Category Archives: history

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Reading: Janet Chen – Guilty of Indigence

Unlike Iain Banks, Janet Chen’s Guilty of Indigence — The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953, has more in common with Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory, and shall not be inhaled in a 24 hour period. It’s possible, but I suspect I’d lose any attempt.

I read about Guilty of Indigence on The China Beat, where the author was interviewed, and figured there would be a lot I’d find interesting. For a start it’s Chinese scholarship written by a women, and having spent more than a decade reading predominately this field written by men before discovering Hershatter, Susan Mann and others, it’s obvious to me my renewed interest has been entirely due to women academics.

Secondly, it covers an era that I find has in general been under-represented – certainly in more popular writing on China – being sandwiched as it is between the Qing Dynasty and Mao. Too often this is referred to as the warlord era – even Wikipedia does, (and it irritates me immensely I can’t refind the brilliant essay deconstructing the term in the context of its use in Afghanistan, as it is eminently applicable to China during this era), used to cover the entire Republican era rather than just the twelve years post-WW1 when the country was split under various military fiefdoms (cliques, hegemonies, etc). I don’t have an alternate suggestion for a name for this era, but I find not reducing it to the preconceptions inherent in the word ‘warlord’ helps to think and write about it with a little more subtlety.

As for the China part itself, Janet concentrates mostly on Beijing and Shanghai, which in general in almost everything I’ve read on China is what is meant by ‘China’; a cluster of provinces, Hebei to Zhejiang, and rarely further west than Henan. Yes, I have a fondness for the Southern Barbarians, and all things border-ish, so experienced small but not unexpected disappointment at absence of Canton in the index, though of course if any book tried to be even slightly all-encompassing when it came to Chinese scholarship, it wouldn’t be finished in this lifetime.

Anyway, it’s beautifully bound, the cover and layout are very attractive, and I think I shall take a pause now to begin reading.

Janet Chen – Guilty of Indigence Janet Chen – Guilty of Indigence
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A Life Spent Searching – the Travels and Writing of Annemarie Schwarzenbach

It’s mainly the reason why every October I write about all the books I’ve read in the last year, that some remain in my thoughts. Isabel Cole’s translation of Annamarie Schwarzenbach’s All Roads are Open is one of these, as well as having the kind of attention to typography, layout, and design that … well, makes me less likely to spill a late-night snack in bed over.

Which is to say, it’s already near the top of everything I’ve read in the last six months. I also read Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way and Vita Sackville-West’s Twelve Days in Persia as a result, and Annamarie makes them both read like spoilt upper-class nobs whose only talent is the distinct whiff of colonial racism – I kept thinking if I was traveling with them I’d be obliged to leave them stranded and be off with their car and money because that’s all they’re good for. Perhaps being hooked on heroin gave Annamarie an empathy absent in these others; it did wonders for William Burroughs also. At very least, her translation into english adds a great deal to 20th century Central Asia writing.

25 April, 2012
20:00
Dialogue Books
Schönleinstraße 31
Berlin, Germany

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Journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, world traveler, the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) became a European cult figure following her rediscovery in the 1990s. At long last, her works are also appearing in English via Seagull Books.

To celebrate, join Dialogue Books as we host Alexis Schwarzenbach, the writer’s grandnephew and the leading expert on her life and work. He and Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s translators Lucy Renner Jones and Isabel Fargo Cole will also read from a selection of her works suggesting the breadth of her concerns and creativity. Lyric Novella is the tale of a young “man’s” love for a nightclub singer in decadent Weimar-era Berlin, while Death in Persia is a more open exploration of lesbian love and existential anguish against the background of 1930’s Teheran, and All the Roads Are Open is an account of Schwarzenbach’s epic journey in a Ford from Switzerland to Afghanistan on the eve of World War II.

ABOUT

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, born in 1908 to one of Switzerland’s most prominent families, published her first novel at the age of 23. Her friends Klaus and Erika Mann introduced her to artistic circles, and she scandalized her conservative family by living an openly lesbian lifestyle and supporting leftwing political causes. From 1933 to 1941 she took numerous trips in Europe, the USSR, the United States, the Near East and Africa as a photojournalist covering social and political issues, while also publishing novels and short fiction. After the outbreak of World War II she sought ways to take political action, helping the Manns’ anti-Fascist efforts, but increasingly succumbed to depression and drug addiction.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach died in 1942 in Switzerland following a bicycle accident.

Annamarie Schwarzenbach Annamarie Schwarzenbach
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Reading: James Palmer — Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China

The last of my current batch of reading … more soon to be procured. It’s a little gluttonous, no?

Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes arrived shortly after I finished The Bloody White Baron, and it had been a book I’d heard about every so often, so I was hoping for something … well, earthquakes, the Great Helmsman; as a follow-up to the Baron I was hoping a for a lot.

I am supposed to write these things before I read, and any reviewing that may or may not be done, is done once a year in October; I’m getting sloppy here.

While my attention for all things Sinological is gradually drifting conspicuously south, and my personal feeling is that in another, slightly different outcome of history, China would be something between the idea of the EU and the reality of Confoederatio Helvetica; so it just helps to think of at least the provinces surrounding Han proper like a misshapen ‘C’ as individual countries (they are big enough, after all), and so while my interest is more towards Canton and the inner asian frontiers, I’m never too far away from picking up any book remotely Chinese.

The premise, that the Tangshan earthquake via invocation of the Mandate from Heaven was part of a series of events leading to not only the end of almost thirty years of Maoist destruction, but equally to the de facto abrogation of Maoism, for me was an attractive subject for a book. Much of this because there hasn’t been much written on one of the most devastating earthquakes in history, and how it affected a country, and I do also have a long-standing love affair with geology — my mental image of China and Central Asia is usually one overlaid with geologic and topographic maps.

I think the initial disappointment for me came around a third of the way in, when background events leading up to Mao’s death and the earthquake were still being worked through. It occurred to me that perhaps with all the reading I’ve done on China, I was not exactly the audience. I was wanting to get stuck in from the first page to some chunky primary source research from provincial and county archives along with fault plane solutions and other geological delights, as I have been in some other recent works, and instead found a summarising of the main events of Mao.

Which James does very well, and if I was coming to this stuff for the first time – when I tend to read a lot of works like this to get the broad idea plus some specifics – this would be a more suitable read for me. From my perspective though, I felt that the connection between earthquake and Mao, was not presented in a way where I was convinced of more than a tenuous, or generalist correlation.

Being more critical, there were a couple of things in James’ writing style that irritated me, being occasional slips into vernacular, and the use of various pop culture references as similes. Which makes me sound like a stuffy old toff decrying the loss of Queen’s English, but references to The Godfather and Dad’s Army while clever or apt have a tendency to limit the audience, and to render the both the simile and intent incomprehensible for anyone not familiar with the allusion.

As with the Baron, the concluding section summarised and put into context the aftermath of the events up to the current day (around early 2011), also drawing comparisons with the state of the Communist Party and the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. Again, mirroring the lengthy lead up to the earthquake, I had this sense I was not really the intended audience, though equally, for a reader coming to this for the first time, he gets through many of the main points in an engagingly readable way.

As an aside, somehow I was expecting a mention of Ai Weiwei, considering the various artists, poets, writers who James mentions around the Tangshan era; for me Wenchuan is quite fixed in my mind with him.

Late in the book, there is a reference to the Republican era which is a common one, describing it as “the warlord era”, and by implication with “the Japanese invasion [and] Maoist insanities”, a very Bad Thing. This is also the Communist narrative and being an era I’ve been reading somewhat on lately-ish (Gourmets in the Land of Famine and The Age of Openness are two I’m thinking of) I would say even given that it was one very broad remark covering the entire Chinese 20th century in a score of words, it is a sloppy and poor choice of words. The mention of R. J. Rummel a couple of pages later, whom I’ve written about previously, also doesn’t help.

So now I feel like I’ve been rather harsh. I was wondering if I felt let down after the Baron, but contra that, if my knowledge of Mongolia and Siberia were commensurate with China, I would have found that work also lacking. I didn’t, because it was a new-ish topic for me — my reading for north of the Tian Shan tends more to the Xiongnu than anything as recent as the Russian Civil War.

Maybe to say that this is one of the better recent books on China you could read which covers both the Maoist era and the 35 years since, without missing many of the main points, and with enough to go on with further, more detailed reading if your attention is taken. I would though like to read the next book from him going to a similar level of research and detail as someone like Susan Mann, Gail Hershatter, or Paul A. van Dyke.

James Palmer — Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes James Palmer – Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes
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Reading: H. P. Lovecraft — Omnibus 1: At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror

Once again, Charles Stross to blame. As if The Bloody White Baron wasn’t sufficiently ghastly, I now travel back to the origins of Cthulu mythos.

Imagine someone whispering in your ear, “Horror. Horror. Horror. Horror. Horror…”, and each utterance was unique and chilling, as if the immensity signified within that word reverberated whole and unobscured for the first time, and beneath the weight of which you quailed, exposed and helpless, in cold terror.

Actually, it’s quite fun to write like that, a bit like Black Metal lyrics; there’s a theatre in the prose, and considering the relative paucity of such dread words, H. P. is remarkable for this quality — even where such word as ‘horror’ (‘the horror’, ‘elder horrors’ …) occurs more than once in a page, it’s context seems distinct.

Paul at Saint George’s persuaded me to take the second-hand copy instead of the new one, which almost led me to take Omnibus 2. Alas, no used copy. It does have a certain majesty to be reading such an author — I could have sat in the shop all afternoon if I wasn’t intent on being hailed upon — especially considering Charlie and China Miéville, two of my favourite authors of the last few years, are so influenced by him.

By him, by the mythos, by Unheimlich horror, New Weird, whatever its appellation, even though H. P. himself was influenced by earlier writers (Necronomicon anyone?), there is something of a well-spring in him, traces of which I find in most of the art I’m drawn to.

I only hope it doesn’t give me nightmares.

H. P. Lovecraft — At the Mountains of Madness H. P. Lovecraft — At the Mountains of Madness
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Reading: James Palmer — The Bloody White Baron

This is one that fell into my reading list in a couple of disparate but connected ways. The first, or rather more direct, being the author James Palmer, is also responsible for Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China, which is on my upcoming reading list. The second, but chronologically earlier (as in read before, though published after The Baron) is Charles Stross.

Science-fiction to insane White Russian nobility seeped in revolution-era apocalyptic Buddhism? Well, it all started in the Laundry, and to paraphrase somewhat, … Eldritch Abominations, the Wall of Pain on the dead plateau wherein the Sleeper lies imprisoned in the pyramid, CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, the Eater of Souls, “Stop Teapot … Before he makes tea.”

(I have a feeling I’ll be reading The Fuller Memorandum again shortly.)

And we do meet Teapot. And he is making tea.

Back in the slightly more real world, The Bloody White Baron is the biography of one Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximillian Ungern von Sternberg, of Baltic-German noble descent who found his way through life with such an unfailing fondness for brutality (he would take walks in the fields around his battles, littered with bones and butchered corpses fed upon by wolves and carrion birds, because he found it peaceful and calming), and ripened with a demented, anti-Semitic, Buddhist shamanism, that the character Charlie grows from the real Ungern and places in a Lovecraftian universe of horror from other dimensions doesn’t seem so unlikely at all.

The actual book is more in the line of Peter Hopkirk, slightly sensationalist but rollicking-good story of Central Asian and far-East Orientalism adventurism in the last days of Empire, which is to say despite the endnotes, this is more a generalist work than my usual tendencies towards academic-ish texts.

Not to imply this isn’t well-researched (as far as I can tell; Russia and north of Tien Shan not being a region I know much about) and James does a commendable job of balancing the hysterical complexity of multiple falling empires, revolutionary nationalists, upstart imperialists, straggling enclaves and exclaves of the former, and various Mongolian and Steppe groups and religious powers all variously forming shifting alliances and slaughtering each other.

I was often reminded, during reading this (yes, I’ve already finished, so this is a quasi-/crypto-review) the similarities between eastern Europe and eastern Siberia, Mongolia and the Steppe; both being ground underfoot repeatedly by advancing and routed ideologies, and both to this day having their histories unwritten, commensurate to say, Germany or China. As he points out in the epilogue, exactly what happened to Mongolian Buddhism in the ’20s and ’30s under Soviet-led or -inspired communism happened in Tibet under Mao. The difference being the latter is something Brad Pitt gets banned permanently from China for (I watched Seven Years in Tibet last night as a distraction), whereas the former is a footnote.

James Palmer — The Bloody White Baron James Palmer — The Bloody White Baron
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Reading: Vita Sackville-West — Twelve Days in Persia

I don’t have much in particular to say about Twelve Days in Persia: Across the Mountains with the Bakhtiari Tribe, nor about Vita Sackville-West. This was one of the books recommended to me by Lucy, who is translating Annamarie Schwarzenbach, during talking about Iran and Central Asia.

Lately my interest has moved slightly from Afghanistan, though naturally still swirling around Central Asia (in addition to all things China and Canton), and I’ve had a curiosity to wonder what I’m missing about Iran. I have read through the region many times, as I’ve traversed the Silk Route, or in various other works of the region, yet never given it the specific attention I’ve devoted to, say, Afghanistan. Though I’m loathe to take on another country and all its history in the same way as I have that land-locked place, Iran is somewhere I’d like to travel to.

So, Vita then. I was never especially fond of her writing, and have her engraved in my memory as one of those early-20th century feminist writers I was supposed to love, yet found a bit pathetic and earnest. It has been a long time though since I was obliged to read those writers, so perhaps I’ll find something I can’t resist and go on a Vita trip.

Vita Sackville-West – Twelve Days in Persia Vita Sackville-West – Twelve Days in Persia
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Reading: Ella Maillart — The Cruel Way

The first of my new pile of books, though i haven’t finished the last lot yet (some shall dwell in my reading stump for quite some time, I suspect, and one likely shall be read in the furthest-from orthodox manner possible; no starting at the start and finishing at the over end.

This one, Ella K. Maillart’s The Cruel Way, came to me from a conversation with Lucy who has been translating some of Annamarie Schwarzenbach, whom I met on the Pförtner bus with Isabel, translator of All the Roads are Open, currently near the top of my list for best non-fiction of the year. They both fielded me that afternoon with the names of several authors who reside at the intersection of a number of sets I have been distracted by for some time: women authors, writing on Afghanistan and Central Asia, in the (broad) subjects of anthropology and history.

I promptly forgot the names, though knew I’d get around to remembering soon enough, and thankfully Lucy scribbled them down for me. To Saint George’s!

When Annamarie travelled to Afghanistan overland by car in the second half of 1939, she did so with the companionship of another writer, Ella Maillart. For both of them, the journey resulted in a book, though until this year, Annamarie hadn’t been translated to english. Ella, on the other hand, was in english since 1947, with one peculiarity: there is no mention of Annamarie Schwarzenbach.

Ella travels with Christina. The one photo of her is from a distance, head down over the campsite, so as to be unrecognizable. Despite this (at the insistence of Annamarie’s mother), there is little or no disguising of whom she travelled with, though this does make for a somewhat sombre reading, knowing full well who Christina is, and that her identity is erased by her own mother in a perverse desire for familial respectability.

It is a rare pleasure to read two highly accomplished writers documenting the same journey; to see the same experiences through the eyes of each. Annamarie writes with such a sparse, poetic, lyrical style as to be a novelist, and very few fiction authors I have read can seduce in telling a story more than she. Ella is somewhat the opposite; a travel writer who is romantic almost becoming saccharine. Nonetheless not to say she is a poor writer, and being a couple of chapters in (arriving at Sophia), she recalls for me the best of the writers of who ventured into Central Asia in a manner unimaginable now.

Elle K. Maillart — The Cruel Way Ella K. Maillart — The Cruel Way
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Kreuz und Pinguin

Yes, I haven’t een blogging. I haven’t even a good excuse. Absence of unique excitement, though presence of multiple small excitements – none of which alone are enough to write about.

Christian sent some photos. He is in South America somewhere, possibly in Patagonia, or Tierra del Fuego. Vircarious excitement for me in the photographs from friends.

south american penguin south american penguin

christian ender & verdienstkreuz christian ender & verdienstkreuz

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Reading: Annamarie Schwarzenbach – All the Roads are Open: The Afghan Journey (trans. Isabel Fargo Cole)

In the first winter of Berlin for me, my poverty and the hanging dread of unwanted return to Australia were I to not remedy it both were alleviated by my sublime almost-dachgeschoß looking south-east over Bötzow Brauerei and on down the low hill across the city as far as Kreuzberg. That winter, a whole month from December’s solstice was met with days of clear frozen sky and opalescent sun, and I lived on Brussels sprouts and Chinese five-spice. Hardest though, was a lack of books, even though my small zwischenmiete was lined with shelves. Then, as now, my german was far too mediocre.

I did plunder those books for names though, and pulled out the occasional one in english, which I subsequently swallowed whole. One name I found recently returned, three years later.

Annamarie Schwarzenbach, the kind of beautiful trouble I fall to, likely because I wish I was myself that, yet I am quite acquainted with the creative paucity such habits tend me towards. Still … “Fast cars, drugs, Lesbianism, Berlin in the 30s, fleeing to Central Asia, Afghanistan, affairs with the daughters of important and famous people …” what more can I say than I did in January three years ago?

Firstly, I don’t have to suffer the lack of her in english. I found an email some months ago reminding me of that post and … The email led to more going back and forth, (even reeling in Dasniya via a thread to Alte-Kantine) and finally on Friday, immediately after my new tyres, to the bus of Café Pförtner where I met Isabel Fargo Cole and Lucy.

Books changed hands.

Isabel has very kindly given me a copy of Annamarie’s All the Roads are Open: The Afghan Journey, of which I can say little beyond my delight; her and there! I took a pause from all my Afghan and Central Asian reading entirely because of the utter lack of women in the frame, and yet my attention keeps drifting towards there … Afghanistan, Iran. I won’t be reading this for a couple of weeks at least, as I have a throbbing mass of China reminding me that I deserted them for science-fiction.

Annamarie Schwarzenbach – All the Roads Are Open: The Afghan Journey Annamarie Schwarzenbach – All the Roads Are Open