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

The Mental Health of our Courts

 

The problem with today, from the Intercept:

After the plea, Harmony spoke up, according to the court transcript.

THE DEFENDANT: Can I ask you something?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE DEFENDANT: Can I ask you something? I know that you the judge and lawyer — judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: What was your question?

THE DEFENDANT: Judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: Judge, lawyer does what now?

THE DEFENDANT: I said judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: What about the case being dismissed? I don’t understand your question.

THE DEFENDANT: I said help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: You want the case to be dismissed?

THE DEFENDANT: I said, I’m telling you all four names, four names y’all said. I’m telling you four names: Judge, lawyer, help, case dismissed.

THE COURT: Okay.

THE DEFENDANT: I said that’s what I wanted to tell you.

THE COURT: You wanted to tell me to dismiss the case?

THE DEFENDANT: Huh-uh. I had wanted to tell you that.

DEPUTY: I’m sorry. Is she in court right now?

THE COURT: Yes.

THE DEFENDANT: Yeah, I’m in court.

THE COURT: But I can’t understand what she’s saying. Judge, lawyer, help —

THE DEFENDANT: I said I had wanted to tell you something. That’s all I wanted to tell you.

DEPUTY: She just wanted to tell you those words.

THE DEFENDANT: I had wanted to tell you something.

THE COURT: Okay. You wanted to tell me judge, lawyer, case dismissed?

THE DEFENDANT: Yes.

THE COURT: Okay. But you told me earlier that you wanted to plead guilty to the charges.

THE DEFENDANT: Yeah. I said — I just said that — really I took my time served. But I just said case dismissed. Other than saying time served, I said case dismissed.

THE COURT: Okay. Well, I can’t dismiss the charges because the State is going forward. The prosecution is moving forward with this case. And that’s why you have an option of pleading guilty or going to a jury trial. And you told me that you wished to plead guilty.

DEPUTY BELL: I think she was trying to tell you she knows those words.

THE DEFENDANT: I said, can I — can I ask you this? Can y’all give me time served?

DEPUTY BELL: She’s trying to tell you she knows those words.

THE COURT: I did give you time served. I sentenced you to five years on —

THE DEFENDANT: I thought Eddy Cossio —

THE COURT: I sentenced you to five years on probation and the jail time that I ordered that you have to serve I’m giving you credit for time served. Now, where do you —

THE DEFENDANT: Okay. Okay.

Harmony told the court she was homeless. The court instructed probation to send her to the Rainbow Community Shelter in Covington because her uncle would no longer take her in. (I have been unable to locate her uncle.) Three days later, the shelter kicked her out for misbehavior, and she found her way back to a downtown Atlanta street corner.

Fed by Unreality

Fortunate enough to have taken a couple of years of literary courses on Borges given by Alicia Borinsky back in the 70's at Hopkins. She instilled in me a love for Borges' erudite fiction and understated humor. Reading recently an analysis of the famed “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” , a story on misinformation and conspiracy written 80 years ago, I googled for the massive book by Bioy Casares on Borges (2006), which appears not yet to be translated, and came up with this nice article on Borges and Bioy's love of crime fiction in Crime Reads:

As the authors cited by Borges suggest, the crime fiction he and Bioy Casares preferred were complex tales of detection. After kicking off the series with Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, they followed up with novels by John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, and Anthony Gilbert. Borges and Bioy Casares had a predilection for British mystery writers, and from 1945 to 1955, when they ran The Seventh Circle, the majority of books they selected were from Britain. They did make exceptions—titles by James M. Cain, Vera Caspary, and Margaret Millar—but what the pair most wanted to display to Argentinian readers were confounding puzzles and whodunnits with clues, narratives where disorder hides behind the scrim of respectability and brutality squares off against the cerebral.

They had, under the name H. Bustos Domecq, collaborated on a detective story collection before creating The Seventh Circle. This book was Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi), published in 1942. Inspired by sedentary sleuths like Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner and Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, Parodi is an armchair detective taken to an absurd degree. He’s a man who has been imprisoned for a murder (wrongly), and who solves crimes from a jail cell. Famous in Buenos Aires for his mental abilities, he receives visitors in his cell, and while he smokes cigarettes, brusque and aloof in his manner, they present “the mystery that troubles them.” On their second visit, they hear the solution, “which astounds young and old alike.” Through a tongue in cheek forward written by a fictional critic about Domecq, Borges and Bioy Casares lay out their purpose and method. The critic states that “an Argentine hero has made his appearance in a purely Argentine setting. What an uncommon pleasure it is…to savor a detective story which does not obey the rigid rules of a foreign Anglo-Saxon market.”

In actuality, the six stories are exaggerated versions of Anglo-Saxon detective fiction, working as both parodies and genuine mysteries. The “Nights of Goliadkin” features a phony priest calling himself Father Brown and takes place on a sleeper train filled with ridiculous, secret-laden passengers. “The God of the Bulls” has an impossible crime taking place on an isolated estate, but this being Argentina, the estate is on the pampas and a prime suspect is a man obsessed with gauchos. “Tai An’s Long Search” is narrated by a Chinese man, whose extreme humbleness and amiability seem to mock a stereotype in part reinforced by the Charlie Chan novels. Borges and Bioy Casares wrote stories that entertain in Don Parodi, but at the same time, to a certain extent, they deconstruct a genre they love.

The stories also illuminate Argentina in the early 1940’s. The tail end of what became known as the “Infamous Decade,” this was a period, before the rise of Juan Perón, marked by fraudulent elections and corruption. Though not known as political writers, Borges and Bioy Casares do present a great deal of social commentary in the book, integrated into the convoluted plots. “A satire on the Argentine,” is how Borges, in his “Autobiographical Essay,” describes it, and what a barbed picture the book gives. Starting with the verbose fictional critic, Gervasio Montenegro, who writes the collection’s forward, pomposity and falsehood are everywhere. Class divisions cause problems, families implode because of rivalries and cruelty, there’s a large divide between rural people and urban, and everybody seems to be commenting on the foreign roots of other people, though Argentina is a nation of immigrants. Not a single person who comes to Don Parodi with a story uses language in a direct manner; voice after voice he listens to is florid and deceptive. His logic cuts through all the pretension, and when he speaks, he is concise and clear. In a world of the self-serving, of dupes and schemers, Parodi stands for intellectual honesty. That he is in prison, and for a crime he didn’t commit, emphasizes the topsy-turvy quality of the world he inhabits.

Four years later, Bioy Casares collaborated on a second mystery, this one a novel. Written with his wife, Silvina Ocampo, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (Los que aman, Odian) came out in 1946 from Seventh Circle. It would be one of the few Spanish language works the imprint published.

 

Advice from Poe

 

Great advice from Edgar Allan Poe on writing:

• Employ an unreliable narrator, preferably one who doesn't know he is insane and has no recollection of such events as digging into a grave to rip out the teeth of his recently departed lover.
• Include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin, preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment.
• Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A little Latin will also enhance the text.
• Do not shy away from such grotesqueries as inebriation, imprisonment, insanity, and men costumed as orangutans being burned to death.

Jean-Paul Civeyrac's A Paris Education

Yesterday we saw Jean-Paul Civeyrac's A Paris Education, a sober and realistic tale of the intellectual and personal travails of young artists. I was taken back because its very realistic, un-romanticized review of the slow progress of a young person's thinking regarding their life and education as they make their way slowly through the typical obstacles of creating and thinking. Especially how it works with those around you who encourage and hamper your way. This black and white film is shot in a very straight forward fashion but that is what makes it more compelling and visually attractive. Though you think you will see lots of Paris but what you see is more of the run of the mill Paris and interiors of apartments, bars, and classrooms. Sounds like an Education. The acting is very strong and the side critique of film is edifying as the name dropping makes a lot of sense to those who love film. Only part I fault is the use of music-both pieces (Bach and Mahler) are a bit overused throughout the film but it is a minor quibble.Here is an interview by Civeyrac on the film:

No Film School: Why make a film about film school?

Jean-Paul Civeyrac: I didn't exactly want to make a film about film school. What I tried to do instead is to make a film about young people's desire for cinema, and these are people who meet each other at a university where they study film. I tried to capture the intensity and the seriousness of this desire for cinema that takes place at a time when studying is very important, as well as the work of artists—whether it's filmmakers or poets or painters or writers who fill us up. This is a time when these choices are really essential in a life. 

NFS: Some of the students in the film grapple with the idea that modern cinema is somewhat rehashed or contrived. Do you take that stance on modern cinema?

Civeyrac: This is the case for many young people who are starting out in cinema or are students in film. They find that contemporary cinema, whether it's commercial film or auteur cinema, somehow does not correspond to their expectations. It is this feeling of being unsatisfied and looking for something else. These unsatisfied young people have to look toward the cinema that does speak to them, and that can be both in works from the past, but also in works from the present.

In the film, we have this character of Eloise who makes films that are very artistically demanding and who Mattias recognizes as a very interesting filmmaker. I think that's what's at stake with these people's relationship to cinema—they're on a deep quest to find what speaks to them and what they identify with in cinema.

NFS: Many critics are saying that this film is, at least in part, an homage to the French New Wave. What of the style or aesthetic did you bring to this film?

Civeyrac: I think the essential contribution of the French New Wave was that it did not bury itself in commercial mechanisms of cinema. What the French New Wave filmmakers did is they tried to film or capture something that they themselves had lived. In fact, I have to say, I don't think that it's only the French New Wave. It's all the New Waves of the entire world throughout the 1960s.

If my film is close to the New Wave films, it's in this way of trying to capture something of my life experience. I tried to film something that is close to me—something that I know—and to do it outside of the machinery of the screenplay and so on. I wanted the film to discover its own style in doing so.

NFS: Can you talk a bit about your aesthetic approach to the film in terms of shooting in black and white and keeping your camera movement simple?

Civeyrac: I'll start with black and white. I felt like black and white allowed me to add a little bit of fiction—something novelistic to what ultimately was quite close to a chronicle of contemporary students' lives. So, the black and white added some feel of a story. Black and white also allows one to capture the subjectivity of the protagonist. 

In terms of style, I've made films where the camera was practically a character in the film. In this case, I did the contrary, which is that I attempted to have the camera basically just record what was going on in front of it: the dialogue. The camera is not trying to make things more beautiful than they are. I think the camera is at the same level as what's going on with the characters. The camera takes what the characters are going through very seriously, and it's not trying to create anything other than that particular thing.

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The Alternate Road to the Future

Last night I finally got an opportunity to see this incredible account of the jazz loft where photographer W. Eugene Smith and composer/musician Hal Overton lived during the late 50's and early 60's. When i first heard about this via the book The loft Project Book by  Sam Stephenson it sounded like a strange fantasy or a piece of fiction gone astray but it there is reality in this tale and the documentary does an excellent job of telling the main aspects of the story including Monk's big band concerts that Overton helped orchestrate. For a jazz aficionado it is as lovely and tragic as the recent documentary on Lee Morgan, I Called Him Morgan.

In today's visual culture these documentaries can be educational tools to help people with an aversion to reading learn about important people and recent history of an art form much more important than most universally. We saw it via the free library service Kanopy that we access through our library. It's an incredible service with lots of valuable cinema for free.

Two Years from Now

Here's an interesting blog post from Jacques Mattheij looking back two years from now on the pandemic:

Covid-19, a Retrospective

March 24, 2020

It’s been a couple of years now, since the 2020 Coronavirus disaster. Society is still not completely back to normal, and I doubt it ever will be. For instance, you can clearly see which movies were made before and after. People shake hands and hug complete stranger with abandon, something that today, even with the virus mostly under control still feels extremely un-natural and would immediately result in people freaking out or at a minimum speaking up and indicating the fact that they are unconformtable. The economy is still in recovery. And it probably will be for a long time. The see-sawing stock market was uncanny to watch. Fortunes were made, and fortunes were lost over the backs of the weakest in society, the elderly, the immunocompromised.

The virus didn’t really care much about the stockmarket. It didn’t read the newspaper, did not participate in politics and didn’t care one bit about whether or not we felt it was important or a danger. All it took was one butcher not cleaning his knife properly and it was done. Patient zero, a man in his 20’s in Wuhan, China, probably never even realized he had contracted it. By the time the seriousness of the situation was recognized it was much too late and the virus had been spreading for weeks. It’s a miracle of science that they managed to figure out how it happened.

Having a psychopath at the wheel of one of the largest and most influential countries in the world didn’t help, but, to be fair, his enablers and the callousness displayed by the people who believed themselves not to be at risk was as much or maybe even more of a factor than the leader. The progression right up to the point where the American ICUs started to overflow was mild enough that lots of people must have thought “I’m young and strong, nothing will happen to me”. If only. When Wuhan, China got barricaded everybody seemed to think: That’s China, far away from here. And when the North of Italy collapsed the same happened. Then Spain got the bill for that massive party they had, in order not to upset the tourism. By the time New York hospitals were overloaded you’d think that authorities would have wised up. But everywhere it was the exact same pattern: slowly trying to curb a disease that was spreading very rapidly with a long incubation time and zero immunity. It was a bad scenario, and collectively we made it so much worse than it had to be.

The deathtoll was well in the millions, and it hit the healthcare industry harder than any other. A large fraction of an entire generation of Doctors and nurses was lost. According to a randomized WHO antibody test which has by now been completed by most countries where the healthcare system has recovered (Spain and Italy are still too harmed to participate) only 35% of the world population caught the virus. It still springs up every now and then whenever a closely connected group of individuals gets infected, a bit like Ebola, only a lot closer.

Old people have become a rarity, especially in public. They as a group suffered more than most. It’s hard to meet their eyes, knowing that we live because so many of them died. Triage at the admittance to the ICUs was based on life expectancy and recovery expectancy. People over 60 were given some morphine for the pain and not much beyond that.

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On Duane Michals

From NYRB, focus ona favorite of mine as I was growing up-photographer Duane Michals:

Months before he turns eighty-eight, the photographer Duane Michals is in the full throes of a remarkable old-age efflorescence. Evidence to that effect fairly leaps off the brightly colored walls of his fascinating new exhibition, “Illusions of the Photographer,” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Michals has long been renowned for three great innovations: his hauntingly atmospheric, teasingly Surrealistic, almost cinematic sequences of pictorial narratives; his use of handwritten texts on small-scale black-and-white silver gelatin prints (the antithesis of the current rage for billboard-sized digitized color images); and his celebratory normalization of homoerotic male beauty, years before Robert Mapplethorpe’s freak-show fetishism and Bruce Weber’s consumer-culture beefcake. Yet, unlike artists who hit upon a commercially lucrative formula and then crank out endless fungible reiterations, Michals is something of a superannuated Huck Finn, an incorrigibly subversive and inimitably American scamp always lighting out for new creative territories.

It took me nearly an hour and a half to work my way through the single large gallery in which Michals and the Morgan’s astute photography curator, Joel Smith, have assembled nearly a hundred works by him and other artists (including Carlo Galli Bibiena, William Blake, and Egon Schiele, as well as the photographers Lewis Carroll, Eugène Atget, and Irving Penn), along with literary artifacts such as Voltaire’s red leather portfolio, Goethe’s quill pen, and an origami-like paper boat folded by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a kaleidoscopic mash-up that is part mini-retrospective and part artist’s choice survey. The latter format has become increasingly popular at museums with deep storage that can be raided for neglected holdings to illuminate the guest artist’s own body of work. Here, Smith combed through the Morgan’s quarter of a million objects and discovered an array of treasures that perfectly resonate with Michals’s quirky sensibility. The photographer in turn made the final selection, and even added items from his personal collection, including Victorian illustrated children’s books of the sort that beguiled the Surrealists. The collaborators then grouped their finds under ten rubrics that reflect the subject’s major concerns: Death, Illusion, Image and Word, Immortality, Love and Desire, Nature, Playtime, Reflection, Theater, and Time.

Among the many surprises are sixteen short color films (with running times from under two to over twelve minutes) that Michals has produced and directed since 2015, all of which will be screened at the Morgan during the run of the show. They range from a scatological one-liner (Trickle Down, 2018, in which Michals urinates on a Rolls Royce, his commentary on conspicuous consumption) and a tense domestic drama (Interruptus, 2018, features a women walking in on her husband as he puts the moves on another man), and from topical political protest (Deport Trump, 2016) to an enigmatic fantasy that blends Commedia dell’Arte, Cocteau, and Sixties psychedelia (YORT, 2019). Also on view are several other late-life Michals enthusiasms, including the anonymous nineteenth-century tintypes that he overpaints with abstract motifs inspired by his favorite modern art movement, Cubism. There are also examples of his postmillennial fan-shaped color photos inspired by nineteenth-century Japonisme and epitomized by a lyrical quartet of views of his upstate New York garden in all four seasons.

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House Made of Sugar by Silvina Ocampo

Longreads has published online a translated short story by the Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo who is finally receiving the recognition she deserves. Here is The House Made of Sugar: a short story from the collection Thus Were Their Faces:

Superstitions kept Cristina from living. A coin with a blurry face, a spot of ink, the moon seen through two panes of glass, the initials of her name carved by chance on the trunk of a cedar: all these would make her mad with fear. The day we met she was wearing a green dress; she kept wearing it until it fell apart, since she said it brought her good luck and that as soon as she wore another, a blue one that fit her better, we would no longer see each other. I tried to combat these absurd manias. I made her see that she had a broken mirror in her room, yet she insisted on keeping it, no matter how I insisted that it was better to throw broken mirrors into water on a moonlit night to get rid of bad luck. She was never afraid if the lamps in the house went out all of a sudden; despite the fact that it was definitely an omen of death, she would light any number of candles without thinking twice. She always left her hat on the bed, a mistake nobody else made. Her fears were more personal. She inflicted real privations on herself; for instance, she could not eat strawberries in the summer, or hear certain pieces of music, or adorn her house with goldfish, although she liked them a lot. There were certain streets we couldn’t cross, certain people we couldn’t see, certain movie theaters we couldn’t go to. Early in our relationship, these superstitions seemed charming to me, but later they began to annoy and even seriously worry me. When we got engaged we had to look for a brand-new apartment because, according to her, the fate of the previous occupants would influence her life. (She at no point mentioned my life, as if the danger threatened only hers and our lives were not joined by love.) We visited all of the neighborhoods in the city; we went to even the most distant suburbs in search of an apartment where no one had ever lived, but they had all been rented or sold. Finally I found a little house on Montes de Oca Street that looked as if it were made of sugar. Its whiteness gleamed with extraordinary brilliance. It had a phone inside and a tiny garden in front. I thought the house was newly built, but discovered that a family had occupied it in 1930 and that later, to rent it out, the owner had remodeled it. I had to make Cristina believe no one had lived in the house and that it was the ideal place, the house of our dreams. When Cristina saw it, she cried out, “How different it is from the apartments we have seen! Here it smells clean. Nobody will be able to influence our lives or soil them with thoughts that corrupt the air.”

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Silvina Ocampo's Memory

Silvina and Bioy

From LitHub, Maria Enriquez writes about Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo:

She was unique, different, seductive, like no one else in the world. That’s what people who knew her say. They try to evoke her, hands in the air, eyes lit up by memory, and when they start to reference the anecdote that would define Silvina Ocampo’s singular brilliance, they shake their heads and smile shyly. “Whenever I try to tell a story about her it always seems silly. She comes off as crazy, or stupid. And she was absolutely neither of those things.” They can’t call her up or bring back that disquieting fascination that so bewitched them. Silvina took her mystery with her.

Those who remember her have only snippets that don’t form a complete image. Silvina walking along the roadside, alone, when she spent the summer in the countryside. Silvina apologizing because she didn’t have sugar for the coffee, because the cockroaches had eaten it. Silvina observing a parade of ants: “If they were capable of thought, they would commit suicide.” Silvina refusing to have her picture taken, wearing her perpetual white-framed sunglasses and her men’s clothing. They remember her legs—beautiful—and her impossible voice, broken and hesitant; they remember her talking on the phone for hours, lying on the sofa. They whisper that she was psychic; she predicted storms, passions, misfortunes.

For many years, Silvina Ocampo, eccentric aristocrat, wife of Adolfo Bioy Casares, intimate friend of Jorge Luis Borges, was the only woman recognized as a writer in Argentina. Of course there were others, contemporaries and predecessors, but it was her name that was taken for granted and considered to be enough. Her social position and her relationships contributed to this unanimous recognition.

Born in 1903, she was the youngest daughter of the Ocampo family, which was among the richest in Argentina, owners of great tracts of land used for livestock and agriculture; the Ocampos were exporters and traders of products that came from working the land. As a child, Silvina learned English, French, and Italian before she learned Spanish; for her class it was the least important language, in spite of the fact that it was the one spoken in the country where they lived. She never went to school or university, or to any educational institution at all: the Ocampos educated their daughters with governesses, at home. The family traveled often to Europe—they had their own apartment in Paris, and they would bring a cow or two over with them on the ship, so the girls could have fresh milk to drink.

That was her childhood, in a country that wouldn’t have universal suffrage until 1912, a nation controlled by an elite that managed power through fraud, repression, and disorder—an elite to which her family belonged. That world of privilege implied an army of domestic employees and nannies, especially at their extravagant mansion in San Isidro, a lovely suburb to the north of Buenos Aires: the house, with its ocher walls and grey slate roofs, part French chateau and part Italian villa, was located on an estate of over ten hectares that ended at the river, with sumptuous gardens and all kinds of domestic animals. In that house, Silvina was free. Her parents were not strict with her. Preoccupied with raising their older daughters—especially the firstborn, Victoria—they neglected their youngest, and she experienced that distraction as pure escape.

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The Logic of Guilt

 

Vallejo Nocturno 2019 - Baltimore MD

The Logic of Guilt

It was true, but I would contest.

The blue car, the red lipstick, the receipt, all were false. Fake.

I was in Singapore. Not in NYC.

There were photographs to prove it. A hotel bill.

There were things that no one notices. The broken lock, her misguide eye, some dirty laundry.

The image was very blurry but I was not there.

I had witnesses, all with good recollections and solid reputations.

They provided their depositions. We had several translators.

They all knew what they thought and what they saw.

My lawyer advised me not to to talk.

It was a simple process.

The evening was getting late, the mountains spoke another language.

The prosecutor obtained some lies from others.

We had some shots of Bowmore No. 1 to celebrate.

But there was more, some stolen jewelry, the perfume spilled in the bathroom, and the missing painting.

The morning afterwards, a walk in the park and some sunlight.

End of story