Potter Wickware's Blog

This movie has striking landscapes but presents a quite negative view of Russian society today under Putin, with fractured family life, rampant alcoholism, a corrupt Church in cahoots with a corrupt bureaucracy, a quite hopeless outlook overall. At first I suspected US-managed state propaganda was behind it, with some evil genius like Dick Cheney pulling the strings to manipulate opinion. But, at least according to Zvyagintsev’s Wikipedia article, it was the director’s own voice throughout. (I’m not sure I believe this, though.)

This novel is built up from an autopsy report following the murder of Jenny Bonnet, who collected frog legs from Lake Merced for the restaurant trade in San Francisco in the mid-1870’s. Donoghue has fictionalized the event and embellished it with local news stories from the period. Jenny was friends with Blanche Beunon, a former Parisian circus trapeze artist who moved to San Francisco after the Paris Commune of 1870 and became a dance artiste and high-class call girl. She had two fancy man boyfriends and produced an unwanted infant, which was placed in a snake pit of a foundling home. Later she repented of allowing this to happen and the latter part of the book tells of her efforts to recover the child.

It’s set in the demi-monde of San Francisco in a time of anti-Chinese riots, a heat wave and a smallpox epidemic, is seasoned with popular songs by Stephen Foster and others, lore about the early bicycle known as high-rider or velocipede, frogs and frog-catching, brothels and steam railroading. It doesn’t measure up to Donoghue’s previous novel “Room,” a relentless and tightly constrained psychological study of a kidnapped mother and child. “Frog Music” wilts chiefly because of its discontinuous narrative line, with the thread of the story broken up in a jerky, time-shifting fashion throughout the book. This device does give a fever dream quality to the smallpox and heat wave sequences, but elsewhere – most of the story – this shattered, disorganized layout is gimmicky and pointless. Stripping away the razzle-dazzle reveals a conventional murder mystery with period details.

The extensive afterword and notes on sources and text are unnecessary and imply a lack of authorial confidence. The overall impression is of a book hurriedly thrown together before it was ready, perhaps by the publisher’s demand for another book before the memory of the brilliant “Room” faded in the public mind.

Tolstoy’s (1859) traces the development of Dmitri Anréich Olenin, a privileged young man who abandons the world of Moscow society life to pursue his imagined idea of openness, freedom, authenticity and the natural life in the Caucasus. Leaving debts and boredom behind, Olenin enters this new world as a cadet, or apprentice officer, in the Tsar’s military operation to put down the insurgency of abreks in Chechnya, then as now a center of resistance to the central authority. The novel presents a vivid picture of country life in a district far from Moscow and its artificial conventions. In addition to Olenin, the principal characters include Maryanka, the beauty of the village, whom Olenin soon falls in love with, imagining he could easily make his life with her by walking away from his privileged upbringing and transplanting himself to the Caucasus.

The portrait of Maryanka: “she was certainly not pretty but beautiful. Her features might have been considered too masculine and almost harsh had it not been for her tall stately figure, her powerful chest and shoulders, and especially the severe yet tender expression of her long dark eyes which were darkly shadowed beneath their black brows, and for the gentle expression of her mouth and smile. She rarely smiled, but her smile was always striking. She seemed to radiate virginal strength and health…”

Other characters include Ustenka, the squeaky-voiced gamine, the young warrior Lukáshka, champion hunter, friend to everyone and soon to be betrothed to Maryanka, and Papa Eoshenka, a mountain man, a sage, an emblem of primitive vitality, an emotional old patriarch who breaks into tears at the memories and feelings that unexpectedly and often interrupt him in the midst of his everyday doings; Eoshenka is a sharp observer of Olenin and other people, knows the land and animals, has a weather eye, is an expert horseman and hunter, a teller of tales, a prolific giver of gifts, drainer of flagons, merry-maker among women, the center of attention and interest in whatever situation in field or mountain or village that he finds himself in.

To the end, though, Olenin remains detached and distant, self-conscious and unable to rid himself of the residue of city and society convention that clings to him despite all his efforts to throw it off. His naïve idea that he could marry a Cossack girl and be happy with her in the village, even as he remembers with disgust the rich, available Moscow girls with their pomaded hair and jeweled gowns, is turned topsy-turvy when the Chechens ambush the Cossacks, killing some of them and gravely wounding Lukáshka. In the shadow of this hard reality Maryanka rejects Olenin, still the outsider, who quietly leaves the village to join the military staff closer to the center of state power. After a tearful farewell with Eoshenka he departs, still with a sense that he never truly belonged, either in village life in the Caucasus or in society life in Moscow.

(1904), Tolstoy’s last novel, is set in the 1850’s in the Caucasus, the wild area between the Black and Caspian Seas, then as now a locus of anti-Russian insurgency. Murád, the austere and pious champion of a Chechen faction, is the rival of Shamil, the extremist imam of an opposing faction who has captured Murád’s family. Murád needs Russian help to oppose Shamil and rescue his wives and children. The Russians need Murád to use his influence to persuade the people of the region to yield to Russian hegemony.

The Chechens are fiercely attached to their religion, loyal to their tribe and unwavering in their opposition to the Russians. To the destruction of one of their settlements by the Russians they respond with emotion “worse than hate: perplexity, repulsion, disgust at the senseless cruelty of these creatures and their desire to exterminate them like rats or poisonous spiders as a natural instinct of self preservation.”

On the Russian side a theme of corruption and incompetence on an imperial scale is delineated in a devastating portrait of Czar Nicholas as a pig-eyed hypocrite laced up in a corset, a “senile sensualist” whose “senseless, contradictory, unjust, insensate, cruel, dishonest” policies and decisions are promoted by fawning courtiers whose chief interest is to retain their positions in the power structure. Powerful descriptions of events and persons and personages flash through the narrative like lightning: the weeping of widows as jackals in the forest chuckle and moan in the background; nightingales pausing their song as the “merry, stirring rattle of gunfire” erupts; the “leathery acid smell peculiar to the mountaineers” permeating a room where Chechen insurgents have gathered.

In the end Murád fails to rescue his family and instead Cossacks in Russian service run him down, later showing around as war booty “a shaven head with salient brows, black shortcut beard and mustaches, one eye open and the other half-closed. The shaven skull was cleft, but not right through, and there was congealed blood in the nose. The neck was wrapped in a blood-stained towel. Notwithstanding the many wounds on the head, the blue lips still bore a kindly childlike expression.”

The tone of Tolstoy’s (1889), a polemic against marriage, is set by an epigraph from Matthew recommending sexual abstinence. The novel opens with passengers in a rail carriage talking about what’s wrong with the women of today. A conservative old-timer says the female sex should be curbed. A liberal-minded lady disagrees, but she gets off the train at the next stop. A stranger with a “glittering eye” chimes in and soon dominates the conversation, insisting on getting to the “essence” of all questions. He turns out to be the notorious Pózdnyshev, just released from prison for killing his wife.

Over the course of the long journey he relates his story, leaving nothing out. In the beginning he had been “depraved” (i.e. boarding school buggery, a thread in other Tolstoy works as well). The years of his young manhood passed until as a sex-obsessed moralist, he was appalled to realize at age 30 that he had become a “libertine”. He rants about “the delusion that beauty is goodness,” about the over-stimulating super-abundance of rich food, idleness and excess sensuality available to his, the privileged class. Marriage is sordid, courtship is a bazaar (marital engagement: what shame! What nastiness!); women, dominated by men, are in turn the enslavers of men by way of their sexuality.

[Note: When I was a student I lived in a boarding house where one of the other roomers was like this Pózdnyshev. He ended up castrating himself. The landlord told me he found the man’s testicles floating in a glass on his bedside table.]

Pózdnyshev married but soon Praskóvya Fedorovna, his bride, turned against him. They became satiated with sexuality and irritated with each other. Human nature is in contest with animal nature, observes Pózdnyshev. The solution is to be continent and withold the sexual impulse, but the lord of nature demands pleasure, demands release! Marriage becomes a form of slavery. Women are the root of the problem: the majority are “mentally diseased, hysterical, unhappy, lacking capacity for human development…” And: “A woman has attained all she can desire when she has bewitched a man”. But for their part men are swine too. Long passages follow about jealousy and against doctors. Consumed with impassioned frustration and admitting he is spoiled and jealous he declares, “I am a sort of a lunatic, I know!”

Praskóvya Fedorovna stopped having children. Her looks strikingly improved and her figure became lush. Pózdnyshev’s jealousy increased and was aggravated by the arrival of Trukhashévski, a music master, for Madame’s lessons. Pózdnyshev discovered he learned his manners in Paris, to him a sure sign of depravity. Arguments and slamming doors followed. Madame abandoned the family; in a desperate scene she takes opium to try to kill herself. The deterioration of the family is witnessed by children, nanny, servants. A musical evening is arranged to try to restore balance. Trukhashévski returns but there is more jealousy: Pózdnyshev’s behavior was coarse and rejecting and the concert was almost called off. But Pózdnyshev’s deep love of music, as shown in an affecting passage on the power of music, is not enough to bring equilibrium. He has an idea that everything is superficial, that true meaning is concealed and only he can see it. He’s a kind of megalomaniac. Trukhashévski and Mme. play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Pózdnyshev is so jealous and moved he has to step out of the salon. Jealousy and irrationality build. Pózdnyshev leaves on a trip, but when he returns it’s with a sword. After a long interior passage on his jealousy and rage there’s a final confrontation and he kills her. In the train carriage he concludes with, “I should not have married. “Yes. Forgive me.”

(1886) is a story of the unexamined life. Ilych, a magistrate, followed the correct path professionally, cultivated the right people, always held himself within proper limits (as defined not by internal self-generated values but by the range of behavior seen in those in his professional class). He married and was happy for a time, until the children came, but then his wife became unsatisfied and shrewish. There was never quite enough money, even though Ilych was careful to keep up appearances and improve the material conditions as circumstances allowed. By good luck he got a better job, which alleviated the money pressure for a time, and the family moved to a more fashionable house. Ilych became preoccupied with furnishing and decorating it. But for all his effort, Tolstoi writes, “In reality, it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich.”

While demonstrating to a contractor how a particular job was to be done Ilych fell and hit his chest sharply on a piece of furniture. There was a bruise that wouldn’t go away. The pain persisted, magnified and eventually came to dominate his existence. He lost weight, the light went out of his eyes, there was an at first unpleasant and then foul taste in his mouth. There’s a terrifying passage toward the end with Ilych in court opening proceedings and carrying himself in his old agreeable way, when suddenly the pain surges up and for some moments blots out everything. His “easy, agreeable and correct life” unravels, leading finally to a grueling death scene, with doctors contradicting each other with worthless treatments, the pain relentless and unbearable, Ilych screaming unremittingly for three days, the attentions of the peasant boy Gerasim, his nurse, his only comfort.

At the funeral his friends calculate how his death will benefit them professionally by creating a vacancy at court and socially by opening a seat at the bridge table. It was a life, Tolstoi says, “most simple, most ordinary, most terrible.”

[A friend in my book group selected this novel. When the time came to meet my friend had had knee surgery and, because he lives alone, entered a convalescent hospital until he could walk again. We met in the deserted cafeteria of this place and while we were discussing certain scenes of this grim novel there was a series of howls and moans, deeply distressed, echoing from the corridor, from one of the inmates. Around our reading table no one in the group gave a hint that they heard anything unusual.]

Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks” (1859) traces the development of Dmitri Anréich Olenin, a privileged young man who abandons the world of Moscow society life to pursue his imagined idea of openness, freedom, authenticity and the natural life in the Caucasus. Leaving debts and boredom behind, Olenin enters this new world as a cadet, or apprentice officer, in the Tsar’s military operation to put down the insurgency of abreks in Chechnya, then as now a center of resistance to the central authority. The novel presents a vivid picture of country life in a district far from Moscow and its artificial conventions. In addition to Olenin, the principal characters include Maryanka, the beauty of the village, whom Olenin soon falls in love with, imagining he could easily make his life with her by walking away from his privileged upbringing and transplanting himself to the Caucasus.

The portrait of Maryanka: “she was certainly not pretty but beautiful. Her features might have been considered too masculine and almost harsh had it not been for her tall stately figure, her powerful chest and shoulders, and especially the severe yet tender expression of her long dark eyes which were darkly shadowed beneath their black brows, and for the gentle expression of her mouth and smile. She rarely smiled, but her smile was always striking. She seemed to radiate virginal strength and health…”

Other characters include Ustenka, the squeaky-voiced gamine, the young warrior Lukáshka, champion hunter, friend to everyone and soon to be betrothed to Maryanka, and Papa Eoshenka, a mountain man, a sage, an emblem of primitive vitality, an emotional old patriarch who breaks into tears at the memories and feelings that unexpectedly and often interrupt him in the midst of his everyday doings; Eoshenka is a sharp observer of Olenin and other people, knows the land and animals, has a weather eye, is an expert horseman and hunter, a teller of tales, a prolific giver of gifts, drainer of flagons, merry-maker among women, the center of attention and interest in whatever situation in field or mountain or village that he finds himself in.

To the end, though, Olenin remains detached and distant, self-conscious and unable to rid himself of the residue of city and society convention that clings to him despite all his efforts to throw it off. His naïve idea that he could marry a Cossack girl and be happy with her in the village, even as he remembers with disgust the rich, available Moscow girls with their pomaded hair and jeweled gowns, is turned topsy-turvy when the Chechens ambush the Cossacks, killing some of them and gravely wounding Lukáshka. In the shadow of this hard reality Maryanka rejects Olenin, still the outsider, who quietly leaves the village to join the military staff closer to the center of state power. After a tearful farewell with Eoshenka he departs, still with a sense that he never truly belonged, either in village life in the Caucasus or in society life in Moscow.

What can a boy do? Maybe be a futbol star like Chelato. What else? Hang around in El Progreso and wait for something to happen? He’s been waiting all his life for something to happen. He’s still living at home and his mamá, his tía, are saying, I’m getting tired of you being here.

There’s this guy who’s been pressuring him. When first enlisted he’ll be a lookout, report on anything out of the ordinary he sees, strangers in the barrio, whatever seems unusual. Tell the jefe what he sees. So now he’s hanging around with the guys and they get to know him. Next he’ll be assigned some errands. Next he’ll be loaned a pistol and told to steal a motorcycle or threaten a cab driver who refuses to pay up. If he’s successful, then he’s in.

Me get a tat? No way.

Wait, I take that back. Suppose I went on a drunk and woke up in a whorehouse with “Death Before Dishonor” spangled across my chest and only a dim memory of what transpired before. Then OK, maybe. Because I gave myself to a wild Dionysian impulse and let the devil take the consequences! At least the impulse was genuine, even if completely idiotic.

But as a program contrived to self-consciously make a personality statement, no. Expressionist black spikes on calves and shoulders, or Yakuza-style Koi carp and Kabuki heroes with threatening eyebrows, or rising sun rays radiating from around a nipple, or the Oriental script trailing down the back of the neck that makes the waiter in the Chinese restaurant burst out laughing? No again.

In contrast consider pandillero gang iconography – eyeballs tattooed on the eyelids like the Argus monster of antiquity, the dark-eyed babe in a strapless dress on his deltoid (she’s still waiting for him on the outside, if only in his imagination), the teardrops on the cheek, the “MS-13” in huge Old English script like diploma lettering on his pectoral. These are not the mannerist fashion statements of a first-world metrosexual. No, they are a desperate assertion of group identity, a brand without which the tattooed one’s survival is at risk. Not body art. Insignia.

Who are they? Where did they come from and what do they want?

They’re descendants of the wave of refugees from El Salvador’s vicious civil war of the 1970’s and 80’s, who fled to El Norte, many landing in Los Angeles. As the newest and poorest of new arrivals they were discriminated against by those who had arrived earlier. For protection, opportunity and community they formed gangs. These groups took their names from the barrios of downtown LA. The main Salvadoran gang faction is called MS-13, after 13th St., in the Ramparts district of downtown LA, while a second major group is Barrio Dieciocho, after 18th St. Contact with the justice system often turned out badly for them, especially the younger generation. As illegal border crossers or released prisoners or merely undocumented persons they are regularly deported back to El Salvador, where they face discrimination again because of their lack of skills, criminal background and poor command of Spanish. Thus gang families that originated in LA as local clubs morphed into organized crime units that now extend back to Central America and to New York, the mid-Atlantic region (a strong presence there) and Spain.

Gang rivalries in El Salvador nowadays are intense. Weapons are available and abundant. Alternatives to crime and violence – job opportunities, education and training as openings to middle class life – are scant, especially for gang members bearing tattoos and criminal records. The result is a country with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world. El Salvador has 70 homicides per 100,000 population per year. By contrast the rate in the US is under 5 per 100,000 per year.

The Maras inhabit a parallel world, a minority slice of the population feared and excluded by the majority. They’re like Yakuza in Japan or the Camorra in Naples, separated from the mainstream by such a distance it’s hard to conceive they could work their way back to the center. They brand themselves with tattoos to show irreversible group loyalty and alienation from the majority. And yet the iconography of their graffiti, with its Old English script like diploma lettering, suggests that they crave a conventional stamp of respect, status and formal validation that mirrors the values of the society they are separated from.

Behind the Maras lies the inescapable fact that in today’s predatory musical chairs economy there’s not enough room for everybody in the mainstream. But even beyond socioeconomic factors is a second element, the need in the human heart, on general principles, for an out-group, an untouchable class, a minority available for the majority to fear and despise. Yet the excluded ones are still with us. They fall away from the center and persist in their own parallel society. Hence, “I’m Still Here.”

How to boost your indie novel. Begin by squandering a morning watching YouTube videos: a bunch of Random House editors in a staged “interview” emoting about how passionate they are; A guy who says begin marketing your book 3 years before you start writing it; A book marketing guru who says he hasn’t been inside a bookstore since the 90’s. OK, now the morning’s gone & that blank page is still looking at you. But wait! It’s time for lunch ...

Blog? What’s the point? It’s imaginary & solipsistic. But one thing it can do is stimulate fluency. Prepare you with responses to questions that may come up in presentations or actual conversations with real people. What do you think about this? About anything? Open up, don’t hold back. Can’t say it? Tongue-tied? Your thoughts are congested, contradictory, fogged over? Say it anyway! Maybe you’ll find something in there. Think about it—not too much – and write it down. Then on to the next.

Results from the March 9 presidential runoff election in El Salvador are in, and they strangely mirror those of the 2000 Bush-Gore contest in the US. In ES, the Left’s man Salvador Cerén, a guerrilla fighter during that country’s 12-year long civil war and now the leader of FMLN, its progressive party, beat Norman Quijano, the candidate of the Right, by just 6000 votes out of 3M cast. The two men have diametrically different ideas about what to do about their country’s major domestic problem, gang violence. Although down from its peak, at 70 per hundred thousand per year the country’s mostly gang-related murder rate is still one of the highest in the world. Quijano wants to double down with the mano dura approach: militarize the country, draft anyone between ages 18 and 30 who’s not working, military courts martial for those who commit gang crimes. Cerén’s approach by contrast is to conciliate and integrate with education, training and amnesty. It is pleasant to believe in the latter strategy, but with a split electorate and a weak economy it’s hard to see how either side can get enough traction to prevail. In this their situation resembles that of their overbearing neighbor to the north ever since the tossup election of 2000, which was “resolved” only by the hairsplitting chicanery of the Roberts-Scalia Supreme Court.