v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Babe Ruth from the Hasting's Historical Society

Babe Ruth and Hasting's dignitaries

Peace Book

I have been reading Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke concerning WW II. I picked up recently as a highly discounted book in Columbus, OH. Having been a big fan of his fiction, I read the book jacket and wondered why this book had not had a longer and more popular life. Now, having read almost 3/4 of it I have a sense why it has withered on the shelves. A revisionist version of the best of all wars, this book gives you a glimpse of why all war is bad and why even the best of them are never what they seem to be. Attacked for its unorthodox approach towards history, Sam Anderson at the New York Magazine hits it right:

Some critics have been predictably outraged by Human Smoke, issuing code-orange alerts about the damage it will do to ignorant and impressionable readers—and not entirely without reason. The book occasionally gives off a strong whiff of Michael Moore. Baker will restate, sardonically, facts that are already powerfully implicit in his anecdotes: “Twelve million people still held to Franklin Roosevelt’s basic principle of civilization: that no man should be punished for the deed of another. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not one of them.” He’ll steer the reader toward certainty about hugely controversial historical points (e.g., that America baited Japan into attacking; that Churchill’s aggression made Hitler’s violence worse; that a workable peace might have been had, at several points, in lieu of total victory; that pacifism was the best response), all of which his unorthodox method, by its very nature, can’t honestly support, given that it denies all the traditional hallmarks of historical argument: direct comment, abstract analysis, deep engagement with the existing scholarship. And so Baker sometimes lapses into the crime he means to correct: He simplifies the narrative he’s trying to complicate, distorting the truth as badly as any pious acolyte of the Greatest Generation myth. Villainizing Churchill isn’t necessarily wrong—the numbers and statements are all a matter of public record—but in the end it’s no more subtle than lionizing him.

To dismiss Baker’s project as a failed work based on the traditional criteria of history writing, however, is to misunderstand its actual purpose and power—and also to underestimate the good sense of the average reader. No one is likely to mistake Human Smoke for a comprehensive scholarly history of the war. It’s an auto-didact’s record of his own obsessive, subjective research. It devotes generous airtime to characters who tend to get excluded from popular history (secretaries, pacifist students, journalists), excavates great lost quotes (“What is the difference between throwing 500 babies into a fire and throwing fire from aeroplanes on 500 babies? There is none”), and powerfully questions canonical events based on carefully identified sources. As in all of Baker’s work, the strength of Human Smoke comes from the defamiliarizing charge it brings to a familiar subject. Its unorthodox form allows it to capture, with brutal efficiency, the daily texture of the war—the suffering, the confusion on the ground, the strike among Viennese mail carriers from the stress of delivering too many death letters. Baker doesn’t hide his omissions or his anecdotes’ lack of context—in fact, each vignette is surrounded by generous white space, so the lacunae are a constant visible presence in the book. It’s the kind of project that encourages, rather than closes off, further reading. Its texture is deeply convincing, and a much stronger message of peace than mere argument could ever muster.

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First flights

from Fotki Yandex

Re: Conchita

By Rafael Cardona from La Cronica de Hoy:

Llevaba meses de llamar a Conchita Cintrón en mis recuerdos. Por eso he parafraseado el título de su hermoso libro ¿Por qué vuelven los toreros?

Me ocurría cada comienzo de año y siempre en enero pensaba escribirle un saludo a su casa de Lisboa. A veces lo hacía; a veces no. Y así fue en esta ocasión. Sea esta columna el sucedáneo de una carta no escrita para una mujer indefinible e irrepetible. 

Mi última reunión con ella fue en Guadalajara.

—Está en México Conchita; me dijo mientras comíamos el ex embajador mexicano en Portugal Mariano Palacios Alcocer. ¿No sería bueno hacerle una entrevista?

La cita fue hecha por teléfono y estuvo llena de condiciones. No quiero esto, no quiero aquello. Por favor, fotografías no; estoy recién operada de los ojos y la luz me ofende. Cuando llegué a Guadalajara me fui a un lienzo charro donde ella aguardaba con su amigo Chucho de Anda. Esperé a la sombra de un árbol en la finca de Ricardo Zermeño y al poco rato llegó ella.

Tenía más de 70 años, el pelo blanco; el paso de quien ha sabido caminar por un ruedo con firmeza y sin miedo; las manos fuertes y a un tiempo delicadas, la barbilla altiva y los ojos cubiertos por unas gafas negras. Negras como su traje negro.

—Muchas gracias por su tiempo, le dije.

—No se preocupe por esas cosas, se lo he prometido al embajador Palacios. ¿De qué quiere usted hablar conmigo?

—De Conchita Cintrón, ¿la conoce?

Sus facciones se suavizaron y apenas insinuó una sonrisa. “Pues a veces la conozco y a veces parece extraña hasta para mí”.

Hablamos y la charla jamás tuvo orden. Los temas entraban y salían junto con los nombres de los hombres de su vida. Su abuelo Varril, a quien ella llamaba Om; don Juan Belmonte, El Gallo; del regicidio de Carlos I en Lisboa; del atentado contra Alfonso XIII con una bomba envuelta en un ramo de flores.

—¿Se imagina usted la metáfora, una bomba entre las flores?, decía entre la sorpresa y el descubrimiento.

En el lienzo dos chamacos entrenan. Uno empuja la cornamenta y el otro ensaya infinitos muletazos de lentitud imposible, como si tras los pitones atados a un palo hubiera un toro verdadero. Pero ellos mueven dulcemente sus muletas de ilusión, con sus boinas y sus pantalones viejos.

—¿Vamos?, le dijo a la señora vestida de negro. Vamos, responde.

El sol pega fuerte en la tarde. Ya pasa de la una y ella mira el ruedo y el partidero del fondo. ¡Oye!, le grita a uno de los maletillas; ¡así no!, ¡ven acá!

Toma el palillo de aquí; le dice al azorado muchacho quien no tiene la menor idea de quién le habla y le ayuda. El brazo suelto separado del cuerpo, así… Y convertida en maestra la Diosa Rubia del Toreo le rompe la dimensión al tiempo. Muletea al viento. O torea un recuerdo, como se quiera decir.

—Ya nadie enseña a torear, por eso nadie sabe lo que trae dentro. Todos iguales, todos parejos, “¡ah”! pero cómo se arriman cuando ya han pasado los pitones, claro, con las orejas ningún toro pega cornadas…

Veo ahora una foto de aquella tarde: Conchita juega con sus manos y con los índices de ambas manos colocados en su cabeza simula una cornamenta y ríe.

Después de eso sostuvimos una relación epistolar. Le hice un dibujo y me respondió con una carta muy hermosa. Tiempo después me envió otra de letras sombrías. Me hablaba de su depresión, de su tristeza. Le respondí con innecesarias palabras de aliento.

“Hace mucho tiempo —me decía— que conozco la impresión de haber vivido más de la cuenta. Quizá un torero, a quien no le importa vivir más allá de la tarde de toros que le espera tiene una formación inadaptable a la vida cotidiana…”

Pero había más. Al final de la carta incluía, con extrema discreción, dos pequeños recortes de periódico. Los había escrito para su hijo muerto. Este es uno de ellos:

“¡Dios mío!... se cumplieron siete años (1980) desde que llamaste a mi hijo Pedro… tenía 22 años recién cumplidos y era el sol y la alegría del hogar… Pero hiciste bien; él no merecía esta vida dolorosa sino aquella que nos tienes prometida.

“Perdóname señor si lloro… es que no sabía que también los ángeles reciben sepultura…”

Después de eso ya no hubo más cartas. Conocerla fue un enorme privilegio.

Conchita Cintron Dies, Great Female Bullfighter

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From El Pais:

El cronista taurino Gregorio Corrochano escribió de ella: "El día que se baje del caballo se tendrán que subir al caballo muchos toreros". Conchita Cintrón Verrill, la mejor rejoneadora de la historia, falleció el 17 de febrero en su casa de Lisboa de un paro cardíaco, a los 86 años. Nacida en la ciudad chilena de Antofagasta el 9 de agosto de 1922, cabalgaba como pocos y, sin embargo, no se cansó de repetir que el caballo le importaba poco, lo que le gustaba de verdad era el toreo a pie.

Se va una mujer osada, aventurera, intensa, -la escritora mexicana Ángeles Mastretta la ha recordado como "una extravagante, para su fortuna y la nuestra"-. No era habitual a finales de los años treinta que una mujer nacida en Chile, de padre puertorriqueño y madre estadounidense, quisiera ser torera. Se crió en Perú, donde un caballero portugués de alcurnia y rejoneador, Ruy da Camara, fue su maestro de equitación y mentor. Debutó en 1936 en la limeña plaza de Acho, la más antigua tras la de Ronda, y se consagró en México, donde recibió el apodo de Diosa de Oro. Recorrió los grandes foros taurinos de América, Quito, Caracas, Bogotá, para saltar más tarde a Francia, España y Portugal, donde terminó su carrera.

Su presentación oficial en los ruedos españoles tuvo lugar en Sevilla, el 23 de abril de 1945, en La Maestranza, de la mano de Marcial Lalanda. No quedaron dudas de su dominio de la lidia y la doma. Poco después debutó en Las Ventas y en La Monumental de Barcelona. Eran tiempos de dictadura, y las mujeres no podían torear en España. Siempre fue fiel a su pensamiento, que resumió en una entrevista concedida a Tauro Delta, revista oficial de Las Ventas: "Todo lo que se hace a dúo es más bonito que a trío. Me enojaba estar supeditada a lo que el caballo quisiera".

From NYT:

Conchita Cintrón, who broke into the male-dominated sport of bullfighting at age 13 and was one of the first women to become famous as a matador, died on Tuesday in Lisbon. She was 86.

A Peruvian who became known as la Diosa Rubia, or the Blonde Goddess, she was known for her bullfighting skills both on foot and on horseback, and reportedly killed more than 750 bulls in her career in Europe, Central America and South America.

“She made an indelible mark on a period of bullfighting history,” Hugo Ferro of the Portuguese Bullfighters’ Union said. “She was probably the best-known woman bullfighter.”

Concepción Cintrón Verrill was born in 1922, to a Puerto Rican father and an American mother. She faced her first bull at 13 and in 1937 made her debut at the main arena in Lima, Peru.

In the 1940s, Cintrón became one of the most famous women in bullfighting at a time when few women became matadors, whose job it is to maneuver around the animal at close range, then stab it to death with a sword.

“She wasn’t the first woman, but she kept going season after season and made a name for herself,” Ferro said.

Cintrón was seriously injured in 1949 in Guadalajara, Mexico, when a bull gored her in the thigh. Carried to the ring’s infirmary, she pulled away from doctors, returned to the ring and killed the bull. She then fell unconscious and was rushed into emergency surgery.

Spudart on flickr

spudart at flickr-inauguration on jumbotron in Chicago

Obama Day in DC-The AfterLife

Vallejo Nocturno 2009  - My Obama Day

The Madoff Puzzle

From Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: The Securities and Exchange Commission has admitted it missed repeated opportunities to discover what may be the largest financial fraud in history: a multi-billion-dollar pyramid scheme operated by Wall Street legend Bernard Madoff.

The SEC said it received credible allegations about the scheme at least nine years ago and will immediately open an internal investigation to examine why it had failed to pursue them. SEC Chair Christopher Cox said, “Our initial findings have been deeply troubling.” He also said the agency’s inspector general would investigate whether personal relationships between Madoff’s family and SEC staff played a role in the failed oversight.

Bernard Madoff was the former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange and a respected figure on Wall Street for nearly half-a-century. For decades, his firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, had been one of the top market makers on Wall Street. In Washington, regulators had sought his advice on any number of regulatory issues over the years. In 2000, he served on a government committee established to protect investors by ensuring accurate and full public disclosure of information to them. In an old video of Madoff that’s come to light, he tells an audience it’s tough to skirt the law.

BERNARD MADOFF: In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules. And this is something that the public really doesn’t understand. And if you read things in the newspaper and you see somebody, you know, violate a rule, you say, well, you know, they’re always doing this. But it’s impossible for you to go—for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time.

AMY GOODMAN: Investigators now accuse Bernard Madoff of doing just that. He was arrested at his home last week on fraud charges. According to court documents, Madoff said his money management business was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme,” a type of fraud in which early investors are paid off with money from later investors, until no more money can be raised and the scheme collapses. He estimated investors had lost as much as $50 billion. The fraud could be larger than the Enron scandal of 2001. Over the decades, Madoff steadily expanded his circle of investors, drawing in small individual investors, charities, pension funds, prominent billionaires and European banks.

Now several non-profits and foundations are being forced to close, because their entire endowments have been wiped out. One victim is the New York-based JEHT Foundation, which was dedicated to electoral reform and improving criminal justice and human rights.

Robert Crane is president of the JEHT Foundation. He joins us here in our firehouse studio. We’re also joined by Paul Kiel, a reporter from ProPublica, which has been covering the Madoff scandal.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Paul, let’s start with you. Explain this whole—how this happened.

PAUL KIEL: Sure. Well, they’re still trying to figure out exactly how this happened. But, essentially what it is, Madoff had this big broker-dealer, which is a type of market making. It’s not a particularly sexy kind of business. He had a room full of traders. But on an entirely separate floor, he had this investment advisory business, which he had been running for decades. And year after year, he was able to give investors, you know, ten percent, like clockwork, these very consistent good returns. And, you know, there was a number of suspicions from outside the firm, but his investors were very happy with what he was able to deliver for them. And it seems they’ve all come crashing down, I think it’s pretty fair to say, as a result of the recent financial crisis.

You know, the way a Ponzi scheme works is you take money that’s coming in, and you pay out people who have been with you for a long time the returns that they’re expecting. And usually what happens, the way a Ponzi scheme falls apart is, all of a sudden you don’t have that new money coming in to pay the people who need their money. You know, investors get angry that you’re not giving them their money. Eventually they go to the SEC or something like that, and the whole edifice comes crashing down.

In this case, he apparently had investors asking for as much as $7 billion, and he apparently only had about $200 to $300 million left, which he planned apparently to give to certain friends of family as sort of the last ditch thing he did before he turned himself in. But he confessed to his sons last Tuesday. His sons were the two senior executives below him. His brother also was an executive there. Apparently, last Tuesday, he confessed to them the whole thing. They said that they had no idea. They eventually went to the SEC and the US attorney’s office. And then on Thursday, the US attorney’s office showed up at his apartment and said, “Hey, we’d like to know if there’s an innocent explanation for this.” And he said, you know, “I’m a complete fraud. This is”—you know, he called it a “giant Ponzi scheme” and said it’s all one big lie. And so, you know, that was that. And—

Change

Marxian Guide to End of Capitalism

From The Guardian Stuart Jeffries:

Sales of Marx's Capital are reportedly soaring as the world realises that this was where he prophesied how capitalism will destroy itself. So it's time for a Capital primer, time to talk fetishism (yay!) of commodities (d'oh!).

1. Commodities. A chair is a commodity - not because you can sit on it, but because it was produced by humans to be traded. Each commodity has a use value, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants.

2. Exchange value. How, you'll be asking, can one measure the difference in value between, say, a 80GB iPod, and a new copy of Capital? It's the exchange value, stupid. This is measured by the amount of labour that goes into making each commodity - such is the Marxist labour theory of value, and the source of what Marx called the fetishism of commodities.

3. Literary value. As Francis Wheen stresses in his biography of Marx, Capital is partly a racy gothic novel, a Frankenstein-like tale of how we created a monster from which we are alienated and which, by means of class struggle, we will slay.

4. Capital. This is money used to buy more money. Like God, capital seems mystical and immutable, but is really only a function of social relationships (Rowan Williams, a Marx fan, disagrees with the God bit). Capitalists think capital has magical significance. Socialist revolution will disabuse them of that.

5. Exploitation. Commodity sales increase the amount of exchange-value owned by capitalists, yielding profit and thus helping them accumulate capital. How? You accumulate capital by the creation of surplus value, which is unpaid labour appropriated by employers.

6. Crises. Capitalists aren't especially interested in accumulating commodities (once you've got a hot tub for your Lear jet, it's hard to decide what else to spend it on) and the incessant drive to amass capital causes crises. The over-expansion of credit by greedy capitalists recently resulted in more goods being sold than can be bought from income and savings. The result? Widespread debts, straitened circumstances (think coarse toilet paper) and happy days for repo men (boo!).

7. Profit. This falls when capitalism exhausts its capacity for growth. Also, as technology improves and productivity rises, more goods are produced, which are worth less.

8. The end. Whether such crises will destroy capitalism is uncertain. Marx thought they would but he wasn't convincing about when. It will, though, end. Some time. Maybe before Christmas.