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There's a splinter in your eye and it reads REACT
I wish I knew where my copies of Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy had gotten to. On the 86 bus yesterday, I was reading Garry O'Connor's Ralph Richardson: An Actor's Life (1982) when I ran into his description of the director and drama theorist Michel Saint-Denis: "A stocky, earthy character both in appearance and flavour, Saint-Denis had a broad Burgundian accent, smoked a pipe, and often had a merry twinkle in his eye . . . As 'Jacques Duchesne,' broadcasting frequently over Radio Free French, he had a price on his head, for his function was to pass on coded information to Resistance workers; he was also responsible for other items such as an ebullient interview with Churchill conducted during an air raid, in which both men, clearly affected by the red wine they were drinking, were audibly being pounded with bombs." I wondered suddenly if I was as old as Keller by the end of The Beggar Queen (1984) or if I had accidentally managed to outlive one of my earliest favorite characters. It took me a minute to trace the connection which my brain had made without bothering to show its work: Old Kasperl "with his peasant jacket, his tankard, and his gray whiskers," namesake of the satirical journal in which he appeared alongside his stealthily smarter companion the Bear. It was popular in Marianstat during the reigns of Augustine IV of Westmark and his successor Queen Augusta, later Citizen Mickle; it was banned and printed secretly during the directorate of Cabbarus and the Ankari occupation. And then I felt like an idiot not to have consciously realized before how much Alexander's experiences in France and Germany during World War II must have influenced these books for all their turn-of-the-nineteenth-century, Les Mis-adjacent Ruritanian setting. Westmark (1981) is a fairly classic political romance ending in eucatastrophe, but The Kestrel (1982) is a war novel and The Beggar Queen is a novel of invasion, occupation, and resistance. Both get very messy. I'll have to see what Alexander said about them in interviews.
I might be older than Keller. I don't know how what I thought "youngish" meant in elementary school. I remember his sharp elbows and his tousled chestnut hair, his argument with Dr. Torrens about the necessity of a free press, the tragicomedy of trying to get himself arrested by a pair of policemen who are too much a fan of Old Kasperl to hand his creator over to Cabbarus and the terrible importance of his ending up where he does. I had a Tolstoy-sized cast to choose from and yet at the age of eight or nine I went unerringly for the consumptive journalist with a never-failing sense of irony and a deep, determined idealism that somewhat embarrasses him to discover, though his passionate quarrels with the politics of his country should maybe have given him a clue. I am not really surprised. He was a writer.
The first and even second time I read the books, I was disappointed by the absence of magic; in college I tried to read them against Ursula K. Le Guin's Malafrena (1979), which didn't work because at that time I didn't like Malafrena very much; on my most recent re-read I couldn't stop picturing Cabbarus as played by Jonathan Pryce circa The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). That was about five years ago and I can still remember the simile that accompanies a man's death in The Kestrel—a side of beef with staring eyes and a mouth full of red mud—and I can remember the ending of The Beggar Queen that I read so young it didn't even strike me as remarkable, but I can't remember if the text ever specifies Keller's age. For many reasons, I think it might be instructive to revisit the series now.
I am off to meet and march with people. That's one of them.
I might be older than Keller. I don't know how what I thought "youngish" meant in elementary school. I remember his sharp elbows and his tousled chestnut hair, his argument with Dr. Torrens about the necessity of a free press, the tragicomedy of trying to get himself arrested by a pair of policemen who are too much a fan of Old Kasperl to hand his creator over to Cabbarus and the terrible importance of his ending up where he does. I had a Tolstoy-sized cast to choose from and yet at the age of eight or nine I went unerringly for the consumptive journalist with a never-failing sense of irony and a deep, determined idealism that somewhat embarrasses him to discover, though his passionate quarrels with the politics of his country should maybe have given him a clue. I am not really surprised. He was a writer.
The first and even second time I read the books, I was disappointed by the absence of magic; in college I tried to read them against Ursula K. Le Guin's Malafrena (1979), which didn't work because at that time I didn't like Malafrena very much; on my most recent re-read I couldn't stop picturing Cabbarus as played by Jonathan Pryce circa The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). That was about five years ago and I can still remember the simile that accompanies a man's death in The Kestrel—a side of beef with staring eyes and a mouth full of red mud—and I can remember the ending of The Beggar Queen that I read so young it didn't even strike me as remarkable, but I can't remember if the text ever specifies Keller's age. For many reasons, I think it might be instructive to revisit the series now.
I am off to meet and march with people. That's one of them.
no subject
I can't locate the map with a quick search anywhere else; however, the Women's March website confirms that they had marches in all 50 states (link here)
Oh, and here is a good map. It seems to show no marches in Montana, but I think it's just that none were big enough to register; the Women's March page says there was one in Helena and one in Miles City.
(That map accompanies an article titled "The Women's Marches May Have Been the Largest Demonstrations in US History"
no subject
Thank you; this is wonderful information.
That map accompanies an article titled "The Women's Marches May Have Been the Largest Demonstrations in US History"
The marches around the globe were also very striking to me. There has to be a way to reach out to the people who organized international marches and support them as they were supporting us. It should be more than a symbol.
no subject
I agree with you on basic principle that there ought to be a way to reach out to people (and in fact I'm sure there is a way, but it's probably time intensive) overseas and support them, too. I think in this actual case, the best response we can give is our gratitude and our hard work countering Trump. People around the world were sticking up for us, but I take it also as a plea: You're citizens of the global hegemon; you all, more than we, have the power to stop him. Please, please stop him.
People around the world do have their own causes too, and they do deserve our support, but/and I think the way we, individually, do that gets back to what I was saying in the top-level comment. There's probably only so many things you can lend a voice to, but hopefully there'll be other Americans lending support to other outside-the-US causes, and in that way we're offering support back.
... not sure how coherent this is (and it's also possible that it's coherent enough, but you'll have a different take on things)
no subject
No, I hear what you're saying. I agree that defusing Trump should make a huge difference to what can be done for any of the world; I just don't want it to be forgotten that there were protesters in Cardiff and Belfast and Toronto and Mexico City and New Delhi and Belgrade and Munich and Berlin and Sydney and Dunedin and Nairobi and Cape Town and Paris and Barcelona and Athens and Erbil and Geneva and Lisbon and Tel Aviv and Tokyo and Pristina and Bogotá and a whole bunch of other places, because I wasn't expecting that at all and even if they were all tied to local as well as international causes, they still marched.
Besides, given all of Trump's nauseating rhetoric about Clinton's global backers and international financial ties, I would really enjoy being part of a genuinely international movement to bust him back down into the dust of history where he belongs.
[edit] You were right about marches in all fifty states of the U.S.
[edit edit] This is an amazing set of pictures.
no subject
Hurray for that Wikipedia page! I really do love Wikipedia. And yeah--I loved that NYT photo set too.
On a somber note, someone on twitter posted a photo of 100,000 or so protesting in early 1930s Germany, against Hitler and the Nazis. I hadn't realized there was a large resistance against him to begin with; I had naively hoped that the strength of our feeling would mean that at least we could be pretty sure that we were not going to let the country go that route, but I guess that's not the case at all. We just have to keep vigilant and keep on letting nothing stand.