployment for young women... I can't even guess. 50%? 70%? So, becoming a sponsor girl makes a certain amount of rational economic sense. What are the options? Killing yourself trying to get a job that will pay $150 per month, if you're very lucky?

Another is the general upheaval in many of those societies, especially the ones that have been hit with war and other problems in addition to economic woes. When you've seen your country collapse, your male classmates drafted off to war, and your neighborhood flooded with refugees, it gets harder to have faith in long-term planning. Live for today, and grab what you can.

Similarly, the typical sponsor girl outfit -- expensive but revealing, aggressively sexy, hung all about with jewelry and fashionable accessories -- is the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a badly shaken society. Look, I am doing well: see my diamond rings, fur stole, gold lame bustier!

In a world where things like university degrees and good jobs no longer matter, status becomes more a matter of display. The young woman with the thousand-dollar outfit, flashing a university professor's annual salary on every finger, is obviously somebody.

Another factor might be the general drop in the status of women in some post-Communist countries. I'm not really qualified to judge this, so I note that some people think it's significant, and move on.

Whatever the reason, sponsor girls are everywhere in the post-Communist world. But they're a lot more obvious in some places than in others. As I said, they're very obvious in Belgrade. A bit less so in Zagreb; much less so in Ljubljana. Bucharest, medium. (I will freely grant that these are subjective impressions.)

Romanian, BTW, doesn't have a particular word for "sponsor girl". Oh, Romania has them... go to the cafes along Radu Beller, just north of Piatsa Dorobant', and you'll see sponsorozhde all around you. But Romanians haven't evolved a word for the phenomenon. They have the phrase femea intretsinuta, but that means more generally "kept woman".

Oddly, Romanians did understand what I meant when I just Romanianized the Serbian term. "I see a lot of sponzoritate up in Cafe Brazilia." "Oh, yes, there are a lot up there."

Win some, lose some

A while back, over on the Head Heeb, I made a guess that turned out to be wrong.

I predicted that Ramush Haradinaj, the Prime Minister of Kosovo, would probably not be indicted for war crimes. As it turned out, he was indicted, and two weeks ago he travelled to the Hague and turned himself in.

On the other hand, right around that time I made another prediction, here on this blog. I predicted that Romania's obnoxious nationalist party, the Partidul Romania Mare (PRM), would consider dumping its even more obnoxious leader, Vadim Tudor.

And, hoo hah: three days ago, they did just that. Vadim Tudor has resigned from PRM. To make the break even cleaner, the party has renamed itself; it's now the Popular Party of Greater Romania, PPRM.

PPRM wants to rebrand itself as a "center-right, Christian, populist, democratic nationalist party" with strong links to "other Central European Christian Democratic and similar parties". Vadim Tudor said that he was "doing this for Europe". He then added that he will spend his time running his TV station, Cosmos TV, and also hosting a "unique" new talk show.

(Random thought: talk show hosts as populist political leaders.)

...it's unclear how serious this is. Tudor apparently still holds an "honorary" post as President of PPRM, and few are willing to believe that he'll really give up power.

On the other hand, the brighter lights in PRM must have figured out by now that they can still get 10%-12% of the vote without Tudor, and that if they can escape the stigma of being a bunch of anti-Semitic fascist wannabes, then maybe they could join a government one of these days. Like, after the next election, which might be held later this year.

...I suppose I should make some new predictions, to replace these two? Give me a few days.

On the road again

We are hitting the road again. After school tomorrow we leave for beautiful Sibiu, then we plan to get as far as Vienna the next day, to arrive at my home town of Ostheim on Sunday. (You guessed it, we're driving.)

Not to dwell too long, I'm leaving for the US the following Tuesday. Doug will be back in Bucharest on Friday, the kids and I will return some ten days later.

As we all know, you're in good hands in the meantime.

Just one day, please

Is that really too much to ask? I want just one day where I'm not disgusted by some weird Bush thing. One day without odd nominations, disastrous decisions, and this creepy smile of his.

Just one day would be nice.

For starters.

Sláinte is táinte!

But liquor is quicker. And quickest of all, apparently, was ether. From Perrine's Chemistry of Mind-Altering Drugs:

Toward the end of the 19th century, the British authorities attempted to reform the Irish drinking habits by heavy taxation of hard liquor. The wily Irish responded by smuggling ether from hospitals. They found that if you drank a shot of ether it gave a quick 15 to 30-minute high much like alcohol, followed by a return to hangover-free sobriety -- and the production of elephantine flatus, in this case highly combustible, which made the simultaneous use of another psychoactive substance, tobacco, very dangerous. The British authorities realized they had a prohibition-created drug epidemic -- and a major fire hazard -- on their hands: "etheromania" was sweeping Ulster! The common sense that made them so successful as an imperial power soon reasserted itself [sic -- CY], and the Irish were allowed their alcohol again.

Éire go brách indeed. Have a happy and healthy St. Patrick's day!

I got your subculture right here 2

From a recent instant message conversation:

Me: Boing Boing: Obsessive gamer Storm Troopers get a Vader-visit
Me: wonder if that happens in wwii games.
Bad Mama: and to think, israel doesn't want these kind of people
Me: and our thoughts converge on the same idea from two different directions
Bad Mama: amazing

Disclaimer: correlation does not equal causation. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. The map is not the territory. Oh my God! It's a gelatinous cube!!!

Romanian word of the week

This week's Romanian word is linguritsa, "teaspoon".

We've been hearing this word a lot because Alan has had a cough. So we've been dosing him with various medicines. And most of these are measured by the linguritsa: o linguritsa fiecare ora (one teaspoon every hour) and so forth.

I like this word because it's derived from the Latin lingua, "tongue". But it has the Slavic dimunitive -itsa. That's cool, and very Romanian. Romanians like to emphasize that their language is Latinate, part of the great family of Romance languages, and that's true. But it's the only Romance language to cross-fertilize with Slavic -- maybe 20% of the vocabulary is Slavic -- and this gives some strange and beautiful hybrids.

Thus, linguritsa, little tongue... teaspoon.

I find that neat.

Happy Birthday, Doug!

Alan's birthday on Saturday, Doug's birthday today. For Alan, it was a Toy Story cake, complete with the face of Woody. For the big guy today, it was a chocolate birthday cake. Since Alan doesn't like cake, there is no cake-smeared picture of him on his birthday, and Doug eats rather neatly -- so here's a picture of David from this morning, with chocolate birthday cake.

I got your subculture right here

Me, the New York City Math Teacher, and the Head Heeb are jointly home-brewing two five-gallon (20 L) batches of stout, at present in the NYCMT's utility closet. Final results in two weeks. We expect cinnamon/caraway overtones. I'll let you know.

What sort of beer is your favorite blogger? No no no.

...so little time.

Oh, there are so many things I should blog about.

The weird, freaky, can't-make-up-its-darn-mind weather of the last week. Sun! Snow! Sun comes out and melts the snow! More snow! Snow while the sun is shining! 10 cm of snow! Sun!

The recent elections in Moldova. In two years here, I haven't blogged one word about Moldova. That's just wrong.

The indictment of Prime Minister Haradinaj of Kosovo for war crimes, and his subsequent departure for the Hague.

The rumbles of labor unrest here in Romania, including possible strikes by postal and railroad workers, caused by labor unions protesting proposed changes to the labor code. (Claudia got caught in one of these the other day, down by Gara de Nord.)

The sudden sharp scuffle between President Basescu and Prime Minister Tariceanu, and its significance for (possible) early elections here.

Some stuff about Romania's economy, including the recent sharp drop in interest rates here; the introduction of the "heavy" leu, which will knock four zeroes off the old leu, so that a dollar will be about 3 lei instead of 30,000; last year's astounding economic growth; and maybe an update on the Dacia Logan.

And some more about Romania in the First World War, because who isn't interested in that?

But it's almost midnight on Friday here, and it's been a really long day. The boys are sleeping in the next room. In a few minutes it will be Alan's third birthday. Claudia spent hours making a birthday cake for him, with a rather amazing picture of Woody (the cowboy character from "Toy Story") on it. I will go in now and kiss him in his sleep and wish him a happy birthday.

Meanwhile... oh, we've never had an open thread. So maybe this can be our first?

What would you like to say to us?

Russo-Romanian cooperation in the First World War

Carlos has inspired me.

I've recently been flipping again through Romania and World War I: A Collection of Studies by Dr. Glenn E. Torrey. And I thought, evolutionary biology, medieval popes, sick parrots, bear hunts, babies... what this blog needs is more military/diplomatic history. And I did promise a post on the First World War, months and months ago. So.

We turn the Wayback Machine to 1916. Romania, which at this point is a funny sofa-shaped country only about half the size of modern Romania, has just decided to enter the Great War on the Allied side.

This has been no easy decision. Romania is in a strategically bad position, stuck between Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria. The straits of the Dardanelles are closed, so Romania can get no help by sea. On the other hand, the Allies are in desperate straits -- the Somme is griding the British Army to hamburger, the Italians are getting clobbered by the Austrians, and the Gallipoli offensive has been a dismal failure. So the Allies, after much haggling, have offered the Romanians a glittering prize: Transylvania.

This was a big step, because it would mean the end of Austria-Hungary. See, already, several Allied countries had made claims on A-H. Little Serbia wanted Bosnia and Vojvodina. Russia wanted a slice of Galicia, in the north. Italy had already demanded Tyrol, Trieste, and much of the Adriatic coast as her price for entering the war. Adding Transylvania meant that, well, there wouldn't be much of Austria-Hungary left. Transylvania made the difference between "the Allies are diplomatically committed to giving Austria-Hungary a really bad haircut" and "the Allies are committed to the destruction of A-H as a Power."

This meant that the Allies could no longer hope to negotiate with A-H for a separate peace. So they were understandably reluctant to commit. It took until July 1916 for them to come around.

Now, there were two Allied troop concentrations within marching distance of Romania. One was the Allied beachhead at Salonika, in what's now Greece. 300,000 French, British and Serbian troops were sitting there, pinned down by the Bulgarians. Salonika deserves a post in its own right, but here's the short version: as part of the deal to get Romania into the war, the western Allies committed to an attack out of Salonika. But when the time came, they reneged. The attack was too small, and came too late, and the Bulgarians were able to attack Romania in force.

Then there were the Russians.

There was some history in the way of Russo-Romanian cooperation. The Romanians had bad memories from their "alliance" with Russia in 1877, when the Russians looted their way across Romania, abandoned their Romanian allies in a pinch, and ultimately betrayed Romania by snitching lower Bessarabia. So the Romanians reasonably asked that, on one hand, Russian troops should come into Romania to help fight; but on the other, that these troops should be under Romanian, not Russian, command.

So what happened?

Well, we turn now to Chapter 11. "Indifference and Mistrust: Russian-Romanian Collaboration in the Campaign of 1916." Great title, no?

[The Romanian war experience] led to recriminations on both sides. The Romanians, with considerable justification, blamed their allies, especially the Russians, for failing to support them adequately. The latter were charged with indifference or bad faith at best and with treason at worst. The Russians, on the other hand, blamed the defeat and even their inability to aid Romania adequately on the shortcomings of the Romanians themselves. Furthermore they resented that there was so little acknowledgment of gratitude for the vast human and material resources they expended. These conflicting interpretations have been perpetuated in subsequent Russian and Romanian historiography.

From its conception, the Russo-Romanian alliance evoked little enthusiasm and even some opposition in both camps... [The Romanian government] viewed the Russian alliance as necessary to obtain Romania's war aims but hedged it with many safeguards. These included provisions in the military convention which spelled out strict lines of demarcation between the two armies, assured the independence of the Romanian command and the explicit subordination to Romanian control of any Russian units operating on Romanian soil or on the Danube... [the] Russo-Romanian military convention was the sort of agreement concluded between 'two allies who did not trust each other.' It goes without saying that this mutual antipathy was a serious handicap for the functioning of the alliance...

Cue ominous music here.

The Romanians had initially insisted on 200,000 Russian troops but settled eventually for 50,000. However [Russian Chief of Staff, General Mikhail] Alekseev, in an act of conscious deception, had the obligation worded 'two infantry and one cavalry divisions' lest the decimated character of the Russian units force him to send more. This expeditionary force, designated the 47th Corps, was composed of a Cossack cavalry division, an exhausted Russian infantry division and a division of Serbs freshly recruited from among Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. Together they numbered only 28,000 - 30,000 men.

This is in a theater where almost half a million Romanians would be facing over 300,000 Bulgarians and (at first) about 100,000 Austrians and Germans.

The quality of forces was so inferior that General Andrei Zaionchkovskii, nominated as their commander, was 'much perturbed' and attempted to refuse the appointment. Certainly Zaionchkovskii was an unfortunatechoice for such a delicate assignment. Even General Alexei Brusilov who selected him testified to his 'extremely caustic and often spiteful wit which had offended his colleagues' and his 'mutual ill-feeling' with other generals... Furthermore, Zaionchkovskii's performance in his preceding commands showed a lack of initiative and preference for retreat...

Here we skim past several hundred words of General Z. trying to wriggle out of the assignment.

That Alekseev presisted in sending such marginal units and such an unsuited commander to Dobrudja reveals how low he valued the Romanian alliance. Unfortunately, the attitudes exhibited by Z. and Alekseev were widespread among the Russians.

The arrival of Russian troops on Romanian soil was marked by a degree of antipathy on both sides... despite the efforts of a special Romanian civil commissioner attached to Z.'s corps, Russian behavior quickly fueled numerous complaints by local inhabitants... the head of the operations office at Romanian Supreme Headquarters charged in his diary that the Russians 'behave as in a conqured country.'

The Russians were also unhappy about their presence in Romania. They complained privately that their hosts deprived them of food, refused to cooperate with or salute Russian officers and called Russian soldiers 'beasts'. Being in Romania was worse than being in an enemy country, one Russian remarked. General Z., already negative, became further alienated after arrival... His impression of Romanian units and their leaders was 'extremely poor'... 'I must struggle more with my Romanian forces than with the enemy,' he remarked. The Romanian Army he described as being in 'disintegration' and prone to panic...

In fairness to General Z., it's difficult to exaggerate the bad state of the Romanian Army in 1916. Badly led and badly equipped. Rear echelons a chaos of corruption and petty intrigue. Officer corps a bunch of prancing fops. Peasant soldiers mostly illiterate and often malnourished. GHQ, least said the better.

Still...

The Russians had hardly arrived when the Romanian fortress of Turtucaia was placed in jeopardy by an unexpected German-Bulgarian attack and by the ineptitude of its Romanian defenders, including General Mihai Aslan, who was Z.'s superior as commander of the southern theater of operations. Aslan, a particularly incompetent leader who kept his headquarters far from the front in Bucharest where he spent much of his time playing cards in the Jockey Club, ordered Z. to march westward to relieve Turtucaia.

A footnote here states that "the Jockey Club proved to be such a distraction and source of intelligence leaks that King Ferdinand considered closing it." Considered. I love that.

When Z. refused, the Romanian [Supreme HQ] sent a plenipotentiary, accompanied by the British, French, and Russian military attaches, bearing a written order from King Ferdinand [of Romania]. Even the argument of his fellow Russian, that he was obligated by the military convention to obey this order, failed to deter Z. from continuing his operations in another direction. Defeated there, he blamed his misfortune on the cooperating Romanian division.

It goes on, and gets worse, but that gives the general idea. Turtucaia falls a day later. Z. continues to be spiteful, insubordinate, and to show a preference for retreat; a few weeks later, one of his retreats will help lose the Romanians Constanta, their major port. The Romanians continue to be confused and incompetent, up to the point where the defence of Bucharest collapses because a general panics and flees, deserting his post and galloping to the rear.

Z. is eventually replaced. General Alekseev retires because of illness and then dies. Bucharest falls and there's a horrible retreat, eventually to the line of the Siret river, which runs through northeast Romania near what's now Moldova.

Dr. Torrey's conclusion:

Although many of the Russian civilian leaders, especially the Tsar, were solicitous toward Romania and her needs, some, primarily in the military, were condescending toward their new ally. From Alekseev, through Brusilov down to Z., aiding Romania was considered an unnecessary burden to be evaded as much as possible.

Indeed. Here's a quote from a Russian commander, Lieutenant General C. G. E. Mannerheim. (Yes, it's the Mannerheim who later became a rather important figure in Finland -- the Mannerheim Line and all that. He was a general in the tsar's army, first.)

In his later memoirs, he described Romania as "a weak ally of questionable value, which tied down thirty-six Russian infantry and six cavalry divisions -- almost a quarter of the entire Russian army -- on a vulnerable, 500 kilometres long front; the Russian military also had to take care of provisioning the entire Romanian army, which contributed to the further deterioration of the Empire's strategic position. A classic example of a case where an unwanted ally can do more damage than good."

Possibly true, afterwards, when Russia had to pump in a massive effort to keep Romania from collapsing. (But notice that unwanted line.)

Back to Dr. Torrey:

This attitude was short-sighted and had devastating consequences not only for Romania but for Russia as well. Allowing Romania to be defeated wasted an opportunity to threaten the very existence of Austria-Hungary and/or link up the Russian army with the allied armies of Salonika. Furthermore, the Romanian defeat and the new burdens it imposed, seriously compromised the entire Russian war effort.

Although counterfactual arguments are by nature inconclusive, one wonders how the outcome of the First World War would have been influenced if the Russians (and the Western Allies as well) had taken the Romanian alliance seriously, committing at the beginning of the campaign the resources and effort they were forced to at the conclusion?

One wonders indeed.

The fussy baby, or Machiavelli and Darwin in the cradle

The superlative science journalist Carl Zimmer has an article in the New York Times about the evolution of colic. It's an interesting read. (Get it while it's hot; the NYT's links fade after a week.)

But Zimmer also has a blog, where he goes much more in depth about the sources he used to write the article. And you know, I'm all about depth.

One source Zimmer didn't use in the NYT article, but describes on his blog, was a recent paper by Hillary Fouts and her colleagues at the National Institutes of Health. They studied baby crying among the Bofi people of the Central African Republic. The Bofi have two lifestyles, farming and foraging. It turns out that "Bofi farmer children exhibited high levels of fussing and crying when abruptly weaned while Bofi forager children showed no marked sign of distress." On the other hand, forager children were more apt to cry after weaning, while farmer children were much less fussy. Zimmer explains:

The foragers nurse their children many times a day and wean them by gradually taper off nursing. The farmers, on the other hand, cut off their children abruptly -- in part because the women need to get back to working in their fields. [...]

Fouts and her colleagues see a subtle strategy at work here. The farmer children may cry in response to weaning because it represents the end of a reliable milk supply and perhaps even because weaning raises the odds of their mothers will get pregnant with another child that will compete for the mother's investment. But once the farmer children are weaned and it is clear that their cries will not do them any more good, they don't waste any further effort on the tears.

The forager children, on the other hand, don't get that clear signal of an impending cut-off, and so they don't fuss and wail more in response. But it's also important to bear in mind that in the foraging community, the children are always around some relative who will be quick to pick up a child. So even after weaning, crying still has some value as a signal, and so the children keep it up.

I was going to call this a Foutsian bargain, but then I remembered that the barely lamented Dennis Miller once made the same joke about Dan "nosebleed section" Fouts on Monday Night Football. (And only Carrie Bad Mama would have got the secondary allusion.)

Of course, one doesn't need a fussy baby in order not to get eight hours of sleep. But that's another post.

Ceaucescu, hunter or butcher? Take a wild guess

There is a type of despicable person that, as one learns more about them, one finds even more reasons to loathe them. Not even the smallest part of their lives seems free from the internal corruption they exude, and whatever they touch becomes tainted.

Of recent historical figures, I feel that way most strongly about Imelda Marcos. But old Nick is certainly in the running. David Quammen, in his recent book, Monster of God (on what he calls 'alpha predators' and the rest of us call 'man-eaters'), gives an unusual perspective on old Nick's loathsomeness: Romania from the bears' point of view.

What proved helpful for Romania's bear population was not so much the lofty ideals of sustainable management as the realities of Communist autocracy. After the war, things were different in the mountains. Common people had no guns. Common people were afraid of the central government, its regulations, and its means of enforcement. Bear hunting became a prestigious privilege reserved mainly to the nomenclatura, the Party elite. [...]

The history books don't say whether Gheorghiu-Dej, an urban agitator in the proletarian vein, fancied bear hunting personally, although there is a record of his hosting Nikita Khrushchev to a hard-drinking, bear-killing junket up in the Harghita district. Nicolae Ceaucescu, similarly, had shown no interest in woodland shooting sports during his earlier years. But in the late 1960s, while Ceaucescu solidified his position as supreme leader of both the Party and the country, he did discover a zeal for hunting -- or, more accurately, for the sort of pampered travesty of hunting that only a despot gets to experience and only a delusional egoist would enjoy.

Truth to power, baby! Quammen continues:

Beginning in the late 1960s, Ceaucescu made himself the hunter in chief of Romanian forests as well as the commander in chief of the military. He arrogated hundreds of hunting areas -- the best of them, so far as large game is concerned -- to his personal use. Forest managers at the district level, and the hunting wardens who worked for them, and the gamekeepers who reported to the wardens, came to realize that any estimable animal emerging within their purview was an animal the Conducator might want to kill. They recognized that pandering to his blood lust, to his lazy greed for trophies, was good professional politics. One district competed against another for his visits, offering big bears and rack-heavy stags as easy targets for his pricey imported rifles.

For a typical hunt, Ceaucescu would fly in by helicopter and land on a cleared pad within the hunting area itself. From there he'd be taken by rough-terrain vehicle (in earlier years he favored Jeeps, then a Russian make, the Gaz, and still later a rattletrap Romanian imitation, the Aro) along forest roads, to a point very near the spot where hungry bears or rutting red deer were expected to appear. He would walk the short distance to a strategically placed high seat -- in a tight little draw that served as a game corridor, say, or along a stream, where the gurgling water would cover noises made by a hunter. Usually he was accompanied by at least one security officer, who would carry his weapons and ammunition, and a forestry official from the district office. Many other Forest Department personnel would have been involved in preparing for his visit, but they were kept at a distance during the actual hunt.

In the high seat, he had little patience for waiting and watching. His attention span, according to a witness who worked with him often, was five minutes. But for this brand of hunting, patience wasn't necessary. Bears came to the feeding troughs; red deer stags congregated in response to hormonal imperatives and the attraction of hinds; or, in some cases, both bears and wild boars were pushed toward a high seat in organized drives involving dozens of beaters. Ceaucescu took his shots, admired his kills, posed for photographs, and then departed.

The report of his short attention span comes from Vasile Crisan, a forestry official who later published a memoir, in German, the title of which translates as Ceaucescu: Hunter or Butcher?

During the twenty-five years of his reign, according to Crisan's tally, Nicolae Ceaucescu shot about four hundred bears. In the earlier years, he sometimes hosted shooting parties at which guests were welcome to kill game -- deer, boar, even some of those precious bears. On a day's hunt in 1974, Ceaucescu himself shot twenty-two bears and his guests another eleven. In later years he more jealously kept the bears for himself. Between 1983 and his death in 1989, Crisan reports, Ceaucescu bagged 130. His most notable fit of excess occurred in the autumn of 1983 when, during a single day, aided by four separate game drives toward his position, Ceaucescu personally shot twenty-four bears.

That slaughter occurred in a hunting area called Cusma, within the Bistrita district, not far from a luxurious hunting lodge known as Dealul Negru (the Black Hill), which had been built expressly for Ceaucescu and his wife. Informed that the 1983 bear crop was bounteous at Cusma, Ceaucescu announced his intention to visit. This triggered a scramble of kowtowing preparations. The high seats were repaired. The forest roads were improved. The bears were fed -- generously, with two tons of fruit and two hundred kilograms of bear chow poured into the area each day for six weeks. The hunting lodge, Dealul Negru, was made spiffy. The local Party office recruited four hundred citizens to serve as beaters, and from among the local police and the Securitate came a hundred more.

Ceaucescu arrived by helicopter on the morning of the hunt, October 15. The plan was to split the beaters into three groups, for three separate drives, and then marshal them all into a giant sweep of the forest for a climactic fourth. Crisan describes how the day unfolded, with Ceaucescu blasting at bears, killing bears, wounding bears as they fled toward his position in one high seat and then another. After the first drive, in which he killed three medium-sized animals and injured two but missed two others that ran back into the forest, Ceaucescu complained petulantly about the arrangements. God forbid that two bears out of seven should escape -- or if God wouldn't forbid it, the Conducator would. Next year, he commanded, there should be a fence along here, dammit, to channel the animals inexorably toward the high seat. Yes yes, the district director promised, next year there would be a fence.

After the second and third drives, having killed seven more bears, Ceaucescu was still unsatisfied. The fourth drive began, the big one, with hundreds of beaters moving down brushy hillsides toward a valley. The security men carried semi-automatic rifles; the foresters had small-gauge shotguns; they all shouted, fired into the air, setting up a din. Vasile Crisan took refuge on a high seat, from where he could watch without too much danger of being mistaken by Ceaucescu for a bear. As the beaters pushed within a couple of hundred yards of the firing line, they came virtually shoulder to shoulder. "The bears were running in every direction, trying to escape," Crisan writes. "But it was useless, it was impossible." Bears fell dead, bears fell wounded, and amid the chaos Crisan couldn't tell just how many; but few if any seemed to be escaping.

Ceaucescu blazed away with a pair of Holland & Holland .375s, a minion beside him reloading one rifle while he fired the other. When the shooting and the hollering stopped, the forest workers started dragging in carcasses. Twenty-four dead bears were lugged back to the hunting lodge (where Elena could admire them) and laid out in two rows, framed with freshly cut brush, like trout on a platter garnished with parsley. Ceaucescu posed for photos. "We, the foresters, gathered at a certain distance," Crisan recalls, adding the tight-lipped understatement, "Contrasting feelings governed us." He had devoted much of his life to hunting, but he labels this sorry episode the Massacre of Bistrita.

You know, as I read this, I thought to myself, what a splendid opportunity for a 'hunting accident'! Oh well.

The Giuliana Sgrena Story

Over at A Fistful of Euros where we are (less than avid, I have to confess) contributors, I wrote a post on Giuliana Sgrena. If you are interested, or if you've never heard the name, take a look. It's one of those stories that make you wish to jump 100 years ahead and see whether all the facts are on the table then. Because they sure aren't now.

I'm trying to tell you now, it's tapirage

While reading Tim Birkhead's book, A Brand-New Bird, about canary breeding in interwar Germany...

Yes, I read some weird and obscure stuff sometimes. But this was interesting. And hey, I'm not the birder of this blog.

... about canary breeding in interwar Germany, I came across the following passage:

There was yet another example of men changing the colors of birds' feathers that Reich probably knew about and related to Duncker. This was the trick of enhancing the color of parrots by anointing them with frogs.

This sounded kind of silly to me, like the set-up to a Monty Python skit, God help us, and Birkhead admitted this as he continued:

The very notion sounds preposterous, and it is easy to imagine Duncker dismissing Reich's story as apocryphal. But Reich assured him that since no less an authority than Comte de Buffon had described it, it must be true. Buffon's description in his 1790s encyclopedia of what he called the "artificial parrot" probably came from Dom Pernetty's account of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's voyage of discovery to South America in the 1760s. Pernetty described one particular parrot thus:

all its plumage, especially the head, neck, back and belly is sprinkled with feathers, some of them yellow like daffodil, or yellow like lemon, some others carmine red or crimson red, mixed with feathers either more or less dark green, or bright blue especially around ears. This type of plumage is due in part to nature and in part to the art. When the bird is very young, and has only got its feather-sheaths grown out after the down feathers, sheaths are plucked in several points, and instead is immediately inserted a sort of poison, like liqueur. Feathers that grow after the sheaths then become yellow or red, instead of green as they should have been naturally.

Duncker and Reich almost certainly dismissed this as nonsense and of no possible relevance to their own work. But as unlikely as it seems, the color changes in these parrots were not only genuine, but genetic in nature. The liqueur came from a frog -- one of the colorful but highly toxic dart poison frogs, azure blue with gold stripes -- aptly known as the dyeing frog Dentrobates tinctorius.

Birkhead states that the mutagenic properties of alkaloids the frog secretes are responsible for the color change. This really startled me when I first read it. Directed mutagenesis by a Stone Age South American people? Hmm. (Unfortunately the reference he gives does not go into the biochemistry of the process.)

I wanted to learn more. Of course, this subject turned out to be really obscure. But I managed to track down a reference to the practice in Reina and Kensinger's The Gift of Birds: Featherwork of Native South American Peoples:

In addition, some groups of South Amerindians practiced a method (tapirage) by which they could change the natural color of birds into more intense hues.

The Tupinamba knew how to modify the natural color of the feathers of living birds; they defeathered a certain species of green parrots and coated their bodies with the blood of a toad. The new feathers which appeared had a red or yellow hue. This technology which the French Guiana creoles called "tapirage" was practiced not only by all the Indians of that colony, but also by those of British Guiana and Venezuela. This process, which seems to have been more common north of the Amazon, was nonetheless carried out to the south: Martius observed it among the Mundurucu and others. Roth and Nordenskiold [list] Macusi, Galibi, Wapisiana, Puinave, Achagua, Pomeroon, Uaupes, Mojo and Huanyam. [Metraux adds:] Paressi, Bororo, Mbaya, Guana, Cocama and Omagua. [Some groups -- Puinave, Omagua and Cocama -- change color of green parrots by making them eat fish fat.] (Metraux 1928:149)

Tapirage did not harm the bird, but was one more reason for domestication.

I wasn't able to track down Metraux's original paper (although I happened to already have two books by him, one on Haitian voodoo and the other on Easter Island). Incidentally, if anyone wants to send me a .pdf of it, the reference is Volume 34, Number 8 of the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, pages 252-255, 1944.

Now that I had additional confirmation that this practice existed, as well as a plausible (though still unverified) mechanism, I still was left with the question: why? Not why would native Amazonians want colorful feathers -- fashion, trade, and nookie all seem like likely motives to me -- but why would they rub a frog's secretions on a parrot to get new colors?

I came up with two naive theories. The first was that since these peoples used frog toxins as poisons, they decided to smear them on a plucked live parrot. That didn't make much sense. A plucked bird ain't going nowhere. Neither did the other one: since the frog was blue, maybe they tried rubbing the color off on a plucked parrot. The main problem here was, it had the clever peoples of the Amazon acting like Beavis and Butthead at a pet shop.

I found the clue in Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked. He gives several native South American myths on how birds gained their colors:

Caduveo:

Three children used to play in front of the hut until past midnight. The father and mother paid no attention to them. One night when they were playing -- it was very late -- an earthenware pot descended from the sky; it was lavishly decorated and full of flowers.

The children saw the flowers and wanted to take them, but as soon as they put out their arms, the flowers retreated to the other side of the pot, with the result that the children had to climb in the pot to reach them.

The pot started to rise into the air. When she saw what was happening, the mother just managed to grab the leg of one of her children. The leg broke, and from the wound flowed a lake of blood in which most of the birds (whose plumage was at the time uniformly white) dipped either all or some of their feathers, thus acquiring the different-colored plumage they have today.

Arawak:

Men and birds joined forces to destroy the huge watersnake, which dragged all living creatures down to his lair. But the attackers took fright and cried off, one after the other, offering as their excuse that they could only fight on dry land. Finally, the duckler was brave enough to dive into the water; he inflicted a fatal wound on the monster which was at the bottom, coiled around the roots of an enormous tree. Uttering terrible cries, the men succeeded in bringing the snake out of the water, where they killed it and removed its skin. The duckler claimed the skin as the price of its victory. The Indian chiefs said ironically, "By all means! Just take it away!" "With pleasure!" replied the duckler as it signaled to the other birds. Together they swooped down and, each one taking a piece of the skin in its beak, flew off with it. The Indians were annoyed and angry and, from then on, became the enemies of birds.

The birds retired to a quiet spot in order to share the skin. They agreed that each one should keep the part that was in its own beak. The skin was made up of marvelous colors -- red, yellow, green, black, and white -- and had markings such as no one had ever seen before. As soon as each bird was provided with the part to which it was entitled, the miracle happened: until that time all birds had had dingy plumage, but now suddenly they became white, yellow, and blue... The parrots were covered in green and red, and the macaws with red, purple, and gilded feathers, such as had never before been seen. The duckler, to which all the credit was due, was left with the head, which was black. But it said it was good enough for an old bird.

Mataco:

The old woman was a wild bee of the moro-moro species. She put the trickster into a deep sleep, and blocked all the orifices of his body -- mouth, nostrils, eyes, armpits, penis, and anus -- with wax; and she also smeared over the spaces between his fingers and toes.

When the demiurge awoke, he realized he was swelling up in a dangerous manner. The birds (who were at that time men) came to his aid and tried to open the apertures with axes -- that is, with their beaks -- but the wax was too hard. Only a very small woodpecker succeeded in breaking through it. The demiurge's blood spurted through the hole and stained the birds with beautiful red colors, all except the crow, which was soiled by the dirt that blew out from the anus.

Shipaya:

The other brother summoned the warriors and ordered them to shoot arrows at the moon and kill it. Only the armadillo succeeded in wounding it. The moon's blood was of all colors, and men and women were bespattered with it. The women wiped themselves with an upward movement, so they came under the moon's influence. The men, however, wiped themselves clean with a downward movement. The birds bathed in the different colored pools, and each species thus acquired its characteristic plumage.

Parintintin:

Together, and in order to attract attention to themselves, uttering loud cries, they flew over the village square, in the center of which Ipanitegue was busy making an arrow. The two birds swooped down on him, attacking him with beak and claw, and carried him off, one holding him by the head, the other by the legs. The Indians fired arrows which wounded only the victim. An attempt to hold him back by pulling the thread that had unwound from his arrow met with no success, for the arrow broke at once. In the square was a pool of blood, full of pieces of intestine and brain.

The eagles took their prey to the eyrie and invited all the birds to the feast, on condition that each agreed to be "tattooed". They painted the macaw with the blood. The beak and wing tips of the mutum were smeared with brain, the beak of the tangara-hu with blood, the feathers of the parrot and the parakeet with bile, the egret's feathers with brain, too. The breast of the surucua-hu and the neck of the jacu-pemun-hu were smeared with the blood... Thus all the birds, great and small, were tattooed; some had a red beak or red feathers; other had green or white feathers; because all colors were present in the blood, bile, and brain of the old man who had been murdered. As for the flesh, the birds ate it.

And finally, the previously mentioned Mundurucu:

The eagle invited all the birds to eat the terrapin, whose shell had first to be broken. The toucan had a try, and its beak became flattened, whence its present shape; the woodpecker succeeded. Then the birds painted themselves with the red blood, the blue fluid from the gallbladder, and the yellow fat. The toucan smeared blue all around its eyes, and yellow on the end of its tail, and a band of yellow across its breast. It also put a dab of blood on its tail. The woodpecker painted its head red; the pipira daubed itself all over with blue. The mutum stained its legs and its beak with blood, and in order to deprive the galsa of the animal dyes, it suggested that it should use white clay. The galsa did as the mutum suggested, but when the mutum's turn came, it flew away. The galsa could only catch the tip of its tail, which has remained white to this day.

Perhaps overkill, but I think that these myths make a pretty strong case that native South Americans believed that animal secretions could change a bird's plumage, under some circumstances. The innovative step to tapirage then would become, in my opinion, much less difficult.

Wow, that was weird and obscure.

What do 8 hours of straight sleep feel like?

I wouldn't be able to tell you. For some odd reason, our kids have both decided to be difficult and give up on the sleeping-through-the-night-thing. Really, it's so boring and all.

It was kicked off by David's croup attack last week. Two nights of very little sleep. The next night, Alan woke up from a nightmare. What can you do. These days, they take turns - first Alan wakes up and won't go back to sleep without a drink of milk, then David does the same two hours later and he also thinks it's a good idea to call the night a day at 5:30 am.

Doug's been taking the night shifts ("I'm doing it for love," he claims), and I'm getting up early.

You can imagine why we're too sluggish to post recently.

UPDATE: Doug's a saint. He took the kids (including the play date for Alan I had arranged for) to the park in the morning and after a nap to a birthday party in the afternoon. I spent the day eating, resting and reading. ("The Third Door", and so far I'm really liking it. Thanks, Carlos!) I know what you mean, Bernard.

Two subcultures walk into a bar...

Yes! My takeover of this blog is now complete!

For those of you left bewildered by the recent discussion on Poul Anderson, here is some illuminative gasoline I'll throw on the fire. Elizabeth Weil, a freelance journalist, recently wrote a book on the rise and fall of the Rotary Rocket Company, a group of spaceflight enthusiasts with an ingenious design for a civilian spaceship, They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus. She is not unsympathetic to their cause, but she does have what my friend Noel would call a different set of 'ideological priors'. Here she is at the Space Access Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona in April of 1998:

At the far end of the hotel, in an outbuilding, a slope-shouldered woman with hip-length hair hunched behind the convention registration desk. She eyed me warily, as a local might a tourist, certain I was in the wrong place.

"Can I help you?"

My name was on her list.

"Oh -- we must really be branching out. You just..." She drummed her fingers on her clipboard. "You just look like such a mundane."

Mundane is science fiction vernacular for those humans so tedious as to be interested only in the extant, no-imagination-required world. SF, not sci fi is the proper abbreviation, and the slope-shouldered woman shared her house with fifty-one cats and six golden retrievers. She and her equally fanatical husband spent nearly every weekend at SF cons (as opposed to space cons, like this one), and they claimed they could spot their fellow fen (the SF plural of fan, a derivative of men) in third-world markets and airport baggage claims with 99 percent accuracy. Reluctantly, she handed me a Space Access packet and badge. A few young men in thin ponytails and black T-shirts walked past without hassle. The woman smiled tightly. "Maybe we'll have you looking like a convert by the time you get out."

Gary, like almost everybody else who worked at Rotary, had grown up in the science fiction world among the fen. His favorite books were Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye and Poul Anderson's The Earth Book of Stormgate, and he believed that science fiction taught its readers that "there is no end to accomplishments" and "the future is yours to create." He believed that adults who had not read science fiction as children had "far more self-doubt" and were "far more skeptical" about what an individual or a society could do. Jaws dropped in Mojave when I first admitted that I hadn't read Heinlein or Bradbury. Or Asimov either. On came an avalanche of well-thumbed paperbacks, people explaining, with generous hearts, that I could not understand them unless I read this one or that. Embarrassingly, I tried to return the favor, extending copies of my own dog-eared favorites -- James Salter's Light Years, Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem -- which people politely accepted and completely ignored.

(Okay, Doug, you can stop chuckling now.)

Oddly enough, the New York City Math Teacher and I recently had a similar experience getting home brewing supplies. A tall bearded fellow with glasses and pulled-back hair was looking through the wort selection and observed us talking. I looked mundane. NYCMT somehow still looked fannish. The man looked at me -- and you could see the wheels turning in his head -- passed me by, and started talking to NYCMT instead.

Anyway. Recently, on Making Light, a commenter called my last post "a not so benevolent analysis of Poul Anderson's writing". That surprised me. I should have thought it was obvious that I've read Anderson deeply and with great affection.

But, you know, I'm not a fan. Science fiction is simply a genre I am deeply interested in, one that I've read for a long time. (And there goes Gary Hudson's negative correlation between reading SF, skepticism and self-doubt.) But the same goes for, say, modernist poetry. And the Internet is a forum where science fiction comes up much more often than modernist poetry. Get me in a circle of comp-lit professors (and some bourbon), and I'll happily chat about Pound, Auden, and Zukofsky.

Man, that comment on Making Light really made my bile rise. People, read more Joan Didion or something.

The PA system is broken

I recently sold off most of my Poul Anderson collection. Some background: Poul Anderson was a Danish-American writer, mainly of science fiction and fantasy, although there were mysteries, historicals and even a psychological novel in his oeuvre. I enjoyed him in my teens and twenties because he was moody and Danish, well-read in the world's literatures and engaged with modern science: things I happened to be or aspired to become. He died recently, and I feel badly that I never got to meet him, or even correspond with him via e-mail.

Unfortunately, his books kept on failing the re-read test. Instead of becoming comfort reading, as familiar books often do, his stylistic quirks, turns of phrase -- turns of mind -- became obtrusive, engrained enough to the point where I suspected I could write a Poul Anderson generative grammar from scratch. Yonder perforce must needs must. Look, listen, smell, touch, taste, list of verbs. Abstraction active-verbed. And at the end, a touchstone image. Judas priest.

Last year, my co-blogger Doug mentioned to someone that I could write Anderson pastiche. (True enough. Pastiche is a good skill to learn.) My response snowballed, as such things do. I decided to analyze a thirty-two page Anderson short story, "Hunter's Moon", from the anthology Medea: Harlan's World, a festschrift for writer and media gadfly Harlan Ellison, using the above list of quirks. It's incomplete, but I think it's illustrative.

YONDER:

Flyers gathered in hordes to feed off yonder swarms (page 411)

PERFORCE:

Thus everybody, herself perforce included (413)

MUST NEEDS:

[none seen]

MUST (PAST TENSE):

He must lock onto (417)
he must feint (419)
Jannika must search (419)
She must will herself toward rapport. (426)
She must be rougher still (427)

LOOK, LISTEN, SMELL, TOUCH, TASTE:

wherever she looked -- or listened, smelled, touched, tasted, moved. (L-L-S-T-T, 404)

The next section of prose immediately goes through each sense, but in exactly the reverse order, including the unhappy phrase, "though her mucous membranes had not yet stopped smarting."

The night muttered around her. She drank odors of soil, growth, decay, nectar, blood, striving. Warmth from Mardudek streamed through a chill breeze to laver her pelt. (L-S-T, 411)

In the above case, the visual sense comes next, "Half-glimpsed flitting shapes," out of the canonical Anderson order, presumably because the scene takes place at night.

the water lay scummy, bubbling, and odorous (L-L-S, 415)

none of what Hugh perceived was verbal; it was sight, sound, a complex of senses, including those interior like balance and hunger (L-L+, 417)

At first, Argo, the stars, and a pair of moons were the only lights. Slowly heaven brightened, the ocean shimmered silver beneath blue, Phrixus and Helle wheeled by the great planet. Wild songs went trilling through air drenched with the odor of roanflower, which is like violets. (L-L-S, 432)

LIST OF VERBS:

nature walled and roofed and weighed on (404)

wherever she looked -- or listened, smelled, touched, tasted, moved. (404)

"Niallah answers questions, tells legends, sings songs, demonstrates maneuvers, whatever we request." (410)

Transmitted, amplified, transformed, relayed, reinduced (417)

the starwings danced, dashed, dodged about (418)

Thickly gathered around him, bobbing, spinning, rippling and flailing (418)

Jannika broke off, swallowed hard, unclenched her fists, and became able to say (422)

"And both kinds of Medeans think faster than humans, observe, learn" (423)

"Dromids don't do anything but make tools and fires, hunt, care for their young, live in communities, create art and philosophy" (424)

He tried to speak, failed, and drank. (424)

Hugh would protest, delay her, perhaps actually restrain her (425)

ABSTRACTION ACTIVE-VERBED:

a grimness had meanwhile congealed (402)
nature walled and roofed and weighed on (404)
darkness laired (411)
Softness muffled (414)
Love began. (418)
His will blazed forth (419)
Reason checked her hand. (420)
Eagerness flung her on (420)
Sleep drained out (425)
Resolution crystallized. (425)
Northward bulked a darkness (426)
Wind wailed. (428)
Pain twisted (429)
strength ebbed and ebbed (429)
Air harried and hooted (430)
Speech burst and skirled. (431)
Slowly heaven brightened (432)

FINAL TOUCHSTONE:

A double sunrise was always lovely. [...] He seized her to him. "Damnation, though, let's try!" (432)

JUDAS PRIEST:

"Judas priest, sweetheart, how could I not?" (428)

Does anyone swear by Judas in English anymore? Criminy.

And the infodumps under stress, the archaisms, the stammers, the stock Apollonian alien primitive, the stock Rousseau noble savage primitive, yet another attempt to write "the ethnic woman", yet another adultery-tainted-marriage-and-reconciliation to drive the characters... I could go on. It was amazing how many Anderson-specific tics this story crammed into 32 pages. At least Anderson didn't use the story as a platform for his libertarianism -- perhaps out of respect for Ellison, who is a passionate liberal -- although there is mention of a "reindoctrination hospice" used by a statist Danubian Federation.

Continuing on with the experiment, I examined his novels' closing epiphanies. Anderson's tics are highlighted, my judgment call.

I'll start off with Brain Wave, 1953, one of his first novels. It's early Anderson, yet it's generally regarded as one of his best works. Yet, two pages before the end, we find:

"We will not be gods, or even guides. But we will -- some of us -- be givers of opportunity. We will see that evil does not flourish too strongly, and that hope and chance happen when they are most needed, to all those millions of sentient creatures who live and love and fight and laugh and weep and die, just as man once did. No, we will not be embodied Fate; but perhaps we can be Luck. And even Love."

And people act as if this stuff was only found in The Avatar, which is almost universally regarded as one of Anderson's worst books. No, it's right there from the beginning. It's simply not being mouthed by The Avatar's infamous stage-Irish folk-singing swingerette character.

We move to 1965's The Corridors of Time. It's still one of my favorite Anderson novels (one I didn't sell), a response to both Robert Graves' Seven Days in New Crete / Watch the North Wind Rise and Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, both very good books in their own right. But even here:

In the end it would all go down, before the cruel age of iron. Yet a thousand fortunate years were no small achievement; and the spirit that brought them forth would endure. Through every century to come, the forgotten truth that men had once known generations of gladness must abide and subtly work. Those who built the ultimate tomorrow might well come back to the realm Lynx founded, and learn.

"Auri," Lockridge whispered, "be with me. Help me."

"Always," she said.

I'm going to skip The Avatar and also The One With the Anti-Hippie Dictionary as being too easy. But here's Orion Shall Rise, from 1983:

"Whoa, now," Ronica protested.

"Oh, not in hour-to-hour existence," Plik said. "That's as full as always of grubbiness, conflict, connivance, short-sightedness, greed, stupidity, laziness, waste, every charming usual human quality at play. But... you have mana, you two, and it will not let you go, no, not even after you are dead. I hope for your sakes you can resist the appeal, and the urge, to set the time a little more nearly right. My hopefulness, though, is very small."

He pondered before he finished: "Unless -- by blazing the trails beyond Earth, you can beget and nourish an entire myth unfelt in the past, that will live on in the lives of your children's children's children... come back in a thousand years, part the weeds on my grave, give my bones a shake, and tell me."

"Hm." Pain dwelt in Iern's grin. "How? We'll scarcely be in shape ourselves to do that."

"Wrong," Plik answered. "For better or worse, your two spirits will walk crowned through the whole cycle to come -- and, it may well be, the ages to follow."

"We're only us!" the woman cried as if struck.

No comment.

"Is anyone only ever human?"

"I don't know," Iern said awkwardly. "I just know that at journey's end Ronica and I will someday slip off to Terai's house, and tell them there about him, our trail-friend. Not to forget, not to forget." He held out his glass. "Pour, will you, Plik?" Raising it filled: "Here, while he can, here's to Terai... Wairoa... Vanna Uangovna... yes, Mikli, Jovain, everybody -- We remember. Do you hear? We remember."

His free hand sought Ronica's. Rims clinked threefold. Wind quickened. A whale surfaced. The ship bore onward, in quest of the Southern Cross.

I am surprised he didn't have the whale broach. Do you hear me, Spock? I remember!

And now we move to late Anderson, 1989's The Boat of a Million Years:

The ships departed, Pytheas and friend. For a while, some months, until speeds grew too high, word went between them, imagery, love; rites celebrated the mysteries of community and communion; for everywhere around them thronged suns.

(Here I snip a biblical quote, which surely doesn't count.)

Hanno and Svoboda stood in the darkened command center, looking out. Through clasped hands they felt each other's nearness and warmth. "Is this why we were born?" she whispered.

"We'll make it be," he promised.

Damn. Smoove B all the way.

You can watch Anderson blow on the kindling, trying to get the spark to light. Sometimes it worked. But sometimes, and much more often in his later career, it just didn't take.

Did it ever take? This is the classic Poul Anderson epiphany, in my opinion. From 1953's Three Hearts and Three Lions:

Holger felt the illusion that masked him dissolve. And his memory returned and he knew himself.

They gathered around him, Alianora in the circle of his free arm, Carahue clasping his shoulder, Papillon's nose gentle against his cheek. "Whatever comes," he said, "whatever happens to me, know that you will return safe, and that you will always bear my love."

"I sought you, comrade," said Carahue. "I sought you, Ogier."

"I love ye, Holger," said Alianora.

Holger Danske, whom the old French chronicles know as Ogier le Danois, mounted into his saddle. And this was the prince of Denmark who in his cradle was given the strength and luck and love by such of Faerie as wish men well. He it was who came to serve Carl the Great and rose to be among the finest of his knights, the defender of Christendie and mankind. He it was who smote Carahue of Mauretania in battle, and became his friend, and wandered far with him. He it was who Morgan le Fay held dear; and when he grew old, she bore him to Avalon and gave him back his youth. There he dwelt until the paynim again menaced France, a hundred years later, and thence he sallied forth to conquer them anew. Then in the hour of his triumph he was carried away from mortal men.

And some say he lays in timeless Avalon until France the fair is in danger, and some say he sleeps beneath Kronborg Castle and wakens in the hour of Denmark's need, but none remember that he is and has always been a man, with the humble needs and loves of a man; to all, he is merely the Defender.

He rode out onto the wold, and it was as if dawn rode with him.

All the "fly-specked treacle", all the grammatical inversions, all the archaisms, all the lists, clasps, soughts, sallies and dawn riding onto the wold... well, it doesn't matter here. It's the difference between a lightning bug and lightning; it's the difference between formula and form.

At least I think so, anyway.

Postscript:

I was once asked to write a Lord of the Rings pastiche in Poul Anderson's style. Here it is:

To move an inch further was a weariness to will, limb, senses, heart. Strength fled from Frodo. "I can't go on, Sam," he whispered. "I'm going to faint. I don't know what's come over me."

"I do, zir. Hoäld up now! Theäre be zome devilry afoot at yon gate." Sam drew out the elven-glass of Galadriel again. Light blazed forth from it suddenly, so that all the shadowy court must dazzle; but it remained steady and did not dim.

Memory sprang unbidden in Sam, back to the Elves in the Shire and the song that drove away the Black Rider. "Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!" he cried.

"Aiya elenion ancalima!" cried Frodo behind him.

The will of the Watchers was broken with a suddenness. Perforce Frodo and Sam must needs stumble. Forward they ran, through the gate and past the great glitter-eyed seated figures. Air crackled behind them. The keystone of the arch crashed, and the wall above shook, crumbled, and fell into ruin...

Pope Watch 1458, part 8: Pius Aeneas

And now we come to the denouement. The votes have been cast: nine for Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, cardinal of Siena, six for Guillaume d'Estouteville, cardinal of Rouen. There are eighteen electors, and twelve votes are needed to become pope. Parts in bold were deleted for four hundred years, but here are links to parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. If you liked what you've read, you really really should get a copy of the Commentaries for yourself. It has Latin!

All sat in their seats, pale and silent, thunderstruck, as if in a trance. For some time no one spoke, no one opened his lips, no one moved any part of his body except the eyes, which kept darting about. It was a strange silence and a strange sight, men sitting there like their own statues, no sound to be heard, no movement to be seen. They remained like this for some time, the junior members waiting waiting for their elders to begin the accession. Then Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor,

The 27-year-old 'young fool', Rodrigo Borgia.

Then Rodrigo, the vice-chancellor, rose and said, "I accede to the cardinal of Siena," which utterance was like a dagger in Rouen's heart, so pale did he turn. Silence fell again, and each man looked at the next, indicating thoughts by subtle gestures. By now it seemed certain that Aeneas would be pope. Some who feared this result left the conclave, pretending physical needs, but really with the intent of frustrating what destiny had decreed must happen that day. Those who withdrew in this way were the cardinals of Kiev and San Sisto. But no one followed them, and so they soon returned. Then Jacopo, cardinal of Sant'Anastasia said, "I, too, accede to the cardinal of Siena."

This sent an even greater shock through the assembly. All were struck dumb, as if a tremendous earthquake had shaken the hall. Aeneas now needed only a single vote, for twelve would make a pope. Seeing this, Cardinal Prospero Colonna decided to seize for himself the honor of acclaiming the next pontiff. He rose and was about to pronounce his vote -- solemnly, and according to procedure -- when the cardinals of Nicaea and Rouen suddenly laid hands on him and rebuked him sharply for wanting to accede to Aeneas. When he persisted, they tried to get him out of the room by force, one seizing his right arm and the other his left -- they would even resort to means like these, so determined were they to snatch the papacy from Aeneas. And yet, Prospero, though he had voted for Rouen in the scrutiny, was bound to Aeneas by ties of friendship. Ignoring their abuse and empty threats, he turned to the other cardinals and cried, "I too accede to the cardinal of Siena, and I make him pope!"

When they heard this, the opposition's courage failed; all their designs were shattered. Every cardinal rushed to fall at Aeneas's feet and hail him as pope. Then, returning to their seats, they unanimously ratified the election. And then Cardinal Bessarion spoke, both for himself and on behalf of those who had favored Rouen:

"Your Holiness," he said, "we honor your election, and we do not doubt it is God's will. We thought before and still think now that you are worthy of the office. We only voted against you because of your infirmity. Indeed, in our view, your gout was your only defect, for the Church needs an active man with the physical strength to endure long journeys and to face the terrible trials we fear the Turks are preparing for us. You, on the contrary, need rest. It was this that led us to support Rouen. Had you been a strong man, we should have preferred no one else. But if God is satisfied, we must be satisfied too. The Lord himself, who has chosen you, will make good the defect in your feet, nor will he punish our ignorance. We revere you as pope, we elect you again, so far as is in our power, and we will serve you faithfully."

Aeneas replied, "Your Eminence of Nicaea, your opinion of us, as we understand it, is far better than our own. You attribute no defect to us except that in our feet. We are not unaware that our imperfections range more widely than this. We realize we possess faults well nigh beyond measure, for which we might justly have been rejected as pope. As for virtues which make us worthy of this post, we know of none; and we should declare ourselves utterly unworthy and refuse the honor offered us, did we not fear the judgment of Him who has called us. For whatever is done by two-thirds of the sacred college is surely inspired by the Holy Ghost, who may not be resisted. Therefore we submit to the divine summons and we honor you, Your Eminence of Nicaea, and those who voted with you. If, following the dictates of your conscience, you thought us unworthy of election, you will still be welcome among us, who attribute our calling not to this man or that but to the whole college and to God himself, from whom comes 'every good and perfect gift.'"

With these words he cast off his old garments and put on the white tunic of Christ. When asked by what name he wished to be called, he answered, "Pius," and was at once addressed as Pius II. Then, having sworn to observe the capitulations issued in the college two days before, he took his place at the altar and was again reverenced by the cardinals, who kissed his feet and hands and cheek. When this was done, the result of the election was made public. From a high window it was proclaimed that he who had been cardinal of Siena was now Pope Pius II.

The attendants of the cardinals in the conclave plundered Aeneas's cell, shamelessly carrying off his silver (though it was very modest), his clothes and his books. In the city, a disgraceful mob not only pillaged his house but actually demolished it by making off with blocks of marble.

And they all lived happily ever after.