Boxer, Beetle (5)

The Boxer Beetle web site has disappeared, so here is the best I can give you, from the ghost web: Boxer, Beetle. I reproduce the images below:

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (5)

I just finished reading Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I don't want to plant major spoilers in this blog, so I will say that there are two major mysteries solved in the end: the nature of the monstrous conspiracy engineered by Litvak, and the murder of Mendel Shpilman. And the subplot of the relationship between  Meyer Landsman and his ex-wife Bina Gelbfish (now Meyer's boss in the police department) assumes a major role in the end.

As to the leading forces behind the conspiracy, there is a true believer, the cynical manipulator Litvak, and perhaps the most powerful faction which in the real world would correspond to the Christian Zionists. But here is what Litvak thinks (p. 345):

In return for providing them with manpower, a Messiah, and financing beyond their wildest dreams, the only thing that Litvak had ever asked of his partners, clients, employers, and associates in this venture was that he never be expected to believe the nonsense that they believed. Where they saw the fruit of divine wishes in a newborn red heifer, he saw the product of $1 million in taxpayer dollars spent secretly on bull semen and in vitro fertilization. In the eventual burning of this little red cow, they saw the purification of all Israel and the fulfillment of a millenia-old promise; Litvak saw, at most, a necessary move in an ancient game--the survival of the Jews.

As Landsman comes face to face with the key player in the American government who facilitates the plot, he is disgusted with the whole game (p. 368):

"Fuck what it written," Landsman says. "You know what?" All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. "I don't care what it written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hair-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

He sits down. He lights another cigarette.

"Fuck you," Landsman concludes. "And fuck Jesus, too. he was a pussy."

On page 372 you will find an account of Landsman's dream about Einstein, chess, Landsman's sister, and the destiny of the Jews.

Bina, like Landsman, realizes the extent to which she is only a pawn. Omitting egregious spoilers, I'm quoting part of what she says to Meyer (p. 375):

"God damn them all. I always knew they were there. Down there in Washington. Up there over our heads. Holding the strings. Setting the agenda. Of course I knew that. We all knew that. We all grew up knowing that, right? We are here on sufferance. Houseguests. But they ignored us for so long. Left us to our own devices. It was easy to kid yourself. Make you think you had a little autonomy, in a small way, nothing fancy. I thought I was working for everyone. [.....]"

A little later Landsman ruminates (p. 280):

Landsman considers the cohort of yids who arrived with his father, those who were not broken by suffering and horror but rather somehow resolved. The former partisans, resisters, Communist gunmen, left-Zionist saboteurs--the rabble, as they were styled in the newspapers of the south--who showed up in Sitka after the war with their vulcanized souls and fought with Polar Bears like Hertz Shemets their brief, doomed battle for control of the District. They knew, those bold and devastated men, knew as they knew the flavor of the tongues in their mouths, that their saviors would one day betray them. They walked into this wild country that had never seen a Jew and set about preparing for the day when they would be rounded up, sent packing, forced to make a stand. Then, one by one, these wised-up angry men and women had been coopted, picked off, fattened up, set against one another, or defanged by Uncle Hertz and his endless operations.

That's about all I can reveal of the plot. As for my overall evaluation, I have come to admire Chabon's fictional achievement. It really does take a lot to write a novel like this. I am not so taken with the nature of the apocalyptic conspiracy that forms the linchpin of the plot, but perhaps that reflects the prevalence now of the theocratic fascism that threatens to destroy the world. Ultimately, this is a meditation on the precarious nature of Jewish identity, which, in the confines of this scenario makes sense, whether or not it would be my main preoccupation in the real world. Chabon's style is quite rich, and he does successfully create a noirish evironment, in which the authenticity of his own Yiddishisms doesn't matter so much.

When you are finished reading the novel, think again about the title.

In addition to the installments of this review, if you follow the subject "Michael Chabon" on this blog, you will find meditations about alternative history and historically oriented novels in general, Jewish and otherwise. I rarely read novels, but before this, I read Ned Bauman's Boxer, Beetle, which featured a seedy lower class Jewish milieu in the East End of London in the 1930s. I don't have much to go on to posit a trend, but I can speculate.

If there is some trend of writing Jewish historical fiction and alternate histories--the ones I know are those in which Esperanto and Zamenhof pop up--it must mean something about an attitude toward the present, as if there were past potentialities according to which things might have turned out differently. But I don't know enough about any of the authors to know their minds, and while I know why Jews and others would be disillusioned with American society or the contemporary world as a whole, I am too far removed from specifically Jewish concerns and their corresponding milieu to know what Jewish authors think about Jews, if generalizations are supportable.

As you know, the whodunit begins with a burned-out, alcohol-besodden detective investigating the murder of a chess-playing junkie in the run-down Hotel Zamenhof in which they both reside. In the end there's a bit of redemption for Meyer Landsman, though not for the society in which he lives. I haven't researched enough of Michael Chabon to know whether Hotel Zamenhof is so named in order to contrast the shabbiness of the reality with the utopian ideal. Zamenhof was a pioneer of the Zionist movement in its earliest stages and renounced it by the time it was becoming a real project, favoring a universalist humanistic project even while still working on the problem of adapting East European Jewry to the modern world. Zamenhof only gets brief mention in the novel as a putative ghost. Perhaps whatever redemption there is must be covered in the grime of hard experience. Perhaps there is at least a reminder of the possibility of redemption in our Hotel Zamenhof?

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (4)

The actual novel Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union comprises 411 pages, including the prefatory quote:

And they went to sea in a sieve -- Edward Lear

But there is also back matter, consisting of a glossary, author's note [acknowledgments] , bio of the author, "The Frozen Chosen" by Patricia Cohen, "Guidebook to a Land of Ghosts" by Michael Chabon, blurbs about Chabon's other fiction, advert for the CD audio of the book performed by actor Peter Riegert.

Cohen's essay, originally published in The New York Times, gives us a portrait of Chabon in the real Sitka, Alaska, along with his thoughts about the construction of his fictional universe. Apparently, in reality Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, actually in 1940 did support opening up the Alaska territory to European Jews. Chabon got in hot water for his essay triggered by his reaction to the 1958 phrase book Say It in Yiddish, and started thinking about an imaginary Yiddishland. Cohen describes the real Sitka and its Jewish and other inhabitants. From the interview with Chabon, we learn that Chabon found an affinity between Isaac Babel in English and hard-boiled detective fiction. Also about Chabon's approach to style:"I felt like I had to invent a whole new language, a dialect." He explains the creation of his own slang as well as his approach to the characters and detective fiction generally.

Cohen was motivated by the themes of destiny and chosenness, and wondering what the world would be like minus the state of Israel. "How mad it seems that this tiny little scrap of land [would be central in global geopolitics] . . . . I have a very strong feeling of complete ambivalence about a world without Israel . . . . I didn't come in with a point to prove or an agenda."

Chabon's 1997 essay on Yiddish, which appeared in Harper's magazine, is reprinted in the book. He takes Uriel and Beatrice Weinreich's Say It in Yiddish as an exercise in futility. As Yiddish had been abandoned by Israel for Hebrew, leaving surviving Yiddish speakers stranded in limbo, the actual application of Yiddish to contemporary situations--booking a plane flight, for example--to be fantasy. Hence Chabon fantasizes about an alternative Yiddish-speaking homeland. Would its denizens be as rough and tough as Israelis? And here is the germ of his future novel. And then he wonders what Jewish Europe would have been like had it been spared the Holocaust.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (3)

I've now read 40 chapters, about 360 pages, with six chapters (about 50 pages) to go.

Occasionally my attention has strayed and I lost the thread of what was going on, but it always picked up again and stayed glued for a long while to this whodunit. As a crime novel with pseudo-Yiddishkeit, this is a great read. What its meaning or message is eludes me, but perhaps that too is part of the whodunit.

The plot revolves around detective Meyer Landsman's unrelenting, unauthorized drive to resolve the murder of Mendel Shpilman (a.k.a. Emanuel Lasker) at their common home, the Hotel Zamenhof. The Hotel Zamenhof, born of high ideals, is a seedy, degenerated dive. Perhaps this contrast was intended by Chabon?  Landsman is an unlikely hero, and Shpilman a dodgy candidate for the role for which he was groomed. The Jewish settlement of the Sitka district of Alaska, temporarily reserved for Jewish refugees with its own governing structure but now facing Reversion to Alaskan control, is now endangered. The Jews are not only unsettled by this prospect, but their entire existence is askew, uncomfortable, damaged and wounded, far remote from ideals or utopian visions, compromised not only by their difficult circumstances but by their internal politics and their relations with both the indigenous people and the American government. The worst among the Jews are the ultra-orthodox, who wield illegitimate political power and harbor a gangster element among them. And the manipulation of their religious fanaticism could prove to be the world's undoing.

Perhaps I am not the only one tempted to draw parallels between this alternate history and real history.  But I have no real clue as to Chabon's intent.

There is a history of struggle between the Jews and the Tlingit, with multiethnic offspring and antagonistic friendships in the mix, as one would expect. Here is an extract from one colorful exchange illustrating the situation (p. 283):

[....] "Johnny the Jew," he says. "Well, well. Beanie and all. Clearly you haven't had any difficulties lately saying the holy blessing over the Filipino donut."

"Fuck you, Dick, you anti-Semitic midget."

"Fuck you, Johnny, and your chickenshit insinuations about my integrity as a police officer."

In his rich but rusty Tlingit, Berko expresses a wish to one day see Dick lying dead and shoeless in the snow.

"Go shit in the ocean," Dick says in flawless Yiddish.

They step toward each other, and the large man takes the small one into his embrace. [....]

There's more to this priceless dialogue. Dick also has more to say about his boundless suspicion of Jews (285).

There is more to the linguistic mix as well, as Jews of different social origins have different linguistic peculiarities.  Here is an example of something new to Landsman (p. 286).

"Hebrew?" Berko says. "Mexicans speaking Hebrew?"

"That's what it sounded like to me," Landsman says. "Not synagogue Hebrew, either." Landsman knows Hebrew when he hears it. But the Hebrew he knows is the traditional brand, the one his ancestors carried with them through the millennia of their European exile, oily and salty as a piece of fish smoked to preserve it, its flesh flavored strongly by Yiddish. That kind of Hebrew is never employed for human conversation. It's only for talking to God. If it was Hebrew that Landsman heard at Peril Strait, it was not the old salt-herring tongue but some spiky dialect, a language of alkali and rocks. It sounded to him like the Hebrew brought over by the Zionists after 1948. Those hard desert Jews tried fiercely to hold on to it in their exile but, as with the German Jews before them, got overwhelmed by the teeming tumult of Yiddish, and by the painful association of their language with recent failure and disaster. As far as Landsman knows, that kind of Hebrew is extinct except among a few last holdouts meeting annually in lonely halls.

I have no idea whether these graphic analogies are apt for any variant of Hebrew or Yiddish. They do in any case illustrate Chabon's vivid style, and they are suggestive of the social/political realities associated with these languages. Note also the reversal of the fates of Yiddish and Hebrew. Remember that in this alternative history the fledgling state of Israel is destroyed, and the Yiddish-speaking Jews dominate the Jewish settlement in Sitka.

The generation that settled in Alaska found a great disparity between the imagined fables of Alaska and the reality found there. Its songs mark this disillusionment. (291)

Two million Jews got off the boats and found no rolling prairies dotted with buffalo. No feathered Indians on horseback. Only a spine of flooded mountains and fifty thousand Tlingit village-dwellers already in possession of most of the flat and usable land. Nowhere to spread out, to grow, to do anything more than crowd together in the teeming style of Vilna and Lodz. The homesteading dreams of a million landless Jews, fanned by movies, light fiction, and informational brochures provided by the United States Department of the Interior--snuffed on arrival. Every few years some utopian society or other would acquire a tract of green that reminded some dreamer of a cow pasture. They would found a colony, import livestock, pen a manifesto. And then the climate, the markets, and the streak of doom that marbled Jewish life would work their charm. The dream farm would languish and fail.

Just a story, or is there more behind Chabon's fictional creation?

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2)

I've now read 22 chapters of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, approaching 200 pages.The plot moved quite slowly as the overall scenario of the Jewish colony in Alaska was in the process of being laid out step by step. Chabon's use of language is quite adroit, and his capacity for description is quite rich. Note that the narrative is written in the present tense, rather than in the past tense as is customary in the English language. I cannot comment on Chabon's dialogue, except for noticing some clever turns of phrase, as I am not conversant with Yiddish culture to judge how he re-creates it in his alternate universe.

The novel is heavily sprinkled with yiddishisms, which I do not understand. The characters, particularly the main character Landsman, always refers to Jews as 'yids'.  Whether or not this is a derogatory term in context I do not know, but it does not sound very flattering.

There are references to real-world Jewish public figures. There is a Max Nordau (pioneer Zionist) Street and a Peretz (I. L. Peretz, Yiddish poet) Street. There is an Einstein Chess Club. The murder victim who is the focal point of the plot is pseudonymously known as Emanuel Lasker (named after a chess champion, who also wrote about other games, e.g. Go).

The Jewish society we see here is not very attractive. There's a low class seediness about it, that begins with the run-down Zamenhof hotel, and the vista of crudity spreads out from there.The orthodox fanatics are referred to as 'black hats'. The Verbovers have their own island, and regard Landsman, who is there investigating the murder, as an interloper, and there is no love lost on his part either. They have inordinate political influence, and there is a fraction of them involved in organized crime. The Jews' relations with the Indians, i.e. the indigenous Alaskans, is none too friendly, either. The overall picture is not pretty. Other than storytelling, if there is a thematic purpose to Chabon's narrative, I do not know yet what it is.

Landsman is divorced, but his ex-wife Bina becomes his boss in the police department. Word comes down to scotch the murder case, but he can't leave it alone.  The Jewish settlement faces Reversion, which presumably means the loss of the Jewish franchise of the colony, which means a certain percentage of the Jewish residents will have to disperse.  Israel itself was destroyed in 1948. An interesting alternate history scenario, to be sure.

There is only one place so far where we learn more about the political factions that once were part of the fabric of the colony (p. 76):

For forty years--as Denny Brennan's series revealed--Hertz Shemets used his position as local director of the FBI's surveillance program  to run his own private game on the Americans. The Bureau first recruited him in the fifties  to fight Communists and the Yiddish Left, which, though fractious, was strong, hardened, embittered, suspicious of the Americans, and, in the case of the former Israelis, not especially grateful to be here. Here Shemetz's brief was to monitor and infiltrate the local Red population; Hertz wiped them out. He fed the socialists to the Communists, and the Stalinists to the Trotskyites, and the Hebrew Zionists to the Yiddish Zionists, and when feeding time was over, he wiped the mouths of those still standing and fed them to each other. Starting in the late sixties, Hertz was turned loose on the nascent radical movement among the Tlingit, and in time he pulled its teeth and claws, too.

As much care as Chabon takes to delineate this society, I found my attention flagging after a while, until, while visiting the Verboters, Landsman confronts the rebbe with the death of 'Emanuel Lasker', whose real identity has just been uncovered. From there I've been riveted to the narrative.

Now on to the Esperanto references.

'Elevatoro', an Esperanto word which appears twice so far, does not really mean 'elevator' in the sense of transporting people: that would be 'lifto'. An 'elevatoro' is more like a winch that lifts cargo.

Hotel Zamenhof is a centerpiece of the narrator. As for Zamenhof the man, he is thought to be a ghost:

"You know what Kohn says," says Tenenboym. Kohn says we got a ghost in the house." Kohn is the day manager. "Taking shit, moving shit around. Hohn figures it for the ghost of Professor Zamenhof."

"If they named a dump like this after me," Landsman says, "I'd haunt it, too."

"You never know," Tennenboym observes. "Especially nowadays." [pp. 12-13]

Much later, while Landsman is on forced leave while recovering from a bullet wound, his ex-wife Bina visits his hovel in the Hotel Zamenhof:

She wades through pieces of Landsman's gray suit and a bath towel and stands at the foot of the bed. Her eyes take in the pink wallpaper patterned with garlands in burgundy flock, the green plush carpet with its random motif of burn spots and mystery stains, the broken glass, the empty bottle, the peeling and chipped veneer of the pressboard furniture. Watching her with his head at the foot of the pull-down bed, Landsman enjoys the look of horror on her face, mostly because if he doesn't, then he will have to feel ashamed.

"How do you say 'shit heap' in Esperanto?" Bina says. She goes over to the veneer table and looks down at the last bedraggled curls of noodle pudding lying in the grease-streaked clamshell. [pp. 163-164]

The Yiddish Policemen's Union (1)

Opening sentence of Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union:

"Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered."

The hotel of course is named after L.L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, whose 153rd birthday is coming on December 15. So in honor of Zamenhof's birthday, I begin reading this alternate history novel. Is alternate history good for the Jews?

"Landsman puts his hand on Tenenboym’s shoulder, and they go down to take stock of the deceased, squeezing into the Zamenhof’s lone elevator, or ELEVATORO, as a small brass plate over the door would have it. When the hotel was built 50 years ago, all of its directional signs, labels, notices, and warnings were printed on brass plates in Esperanto. Most of them are long gone, victims of neglect, vandalism, or the fire code." [p. 3]

Omaĝe al la venonta naskiĝtago de Zamenhof, mi komencas legi ĉi tiun ukronian romanon (La Jida Policana Sindikato/Unio), en kiu situas Hotelo Zamenhof.

Boxer, Beetle (4)

Boxer, Beetle has been blurbed as hilarious. I would call it satirical in the extreme, but I haven't been laughing.

There are no redeeming characters in the book. Not only are the fascists obnoxious and stupid, but their would-be victims, the underclass East Ender Jews of London, are primitive and crude. Seth "Sinner" Roach is the crudest of them: a malformed boxer who lives to fight, who hates Jew-haters but has no political perspective, only selfish interest. His bizarre symbiosis with the anti-Semitic fascist entomologist and amateur eugenicist Philip Erskine and their mutual fate is the focal point of the mystery Kevin Broom is trying to solve under extreme duress in the present. As the narrative toggles between tracking down vanished persons and the obscure events of 1936, we descend further and further into the pit.

Erskine not only names a beetle he has bred after Hitler, he receives an effusive letter from Hitler. Sinner becomes a mercenary in a brewing battle in the East End as Mosley's fascists storm the area to confront the Jews, who are poised for battle.

Well, Broom and his kidnapper (and the latter's mysterious boss) finally solve the mystery of the boxer and the beetles, as do we in a flashback to October 1936. Both halves of the story conclude with no justice meted out to the bad guys, no good guys to win or lose, no redemption and no moral. This satiric portrait of degradation and fascism is a brilliantly written tour de force, well worth reading, but don't expect any wisdom to be gotten from it.

What this young man is about I do not know, or if this novel bespeaks a trend in Jewish fiction, but you can learn more about the author and his work at Ned Bauman's web site, which also links to his blog "Oh my god look at its little face!". Bauman, born in 1985, studied philosophy in Cambridge. Make of that what you will. There is also a bibliography for this novel. The references for artificial languages are:

The Artificial Language Movement by Andrew Large (1985)
Esperanto: Language, Literature and Community by Pierre Janton, ed. Humphrey Tonkin (1993)

Boxer, Beetle (3)

In the present (Chapter 12 of Boxer, Beetle) the narrator is kidnapped to Claramore, where the key to the quest is thought to be: an incident suspected to have taken place at a fascist conference in 1936.

Then we are back in 1936, at Claramore, the bizarre estate of the Erskine family. William Erskine, inheritor of the estate, rigged it up with high-tech (for 1936) inventions and gizmos in accordance with his vision of the technological future.

Sinner (Seth Roach) and Philip Erskine arrive for the upcoming conference. Pangaean gets mentioned a few more times (145, 149, 163). Philip's father William reads the son's manuscript and decides to have it bound. Later on as the drama at the household reaches a macabre climax, Erskine--which Erskine I'm not certain--has a morbid fantasy involving the third Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon.

It also bears mentioning that Evelyn, Philip's sister, is an aficionado and composer of atonal music, which she ends up attempting to justify to Sinner (171). I mention this noting that one of the prefatory quotes to the novel comes from Adorno on dissonance.

Chapter 13 (August 1936) teaches us that the entire family and the assembled fascist guests all belong in a looney bin. It's a bizarro Addams Family world, only truly morbid. And each fascist we encounter is crazier than the next; each insists on the peculiarities of his own cobbled together world view, such that none can agree and all end up bickering.

Chapter 14 begins with footman Alex Goodman obsessed with two goals: marrying Evelyn's maid, and securing a "top-class conjugal safety coffin." But that's normal compared to what transpires by the end of Chapter 15, as the insanity at Claramore reaches a climax, in more ways than one.

Boxer, Beetle (2)

In the past two days I have read 11 chapters (133 pages) of Ned Beauman's novel Boxer, Beetle. It's a real page-turner, compelling reading, superbly written, and highly absurdist.

Chapter 10 (Autumn 1881), on which I reported in my previous post on this book, is actually a historical digression from the main two plots. incorporates the real history of artificial languages into the fiction. Erasmus Erskine appears to be the grandfather of Philip Erskine, entomologist, eugenicist, Nazi sympathizer. His main occupation is finding and breeding beetles, until he secures the cooperation of gay, nine-toed Jewish Boxer Seth "Sinner" Roach to serve as a guinea pig for a eugenics experiment. This scenario takes place in Britain in the 1930s.

The other main plot takes place in the present, in which Kevin Broom, a collector of Nazi memorabilia, is sucked into a nefarious intrigue involving the sordid past just described.

At the end of chapter 9, Philip Erskine is forced by his father to leave beetles and boxers be for a time in order to complete another project:

"It was time to write the history of Pangaean--the Erskine dynasty's greatest pride, and greatest embarrassment."

So the chapter on artificial languages, though seemingly out of place, is a historical flashback from the 1930s, and pits not only artificial languages against one another, but anti-Semite against Jew.  Erasmus Erskine, creator of Pangaean, wants to abolish adverbs as well as Jews. In 1881, "on the same day that the Jews were driven out of Fluek, the adverbs were driven out of the English language." Meanwhile, far away in Poland, Seth Roach's grandparents prepare to fight off a pogrom.

Erskine, bigoted and obsessed, makes Pangaean so complicated and difficult, that even he can't master his language.

"He was even forced to consider putting the adverbs back in, but concluded that he had left himself no room for them, on the same day in June 1882 that Sinner's grandfather returned with his wife and daughters to Fluek, where they were told by local officials that, according to Alexander III's new Temporary Regulations, no Jews were allowed to settle in the countryside of Russian Poland."

So they left Fluek and ended up in Bialystok (in real life, the birthplace of Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto), where Sinner's father "was born on the same day that Erskine completed the 998-page first draft of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon."

Pangaean, of course, never existed, but the real history of the international language movement, with some historical distortions, serves as the backdrop for the unhappy fate of Pangaean. Erskine opposes Esperanto as a Jewish language, as did Hitler later on, but as fate would have it, Hitler ends up banning Pangaean as well as Esperanto.

Boxer, Beetle

First, here is the web site for the novel Boxer, Beetle.

The novel is prefaced by two quotes. The first is from Jane Jacobs, from her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The second:

"Dissonance is the truth about harmony." -- Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Who knew?

I don't follow trends in fiction generally, or even in various fictional genres, but I have taken note of several contemporary Jewish novelists who have immersed their imaginations in the cultural environments that would have been familiar to their great grandparents, often incorporating real historical figures, or creating alternate histories. Michael Chabon and Joseph Skibell come immediately to mind.  I suppose then it should not be too surprising that Esperanto and its Eastern European Jewish creator L. L. Zamenhof would appear in this fiction. Ned Bauman's novel, published in 2010, can be added to this list.

Entomologists, eugenicists, Nazis, and a Jewish boxer occupy this scenario. Chapter 10 (Autumn 1881) incorporates the real history of artificial languages into the fiction. Erasmus Erskine insists that in a true philosophical language, ambiguity would be eliminated. There is speculation about an alleged archaeological finding of a legendary ancient advanced civilization and the language its inhabitants would have spoken. Sudre's musical language Solresol is mentioned as is perhaps the oldest recorded example of an artificial language, produced in the 12th century by St. Hildegard. The era of a priori constructed languages is mentioned. In the same era in which pogroms in Eastern Europe are feared on a daily basis, Erskine pursues his project, until in January 1890 Erskine completes "the 998-page first draft of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon." Zamenhof's native city of Bialystok is also part of the story.

Erskine's friend Thurlow continues to discourage the project, mentioning Volapuk had already achieved success and was a far superior language than Pangaean and easier to learn. (The irony!) But Erskine is more irritated that someone of his acquaintance, Marcus Amersham, is working on his own artificial language Orba, and has a club devoted to it. Amersham's publications include forms to which the reader can subscribe promising to learn the language if 10 million other people do so. This fictional item is borrowed from real life Zamenhof's initial attempt to promote Esperanto.

Esperanto then makes its appearance: "But by 1901 Pangaean, Orba and Volapuk were all being swept aside by the onrush of Esperanto." A few paraphrased quotes from Zamenhof are adduced to demonstrate Zamenhof's Jewish motivation. Erskine learns about the forthcoming Delegation for
the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language (which in real life selected the dark horse Ido, resulting in the famous Esperanto-Ido schism),  and is determined to counterpose Pangaean to the Jewish cosmopolitan Esperanto and mold his language accordingly. Erskine, apparently, is an anti-Semite and presumably a non-Jew.

The 1903 Delegation could not gain assent to its authority, and so no new language definitely triumphed. Bauman correctly describes Hitler's animosity to Esperanto and the Nazi extermination of Zamenhof's family, but adds the fictional element that Hitler bans Pangaean as well as Esperanto. To Stalin's real-life persecution of Esperantists is added Stalin's unverified anecdotal inability to learn Esperanto and purely fictional inability to learn the fictional Pangaean.

And now the final SPOILER: Erskine catches Thurlow with his wife, with a book of Orba grammar between them. Devastated, Erskine discards his notes for the third edition of the Pangaean Grammar and Lexicon.  I have deliberately kept this description as dry as possible, because the actual writing is hilarious.

And undoubtedly the balance of this award-nominated novel is equally as entertaining.

Steampunk & history

Steampunk is the imagined futurology of the past. As such, at its best it invites a critical approach to the real past and its unrealized potentialities. Steampunk is a product of our time, and thus a comparison with the imaginative universe of the real 19th century, and the imagined worlds at various points in the 20th century, is warranted.  There remains the question of what we are imagining now about our future, and what is actually in the cards for the 21st century.  For all we know, we are winding up our assessment of our entire human history and our species will not survive this century.

Esperanto literature has its own history of utopian and futuristic visions. You can find several of them, spanning the 20th century up to the 1970s, in William Auld's 1981 survey of original novels in Esperanto, Vereco, Distro, Stilo: Romanoj en Esperanto [Veracity, Amusement, Style: Novels in Esperanto]. Esperanto fiction exploded in the 1970s and afterward, so this survey is seriously incomplete. None of the other authors cited in Auld's book can compare to the historical importance of the work of Hungarian Esperantist author Sándor Szathmári.

But as Esperanto evolves with the times, Steampunk appears in Esperanto literature as Esperanto appears in the literature of Steampunk and alternate history.

But now here are some interesting links to viewpoints (in English) on Steampunk and historical perspective:

Cultural Historian, James Carrott Part 1 – Steampunk | The Tomorrow Project

Cultural Historian, James Carrott Part 2 – Steampunk | The Tomorrow Project

CultHistorian (blog by James H. Carrott)

Trial by Steam (history of Steampunk)

Steampunk and History (GD Falksen)

The Importance Of The Responsible Use Of History In Fiction, June 27, 2012 by bryantschmidt

Steampunk is also a commodity of late capitalism. Thanks to this workshop, you too can learn to configure your imaginary world:

Tweaking History: Steampunk And Other Tales Of Alternate History

And the ideological and institutional place of Steampunk in today's real society is intriguingly, and perhaps ambiguously, presented to us here:

“Can Steampunk Look Towards the Future?” Vintage Tomorrows Screening Report by Ay-leen the Peacemaker

Recenzoj de Joseph Skibell

Beletra Almanako, N-ro 13, Februaro 2012 (6-a jaro)

Aldone al intervjuo kun Joseph Skibell, enestas en ĉi tiu numero du recenzoj de A Curable Romantic [Kuracebla Romantikulo], fare de:

Anna Löwenstein (137-141);

Esther Schor, el la angla tradukis Brian Moon (141-146).

Mi jam blogis pri la originala anglalingva recenzo de Schor, kiu aperis en:

The Crooked Heart by Esther Schor; review of A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell; The New Republic online review, September 10, 2010.

Löwenstein taksas la ĉefrolulon Jakob Sammelsohn "epopea senspinulo"kaj la romanon "tre juda libro." Skibell montras D-ron Zamenhof el ne-ŝablona perspektivo. Skibell tro detaligas pri la aferoj de la Esperanto-movado, kiel eble ne taŭgas por neesperantista legontaro. Sekvas kelkaj aliaj kritikoj.

Schor diras:

Temas pri energi-riĉa, senbrida enscenigo, same vaste kiel la apetitoj de ĝia protagonisto - la postmoderna juda romano kiel kunkirlaĵo de ĝenroj: jida folklora rakonto, edukado de la sentoj, freŭda kazostudo, erotika konfesaĵo, utopia parabolo, ĉio envolvita en "alternativa historio" pri emancipiĝo de la judoj, kiun hantas la figuro de Dreyfus kaj ebriigas la sorĉaj plezuroj de la lingvo Esperanto.

Sekvas detala resumo kaj pritrakto. Apud la fino ŝi diras:

Lukács fame aljuĝis al Walter Scott la meriton inventi la modernan historian romanon. La geniaĵo de Scott estis, ke li lokis ajnulon meze en la historio kaj uzis lin (aŭ ŝin) por refrakti la potencojn de reĝoj kaj reĝinoj, tiranoj kaj popolamasoj. Sed en la eksterordinara romano de Joseph Skibell, eĉ la ŝajna ajnulo ne estas apudstaranto en la historio.

Do jen kelkaj tentaĵoj al legado de ĉi tiuj recenzoj.

Intervjuo kun Joseph Skibell

Mi jam blogis kelkfoje pri la anglalingva romano A Curable Romantic [Kuracebla Romantikulo] de Joseph Skibell. Jen aperas intervjuo kun li, tradukita en Esperanto, en:

Beletra Almanako, N-ro 13, Februaro 2012 (6-a jaro) (p. 166-171)

István Ertl intervjuas pri la spertoj de Skibell lernante kaj esplorante Esperanton kaj ĝian movadon prepare al la romano. Tiurilate Skibell vojaĝis kaj konsultis esperantologojn. Li ankaŭ eltrovis la Ido-movadon. Li esploris kaj eĉ ĉerpis el Esperanta beletro. Li eĉ tradukis al la angla la Sekretajn Sonetojn de Peter Peneter por adapto al muzika komponaĵo, sed tiu projekto ne plenumiĝis. Ertl trovas ironion en la uzo de Zamenhof en nacilingva fikcio kaj la supriza relativa foresto de Zamenhof en la originala fikcio de Esperanto.

Skibell diskutas sian perspektivon pri ĉefroluloj Zamenhof, Freud, kaj rabeno Kalonymus Kalman Shapira: Ŝapira sintezas la malajn perspektivojn de Zamenhof kaj Freud.

Paradokse, Skibell ne konsideras sin "juda verkisto." Ankaŭ okazas interŝanĝoj pri ebla filmo de la romano, de preseraroj, kaj de aperoj de artefaritaj lingvoj en nacilingva fikcio. La originala anglalingva intervjuo enhavas kelkajn esperantlingvajn frazojn fare de Skibell.

Jen retligaj referencoj el la teksto:

Loneliness and the Novel, Jewish Book Council Blog, June 6, 2011

Joseph Skibell, Writers Read blog, October 11, 2010

Bibliography for A Curable Romantic 

Joseph Skibell's "A Curable Romantic", November 4, 2010

Nu, la tuta ĉi tiu numero de Beletra Almanako estas alloga, do aĉetu se vi povas.

Black Steampunk / Negra Vaporpunko

I have no investment in steampunk as a lifestyle/subculture or as a literary/artistic genre, but I do think it is a significant phenomenon and symptomatic of our time. It is the futurism of the past, and that it should surface as a recognizable phenomenon and be named in the present is probably not accidental. (Of course there were manifestations of steampunk long before it became a category, but I’m referring to its emergence as a conscious movement.) Why now the futurism of the past?

The fantasy future of unlimited possibilities coexists, even as it did a century ago, with the fantasy of a terminal disaster much closer to realization. The contours of futurism have already been mapped out. Not only do we live in an alleged postmodern age, but we live in a combinatorial age, and a retrospective age. Our society has already reached the peak of real abstraction. We look backwards toward origins, reevaluating the past, the present, and the path taken in between.

Steampunk matters, I think, because the tangible origins of science fiction, of futurism, and of what has been constructed throughout the twentieth century, is really the nineteenth century. Science and technology as well as the projective imagination reached a critical point in that century, and so, rather than with foraging, pastoral, agricultural, feudal, mercantile, or emergent industrial society, the future originates in the nineteenth century.

Steampunk, with its odd mixture of futurism and the quaint and outdated Victorian aesthetic, combines and naturally merges with the parallel genre of alternate history, which itself could be considered the fantasy counterpart of the historical novel, which has also taken on a new flavor in recent decades. And this retrospective consciousness is also a reflexive consciousness. We are already aware of fundamentally changed assumptions in contrast to those of the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, so when we look back more than a century, we are not just trying to recreate a bygone era but to be aware of its presuppositions, and from there postulate alternate histories.

(This retrospective consciousness enters into historical Jewish fiction as well, which is where Esperanto now shows up as one of those utopian possibilities of a long-lost era. But Esperanto and Volapük show up outside of Jewish preoccupations as well.)

Of course, any subculture can end up as yet another thoughtless, escapist refuge. There is no novelty left in subcultures, though of course creativity can be found anywhere. Still, this awareness of the ability to manipulate cultural codes has many twists. And so there is not only steampunk, but there is black steampunk, as there is already Afrofuturism, another conceptual category constructed many decades after its manifestations appeared in practice.

Which brings me to black steampunk. Maybe, in the spirit of retro, it should be called Negro steampunk. In any case, here are some manifestations of said orientation.

Beyond Victoriana

State of Black Sci-Fi 2012: Why I love Steampunk!
Balogun, 23 Jan 2012

The State of Black SF 2012: Why I love Steampunk 
Valjeanne’s Blog, January 24, 2012

Guest Post: Steampunk/Alt History Week
Living in Color by Tanita Davis
SFWA Blog, December 23, 2010

The Intersection of Race and Steampunk: Colonialism’s After-Effects & Other Stories, from a Steampunk of Colour’s Perspective
By jha
Racialicious (blog), June 24, 2009

Do Goggles Block the Sun? Steampunk in Africa
Clay and Susan Griffith
Tor.com, Oct. 28, 2010

Steampunk Webcomic Set in Africa
By Manny, Steampunk Costume, June 11, 2010

Africa: "Steampunk Values." Bushpunk Slums
Bombasticelement.org, November 22, 2010

African Empires
By G. D. Falksen
Steampunk Fashion, June 30, 2009

Steampunk Author Balogun Oyabode Abeegunde Writes Harriet Tubman as an Extraordinary Gentlewoman!
Alicia McCalla, December 5, 2011

Interview with the African American Steampunk Author of "Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman"
Yahoo group discussion, Dec. 6, 2011

Steampunk: What it is, why I came to like it, and why I think it’ll stick around
The Clockwork Century, August 8, 2009

Books: Yet Another Ramble About Steampunk Romance
The Fancy Reader, Dec. 12, 2011

African steampunk merchandise
Etsy

Esperantistoj, iam mi tradukos miajn cerbumaĵojn pri vaporpunko al Esperanto. La temo rilatas al Esperanto pro la apero de Esperanto en historiaj kaj ukroniaj fikciaĵoj, kaj pro la fakto ke Esperanto estas samtempa kun la vaporpunka erao. Legu miajn antaŭan afiŝojn pri vaporpunko kaj ukronio.

Steampunk / Vaporpunko & Esperanto

Mi jam menciis . . .

League of Steampunk Esperantists (GVE), ero de The Steampunk Empire (La Vaporpunka Imperio).

Jen aliaj ligoj:

Steampunk in Esperanto (Ĉe la Koro de la Tero) 
by Marquis de Montcalm on March 3, 2011

The value of Esperanto to the Steampunk Crossroads?
by Leane Roffey Line on February 6, 2011

Multiculturalism for Steampunk: February is the Great Language Learning Challenge! *fanfare*  
January 24, 2011

Successes, News and Other High-Fives for SlugTribers 
The Slug Tribe, Summer-Winter 2011-12

"N'Gasta! Kvata! Kvakis!" I found Esperanto in Skyrim!
Tia Marie, February 08, 2012

Cândido Ruiz's Page
 
1ºEvento Steam
Video

R. Cândido Ruiz's Gallery
Ipernity

Teknoviktoriano 
Diskuto, novembro 2011

Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau: "El anacronópete" — The First Time Machine / La Unua Tempomaŝino

Do you think there is some tacit affinity connecting landmark events of 1887? 1887 saw many firsts, including the first appearance of Esperanto, Sherlock Holmes, and the time machine (not the novel or story by H.G. Wells). Read all about it:

Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau: El anacronópete — The First Time Machine

Anacronópete estas hispana neologismo kiu signifas "tiu kiu flugas kontraŭ tempon". Finfine anglalingva traduko aperos en 2012.

En 1887 aperis ne nur Esperanto sed ankaŭ Sherlock Holmes kaj la unua fikciaĵo pri tempomaŝino. La plejparto el miaj referencoj estas en la angla, sed rigardu ankaŭ la Esperantajn retligojn:

Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau: El anacronópete — La Unua Tempomaŝino

Poste aperis la koncernaj verkoj de H. G. Wells: novelo La Tempovojaĝantoj (1888) kaj romano La Tempo-maŝino (1895). Patafizika eseo "Kiel Konstrui Tempomaŝinon" de Alfred Jarry aperis en 1899.

Troveblas multaj studoj pri la intelekta kaj socia kunteksto de la verko de Wells. La furoro de la kvara (spaca) dimensio en la 19a jarcento—ne nur en matematiko sed ankaŭ en amaskulturo, ekz. fikcio kaj spiritismo—estas bone konata. Historiistoj pri sciencfikcio kaj pri scienco pritraktis la tempvojaĝan koncepton. Eble en tiu literaturo troveblas studo pri tio, kiel kaj kial la konceptoj de tempomaŝino kaj de la tempo kiel kvara dimensio aperis tiutempe.

Estas nuntempa emo nomi nian epokon postmodernisma. Kombinismo elstaras ne nur en la amaskulturo de la nuno, sed ankaŭ en intensa retrorigardado al la kultura pasinteco kaj ties antaŭsupozoj. Eble tial Esperanto aperas kiel temo en pluraj lastatempaj histori-romanoj—kaj en la angla lingvo! Do angla traduko de la unua fikciaĵo pri tempomaŝino des pli bonvenigendas.

Ninieslando (2)

Mi antaŭe raportis pri "Ninieslando", novelo de Howard Waldrop en la antologio Warriors (militistoj) sub redakcio de George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois. Estas interese, ke Esperanto lastatempe aperas en historia fikcio, ĉi-kaze fantazia. Mi ne scias, ĉu la "eraroj" ĉi tie estas intencaj tordoj aŭ sciomanko flanke de la aŭtoro. Jen lia erara enkonduko al la historio de Esperanto:

It was one of the ironies of these times that in that far‑off golden summer of 1914, when "some damn fool thing in the Balkans" was leading to its inevitable climax, Tommy's brother Fred, who was then eighteen, had been chosen as a delegate of the Birmingham Working‑Men's Esperanto Association to go as a representative to the Twenty‑fourth Annual Esperanto Conference in Basel, Switzerland. The Esperanto Conference had been to take place in the last days of July and the first days of August. (Fred had been to France before with a gang of school chums and was no stranger to travel.)

The Esperanto Conference was to celebrate the twenty‑fourth anniversary of Zamenhof's artificial language, invented to bring better understanding between peoples through the use of an easy‑to‑learn, totally regular invented language—the thinking being that if all people spoke the same language (recognizing a pre‑Babel dream), they would see that they were all one people, with common dreams and goals, and would slowly lose nationalism and religious partisanship through the use of the common tongue.

There had been other artificial languages since—Volapuk had had quite a few adherents around the turn of the century—but none had had the cachet of Esperanto, the first and best of them.

Mi ne malkaŝos la finon de la rakonto. Kompreneble, "Ninieslando" estas, en reala Esperanto, "Nenieslando" = angla "No Man's Land", t.e. areo en batalkampo kiun regas neniu lando. Ĉi-kaze, temas pri sekreta taĉmento—kaŝa societo—kiu organizas eskapon el la Milito (la Unua Mondmilito). Oni enkondukas Tommy tiu"land"en, kie li povas denove paroli Esperanton kaj preskaŭ forgesas la anglan, ĝis . . .

Steampunked at a glance

Here is a handy blog introduction to the Steampunk ethos:

Steampunk'd at The Private Library, 26 May 2011.

No mention of conlangs here, but as I've blogged on this subject before, I thought this would be another useful in, and besides, I'm a fan of the Private Library. Maybe this will give you some ideas on the age in which artificial languages gained mass movements for the first time.

Ninieslando

“Warriors” edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois (Reviewed by Robert Thompson), Fantasy Book Critic, March 1, 2010.

“Ninieslando” by Howard Waldrop. “Ninieslando” is one of those stories that starts off in one direction before suddenly veering off onto another. In this case, “Ninieslando” begins as what appears to be more historical fiction, particularly a realistic glimpse at trench warfare during World War I. But then the protagonist discovers a secret society based on the principles of the real life artificial language Esperanto and their plan to start a “New World of brotherhood”, and things start to get weird, but in a good way...

Joseph Skibell accepts prize, gives speech

Jen akcepto de premio de la Juda Libro-Konsilaro kun parolado de premiita verkisto Joseph Skibell:

Loneliness and the Novel, Jewish Book Council Blog, June 6, 2011.

"Joseph Skibell, 2011 Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award recipient and author of A Curable Romantic, shares his remarks from the 2011 Sami Rohr Priza Gala."