In the Meantime (3 cents)

While procrastinating on detailed descriptions of some of the sights of Barcelona, I have not been wasting all of my time (or perhaps I have, depending on your point of view). Here is what has been going on since we returned from Spain ten days ago.

Books: First, I have read two books.



The one, not surprisingly, was George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia", his description of his time in Barcelona and environs during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went to Spain as a journalist, it would seem, in 1937, but quickly decided the owed it to the world to enter what he hoped would be the first successful defeat of fascism (Hitler and Mussolini facing no opposition). He joined an Anarchist militia and spent several months in the mountains of Catalonia, freezing, starving, observing, ruminating, and participating in several minor skirmishes to try to divert the Franco troops from the real battlegrounds, such as the city of Huerca. He was one of a number of English volunteers, and he was seriously wounded with a bullet that went through his neck, and was lucky to have survived. After spending time in various hospitals, he was sent back to Barcelona, arriving in time for the street fighting that occurred there, all between various of the non-fascist groups, the "democratic" government, the communists and the anarchists.

He concluded that war was unpleasant, that the Franco forces were going to lose (so he thought), but that the communists and the anarchists would also be on the losing side, with the government forces in control, leading to more of a plutocracy or oligarchy than a true democracy. He felt that the communists, afraid of the egalitarian philosophy of the anarchists, were a reactionary, rather than a revolutionary, force, siding with the government against fascism. He felt that both communism and fascism shared many qualities, including extreme class inequality (in spite of the communists stated) and total lack of tolerance. Orwell was of course quite right in much of his thinking.

"As for the newspaper talk about this being a war for democracy, it was plain eye-wash. No one in his senses supposed that there was any hope of democracy, even as we understand it in England and France, in a country so divided and exhausted as Spain would be when the war was over. It would have to be a dictatorship, and it was clear that the chance of a workingclass dictatorship had passed. That meant that the general movement would be in the direction of some kind of Fascism. Fascism called, no doubt, by some politer name, and - because this was Spain - more human and less efficient than the German or Italian varieties. The only alternatives were an infinitely worse dictatorship by Franco, or (always a possibility) that the war would end with Spain divided up, either by actual frontiers or into economic zones."

You can imagine what Orwell would be saying about Iraq.

He wrote this book, by the way, as a relatively young man, shortly after his return from the country. "Animal Farm" and "1984" were yet to come.




The second book I read was William Golding's "Pincher Martin", selected because I had read nothing by Golding and it was short. Man against nature: like "Robinson Crusoe" or "The Old Man and the Sea", but much more ambiguous than either. Martin is shipwrecked of a British warship during World War II and swept onto a remote Atlantic Island. The book is the story of Martin's battle against drowning, and his fight for survival without obvious sources of food and shelter. The prose is dense, but very well composed and very evocative.

But then something weird happens, that no one knows how to describe. Two new characters suddenly appear in the last chapter. Other members of the British navy exploring the island. They find Martin's body on the beach.

The trick is that Martin is wearing the boots that he had taken off while fighting the ocean to keep from drowning in the first chapter of the book.

What does this mean? Where is the reality? Was his survival a dream? A post-death dream?

Questions, questions, questions. And Golding was certainly not going to provide the answer.

Movies: I have seen three movies. Only one, "Once", was seen in regular theater; the other two were seen as part of the National Gallery of Art's free weekend cinema program.



"Once" is a very uplifting and enjoyable Irish movie. starring Glen Hansard and Marketa Iglova. Hansard, the leader of the Irish rock group 'The Frames' plays a young man who, when not helping his father in his vacuum cleaner repair shop, busks on the streets of downtown Dublin, playing popular songs during the daylight hours, and his own compositions at night. Iglova, who in real life sings with the Frames, plays a recent Czech emigrant who is intrigued by Hansard's music and by Hansard and who is excited to learn his day time job, because she has a vacuum in need of repair.

The chemistry between these two very likeable characters is highly charged, and together they work on his music (she is a musician as well, and helps him put together a makeshift band - the Frames, I suppose -) and produce a CD. They borrow money for the production, and the recording studio director thinks that this is a big waste of his time, until they start to play and sing.

You can imagine what will happen next as this couple draws closer and closer together. But it does not happen. Their relationship is an impossible one (she has a husband, still in the Czech Republic, and a daughter), and he still pines for his old girlfriend, now living in London.

Nevertheless, the movie has a happy ending (if indeed it is the ending), as they go forward on their separate life trajectories. The music is good. And, believe it or not, not only is there no overt sex in the movie, but there are no bad guys either.

Once has won a number of audience awards at recent festivals. It was released this year.



The second movie was "Maskerade", a 1934 Viennese movie, set around the turn of the century, and centered around the Viennese elite and their highly cultured high life. The most famous portrait painter of the time is rumored to have affairs with the women he paints; the wife of one of the city's top surgeons who is the brother of the musical conductor visits the painter hoping for more than a painting, and, although she is painted on wearing a mask and a chinchilla muff, she is disappointed to learned that the painter is a painter and not a serial lover. But her picture accidentally becomes public, and a scandal must be avoided. Of course, the painter falls in love with a woman of a lower social class, who is the only person in the movie with deep common sense and have furtive romantic interludes, all sorts of family intrigue and even an attempted murder (along with a Enrico Caruso performing in Rigoletto under the not quite cuckholded maestro) occur, but again all live happily every after (or, I guess, until World War I breaks out).



A very different movie was "Miss Universe 1929", a documentary about the first Miss University, Lisl Goldarbeiter of Vienna, half Jewish and very attractive, and her first cousin and second husband Marci Tanzer of Szeged, Hungary. Tanzer, a mechanical engineer by training and an amateur movie maker, filmed Goldarbeiter throughout her life, and it is these films that provide the basis for the movie. They were put together, with a little supportive dialog from a very old Tanzer (90+), awfully. An interesting story, with very interesting movie clips, could not have been turned into a documentary more sloppily.

Educational Forum: Only 27 people by my count attended a workshop presentation on Friday at the Holocaust Museum on the subject of Kristallnacht and the reaction of the American religious establishment (based on religious media, press and airwaves) to it. The nine presenters were finishing a two week workshop program sponsored by the Helena Rubenstein Foundation. They were all scholars, and representatives of various religious denominations. There was quite a bit of interest in this presentation (as a scholarly topic, this is apparently fairly virgin territory), as the reactions (and the intensity of pursuit of action based on the reactions) were quite varied, and often in surprising ways. But I came out of it thinking, in a sense, who cares? Clearly, nothing helped.