ZARAFA

THE CHRISTMAS KID

2011-08-03T08:02:00.000-07:00

http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage.aspx?isbn=9780312266639#Excerpt

ZARAFA III

2010-11-20T10:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbihjle5oY0

2009-01-24T12:27:00.000-08:00

Check out the Okavango Delta's new ZARAFA CAMP, named after my book and about which I hope soon to report firsthand:
selindareserve.com/zarafa.html

2006-03-31T12:39:00.000-08:00

Librarian extraordinaire Nancy Pearl included my book ZARAFA in a discussion on NPR's "Morning Edition" Friday 31 March 2006; here's the text-to-audio Weblink:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5297601

And here's the Weblink to audio of my own Z-interview on NPR's "All Things Considered" with Daniel Swerdling:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1006555

"ZARAFA - A GIRAFFE'S TRUE STORY,
FROM DEEP IN AFRICA TO THE HEART OF PARIS"

Prologue

Through a hole in the wall
Of the Jardin des Plantes
We come to go round
The animals for the last time...
-- James Dickey, "Goodbye to Serpents"

LIVES AGO, those lines were the first place I ever saw the words Jardin des Plantes. "Goodbye to Serpents" is a poem about an American father and son whose final visit to the old Paris zoo, located in the park that is le Jardin des Plantes, becomes their farewell to Europe.

I loved the poem for its snakes in my imagined paradise of Paris, and for the lucky little son in it, and for its searching irony that was quintessential Jim Dickey: the irony that the poet's disconnection with what he is seeing dogs him and drives him to find his own relationship with it. "The hardest thing in the world," Jim was always saying, "is to make a mountain out of a molehill."

Ever since first reading "Goodbye to Serpents," I have sought out any mention of le Jardin des Plantes. As a university student working first in the college library, then in a bookstore, I developed a ritual of checking for le Jardin, along with my handful of other obsessions, in every book that had an index. Long before I ever saw it, I knew that the oldest tree in Paris has grown in le Jardin since it was founded in 1635; and that la Rotonde is the menagerie's oldest and most beautiful building, designed to replicate the cross of the Napoleonic Legion of Honor; and that the menagerie, which is the world's oldest municipal zoo, was started with animals rescued from the mobs of the French Revolution.

It took me years to get to Paris. My first morning finally there in 1977, I took my wife to see le Jardin des Plantes and say hello to the serpents. It was perfect spring, sunny and warm. The intricate gardens were full of flowers. The endless allées of plane trees and horse chestnuts were magnificent with their new leaves. But the old art nouveau serpentarium was shabby and sad. The snakes were geriatric. My pilgrimage was a disappointment. Until a zookeeper ran through, yelling, "On ferme! On ferme! Closing!" and herded the few of us outside and around to a big window looking into the enclosure of the python.

The python was as thick around as my thigh and had climbed vertically most of its fifteen feet up an inside edge of the window. Its head was up out of sight, and we did not realize at first that it was a snake because its body was so big and gleaming dark like a wet tree. A three-or four-inch slit in the snake, perfectly positioned for spectating, widened, and out of it we watched eggs slowly appear, one by one, as asymmetrical and irregular as stones, no two alike.

At the inside door of the python's enclosure, two khaki-uniformed zookeepers and a blond woman in a white laboratory smock over a yellow dress were beside themselves with excitement. I have no idea how much time went by; but when the eggs stopped coming, we had counted seventeen.

Then, after an animated consultation, the two very nervous keepers climbed through the door into the enclosure, one with a gunnysack that he held up at full arm's length around the python's head, struggling to hold it as the gigantic snake began to writhe, while the other man handed the eggs out to the blond woman, who gathered them in her smock like a farmer's wife in her apron. When she had them all in her standing lap, the egg-gathering keeper exited and got ready to close the glass door of the enclosure as fast as he could after the man with the gunnysack let it drop and leaped away from the snake.

The two men and the woman disappeared until they emerged hurrying in a tight group, their six hands all carrying her smock full of eggs, out of the serpentarium and across the gravel and into another building.

The snake slithered down onto the floor, huge-headed and even more awesome in its horizontal length as it searched around and around the cage.

~

AFTER I WAS thus granted experiential ownership of le Jardin des Plantes, my obsession with it became proprietary. And one day, after twenty-five years of checking indexes, I found an astonishing paragraph in the New Yorker about a giraffe that had arrived at le Jardin in 1827 -- astonishing because this first giraffe ever seen in France, after sailing from Egypt, had walked all the way from Marseille to Paris.

It was a simple story, or so I thought at first, based upon the innocently exotic and fairy-tale image of a giraffe -- a royal gift from Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, to King Charles X of France -- strolling through the glorious French countryside in spring.

Researching the giraffe over the next decade, I found her story told and retold -- by scientists, journalists, historians, novelists and authors of childrens' books, cartoonists and painters -- accruing an amazement of details that were hopelessly unreliable. Intending to treat it as fiction, though, I felt no need to seek the truth. The giraffe's chroniclers, myself included, had fallen in love with her story, myths and all; and as by a pharaoh's curse on tomb robbers, we were spellbound to convey wonder instead of facts.

Giraffe, girafe, giraffa (English, French, Italian) -- all derive from the Arabic zerafa, a phonetic variant of zarafa, which means "charming" or "lovely one." I named the giraffe Zarafa and imagined her wading through a field of sunflowers somewhere in France. But as I learned more about the extraordinary achievement of her arrival in Paris, the scattered facts became too impressive to fictionalize. And as the humans involved with the giraffe's journey emerged in my research as real-life figures, the fairy tale kept backing up into ever more fascinating history.

France's first giraffe was the brainchild in 1824 of Bernardino Drovetti, French consul general in Egypt and indispensable private adviser to Muhammad Ali. The viceroy was about to become unpopular in Europe for his war against the Greeks, and Drovetti's suggested gift of a giraffe was intended to befriend Charles X, who had become the king of France that year.

Drovetti and the viceroy were both expatriate adventurers who had come to Egypt at the turn of the nineteenth century: Drovetti was a young Italian soldier turned French bureaucrat; Muhammad Ali was an Albanian mercenary in the Ottoman Turkish army. Both men were, like the giraffe, charming and deadly in their contradictions.

Muhammad Ali sent his son and thousands of other Arabs to be educated in Europe, while financing his impressive modernization of Egypt with the African slave trade and confiscatory taxation of his subjects. Drovetti, officially a diplomat, made a fortune trafficking in exotic animals, Egyptian antiquities, mummies by the pound, and whatever else his wealthy European clients desired.

Drovetti was the classic entrepreneurial middleman, an expert at turning royal gratitude to his own financial advantage. His long relationship with the viceroy made him the most powerful European in Egypt. As the first wholesale tomb robber of modern Egyptology, Drovetti was ingratiating to his patrons and dangerous to his competitors. His career in Egypt spanned almost thirty years, and his archaeological removals became the great museum collections now in Turin and Paris and Berlin.

Zarafa's walk from Marseille to Paris turned out to be but the finale to a journey she had begun 4,000 miles and two years before in central Africa. Captured as a calf in the Ethiopian highlands by Arab hunters, she had been packed on a camel to Sennar and shipped down the Blue Nile to be raised in Khartoum. From Khartoum she had traveled the harrowing slave trail down the entire length of the Nile, nearly 2,000 miles to Cairo and Alexandria -- none of the various versions agreed as to how -- before sailing across the Mediterranean.

Zarafa's survival was ensured by fear of the viceroy's wrath and by Drovetti's experience in shipping African animals to Europe. In Alexandria, Drovetti put his Arab groom, Hassan, in charge of her journey to Paris and sent along his Sudanese servant, Atir, to assist. They were three weeks on the Mediterranean, another week waiting off Marseille -- thirty-two days in all -- during which the giraffe rode standing among the other animals in the hold with her long neck and head protruding through a hole cut in the deck.

While bureaucrats in Marseille and Paris squabbled over who was responsible for the giraffe's expenses, the prefect of Marseille doted on her, constructing a stable especially for her on the grounds of his mansion and bringing her there through the city late at night to avoid the crowds. Hassan and Atir wintered in the stable with her, training her to follow milk cows on fair-weather constitutionals. These lengthening walks out into the countryside around Marseille eventually convinced the prefect and Hassan that the giraffe could walk to Paris in short daily treks.

The procession set out on May 20, 1827, led by no less than étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, one of the foremost scientists of his time. In 1793, when the French Revolution had created the National Museum of Natural History, Saint-Hilaire, at twenty-one, had been the youngest of its twelve founding professors. It was Saint-Hilaire who had started the Paris zoo with animals saved from the mobs that had attacked the royal menagerie at Versailles. Before he was thirty, he had been among the heroic corps des savants that accompanied Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in 1798 and was stranded there with the army for three years.

Now fifty-five and suffering from gout and rheumatism, Saint-Hilaire was a living legend, a grand and improbable eminence to make this journey with the giraffe on foot. In Marseille he hired an Arab urchin named Youssef, the bilingual son of Egyptian refugees, to serve as his aide and translator with Hassan and Atir.

Marseille to Paris in May and June of 1827 was a 550-mile parade, during which the giraffe became such a never-seen-before attraction that crowds rioted around her. People came out of their fields and vineyards and distant villages to marvel at this living mythological combination of creatures -- a gentle and mysterious sort of horned camel whose hump had been straightened by stretching its neck, with legs as tall as a man and the cloven hoofs of a cow, and markings like a leopard or a maze of lightning, and that startling blue-black snake of a twenty-inch tongue. During the journey, Saint-Hilaire's health deteriorated, and officials in Paris ignored his concern about the increasing crowds. By the time the convoy reached Lyon, the giraffe was so famous that 30,000 people turned out to see her. In Paris she was paraded through the city and presented to the king.

This conclusion to Zarafa's travels was only the beginning of the sensation she became in Paris, where glamorous women imitated her with their hair styled high, à la Girafe, and in the streets and salons, men wore fashionably giraffique hats and ties. Now remembered as a beautiful but vague legend, France's first living giraffe was a national icon, the envy of Europe, the subject of songs and poems, vaudeville skits and political allegories, the namesake of public squares and streets and inns and even a form of influenza.

Atir remained in Paris with Zarafa, becoming renowned as the Arab who lived with the giraffe in her enclosure at le Jardin des Plantes. Two ladders took him up to a mezzanine, where he slept within scratching reach of her head. Grooming her was his daily public performance. By night, he was also famous as a neighborhood ladies' man.

~

IN THE FALL OF 1996, I set out to retrace Zarafa's journey. On Thanksgiving Day, I was in Sennar on the Blue Nile. Below the town the river bends, widening to the north, but there is nothing left of the landing where Zarafa and so many hundreds of thousands of human captives embarked for Khartoum. The French explorer Frédéric Cailliaud saw giraffes at Sennar in 1821. Arab slavers and hunters soon depopulated them, so that only three years later, Zarafa was captured 200 miles away. As I followed the Blue Nile from Sennar to Khartoum and on down the Nile into Egypt, the seasonal logic of the river made it clear to me that Zarafa would have sailed easily all the way to Alexandria.

In Africa there are no written records of Zarafa until Cairo. These were forgotten until 1938, when the archives of Muhammad Ali were discovered in the snake-infested cellars beneath his tomb at the Citadel. Every official word he had spoken during his reign of more than forty years had been transcribed into Arabic and saved. King Farouk, Egypt's last ruling descendant of Muhammad Ali, ordered an inventory that year of these documents, among which were found the viceroy's orders regarding "the giraffe from Sennar." During the inventory, these orders were not translated from Arabic; they were only described to a European journalist, who, with great love and inaccuracy, ultimately reminded France of the story of its first giraffe.

From Sennar to Khartoum and down the Nile to Cairo and Alexandria and across the Mediterranean, this journalist's invaluable inaccuracies led me at last to treasure buried in the archives of Marseille -- a dusty, ribbon-tied cache of 170-year-old official and unofficial letters, ministerial reports and memos, and detailed day-to-day invoices of the giraffe's winter in Marseille and subsequent spring journey to Paris.

This miraculous find revealed firsthand accounts of that part of her story, while old newspapers in Lyon provided further eyewitness reports of the tumult that greeted "the beautiful Egyptian" and her exotic Arab handlers. The same newspapers were shrill with anti-Islamic news of Muhammad Ali's war on the Greeks. Zarafa came to life with the times she lived in, and her story elaborated into a kaleidoscope of historical connections.

The giraffe was a royal gift intended to link Egypt and France. She was an emissary from another world whose journey, like the Nile itself, threaded distant and unimaginably disparate places. But the cast of characters along her way, and the history they gather and bring into focus around her, are as astonishing as her walk to Paris. Drovetti is Egyptology, which began with Napoleon's invasion in 1798; that, in turn, set the stage for Muhammad Ali, the renaissance barbarian whose enamored admiration for the French not only modernized Egypt but unlocked its ancient past. From beginning to end, and on every level, Zarafa's story is one of incongruous encounters -- as complicated as the African slave trade meeting the European Enlightenment, and as deceptively simple as the White Nile and the Blue Nile contending into the Nile.

Excerpted from Zarafa: A Giraffe's True Story Copyright © 1998 by Michael Allin.

2005-12-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

Honorary Parisian

It was October and I had crossed Dover-Boulogne on the Channel ferry, standing on deck in the wind and wet of a passage so rough the captain said he should not have gone out, but the blue sky and bright sun had fooled him. In Paris I came down with a drowning cold and took to bed where the feverish idea struck that a gringo cheeseburger and french fries would cure me, so I pulled on my still damp and saltstained raincoat and dragged my rumpled self across the river to the Marais. I was moving slow, looking and feeling very much the worse for wear with my red running nose when a lady drunk whose nose and raincoat were equal to mine stepped up to me and asked, "Vous êtes du quartier?"

2005-12-02T05:13:00.000-08:00

MOVIE LOVE, a short film:
(for Nicolas Roeg)

A man and a woman exit the dark of a movie theatre in each other's arms, enjoying themselves under the spell of the movie they have just seen. Stopping to read and admire the poster for their movie, they strike the pose of the lovers on the poster before they stroll out into the night with all its beautiful and glittering cinematic promise. On the sidewalk in front of the theatre the man slips and finds that he has stepped in dogshit. The romantic post-movie moment - like the twilight consciousness between sleeping and waking - is shattered as the man shouts at a person walking a dog away from the mess. The owner of the dog turns and reveals that he is blind.

2005-11-28T08:51:00.000-08:00

Dragon Meets Giraffe:

My often surreal Sudanese encounters began at a delicious Lebanese lunch in New York with a diplomat who was helping me obtain my visa. She had grown up in Khartoum, the daughter of a medical doctor who took her with him on his rounds out in the countryside, where she remembered watching jockeys racing ostriches. She introduced me to the tobe, the 13 feet of black (for sadness and traveling) or white (for work) or colorful fabric every Sudanese woman wraps around her hair and body. (In Sudan, among thousands of colorful tobes, I never saw two alike, as though every woman was a garden or a national treasure wrapped in her own flag.) My diplomatic friend also told me about the civil war that had raged since Sudan's independence in the 1950s, and she acknowledged "rumors" of slavery still in the south. I had already received a lurid no-go advisory from the US State Department. Sudan seemed an alien world, problematic and totally unfamiliar. But when the diplomat asked about my background and I told her I had written Enter The Dragon, she was stunned silent. Then she gathered her wits and told me, "You know, when I was a girl in Khartoum and my father bought us a VCR, our tape of Enter the Dragon was the first thing stolen from our house."

2005-11-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

A memory evoked by the statue of Bruce Lee unveiled yesterday in Bosnia:

I was in Khartoum, perhaps the last American to get a visa into Sudan, retracing the journey of Zarafa. I kept off the streets at night and made friends who looked out for me by day: a Muslim taxi driver, Mohammad, who adopted me as his daily daylong fare; and William, very tall with facial scars that identified him as a Nuer tribesman, who worked at my hotel. I had arranged for a government functionary to accompany me to Sennar on the Blue Nile, and William surprised me by knowing about the trip before I could tell him.

"Be careful of your friends with the turbans," William told me. "If, at the last minute, they can not go with you, you do not go."

"Thanks, William," I said, not as worried as he wanted me to be. "What could happen?"

"They will put you in the cannibal pot."

"I'm too skinny to eat."

"They will make soup."

The night before I left for Sennar, Thanksgiving eve, I was returning later than usual to my hotel and Mohammad asked if we could stop at a mosque for his evening prayer. The mosque had glass walls and I got out and stood on the sidewalk watching the crowd of men praying in the light inside, kneeling and bowing in faithful unison. The street was dark with night in the trees but there was still light in the sky. A man walked by and our eyes met and, shocked at the sight of me, he stopped and shouted at me in Arabic. His diatribe attracted a few other men who joined him in heckling me. They were between me and the car and I was stuck, instinctively holding up my hands to placate them, when Mohammad appeared and stepped in front of me. The men yelled at Mohammad and he yelled back, and suddenly the hecklers went silent and looked around amazed at each other. Then they all stepped forward and each man shook my hand.

I was as amazed as they were. "Mohammad, what did you say to them?"

"I told them you wrote Enter The Dragon."

To see and read more about Bosnia's Bruce Lee: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/entertainment/4474316.stm

2005-11-20T05:37:00.000-08:00

My friend, Aleco Noghes:

The kindest, most elegant man I have ever known was Aleco Noghes, monégasque tennis champion and bon vivant in exile. He died in his 80s, a decade after having happily returned to live along the Corniche overlooking Cap Ferrat, repatriated with the menagerie of stray dogs and cats he had collected over his years in California. In California he'd had a large garden that kept him busy with the lawn and roses and two or three orange trees - "mon allée" - shading the little path from his patio to his pool alongside his tennis court.

"Do you miss your garden in LA?" I asked him soon after he moved back to Eze.

"No, it is a paradise here. The ten acres of hillside around the house are too steep for gardening and the dogshit rolls downhill!"

When I first met Aleco he was in his mid-50s and looked like Hemingway at the same age, with an affable French-accented charm that disappeared when he went to work on the tennis court. On one of his birthdays, after we drank my gift of Dom Perignon, I challenged him to a tennis match in which, to handicap him and lower the hopeless odds against me, he would play against my racket with the empty champagne bottle. He laughed, but his eyes narrowed at the challenge and suddenly he was someone else as we took to the court and he gave me set point, 40-love, 5 games to 0, his serve. All I needed was to take that first point or somehow just the first game for the match, which, of course, I did not. During the rest of the set I may have won a trimphant point or two, but he demolished me 6-0 with his repertoire of aces and topspin and trick bounces, power and junk.

Of the top players then in tennis, Aleco particularly admired Ilie Nastase. "Nastase is something somewhere else, "Aleco said, "playing a game all his own, an artist. But his genius is temperamental and this keeps him from being a champion."

"What makes him a genius?"

"I watch him receive the ball and I see three possible returns. He sees five."

My favorite memory of Aleco is one day on the court when he wore an old, beautifully faded milky red sweater. I asked him how long he'd had the sweater; he told me it was older than I was and, seeing how impressed I was, he summoned me to the net for one of our typical philosophical discussions, during which he always reached over the net to hold my forearm while he made his wonderfully lengthy point.

"Do you remember the blazer I wore to our soirée on your birthday?" Aleco asked me.

"Yes; double-breasted; beautiful. In your white trousers, you looked like a tennis yachtsman."

"Exactly me, in a former life. My tailor made that blazer for me before the World War II."

"Fantastic."

"Michael, listen to me. You, I, we both love our dogs who will not live as long as we love them. Our children grow up into their own lives and leave us. Never mind what women do to us all our lives. Michael," Aleco said squeezing my arm, "everything we love will break our heart. Take care of your clothes. They
are your only friends!"

2005-11-14T15:16:00.000-08:00

Remembering Maxine Dickey:

I was visiting Jim and Maxine Dickey in South Carolina, soon after Robert Penn Warren and his wife had been there. Maxine and I were partners in crime and literary gossip and I always stayed up late with her, post-soirées, while she washed her beautiful beloved dishes brought back from Italy and never let me help. This particular time we started talking about Red Warren and his recent visit, during which he had read and held forth at the University of South Carolina where Jim was genius-in-residence. Maxine got strange, asking me again and again if I really liked Warren and his work; and I kept telling her yes, yes, especially the poems for which I was not alone in thinking he deserved the Nobel Prize.

"But why do you keep asking me if I like him?"

"It's important. You really like him?"

"Yeah, I keep telling you. One of my ambitions as a writer is to meet him."

"Oh, I'm so glad."

"Why?"

"Because Michael, darlin', I didn't change the sheets."

2005-11-13T14:43:00.000-08:00

From my novel THE CHRISTMAS KID, my favorite lie:

I should not have gone on and on...about working on the shrimp boat out of Key West and tending bar on Caroline Street and living with the girl who sang in the bar and who owned a 50-year-old blue macaw named Luigi. Every night was a party in the bar and we always slept past noon. Luigi woke us every morning with operatic arias, which he sang in the magnificent tenor voice of my girl's beloved deceased singing instructor. Key West is the southernmost piece of America, 375 miles farther south than Cairo, Egypt, and 90 miles north of Cuba. Summers get so hot there that the shrimpers sweat off their tattoos. The best time was the month around the autumnal equinox, after the worst heat and before the worst tourists - hurricane season. Key West is situated right in the middle of Hurrican Alley, vulnerable to Gulf, Atlantic, and Caribbean storms. After a hurricane Key West was a paradise of rainbows. There were rainbows everywhere, wherever you looked, of all sizes: rainbows in raindrops caught in spiderwebs; rainbows laced amid steaming frangipani, festooning the dripping branches of the ceiba tree (source of kapok), the strangler figs, the screw pines, the wishbone cactus; neighborhood rainbows reaching from block to block of the little town; transoceanic rainbows arcing over the entire island with one end out in the Atlantic and the other end out in the Gulf of Mexico. Puddles reflected rainbows in scattered pieces all over the streets. The sunlight, that blazing stormlight after a hurricane, was so amazingly, miraculously beautiful, with the air so clear and clean, that every time you saw it was like seeing things and pure colors again for the first time. My girl rode her bicycle up Duval Street under the rainbows, splashing through the rainbows with Luigi on her handlebars. Luigi was a bicycle expert, spreading his brilliant turquoise and yellow-flashing wings wide, wider than the handlebars for balance, yellow-breasting proudly into the wind in front of my girl and belting out Pagliaci. When hurricane season ended the tourists came and carried Luigi's fame back with them. Only Hemingway was a more renowned denizen of Key West. Hemingway had known and loved Luigi in the old days and had taught him a bawdy little Spanish ditty that Luigi still screached full blast exactly as he had learned it in Hemingway's voice. But only at dawn; and as a result the oldtime conchs, the born-and-bred native Key Westers, would swear they had heard Papa's ghost singing the sun up again. One night while my girl and I were away at work in the bar, robbers broke into our beach shack and kidnapped Luigi. When we came home feathers still floated in the air. Luigi had put up a fight. For heartbroken days my girl and I collected every feather and added them to the others we had always so carefully saved and never sold, not one, no matter how much the tourists offered. We searched the island, listening desperately for the slightest wisp of familiar melody, grieving, tormented by sudden false hopes from radios and the whole panoply of contemporary electronic musical reproduction. We couldn't eat. We couldn't sleep. One morning at dawn, lying weeping together in our hammock, we thought we heard Hemingway. Then we heard Pagliaci and Luigi flew in through the leeward window clutching in one talon what we discovered was a human ear. It was a left ear, savagely amputated with streamers of ripped flesh caked with the same blood that stained Luigi's powerful black beak and the black and yellow feathers of his throat. Ecstatic as he was to see us, Luigi refused to relinquish his gory trophy, viciously defending it from our attempts to take it away from him while he stood on it and ate it in shreds. We suspected transients, but kept an eye out from then on for a local van Gogh. After that came the star-crossed part of the story. My girl had a hit record and chose her career over me and Luigi. She became a household name. Luigi died of missing her. I buried him at sea and cast our fortune of his collected feathers to the Gulf Stream.

2005-11-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

LIMA IN WINTER - La Venganza de los Incas:

Coastal Peru is a 1,000-mile-long desert, a beach in most places 50-100 miles wide sloping up into the foothills of the Andes. In winter the cold Humboldt Current comes up the coast from the south. Lima is uniquely cursed by high ground close in the east where there is constant tropical sun, the rising heat of which sucks cold air in and up off the Pacific. Too cold to contain enough moisture for rain, this air merely condenses into a chill gray mist, the garua, a drizzle that does not fall and hangs over the city as constant humid overcast. Winter in Lima can last from March to January. Weeks, months, lives pass without sun, and the city becomes a purgatory without shadows or stars. Mixed with the pollution of Lima's 8,000,000 congested people and traffic, the garua eats metal and fills lungs with more or less chronic bronchitis. Add the poverty that sluices people down out of the mountains into the whirling drain of the capital and Lima in winter is grim - a vision of what Los Angeles will be when we use up the planet. The living is cheap, though, and the Humboldt Current provides nutrients for the delicious variety of fish here. Summer comes in December when the sun is in the southern hemisphere and warmer currents come down the coast from the equator, and the equalizing temperatures of sea and land clear the garua. In years of El Niño the warmer equatorial currents last all year, killing fish but giving Lima a rare year-long summer.

2005-11-04T06:59:00.000-08:00

My dear friend Carol Dickey, who gifts me with her ferocious and most original intelligence, teaches English in Paris; here she is on F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Fitzgerald is such a beautiful writer I can't bear sometimes to read him. When my students ask me what to read to learn about English, I often suggest FSF and my eyes always fill with tears, which makes them all very sad for me and of course totally afraid to read Fitzgerald.

2005-11-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

RE needing to be on the ground:

My favorite example of why you have to go and see things for yourself happened in Spain. We were on our way south to Ronda, returning after long years of missing it, and drove down into the little valley of a pueblo blanco that was strangely Mediterranean pink in the glaring summer sun, more like the south of France than Spain. I thought that the whole town had been painted in some kind of Analusian folly...until a cloud passed in front of the sun and the entire village changed from pink to white...revealing that the pink was sunlight reflecting off the red tiles of roof terraces. We stopped on a mountainside and couldn't stop watching the town across the valley change colors with the passing clouds, unimaginably beautiful, again and again seeing new details that kept us there for a long time.

2005-11-04T04:04:00.000-08:00

Le Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de La Rochelle, where the giraffe who walked to Paris is exhibited, has re-opened after renovation. Remembering the little plaque that formerly identified her only as "la girafe de Sennar," I am honored to report from the museum's Website:

"La visite guidée:

L'histoire de la belle girafe Zarafa est passionante: quel voyage au départ d'Egypte! Quelle vie intrépide aux cotés du roi Charles X!...C'est à voir et à entendre...tous les mardis et les jeudis...

Zarafa est le nom de la girafe naturalisée du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de La Rochelle. Cette girafe est célèbre à plus d'un égard. C'est un cadeau diplomatique du vice-roi d'Egypte Méhémet Ali à Charles X et elle est la première girafe vivante à être arrivée sur le sol français. Après avoir traversé la méditerranée sur un bateau adapté à sa morphologie, Zarafa arrive à Marseille le 26 octobre 1826 où elle passe son premier hiver pour s'acclimater. Au printemps suivant, elle, et toute son escorte prennent la route pour Paris. Ce voyage durera six semaines. Arrivée à Paris, elle s'installe dans la ménagerie royale (actuel Jardin des plantes). Zarafa s'habitue très bien à cette nouvelle vie et s'éteindra dix-sept années plus tard (en 1845).

C'est une girafe de l'espèce massaï qui a été naturalisée sur une structure en bois. En 1931 le Muséum national d'histoire naturelle fit don de ce spécimen au Muséum d'histoire naturelle de La Rochelle."

2005-11-03T03:20:00.000-08:00

Grateful tribute to Matthew Bruccoli, my friend and literary slugger:

Every year, for at least a couple of decades, I reread The Great Gatsby. But I was never lucky enough to read your definitive edition until I found it in a library in Lima, Peru. It is incredibly more beautiful without all those commas. I know it almost by heart, but I had no sense of Fitzgerald's phenomenal melodic length and rhythm. Thank you, Matt.

Matthew Bruccoli's definitive edition of The Great Gatsby is published in paperback by Scribners, with cover art from the first edition of 1925. (Matt owns the original painting of the cover, which Hemingway describes in A Moveable Feast: "...a garish dust jacket...I took it off to read the book.") Find it at:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743273567/qid=1131017045/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3894812-4429434?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

2005-11-01T14:21:00.000-08:00

Adapting Enter the Dragon into a theatrical production, a glimpse into the process:

It's a wonderful opportunity to delve back into those characters, to deepen the story with the personal dynamics of the legend we now know as Bruce Lee - whose secret, greatest battle was with his own "inner spirit" - which makes him a metaphor for everybody and explains our vicarious wishful worship of any superlative human skill, the other side of which is the loneliness of the person who wields it and must lose it to defeat, age, etc. All these years later we have the whole mythology of Bruce Lee to draw on. Han could now be a more prescient villain, a God-like genius who personifies the inevitable tragic future of skill corrupted into power...which Bruce's character, Lee, escapes...at least for now, because the test of his discipline will be lifelong. We could dramatize this, for instance, with the dramatic device of Lee shadow-boxing - "One's shadow," as Han could say, "is the only worthy opponent." - which evolves in the story to culminate, when Lee is alone in the cell after the fight with the guards, into a private night-before-battle duet-fight with his shadow...and he loses! And after the mass melee finale and Han's defeat, at the very end of the show, Lee is alone on stage with his shadow looming over him, menacing and inescapable.

2005-11-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

WHY MADRID (written for my friends at the Travel Bookshop in London and first published in their Newsletter):

Americans always wonder why I choose to live in Madrid. Spaniards never ask, preferring conversation to direct questions. What there is to know about a person comes out in the course of an encounter, over a meal or a copa, or more gradually but just as inevitably in the brief daily chats where you get your newspaper, buy your bread, take your coffee. Manners are exquisite but deceptively informal, rooted deep in subliminal worry, with the easy open point being that no one remains anonymous. Men and women unfailingly trade two kisses, a peck on each cheek when meeting for the first time and by way of every greeting and farewell. Strangers are sure to say hello and goodbye to each other in elevators.

In the last century this national graciousness was honed by a brutal civil war and the subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco. After the mutual atrocities, and under the watchful eyes of Franco's military police and their neighborhood informants, it was better to get along and keep your private life and opinions quiet. Ironically, repression tempered Spain - con ganas, "with desire" - for an eventual democratic transition that was all the more historic for being unprecedented in its orderliness. The country had a long reflective time, 36 years of absolute autocracy, to prepare for the Generalissimo's demise in 1975; one proud legend has it that the night he finally died, statues of political figures all over Spain were quietly and symbolically replaced with telephone booths.

The telephone booths, as sudden links to the outside world, point up another irony of the Franco years: Fascist and nominally neutral during WWII, Spain was excluded from the post-war modernization of Europe and ostracised as a diplomatic pariah - enduring los años de hambre, "the years of hunger" - until it joined the United Nations in 1955. Also, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its spawn of sub-cultural activism came late to Spain, where public display of affection was a citable offense under Franco. Spaniards have caught up fast, but those 30 years outside the international mainstream arguably kept Spain more historically authentic, more stubbornly idiomatic and less homogenized - less Americanized - than her European neighbors who were earlier to put out the tourist trough.

The past is everywhere in Spain, even in the capital, constantly contradicting the future. Everyone's favorite example is lunch: While America and the rest of Europe grab a bite, most of Madrid still closes up shop at 2 and goes home for a proper meal and a siesta in the heat of the day, in the cold shorter days of winter as well. Business resumes at 5, ends at 8; dinner is at 10 and 9 is early to find a restaurant open. Your waiter will probably work there his entire adult life, a professional and proud of it. He is also a source of information about everything from the secret lowdown behind the local news to Madrid's notorious vagaries of spring weather - "Don't take off your overcoat until the 40th of May."- and he has timed the ebb and spate of city traffic to a science. His best kept secret - which he can't help sharing, drawing a map - is that for all the cars and their infernal pollution, and even with all the construction suburbanizing the outskirts of Madrid, it is still possible for a person to arrive at Barajas International Airport and walk west and south into the city, almost 10 miles, almost all of it through open country where the only sounds are birdcalls and the faraway bells of sheep and goats.

This continuity of life can be intriguing to an American, and maddeningly inert when it's time to get something done in a hurry or deal with any bureaucracy. But in the offices and corridors of paperwork, you find yourself, for good or ill, seeing the same faces; they remember you; a greeting elaborates into an exchange, something shared, even if it leads only to further debate. Then one day a small administrative favor solves the insoluble problem, and afterwards your friend the waiter celebrates your victory with a drink on the house, a second one just as you are getting up to leave. You settle back into your seat, your battle with the bureaucratic windmill more or less amicably won and now the occasion of a kindness. This is Madrid, this gift of an unexpected moment when you take another, more relaxed and appreciative look around. No wonder a recent study in the British Journal of Psychiatry has shown that Spaniards are less subject to depression than other Europeans - only 2.6% of the Spanish population, compared to 17% of the British - and actuarial tables give Spaniards a longer average life than Americans.

Visit the Travel Bookshop: thetravelbookshop.com

2005-10-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

Sailing to Mars:

The voyage to Paracas was fantastic, fraught, exhausting; 19 hours onboard galloping and bucking just a little east of straight into the wind and waves. Never so clumsy in my life, hanging on with every muscle and operating on sheer excitement while the three other hands scampered the deck like lizards, sometimes like cats skewing for traction on a slippery floor. Didn't have charts for the usual route way out to sea and then southeast, so we paralleled the coast 10 miles out. At midnight we cleared the edge of the fogbank and Mars, historically close, was already high between the almost-full moon and the mast. I saw Mars again in Paracas, but at sea it was impressivly bigger and brighter red. At apogee Mars was directly over the mast, with the mast rocking and reeling and whirling circles around it, like being drunker than I've ever been. Just before dawn we passed the guano islands off Paracas and their sudden land-ho stink in the dark. We left Callao, Lima's port, at 12:30 Thursday afternoon and anchored off Paracas at 7:30 Friday morning.

The house in Paracas is at the less populated southern end of the bay. Turn left in front of the house and you can walk toward the Reserva into nothing but beach and birds and seashells, along the water's edge or trekking the dunes toward where flamingos stand in a long line just offshore. Farther on, the Reserva with its desert and wild beaches is like the moon with an ocean, like the beginning and the end of the world. Turning right from the house takes you along the bayfront houses to civilization at the nice old Hotel Paracas with its gardens of huge ancient bougainvillea and an outdoor bar for a pisco sour, the Peruvian national snort, while swifts and swallows whirl around dipping into the pool. With the long winter neblina, Lima never sees stars or sunrise and sunsets are rare, but in Paracas you can watch the sun up and down most every day. The dark nights in Paracas are fabulous with stars and the Milky Way.

2005-10-27T06:40:00.000-07:00

In France, tracking the giraffe:

The car took me back in time. I got out and walked remote gravel roads, crunching along in the country quiet, pondering, trying to get a sense of that long-ago trek [in the spring of 1827] - back when France had 30,000 miles of these lanes of rocky dust, and they were the best roads in Europe; when the first train in France was still a decade away, and ordeals of distance had not yet accelerated into passing scenery; when steam had not yet democratized speed, and velocity had not yet blurred the landscape into Impressionism; when even pollution was still distinct and local, limited to what you could step in or smell - until my 19th-century spell would be broken by some anomaly, such as a family of ostriches staring at me over a fence, or the woman on a bicycle wearing only a straw hat and a bikini.

I carried a sack for collecting wildflowers, to be identified with the help of locals at the next café or outdoor market or little out-of-the-way museum. Finding someone sympathetic I would open my sack and, flower by flower, my questions usually attracted bystanders and developed into a botanical seminar. Afterwards my specimens became souvenirs of each encounter and aids to memory, impossible to throw away. My collection grew daily, strewn wilted and drying and blowing around inside the car, eliciting the amused interest of more than one gas station attendant.

The 18-century Enlightenment lives on in the French love of collection and display, turning the variety of any and everything into a cabinet de curiosités. A single item may well be trash or meaningless junk; but with plurality, even a car full of dead flowers attracts attention. More than one of something, no matter how useless or eccentric, accrues possible value, if only conversational, perhaps worthy of the ubiquitous weekend flea market.

In the daily village food markets, each stall presents its plentiful variation on a theme of apples or grapes or lettuce, squash, melons, peppers nuts, spices...whatever, in as many versions of it as can be had. Under the plane trees shading the market square in Aix-en-Provence, I counted more than two dozen kinds of olives, which, according to their purveyor, were not even half of all the distinct cultivars grown locally. Not to mention, he went on happily and well rehearsed, imports of others from among a total of at least 700 varieties, all produced by the single species of olive tree, Olea europea, whose indigenous range defines the Mediterranean region.

Then, progressing with the French gift for abstraction from the fact to the idea of olives, the man held one up between his thumb and forefinger and said, "This is the center of the Mediterranean universe, the key to our life-loving sensibility, the basis of our cultural heritage. For olive trees live and bear for centuries, valuable in their longevity, and requiring care that has created and stabilized, more or less, the world's happiest and most beautiful civilization. Olive trees survived the Flood and provided the wood of the Cross. Fire can't kill them. Their roots live on and the trees grow back, a glory to all five human senses. And the oil of their fruit," he popped the olive into his mouth, "is without equal as a laxative."

2005-10-08T05:20:00.000-07:00

Leaving Africa, from my book ZARAFA:

At Alexandria the sea is ever changing -- turquoise shallows and purple depths and vast outer blue that turns dark green when the wind roughens it too choppy to reflect the sky, silver gray under clouds and patched with golden columns of sunlight -- constant only in its immensity and, after the snaking current of the Nile, violently alive. Incoming swells explode into rainbows against the limestone fortress of the Mamelukes at the entrance to the harbor. The light, too, is mercurial, moody without the solid heat of the desert. Arabic sounds different here, and faces change as Egypt turns Greek.

After the overwhelming fact of the Nile -- where the heat and the landscape and fifty centuries of history confirm the irrelevance of any particular life -- Alexandria is a physical and emotional relief, a beautiful and confusing letdown. Body and eyes no longer suffer, and the mind no longer searches in awe for the shelter of a detail -- momentary shade, a drink, some small living touch like the green monkey climbing that other Zarafa's neck [painted in a tomb at Luxor] 3,500 years ago.

The magnificent ordeal of a journey down the Nile is over, but Alexandria is strangely melancholy. Time passes here on the human scale, fleeting and never exactly recurring. Depending on the light, the foursquare Mameluke fortress between mild harbor and wild ocean changes from tawny to glaring white, a sand castle only five centuries old. Instead of the desert mirage that taunts with its vision of Muslim paradise, rainbows disappear here with the breathing rhythm of the sea. The traveler from the south is reluctant to proceed, homesick for immortal things.

2005-10-07T19:42:00.000-07:00

On the Silk Road, across the Takla Makan:

The Takla Makan is the Godforsaken heart of an area called the Tarim Basin. Barricaded by colossal mountains to the south, west and north, and blocked to the east by the Gobi Desert, the Takla Makan seems cursed and banished from the living world, satanic in its exile, so hostile that cliches of fatality come to life here and hyperbole is impossible: an unearthly, inhuman, unimaginable monster of a place that will broil you by day and freeze your corpse at night. The new two-lane across the north-south center of it, 420 miles from Luntai to Mingfen, is literally a road through death. The desert’s name describes it best: Takla Makan is Turkic for “go in and you don’t come out.”

The mountains created the desert, enclosing it in a vast rain shadow, forcing any moisture from south, west, north to rise over their frozen summits and precipitate as snow feeding glaciers. Virtually no rain has fallen in the Takla Makan since the Ice Ages ended 40,000 years ago. Year by year, the glaciers grow down to where they melt into rivers sustaining oases around the desert – Indian monsoons and Russian winters from the past, arriving as ice water in hell.

The mountains are responsible for its climate, but the Takla Makan exists because the underlying rock of the Tarim Basin is harder than the mountains and has withstood the tectonic creep of the Indian subcontinent. 40 or 50 million years ago, India was an island moving north at 30 feet per century when it rammed into Asia. The collision slowed its speed by half, and since then, while the Himalayas have buckled and crumbled and inched up five and almost six miles high, the solid block of the Takla Makan has remained intact and sunk – as though doomed by its unyielding geological personality – shoving north to raise the Tien Shans and complete its arid seclusion.

At its lowest point near Turfan, the Takla Makan is more than 500 feet below sea level. Rivers of melted ice course down out of the mountains into this desolate sink and, if unmanaged, disappear. 2,000 years ago Gaochang was a major oasis stop here along the northern route of what the Chinese called ¨the camel road.¨ Today it is a ghost town of dirt walls, a roofless maze where every corner, every edge has been rounded by the eroding wind. Gaochang looks as though one good rain would liquify it back to mud. Nearby Turfan remains as a manmade oasis, sustained by an elaborate and centuries-old system of underground irrigation channels called a kerez. Using gravity, the channels are fed by miles of caves dug from the city into the mountains.

The sand of the Takla Makan is soft and powdery, pulverized by centuries of wind, so loose that the ground is never still. Becalmed, a shallow rushing current of sand blurs the dunes, disconcerting the eyes with an apparent inability to focus. At its most violent, the ground rises into a blinding cyclonic avalanche filled with flying rocks. The camels of the silk caravans, in addition to being able to smell underground water, could foretell worsening wind conditions and warned humans by refusing to proceed. Horses panicked and often carried their riders away, hopelessly lost, their corpses never found.

Whole caravans were lost even at the edge of the shifting, wind-driven dunes. The largest dunes advance looming as high as 300 feet, rippled behemoths that caused the Chinese to describe the desert as a devouring yellow dragon. Men heard voices shrieking in the wind, and the dust swirled with vicious invisible creatures and evil spirits. Some travelers went mad with fear. Making camp always before dark, the caravans marked their direction so as not to lose it in the morning’s new landscape.

By day the wind blows the desert into the sky, blasting the dunes into spindrift, filling the air with an infinite glaring haze in which any color but sand dies. The most striking phenomenon is the complete disappearance of atmospheric blue – the blue of sky and distance – as the lofting particles densify and suffuse to shift the diffraction of sunlight. Visibility can be anywhere from zero to unlimited, but always indistinct, filtered through the monochrome glare, without horizon. Even today, encapsulated at highway speed, the monotony of earth and sky induces a near motionless sense of crawling along the bottom of an ocean of dust. The occasional tangle of deadwood becomes a sighting event, buried treetops of a long gone oasis. The flash of a hoopoe is momentous, surreal in its garish pink-orange-brown and dark stripes, more like a sudden tropical fish than a bird of the desert. Workgangs travel the new road, bundled up and masked like ragged bandits against the wind, covered with dust, constantly shoveling and sweeping the pavement clear of drifting sand. At night the wind drops and dust rains out of the sky, so thick that headlights are useless and it is impossible to drive.

At the desert’s edge the mountainous dunes flatten to endless gravel pan. Bactrian camels roam wild here, along the highways that follow the old caravan routes. These east-west roads go on forever, dead straight, vanishing into the shimmering haze ahead and behind, into a future identical to the past. Today’s traveler can count the infinity of telephone poles – 20 per kilometer = 33 per mile = 11 per li, the old Chinese unit of distance – while the numbed mind wanders and eyes search, craving color. Now and then a scraggly tamarisk offers its anemic pink clusters of tiny flowers. Up ahead the pavement melts and widens into a blinding lake of mercury; over it the heat dances into faint shapes, a mirage that may or may not become poplars marking the next oasis town. Among the poplars the road will enter its beautiful high tunnel of shade, identical to the last town and the next. The mind is already there, but the body must wait, uncertain. Ghostly, disorienting without the blue of closing distance turning them green, the tall trees enlarge without seeming to get any nearer. Often they disappear in the sudden whirling dark of sandstorms – the kara-burans, “black hurricanes” – which would have buried a caravan in minutes.

And the devouring yellow dragon has grown. Over the last 2,000 years warmer climates have shrunk the glaciers into higher, colder elevations in the surrounding mountains. Less ice melts; rivers have dried up or changed course, no longer flowing as far as they used to into the desert. Archeologists have discovered that the southern edge of the Takla Makan now stretches 30 miles beyond ruins of the ancient oasis stops along the caravan route.

2005-10-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

On the Silk Road, at the speed of muscle:

The caravan crossroads were places where worlds met, and where the past encountered the future. And because the surrounding landscapes remain so unalterably harsh, life today along the Silk Road retains its ancient feel, isolated and preserved by its forbidding rigors -- much as the dry heat of the Sahara has maintained the monuments of Pharaonic Egypt, or as the salt graves of the Takla Makan have mummified 4,000-year-old corpses.

In Luntai, at the northern end of the road across the Takla Makan, there is a new hotel for the tourists and oil men who now travel the desert. Dust, the color and consistency of light powdered chocolate, covers the cars and trucks and minivans in the parking lot in front of the hotel. The grounds of the hotel are taken up entirely by this parking lot, the forecourt of a modern caravansary, landscaped with the Chinese love of symmetrical, efficient, easily swept cement. Mulberry saplings will eventually grow to relieve the heat glaring off a far wall, a vague memorial to the silk trade and the middle route of the camel road that passed this way.

Inside the hotel smells of new wood, new carpeting, clean and calm with constant Western muzak. The staff of young Uighur girls, pretty and petite in their striped waistcoats and fitted skirts, muscle guests' luggage up and down the three flights of stairs. The hotel does not have an elevator. There is no hot water until after dark, and then there is no cold. The well-appointed bathrooms have a sign warning that the water is "non-potable," and a basket reminds that toilet paper must not be flushed.

In Luntai and all over western China, the bareheaded men are han -- Chinese who have been relocated by the government in Beijing to create a colonial and greatly resented presence among the native Islamic population. The other 90% of the men in Chinese Central Asia wear their identifying headgear -- Uighurs in their embroidered skullcaps; Kyrgyz in their fleece-side-in kalpaks, shaped like the mountains where they live; Tajiks in their tumaks, which replicate the royal crown of their ancient kingdom, now worn by each man "signifying the happy and continuing future of our long history."

This sensation of historical future, of premonitory déja vu -- of the past prevailing -- is strongest in Kashgar, China's version of a Wild West town. Kashgar has always been a terminus, the inbound beginning or the outbound end of travel across Asia. There is an airport now, but by land today's eastbound traveler still arrives recovering from the breathless altitude of the high mountains -- depressed by a lethargy that lifts with descent and surges into the manic elation of reoxygenated blood. The westbound traveler has dared the Takla Makan, glad to have escaped the bizarre claustrophobia of its nothingness, wondering at this return to all the colors and variety and sheer busyness of human life. Kashgar has always known the celebration of survival. And after attending the livestock market that has convened at Kashgar every Sunday for more than 2,000 years, today's visitor can check for e-mail at a cybercafe.

Outside on the terrace of the cafe, amid the dust and babel of other foreigners, the traveler can sit -- avid for every shade of blue -- watching cars and trucks and tour buses honk their way through throngs of pedestrian porters and massively laden two-wheel carts drawn by donkeys or horses or camels , wheelbarrows conveying the young and the old, and bicycles, bicycles everywhere conveying crops, goods, livestock, friends, lovers, whole families. Even in the cities, and with a rural population of 8,000,000,000, most of China still moves at the speed of muscle. The past is everywhere, plodding through the bigger, faster, louder, polluting efficiency of the present. There are well over a billion Chinese, more than 1/6 of the total world population; it is said that if they all went by the traveler in single file, the line would never end because of the birth rate.

Pondering the mix of timeless and timely at Kashgar, it is hard not to confuse them and wonder which is which. As we use up the planet, China's past may be our whole world's future. In the 13th century Marco Polo followed the southern silk route to Cathay and the court of Kublai Khan. The eastern Takla Makan -- where ancient travelers heard demons in the wind, and which Marco Polo described as haunted by "spirit voices and...the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms" -- is now China's nuclear testing ground.

2005-10-03T04:41:00.000-07:00

A postcard from Peru:

Lima sucks, truly, with its sunless winter neblina and Second-World colonial bourgeoisie who freed their slaves into poverty. The air is filled with the chill humidity of the garua, an acid mist that eats metal and never falls, gathering the particulates of the city´s pollution into your lungs. Winter in Lima is the vengeance of the Incas. But outside the capital Peru is fascinating and beautiful, amazing in its three distinct geographies: coastal desert, like a beach 50-100 miles wide that climbs seemingly forever into the high Andes, which then drop down through cloud forest and the "eyebrow of the jungle" into eastern jungle proper. At the end of August, austral mid-winter, we drove to Tarma -- "the pearl of the Andes" -- a small town way up over 9,000', situated in a narrow valley patched with hundreds of little flower farms that supply the florists of Lima. It was cold, with the first rain we've seen since Spain, and I drank whisky by the fireplace in the hotel. Next day we drove down into the sun of the selva, doffing layers of fleece and wool, and had an outdoor lunch at a restaurant in an orange grove after a jungle trek where butterflies surrounded us like tropical fish deep in a green sea of vegetation, one species with electric-blue wings as big as my hands. After lunch we left the sun and the glorious sticky heat and meandered back up through the cloud forest, and I was back at the fireplace at whiskytime. The Tarmeños truck their flowers six hours every night from Tarma to the wholesale market here in Lima, grab breakfast at dawn and some rest before making the return trip...so I know where to hitch an anonymous ride out of this Goddamn town.

2005-10-02T07:27:00.000-07:00

An exchange with Christopher Dickey:

MA: I have suddenly today synthesized and crystallized an American duality: guys like you go out interested in the rest of the world, fascinated by and respectful of multiculturalism at its various sources and in all its shifting, kaleidoscopic implications; others -- let's, between us, call them proud C-students -- go out to develop those other cultures, motivated by a genuinely missionary or profitable but ultimately practical impulse to raise standards of living. When other cultures don't see the light, however, and refuse to change their "backward" ways, the second type of American dismisses them as benighted. And isn't that exactly what the Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan? It would be inflammatory, unto losing the point, to draw the parallel with what you so deftly term the current Republican theology...but they sure as hell are American fundamentalists.

CD: It's a duality that goes back at least to the time of
"The White Man's Burden" and the Anti-Imperialist League of 100-plus years ago.

MA: The WM's Burden isn't quite what I meant, which was more about a contradictory tension in the American personality...

CD: All Kipling's biographers agree he meant it seriously as an exhortation to take up the burden. I read it as deeply ironic and an appreciation of the kind of duality you're talking about. Kipling was, after all, the ultimate Orientalist. Even Edward Said, in his introduction to Kim, grudgingly admires him for that. But Americans are not Orientalists, they're missionaries, at best, or "Quiet Americans," and at worst they're just blundering tourists. They're not interested in the actual culture where they're trying to sow their message of religious or political or economic salvation. It's not a problem to be understood, it's just a problem to be solved. Which is what I took you to be saying about those C- students.

MA: You say it exactly: "Problem solved, but not understood." And what I meant by the American fundamentalism is how fast that salvationist practicality turns into dismayed resentment of the ungrateful frogwog. It goes back psychologically through our own Manifest Destiny and the Indians we didn't bother to colonize, despite Jefferson's British-model plan that began with the peace-through-trade overtures of Lewis & Clark. As a national trait, it's a deep distrust of confusion and the curiosity that kills the cat, an impatience with abstraction and anything else that keeps the job from getting done. In God we trust, and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys can keep all that cultural hoity toity and free sex. And doesn't that also describe the Taliban?

2005-10-02T06:52:00.000-07:00

From a magnificent speech by Robert Kennedy, Jr.:

...We don't know Michelangelo by reading his biography. We know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And particularly wilderness, which is the undiluted work of the Creator.

And you know if you look at every one of the great religious traditions throughout the history of mankind, the central epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to experience self realization and nirvana. Mohammad had to go to a cave in the wilderness. Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity for the first time...

Read the entire speech: http://www.sierraclub.org/pressroom/rfkspeech/

2005-09-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

A limerick and some thoughts on James Dickey:

SURGERY AT 57

Sawbones sent JD away
Under the knife for exorbitant pay.
He pulled my pal's guts
And cried, "I'm a putz!
You've the innards of Dorian Gray!"

Yes, the letters are embarrassing and the bio is bonehead. But audience-therapy America ain't interested in a celeb who didn't make it into at least serial rehab. And even if he had, the publicity would only further offend academic anthologists who define their loftier, ivory-tower values by steering clear of marketplace success and cliche failure. Success seems to alienate the effete amateur world of poetry, just as Jim did with the flamboyance of his celebrity. "Celebrity poet" is an oxymoron. Only Jim himself could imagine and assemble and juggle all his whirling disparate selves into that amazing range of personality. Without him, we're left with the static, contradictory pieces...the poems...the novels...the work temporarily overshadowed, post mortem, by summing up the self-destructive life. The world's hindsight revenge on a non-repentant genius is to cluck and, sadly or not, dismiss him as a fool. But time will put at least the work back together, and bring it into the foreground. It won't be the celebrity who resurrects; it'll be the poet. And the rock will roll away from the mouth of the cave for the same reason it did for Jesus: because someone, some anthologist and/or publisher such as superb Daniel Halpern or an editor like Peter Davison (bless him in heaven), believes hard enough in the work and wants to carry it on.

One of the most revealing things Jim ever said was his endlessly repeated quip to his wife Maxine about being nervous before one of his first readings:

"'Just be yourself,' she said."

"And I answered, 'Ah, but which self?'"

Jim was and still is so confusing, especially to anyone who loved him. But out of that comes the question that might help:
Which Jim do we want to remember?

2005-08-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

April 10, 2005OP-ED COLUMNIST Bellow's Democratic Nobility of the IntellectBy DAVID BROOKS

In this country we have hotels that are democratized versions of European palaces. We have parks that are democratized versions of royal hunting grounds. And we have the novels of Saul Bellow, which are European novels of ideas adapted to the idiom of the American wisenheimer.
So much of the best American culture has been an imitation, adaptation or rejection of European forms and ideas. But Bellow's death reminds us that we're now living in a unipolar moment, culturally as well as politically. Today's writers and artists are much less likely to be Americanizing European stuff, and a way of writing and thinking is dying.

In the 1950's, when Bellow came of age, European ideas enjoyed immense prestige. Hannah Arendt and other émigrés brought their central European intellectual seriousness with them, and it was natural that a young, ambitious writer like Bellow would want to take on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Proust and Kafka. It was natural that he would go on to write a novel, "Herzog," in which the hero tries to make sense of the world by writing letters to Martin Heidegger.

"American readers sometimes object to a kind of foreignness in my books," Bellow once observed.

But contact with European seriousness only made him more acutely aware of his own Americanness, as it has with so many others. While admiring the intellectual aristocracy of Europe, he grew up on the streets of Chicago, a full-bore democrat. Attracted by the hierarchies of the best that has been thought and said, he still had that American instinct to take any hierarchy and - Marx Brothers-style - ridicule it to smithereens.

Attracted by the rarefied but often anti-Semitic world of high culture, he had that Jewish instinct to want entree into that world and yet not want it at the same time.

Out of that tension between European elitism, which stoked Bellow's ambition, and America's leveling democratic shtick, which was in his bones, emerged Bellow's manic conception of the American dream. In his first great book, "The Adventures of Augie March," Bellow writes of "the universal eligibility to be noble." As Christopher Hitchens wrote in a wonderful essay for The Wilson Quarterly a few years ago, that's as "potent a statement of the American dream as has ever been uttered."

This idea, that we can all grow up to be noble, acknowledges the virtue of aristocratic greatness and reconciles it with equality. It spiritualizes the American scramble for success.

"Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand," Augie March exults. Bellow's comic twist on this idea is that these soaring big ideas and big ambitions often end up detaching Americans from reality. Bellow's characters are often on these epic voyages - even if only in their own minds - and they flit wildly between the hyper-materialism of American commercial life and the hyper-attenuated aspirations in their heads.

As one of the characters says to Augie, "You have a nobility syndrome. You can't adjust to the reality situation."

Bellow's best America would be a Times Square version of a German university, with intellectual rigor on one side and scrambling freedom - sex included - on the other.

The tension that propelled Bellow's work is now mostly absent from American life. On the one hand, you have a generation of students who are educated in a way that doesn't bring them into contact with the European canon, the old "best that has been thought and said." They don't have a chance to push back and assert their own Americanness. On the other hand, there are those in the academic and literary stratosphere who are part of the global circuit of conferences and academic appointments. They seem aloof from or ashamed of America, so they are not driven to define, the way Bellow did, an American identity.

Finally there are the rest of us who don't pay attention to what is being written and said in Europe because it doesn't seem that exciting, (Quick, what book is the talk of Berlin? Who is the François Truffaut of our moment?)

American democracy is no longer engaged in an Oedipal struggle with European aristocracy, the
way it was from the days of the American Revolution all the way up until Bellow's heyday.
We're living in a unipolar culture, and it's lonely at the top.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

2005-07-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

MICHAEL ALLIN is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet. He is the author of "Zarafa:A Giraffe's True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris," which has been published in 17 languages. Allin's first published work was poetry, written while in college studying with his life-long friend James Dickey. After graduating as an English major with minors in Art History and Romance Languages, Allin began his cinematic career writing documentaries. He has since worn out five passports writing movies and researching books in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. An indefatigable traveler, Allin retraced the journey of France's first giraffe from Khartoum to Paris and has crossed China by land. His novel, "The Christmas Kid," which is based on his experiences hitchhiking across the United States, was adapted by him and 11 subsequent screenwriters into Disney's movie "I'll Be Home for Christmas." Allin's other screenwriting credits include "Enter the Dragon." Allin also wrote the the original 11 drafts of the screenplay for Dino de Laurentiis's "Flash Gordon." Allin also wrote the screen adaptation of his play "Hotel Paradise," which was directed by Nicolas Roeg. The next Allin-Roeg collaboration will be "Night Train,"based on the novel by Martin Amis.

Startup

2005-07-30T10:03:00.000-07:00

Embarking this message in a bottle...who knows where?

ZARAFA refers to my book of the same title, about the giraffe who walked to Paris.

I also write movies, among them ENTER THE DRAGON.