The Blaring of the Green

You're probably reading this on March 18, but I'm writing it on March 17, and as I write it, 500,000 people (according to the always-reliable Huffington Post) are jammed into the streets of Dublin to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

I am not among them.  I would not be among them if I were in Dublin.  I would not be among them if I were on the streets of Dublin.  I would be a lonely, somewhat foreboding spot of non-green, like a drop of antiseptic in the middle of a culture of bacteria.

Irish though I am, I have to admit that ostentatious Irishness, in all its manifestations, makes me wish I were Jewish.  Or Hungarian.  Or Jewish-Hungarian.  Or a mixed species, perhaps part greyhound.  I'd be quick, narrow-waisted, and glossy, and no one would ask me why I'm not wearing green.

It's always bewildered me that--despite the fierce strains of melancholy, loss, lyricism, anger, and alcoholism that have claimed permanence of place in the Irish character, like genes on a chromosome--most of what I think of as "postcard Irish" or "boarding-pass Irish" is so twee.  Sentimental ballads about Irish eyes; large men in boots hopping up and down without moving their arms; leprechauns, for Christ's sake.

Originally, leprechauns were something to take seriously.  In the first written mention of them, they're water sprites whose idea of a merry prank is to drag a sleeping man into the sea and drown him.  Only when he awakes and subdues them do they offer him three wishes in exchange for their lives.  Over the centuries, they've been housebroken and domesticated, turned into Munchkins with pipes and brogues and twinkles, eager to share their gold with whoever can get to the end of the rainbow.

I suppose it's twinkle that I most object to, and it's Vaudeville and Hollywood who are probably most to blame for that.  No Vaudeville show worth a nickel was without its "Pat and Mike" act, two dubious Irishmen with thick brogues and great naivete, who comically got wrong all the news of the day while unknowingly stripping away "official" perspectives to accidentally get things right--an unendurable stereotype that wasn't sweetened by the act-closing revelation that one of them possessed an Irish tenor perfect for the most lachrymose ballads of the day.

But Hollywood really poured it on.  Twinkle went widescreen in the movies, with Errol Flynn (born in Tasmania but transformed into a native of Ireland by Jack Warner's publicity people) twinkling at one end of a sword, and Barry Fitzgerald twinkling in a priest's cassock, and John Wayne, who had the world's most ponderous twinkle, slugging Victor McLaglen across half of County Cork and back again in John Ford's "The Quiet Man" while Maureen O'Hara fretted and fumed, all red-headed, at the edge of the screen.  The Irish, as Hollywood saw them, were always either fighting or drinking, or fighting and drinking, or fighting and drinking and crossing themselves.  And twinkling, always twinkling.

I prefer the magical, tragic, mist-enshrouded Ireland of Yeats and Synge and Augusta Gregory and James Joyce and even Wilde, an Ireland where the flow of words papers over the yawning chasms and lurking catastrophes of everyday life.  Where the real St. Patrick was kidnapped from Wales at the age of 16 and enslaved on the Emerald Isle, later returning to minster to a lonely scattering of 5th-century Christians.  Where leprechauns were dangerous, and the poor drew together against the absentee landlords who would starve them.  Where it's cold and raw much of the time and the peat smoke is choking in midwinter and only the whiskey lets in the light.

And nobody twinkles.

Tim -- Sundays

Now Is The Time

I’ve been meaning to write something like this for quite a while but kept putting it off.  I’m returning to Mykonos in two weeks and perhaps that’s why I decided now is the time to write.  Come to think of it, I guess I could have waited until clearing Greek immigration.

Some may say I’ve been away from Greece for too many months to express an opinion on the state of things there at the moment, and possibly even a few who think I should not speak up because I am not Greek by birth and therefore “can never understand us.”

Personally, I love those folks.  They love Greece, as do I, and want to defend it at all costs from criticism.  Uhh, make that at almost all costs.  And that limitation is precisely what concerns me.

Many say Greece just dodged a bullet with the second bailout package.  As I see it, a minefield’s only been moved farther down the road.  There is no open ground ahead unless Greeks are prepared to change their ways and insist that those charged with shepherding their form of government do the same. 

Plodding along, head down, determined to make it through these miserable times by following the same path that so many have come to accept as “the way things are done” will end in tears.  Nor will dancing along in blissful ignorance spare those still relatively insulated from their country’s expanding financial misery.

Put in crassest terms, if things continue as they are, is there anyone out there who honestly believes Greece won’t be booted off the euro (and possibly out of the E.U.) the moment Germany no longer sees the financial collapse of Greece as a financial catastrophe for itself?

Some of my Greek friends see an idyllic serendipity in the crisis:  We shall leave the cities, go back to our villages, and live a simpler life.  Sounds great, except for one major problem (beyond how many of my city slicker buddies still remember which side of the goat to milk):  Fleeing to the countryside to grow tomatoes—even metaphorically—leaves their cities open to pillage by opportunists.  In chaos and lost hope criminality thrives. And I’m not just talking about those who rob by knife or gun.  Let us not forget the pen, which more than any other weapon brought Greece into the mess it confronts today.

One could compare the Greek government’s immersion in seemingly endless international financial talks to some Homeric-length performance of classic Greek theater, but I think it resembles something else: an industry-wide management/labor negotiation.

I’m talking about the kind where both sides know at the outset where things will end up, but nevertheless drag out negotiations to the last moment in order to convince their respective constituencies that the battle drew the very last drop of blood. Name-calling, threats, ignored deadlines, and the like are subterfuges, as is all the praise exchanged on reaching an agreement at how Armageddon was just narrowly avoided and a new course has been set toward a better future. That’s a time-honored model and it works well in a lot of testy situations. 

But where the problems are systemic, as in Greece, that doesn’t work unless the participants are committed to sharing in painful systemic change.

There is no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of Greeks want their form of government to work, but they want it to do so fairly and honestly, and until that day they will not trust it.  It is a hugely complicated task, made even more so where those possessing the power to expose or prosecute the corrupt are themselves compromised.

In a nutshell, the dilemma the country faces is whether to bring down entrenched practices that have benefited so many for so long in the hope change will lead to a better future.  That’s a pretty big leap of faith to ask of even the most dedicated citizens of goodwill and influence.  To some it’s akin to asking that they defend their country at all costs. 

But what choice is there?  Leave it up to the gods?

(1729-1797)

As Edmund Burke is often quoted: “All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.”   

Let us hope that those capable of bringing about peaceful change have the will and vision to see that now is the time.

One final thing.  This is the symbol of the Athens-based soccer club, Panathinakos.  I can assure you that what I’ve written today is nowhere near as threatening to my continued wellbeing as being perceived to have chosen sides in the Greek soccer wars.  I assure my friends that I have not.  It’s only my way of segueing a shamrock into the post as a means of expressing my very best wishes for a Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

Jeff—Saturday

The Blitz

In recent weeks I've been looking at London during and after the Blitz.  For a decade or more years after the war the city was still scarred by the damage caused by Hitler's Luftwaffe. According to many accounts, you could wander around the city well into the 1950s and still see whole rows of houses missing, their cellars exposed to the sky, tall weeds growing over the rubble. Children were able to pick and eat gooseberries from the bushes that grew on bomb sites. The country was simply too impoverished by the war to be able to afford to start rebuilding.

I came across the video above, of rare colour footage of the effects of the bombing, which includes a few London landmarks as well as Winston Churchill surveying the damage.

A few other stories and images have stuck in my mind during my research, most of them linked to my fascination with the underground. In 1941 a German bomb struck a direct hit on the ticket hall of Bank underground station, killing 57 people.

It must have shaken the public's confidence. The underground's became bomb shelters, a safe haven from the raining bombs above ground. In 1944 the air raid sirens went off in Bethnal Green and the locals started making their way to the shelter in the tube station. All of a sudden there was vast bang, like the sound of an exploding bomb, which created a wave of panic. On the narrow stairs which led to the entrance into the station someone slipped. People poured down, falling over each other, stepping on others, the human instinct to survive trumping all other. 173 people lost their lives, many of them children. The incident was  reported, though the severity and the location weren't mentioned to avoid denting morale. Neither was it reported, though it was later admitted, that the bang that created the panic was the testing of a new, secret anti-aircraft gun in a nearby park and not a German bomb.

In 1940, a bomb landed on Balham High Road above the tube station, creating a huge crater into which a bus crashed. The bomb fractured a water main which sent water, sewage and debris cascading down on to the platforms below. In all 68 people were drowned and killed. Those of you who have read or seen the film adapation of Ian McEwan's Atonement will know the incident well.

During the Blitz, even well below ground, you weren't safe.

cheers

Dan - Friday

Baobabs

Baobabs are wonderful trees.  I love them!  They store water, the leaves are nutritious for people and animals, they are the source of cream of tartar, and...well, they look as though they come from another planet.  David Livingstone apparently said they looked like "a carrot planted upside down".  I don't quite get that comparison, but in the winter - as in the specimen above - they certainly do look as though the roots are in the air.  They're sometimes called upside-down trees.

The Bushmen have a number of legends about them.  Great story tellers, it is hardly surprising that the baobab would intrigue and entertain them.  One story is that in the beginning the gods distributed the seeds of all the plants to the animals to cultivate.  The hyena was the last to receive his seed and it was a baobab.  He was so disgusted to be last that he planted it upside down.  An even more intriguing story is that baobabs don't grow at all.  They are dropped from heaven fully grown, and being top heavy they land upside down with a loud thud still sometimes heard today... 

The second legend may come from the fact that the trees are very slow growing indeed and the young ones look very different from the adults.  Some of the adults are thousands of years old.  They've seen a thing or two. Like ones with cannon balls embedded in their trunks from battles long past. 



Women's prison tree with new police station.



The largest may grow to 150 feet in circumference, and they can be used as shelters. Baobabs are not very common in Botswana - preferring the tropics - but in the north you see them from time to time.  In Kasane, on the border with Zimbabwe, they were even once used as prisons - one for men and one for women.  When the new police station was built, it was designed so that the trees and their history could be preserved.

Prison trees seemed to be an idea whose time had come.  This one in Australia was used for a similar purpose.



This one does service as a pub.



                                                      





Here's one on Kubu Island growing from the rocks.  There aren't hippos on that dry pan despite the name!



Baines' Baobabs.





A Baines painting.



This group in the northern Kalahari is known as 'the sleeping sisters', here in full leaf after unusually wonderful rains.  The group is also named after Thomas Baines, naturalist, explorer and painter who seemed to have an affinity for these trees.  He travelled with Livingstone, and also explored in Australia.  Perhaps he was after the baobab species there.  There the name is shortened (as with many names in Australia) to baobs.



Madagascar



The family name is Adansonia and there are only eight species in the world.  One is widely spread over Africa and Asia, one occurs in north-west Australia and the other six are in Madagascar.  It's one of the many reasons that I'd love to visit there one day and see the forests of these amazing trees.  The Madagascar species look quite different to ours; they have a sort of fantasy shape that makes you think they may have walked out of middle earth.

They catch the eyes of editors too.  Two of our books have them on the cover amid the African reds and oranges: A DEADLY TRADE (the UK edition of The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu) and IL DETECTIVE KUBU (the Italian version of A Carrion Death).  We love the menace of those eyes on the Italian book!  (Cat eyes rather than hyena eyes, but then the baobabs are one of the species  from Madagascar.  No, we don't get to approve the covers!) 

Michael - Thursday







John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, and the Colony of New Holland

The early seventeenth century was a time when the powers in Europe were grasping for new territory.

Possessed of heavily-armed fleets, and large numbers of well-trained soldiers, the hardy Dutch, in those days, were every bit a match for England, Portugal and Spain, and they were out there grasping with the best of them.

They grasped at the East Indies, they grasped at South Africa, they grasped at North America (founding New Amsterdam, the city that became New York, in 1625) and in 1624, with a small contingent of troops, they took Salvador, the seat of the Portuguese viceroy in South America.

Unable to hold it, they were expelled in less than a year.

But, by then, the Dutch West India Company, the nation’s mercantile arm, had acquired a taste for Brazil’s riches, and it wasn’t long before they returned for more.

Over the course of the next decade, the WIC succeeded in occupying much of the rich sugar-growing region of Pernambuco. They named it New Holland and, in 1636, appointed John Maurice (Johan Maurits) the Prince of Nassau-Siegen to govern it.

John Maurice was an amazing man, and he tackled his new responsibility like no other colonial governor before or since. Before sailing, he assembled a coterie of artists, scientists and artisans to take with him. Rather than plunder Brazil, he announced, his intention was to enrich it, study it, record it and improve it for the generations to follow.

His colony extended all the way from below Sergipe, in the south, to above São Luis de Maranhão in the north -- almost half of what was then Brazil.

He'd been a successful soldier in Europe, but he was also a man who knew how to forge a successful peace. He convinced the rebellious Portuguese settlers they’d be better-off under Dutch rule, established representative councils to enlist their participation in administrating the colony and promulgated freedom of religion by allowing the local Jewish merchants to establish a synagogue, the first in all of the Americas.

It’s still there.

He built streets, roads and bridges. He developed a colony-wide transportation structure that enriched everyone by enabling the sugar-growers to bring their product to the coast. He created an astronomic observatory and a meteorological station, also the first institutions of their kind in all of the Americas.

It wasn’t long before new Portuguese settlers were choosing Dutch-occupied, rather than Portuguese-occupied territory in which to establish themselves.

He ordered the great architect Pieter Post, of Haarlem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Post to transform the small port where he’d landed into a splendid capital adorned with fine public buildings and gardens.

Before and after Prince Maurice the place was named Recife (it means “reef” in Portuguese and there is one – a big one – just offshore) but during the time he lived there people called it Mauritsstad (Maurice’s Town).

It once looked like this.

But it was not to last.

Back in Holland, the directors of the West India Company were more interested in short-term returns than  a happy and successful colony. They were horrified at the investments John Maurice was making and wrote to tell him to cease them forthwith - and to pay out the savings in dividends.

He threatened to resign. And they let him. He sailed back to Europe, and they replaced him with a more

malleable man. Without John Maurice, and with the new measures introduced by his successor, the Dutch lost the support of the populace. A revolt was organized. And by 1654 it was all over. The Dutch West India Company withdrew from the continent, putting an end to John Maurice’s brilliant experiment in good government.

There is very little left of the city of John Maurice’s time, but quite a few paintings from the artists he brought along have survived.

Here are three from Frans Post, the younger brother of the aforementioned architect:

Post, as you will have noted, was charged with documenting the land, while his colleague, Albert Eckhout, bore the responsibility for recording the fauna and the people:

Some of Post’s work remains in Brazil, some in John Maurice's house in the Hague (now a museum) and some at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The best and largest collection of Eckhout can be seen, strangely enough, in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.

But that’s another story.

Leighton - Monday

Zero Intelligence

Lately, we've seen a lot of thin-lipped, power-mouthed public "servants" growling about "zero tolerance."  But what, in practice, does "zero tolerance" really mean?  

Let's start with examples from the schools. where zero tolerance is becoming a way of life.

In the past year in America, children have been suspended from various schools for:

Bringing a squirt gun to school.

Making a drawing of a squirt gun in school.  (The cartoon above refers to a real case.)

Being found in possession of a butter knife.

Having four Midol in a backpack to alleviate cramps.

Bringing a bottle of peppermint oil to school to flavor water with.  The school said the oil was an "over-the-counter unregulated drug."

Bringing interesting rocks to school to share with the class as part of a geology lesson.

And, to take the butter knife thing a bit further, Amber Dauge, a tenth-grader in Charleston, South Carolina, was EXPELLED when she was caught using a butter knife to, well, spread butter on bread.  Her explanation -- that the school's plastic knives broke because the butter was too hard -- was rejected as transparently self-serving, and she was expelled.  Not suspended, expelled.

In Longmont, Colorado, a fifth-grader named Shannon Cosiet discovered that her mother had put a table knife in her backpack to cut an apple with.  She went to the vice-principal to turn it in.  She was expelled.  Not praised for being honest, not reprimanded, not suspended.  Expelled.

Let's leave the schools behind, as I'm very happy to have done in real life. Virtually once a week we read about some act of maniacal stupidity committed by the minimum-wage/maximum-power boys and girls of the TSA.   For example:

A woman was recently thrown off a flight because she had bought a toy solder for her son, and it was holding a rifle.  The soldier was four inches high, the rifle was less than in inch long, it was made of solid plastic, and it couldn't be removed from the soldier's shoulder. So even if the woman had wanted to use a three-quarters-of-an-inch-long, solid plastic rifle to menace the stewardess or stir her martini, she couldn't have.

Denied boarding.  Zero tolerance.

A woman's cupcakes were confiscated because frosting qualifies as a "gel-like substance."  (By the way, is there any "gel-like substance" that isn't actually a gel?  Is this mind-numbing, humanity-stifling legalese really necessary?)  Zero tolerance for cupcakes.

Several people--all of advanced age- have had their incontinence diapers searched.  I personally do not want to know what was found

A woman traveling with her 91-year-old, wheelchair-bound mother, protested when her mother's applesauce, necessary for the administration of a medication, was confiscated.  The woman was arrested, and she and her mother taken into custody.  Zero tolerance.

Zero tolerance is a vile precept, not only because it results in actions that defy analysis, but also because it's based on the fundamental assumption that the people who have been assigned to enforce the rules--teachers, TSA agents, even cops--are all idiots.  They're incapable of making a judgment call. Left to their own devices, this thinking goes, a school official might decide that it's just fine for a third-grader to possess a hypodermic, a bag of powder, and a bent spoon,  On the other end of the spectrum, a TSA enforcer might decide that the Middle Eastern man in his middle-twenties with the  C-4 strapped to his body has kind eyes and allow him on the plane.

Zero tolerance says: No investigation.  No explanation.  Guilty.  Next.

Because their superiors have no faith in their intelligence and -- what was that term people used to use?  Oh, right, common sense  -- these public servants are deprived of the right to exercise judgment.  So they ignore the evidence of their eyes and their intellect and their humanity, and press hard on someone's colostomy bag and/or urine receptacle, and the passenger, humiliated and stinking, is finally allowed to board the plane.  Or not. Another blow for freedom and National Security.

What this implies is that the people we're entrusting to educate our kids and keep the country safe from terrorism are too dumb to know that you can't shoot someone with a tiny plastic rifle and that Midol and peppermint oil are not controlled substances.

Well, then, why don't we hire some people who aren't that dumb?  (Last I heard, lots of people were unemployed.)  Or -- here's a sweeping concept - once we've decided someone is qualified for a job, why not let him or her actually do it?

Zero tolerance, in the end, is Fascistic.  It's the policy of a power structure that thinks the worst both of those it governs and those it empowers to exercise authority.  The classic excuse for the executioners and torturers of Fascist regimes is "I was just following orders."  Those were zero-tolerance orders, designed specifically to remove the enforcer's judgment or mercy from the equation.  We need to get rid of it, just as we need to employ, in positions of authority, only people who are capable of making a judgment call.

Reduce brainless behavior.  Do away with zero tolerance.  Oh, and hire the capable.

Tim -- Sundays

Free at Last, Free at Last. At Least Some Are.

Catchy title, huh?  Almost as catchy as The Bone Polisher, which is Timothy Hallinan’s classic Simeon Grist novel that is available this weekend on Amazon for FREE!  Actually Saturday (today), Sunday, and Monday.

I honestly can’t believe any book by Tim would ever be offered for free. I mean, why? Who on earth wouldn’t know to read his stuff?  Let’s be real here, Tim’s an Edgar and Macavity nominee who can’t seem to write anything that doesn’t sparkle.  And it’s not as if this one’s the runt of any litter.  It’s the capstone of his LA private detective series, one that has Grist chasing through 1995 gay West Hollywood after the most dangerous adversary of his career, a man who kills his victims not once, but twice: once physically and once in spirit.  And in classic Hallinan fashion, there’s a giant plot twist surprise to come.   

Don’t ask, just download it and decide for yourself.  After all, it’s free!!

Which brings me back to the question, why offer a book for free?

Practically everywhere you look these days on author Internet groups there’s a discussion raging over “setting the right price for your e-book.”  And of course there are tales of phenomenal success achieved by some who offered their books for free, only to reap small fortunes once they were restored to “full price” from the rush of folks who missed out on the opportunity to get in on the freebie deal but still decided to buy the books.

To normal folks (non-writers) that marketing practice may seem counterintuitive, but if it works, who are we to question?  Besides, it certainly gives the author the opportunity of reaching more readers, and hopefully selling other books to those who liked what they saw of the author’s work. 

I know that whenever I go to NYC’s legendary Strand Bookstore I always scour the dollar table for a “deal.”   It’s just our nature I suspect.  And when my publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, last weekend reduced to $0.99 the e-book price for the first book in some of its authors’ series (including my Murder in Mykonos, which is also available for $0.99 on Amazon—how could I not sneak that in here), I actually took the opportunity to buy the works of some colleagues I had not read.

So, I guess that’s the answer, the proof of the pudding is in the reading.

All I know for sure is what I said at the top of this piece: take advantage of this offer on Tim’s book, The Bone Polisher.  Besides, if you don’t like it I personally promise to refund your purchase price.

And just so you don’t think this is all about hawking books, here is a public service announcement: Daylight Savings Time starts tomorrow in the United States at 2AM, so set your clocks ahead one hour  (Spring forward, Fall back). 

  

Jeff—Saturday