“Only God will remove me!”

My earlier hopeful post about developments in Zimbabwe was obviously off target. Sunday’s Times carried a heartbreaking story about the horrific violence being used against opponents of President Mugabe as a runoff election approaches.

Today’s paper reports that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has decided that the level of violence is too high to justify taking part in the election. Meanwhile Mugabe declares, “Only God will remove me!” and South Africa has declined to put any serious pressure on Mugabe’s government.

You’re missing

Please excuse the silence. I’m in a state of shock right now. My youngest brother John passed away earlier this month, less than three weeks after our father’s death from cancer. He died of a heart attack in his sleep.

John had high blood pressure and a heart condition called bundle branch block, though I had never thought that this was life-threatening. He was under severe stress in recent months, both because our father was ill and because he had lost his job at the social services agency where he worked for almost twenty years. He told me he sometimes went three days in a row without sleeping. In his last email to me, he said that he was ready to concentrate on finding a new job but that it was scary because he’d never really had to do it before.

My partner Jenn has created a website for John, which includes a slide show set to the song “You’re Missing” by Bruce Springsteen (one of my brother’s favorite musicians). Well over 75 people came to a memorial gathering for John on June 14, though it was put together at short notice. John had many friends, and all of us will miss him.

Guinea pigs for dinner

In the Times recently, a reporter described dining on roast guinea pig at an Ecuadorean restaurant in Queens. Guinea pigs are eaten, and apparently enjoyed, in the countries of the Andes, and a painting in the cathedral in Cuzco, Peru, pictures Jesus dining on guinea pig with his disciples.

The reporter’s description was less than enthusiastic:

There was very little meat, and it tasted somewhat similar to the dark meat of chicken, gamey like duck or rabbit. The meat was fatty and stringy at times. I had to pick it off the little ribs, and the skin was crunchy, with parts of it thicker with a chewy, almost rubbery, texture.

I was reminded of The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian, the 16th volume in the Aubrey-Maturin series, in which Dr. Maturin sets out on a perilous mission through the Peruvian Andes. The account of guinea pig is even less appealing there:

Three times that day, and at ever-increasing heights, they had left their mules in the hope of a partridge or a guanaco, and three times they had caught up with the llamas not indeed empty-handed, since Stephen carried a beetle or a low-growing plant for the pack of the animal that carried their collections, but without any sort of game, which meant that their supper would be fried guinea-pig and dried potatoes once more; and each time Eduardo had said that this was a strange, unaccountable year, with weather that made no sense and with animals abandoning customs and territories that had remained unchanged since before the days of Pachacutic Inca.

A few pages later, Maturin suggests shooting a vicuña for food, observing to his companion, “You yourself said that you were tired of fried guinea-pig and ham.” Eduardo quietly confirms this in a little while, when Maturin says he would like to dissect an unusual bird they have just bagged.

‘That would mean fried guinea-pig again,’ observed Eduardo.

The two eventually arrive at a Catholic mission, but the priests are nonplussed at having little to offer their guests. “Well,” says one at last, “there may be a few guinea-pigs left in the scriptorium.”

One would think that O’Brian has exhausted the subject, yet his final unfinished novel (published under the title 21) features “a formal dinner given by an Argentine grandee, which includes lobster in a bitter chocolate sauce and 70 freshly harvested guinea pigs.”

The World of Donald Evans

My copy of The World of Donald Evans is one of my most cherished books. In addition to being a beautifully produced record of a short but luminous art career, it was also surprisingly hard to get. Used copies were not especially expensive when I looked for them online, but the first two or three times I ordered one, I was told the book wasn’t available after all. Maybe the book dealers decided they couldn’t part with them.

Donald Evans was an American artist who lived in the Netherlands and died in a fire when he was in his early thirties. His specialty was the creation of postage stamps from imaginary countries, which he rendered in watercolors and often marked with custom-designed cancellations. Bruce Chatwin wrote a tribute to Evans that appears in the collection What Am I Doing Here:

His colour sense was as faultless as his draughtsmanship. A set of his stamps sits on a page like butterflies in a case. And, needless to say, he loved butterflies and came up with a country for them — Rups, which is the Dutch for ‘caterpillar’. He himself said he had no originality, and that he preferred to work from photographs or given images: yet one flat panorama of Achterdijk has the ‘breathed-on’ quality of a sepia-wash landscape by Rembrandt. His art was so disciplined that it was patient of receiving anything that happened to attract him — zeppelins, barnyard fowls, penguins, pasta, a passion for mushroom hunting, Sung ceramics, shells, dominoes; drinks at the Bar Centrum; windmills that were ‘abstract’ portraits of friends; the vegetable market at Cadaques, or a recipe for pesto from Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Cooking: his way of recording the pleasures of food and drink reminds me, somehow, of Hemingway.

Grammatical humor

One of the pleasures of rereading Patrick O’Brian is that the Aubrey-Maturin novels become funnier as you become attuned to O’Brian’s understated sense of humor. Much of the humor is in the dialogue (pay particular attention to the pauses), but by no means all. This passage (p. 195 of Master and Commander) made me wonder if O’Brian was lectured as a child about ending a sentence with a preposition. Captain Aubrey is speaking to some midshipmen who have been doing poorly on their navigation homework:

‘You can write decently, I suppose? Otherwise you must go to school to the clerk.’ They hoped so, sir, they were sure; they should do their best. But he did not seem convinced and desired them to sit down on that locker, take those pens and these sheets of paper, to pass him yonder book, which would answer admirably for them to be read to out of from.