Anne Dromache – Page 2 – My Own RE:public

Good night and good luck

… What follows is not about that precisely – the 2005 movie, the expression that gave the title, but George Clooney has been on my mind of late, and said movie is not only one of my favorite Clooney films, but I also became aware a short while ago that he is to produce and star in a Broadway adaptation next spring – the twenty year interim reflected in him this time playing the Murrow role. This was very surprising to me because I have never associated Mr. Clooney with the stage, but as I remember it the fixed interior (TV studio) and dialogue does indeed lend itself to that medium.

But this is not about the biz, but something else in which Clooney has, quite extraordinarily, not played an insignificant role. Others, with names like Pelosi and Obama, have of course played more significant roles.

On Sunday, at about 2:00 in the afternoon Eastern Time, Pres. Joe Biden withdrew from seeking (the seemingly assured) Democratic nomination for US President. This came after weeks of mounting discontent amongst the ranks of the party; from the foot soldiers, to the officers – elected and not, to the money sources. I will not re-litigate the arguments parlayed in the sad saga of a man in decline, and in denial, of the ravages age brings with it, or of its tragic pinnacle in a humiliating television debate with Trump.

Clooney? As an influential Democrat, a major fund raiser, he wrote an opinion piece – sorry, ‘guest essay‘ – for the NYT making a case that Biden should leave the race – and one of the first to publicly do so. One could ask: well, what has HE got to lose? But, still … A big star in a supporting role – most just wouldn’t touch it. Yes, I am an unabashed fan – seriously dating from the early ER days – but in recent times I have been more impressed by his presence on the theater of real life, albeit of the highest Niveau. (See, for instance, in a role reversal of the marital solidarity norm, his ‘standing by his … what? partner?’, after Amal Clooney was harshly criticized for her work for the ICC in respect to potential crimes – by both parties – during the Gaza conflict.)

As I write, following an immediate endorsement by Biden, and an ensuing closing of ranks, the Vice President Kamala Harris is now all but the presumptive Democratic nominee. Can a Black woman do what an eminently qualified white woman could not: be elected President of the United States of America, and do so against the same opponent?

By the way, did I mention the bizarre assassination attempt perpetrated against that person the previous week? I thought not. I will return to this.

In these days, as in his own, Ed Murrow’s sign off is more wish than promise, and luck an unreliable quantity.

A changing of the guard …

in London, today. Performed outside Buckingham Palace this morning and, as I write, a short distance away in Downing Street; granted, without the royal pomp and ceremony but with some very civil good cheer and good will.

An interesting (almost) all-nighter behind me; this time ending with some hopeful signs. Which can not be said of some previous experiences, nor represent future expectations. After fourteen years and a series of leaders, the United Kingdom has rid themselves of an appalling generation of Tories and a Labour government has been elected with a huge majority.

05/07/2024. London, United Kingdom. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria arrive at Number 10 Downing Street Picture by Rory Arnold/ No 10 Downing Street

The new Prime Minister (the 58th -and an elected one this time!) is Keir Starmer. A serious man has left his audience with the King and, as I write, with the midday sun shining after a rainy morning, approaches the lectern in front of No. 10 to make his first address as Prime Minister.

An overtly thumping majority not to be taken for granted, for a closer analysis indicates a complicated result with tensions from the Right (and to a lesser extent Left), the potential for messy intraparty conflicts and a fickle, unenthusiastic electorate.

Once bitten…

“Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer” by Cordelia Edvardson, 2023.

Übersetzt aus dem Schwedischen von Ursel Allenstein, Hanser Verlag.

In his afterword, Daniel Kehlmann, describes the sheer visceral horror of reading this slight memoir of fragments of a childhood culminating in an actual horror; of confusion, betrayal and a young girl’s fight for survival – from the creeping Nazi terror of Berlin, to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. And having survived, reflections on the just that: the burden of being an Überlebende. It didn’t have to be, but Cordelia Edvardson had a life; a long, productive life – in Sweden, in Israel as the Jerusalem correspondent for Svenska Dagbladet, as a mother. I hope she also found some happiness and peace of mind.

I did not know Cordelia Edvardson (1929-2012), and her Wikipedia entry is brief and the accuracy of which I can not vouch for. (The German entry is longer but also confusing. At the Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon, a Swedish site, is a good biographical overview.) But her mother is Elisabeth Langgässer, a writer of some renown in the post-war years who has mostly disappeared from literary discourse in Germany – for good reason, Kehlmann says; has not dated well, he says; Catholic mystic, he says. Her name is only known to me through acquaintances that live in a street with her name in the Rhineland. I must say, after reading her daughter’s book and Kehlmann’s remarks I feel absolutely no inclination to pursue her any further. Only to wonder why there are streets, schools and literary awards in her honor.

Daniel Kehlmann makes the case for Edvardson’s book being one of the rare and most powerful first hand accounts of the industrial killing machine of the Holocaust, and one wonders why after its original publication in 1984 it did not find its place in the culture of remembrance. Or why it does not seem to have been translated into English (?). One wonders whether her familial situation, as a precursor to the events she describes or in the aftermath, was not just a little too complicated; whether she was just not Jewish enough; or was it that a mother’s betrayal, or at least her egocentricity, was not just too contrary to the maternal norms?

Above I referred to this book as a memoir, the publisher’s call it a Roman, that is, a literary novel; this something Kehlmann also wonders at. Edvardson does write in the third person, a narrative device most associated with fiction, but one could imagine she did so to create some distance from people and events and the emotions they gave rise to and that she had learnt to live with, but which no doubt loomed large still in her inner consciousness, ever threatening to overwhelm. In other words, there is no reason to doubt that das Mädchen in the telling is Cordelia Edvardson.

“Once bitten … twice shy” so it is said in English ; in German the expression is: “Gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer”- literally, a child once burnt will tend to shy away from fire. But this child, das Mädchen, seeks it out – Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer. The imagery is devastating. The flames may no longer burn but the damage caused is never extinguished, nor is the urge, the necessity, to return to the source of her suffering. As if willing the flames to consume her as they did so many others.

An extraordinary account that, however horrendous the content, deserves much wider recognition.

The center holds…

albeit only just.

Sunday saw the completion of the European parliamentary elections, and the results were fairly much in line with the gloomy predictions. Some member states moderated or at least stabilized – Poland, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, for instance. Some continued a marked rightward tendency, including the big three – France, Germany, Italy.

Primary sources are always the best, so here are the results on the European Parliament site. For the curious, a multitude of resources – data, diagrams, FAQs, etc. – invite to further research.

For orientation, the EPP (European People’s Party) is the largest group and consists of members sent from national center-right parties of the European ‘Christian Democratic’ tradition, e.g. the largest being the CDU in Germany. To its left is Renew – broadly described as Liberal, e.g. Renaissance, France; then Greens and Socialists to various degrees and of various persuasions. Messy is it right of the EPP – the ECR (-Conservatives and Reformists), think Meloni, and ID (Identity and Democracy), think Le Pen.

On the last mentioned, in the wake of the Rassemblement national blow out victory in France, and his own coalition’s dismal performance, President Emmanuel Macron immediately dissolved the Assemblée nationale (that is, the legislative body) and called snap elections for June 30. An absolute political bombshell! The logic is hard to get around, but I think it probably is something like this, if you were to imagine Monsieur le Président in conversation:

So, beloved citoyens de la république, you have made clear in recent times and in a myriad of ways your collective disapproval of my politics and my person and I understand that sentiment to have been cemented with this vote, from which I can only take away that many of you would prefer a right wing nationalist government, so I give you now a chance to vote for one. I say many of you and I hope that it is not a majority. But I say, should you give them – or other extreme factions – a majority you will soon see whether they can deliver on what they promise, whether your life is any better. I’m betting not and hope that Le Pen’s chances of the presidency in 2027 will diminish accordingly. On the other hand, I remain optimistic that reasonable minded coalitions may ultimately (in the second round on July 7) coalesce to block RN’s path, as they have done previously. And, then, my beloved citoyens and those newly elected members of the Assemblée, perhaps during these last years of my presidency we can pursue a more conciliatory course for the benefit of our grande nation.

A god almighty risk, to be sure, but all power to him. Such balls are not to be had in Berlin.

New(s) out of the British Library

A few days ago I wanted to access some bookish stuff at the British Library – but, alas, to no avail. It hadn’t occurred to me that last year’s ‘mega hack attack’ – for want of a better expression – still remained unresolved.

To that end here is a blog entry from last week written by the Chief Executive, Sir Roly Keating; for me the most relevant information being:

For the Library’s global community of users on the web, the absence of our online and digitised resources has been keenly felt. Two early priorities for restoration are the web pages providing access to the Library’s unique collection of digitised manuscripts, and our popular Learning resources, including Discovering Literature. Work is under way on both of these, with the aim of getting them online again by September, in time for the start of the new academic year.
Knowledge Matters blog: “Restoring our services – 28 May 2024 update”

Hopefully their end of the Summer target will be met. A very complex matter it seems, further exacerbated upon in this March entry, and much more so in the therein mentioned review explaining the incident and the aftermath which I have embedded below.

british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024 Download

Pas de deux

Le Pays des autres 2: Regardez-nous danser (read by me in German as Schaut, we wir tanzen, and available in English translation as Watch Us Dance) continues Leila Slimani’s family saga; a fictional dive into the colorful, often murky and treacherous depths of her own dynastic history, the first part of which I wrote enthusiastically about here and which ended with the beginning of the end of colonial rule in Morocco.

When the story continues, it is the summer of 1968 and more than a decade has passed since Morocco gained its independence from France (in 1956), but the country is struggling now under another – this time home-grown – brand of tyranny: defined through its authoritarian monarch, a brutal police and judicial system in cahoots with a corrupted elite and a patriarchal hegemony. It is to this Morocco that Aïcha, who so entranced with her intelligence and originality as a little girl, returns after some years studying medicine in Strasbourg. For one summer – and then perhaps a lifetime. One is tempted to say: she returns to the fold. But that is something for sheep, and an instinctive follower is this young woman not. Nor lost, nor castout. Rather it is to the bosom of her family in Meknès that she returns; their fortunes having risen in the ensuing years and now with a place amongst a burgeoning new marocaine bourgeoisie. The reader remains alert still to Aïcha’s contrariness: her self-possession and her selflessness; her wanting to please and her not giving a fig; her intellectual rationality and discipline and her emotional inner-life and flights into religious mysticism. One empathizes with Aïcha, with each dilemma she faces (and faces down) – her love of family, of friends and two nations; and the loyalties demanded and the conflicts that ensue – always knowing that the latest will be not the last.

And because she so fascinated me in In the Country of Others, I concentrate on Aïcha (and I suspect Slimani developed her character to be the focus – clearly inspired by her mother but also with a good dose of self one could think), others in the Belhaj family have central moments; both individually and in their interactions amongst each other. (The changing perspectives are – along with her blissfully short and elegant sentences – a defining quality of Slimani’s writing.) Aïcha’s parents, Amine and Mathilda, of course: the very personification of two nations in co-habitation; each with their own truth, intimately attached and profoundly detached, forgiving and unforgiving in equal measure. It is not always clear who is controlling whom. But there is a sort of love, that is frayed, tested, rarely acknowledged – and a lot of regret. The radical choices of Amine’s siblings, Omar and Selma, have only become more so since the first book. But this story here is one of more youthful years spent during a time of immense social and political upheaval, and so Aïcha’s path is very much juxtaposed against that of her younger brother Selim – restless, sexually awakened in ways unexpected. As Aïcha returns to the nest so does Selim take wing.

Aïcha pursues her career in obstetrics. Aïcha marries Mehdi – once, theoretically, a Marxist, now, practically speaking, beholden to the government. The book ends in 1971; the king has survived an assassination attempt, and Aïcha has brought her own child into the world.

Explicit in the title, dancing can be extended from the very reality of the clubs and bars of Casablanca and beyond where the young of Morocco gather to a metaphorical place; for it is a heady time of post-colonial uncertainty when power dynamics have changed and can be visualized as two parties skirting around each other, conscious of their position in any one moment, but unsure of their next step, and this reflected in the age-old story of when boy meets girl, of codes and signals, of swirling skirts and feigned youthful insouciance. Dualities abound in Leïla Slimani’s narrative, and this series could be well described as a pas de deux, whereby here there are no clear partitions; each blends into the next; from the entrée to the adagio and with some variations. I await with anticipation the continuation and culmination (coda) – presumably due from Gallimard this year or next.

Did I mention the translation? No, I did not. Translators should always be credited. I know enough to be quite confident that Amelie Thoma captures Slimani’s literary voice beautifully in German. (Of the English translation I cannot say, but Sam Taylor has creds so to speak!)

Alice Munro obituary | Alice Munro | The Guardian

Canadian short-story writer who won the Nobel prize in 2013 and was often likened to Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/14/alice-munro-obituary

The death has just been announced of the truly great Canadian writer, Alice Munro. Lots to read at The Guardian and, of course, at The New York Times, including from earlier this year an “Essential Alice Munro” (astutely subtitled with the prerequisite for reading Munro being simply to have lived!)

Sent
 a life as long
 as said stories short.
Said therein
 much more than most.
Surely to live long,
much longer than most
 mere mortal days
 here spent.

- Anne Dromache, May, 2024.

‘They’re teaching me’: Greg Doran on staging Shakespeare’s unloved Two Gents with students | Theatre | The Guardian

The theatre director, now teaching at Oxford after years running the RSC, thinks The Two Gentlemen of Verona is perfect for a young cast to argue over. We go into rehearsals
— Read on www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/may/10/student-production-two-gentlemen-of-verona-oxford-greg-doran

Listening to Greg Doran on Radio Four’s Today programme this morning alerted me to his visiting professorship at Oxford and the Playhouse production. The above Guardian piece by Michael Billington informs on this and other aspects of Doran’s life post-RSC, and takes us inside rehearsals of the diverse student production of one of Shakespeare’s least performed (and ‘problematic’ says Billington) works. A terrific read.