Writers and Publishers Mix it Up in Europe: the first blog en route to the Frankfurt Book Fair

In the month that I am here in Europe, between three countries--Holland, France and Germany--half is dedicated to research and to writing on my second novel in the Textile Trilogy, Linen Shroud. I follow Carole Maso's dictum that form should follow function, therefore silk is by definition sensuous and heady: in our country, a novel of ideas only rarely includes the erotic, but it's no surprise that my favorite writers combine intellect and sensuality: Durrell, Duras, Nin, Miller, Maso. Kundera.

Linen Shroud, by comparison with Burning Silk and their respective textiles, is tough, difficult to produce, flexible and enduring. The theme of Linen Shroud-- war--presents me with a particular challenge, as I am a lifelong antiwar protestors even while I acknowledge that WWII--my father a medic in Patton's Fourth Army--was necessary for the continuation of our western way-of-life.

The other half of my month, one might say, is dedicated to developing an audience both for my books and for the other books that we--the publishing collective that is sitio tiempo press--intend to publish.

So I am en train de traveling from Brittany, where I had the opportunity to put face and place--essential to a novelist--on the oystermen I had only read about in The Oysters of Locmariaquer. I am heading to Le Havre where I will be a presenter at a conference given by the University on The Woodstock Years, a fine bilingual audience for my books and our ideas I think. And after, I will be meeting a friend, Inke Schwab, who has the advantage of being trilingual, to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.

I will be issuing reports on a daily basis from the Frankfurt Book Fair in my blog.

Purposes always overlap in my estimation. And so I began doing research years ago on selling foreign rights. A file disgorged an article I clipped from the NYT several years ago that followed Mizzi van der Pluijm of Contact Publishing in Amsterdam, around the floor of the Fair and to parties in the evening. This allowed me to google Mm. van der Pluijm, read her articles and appreciate how she analyzes the book market for foreign rights. How could I cold-call a possible publisher without doing at least this? I sent her my book Burning Silk, together with the bound bilingal booklet with the first chapter in French and English and a personal note on the press' executive stationery. I emailed her asking her to expect the same. I think I can't do more.

While in Amsterdam, I checked out the two bookstores in Spui (said Spow): the American Book Center and the Athenaeum. Of the two, I would have to say Athenaeum is the more literary and multicutltural, while ABC and its attendant performance/

meeting space The Treehouse, is largely for an English speaking audience. The buyer at Athenaeum, who will remain unnamed, implied that I was cracked to be going to Frankfurt without appointments. And, though I know this is how the Book Fair works, I have always had to see a product in production before I completely understand it.

Inke Schwab and I will attend instructive seminars in buying and selling foreign rights. With 20,000 people there, all agenda driven, we will be able to tease out (I hope) the players that we are interested in speaking with us. That's the plan.

While in Paris, I made a personal contact with the manager who books readings at Shakespeare & Co, as conversation we had begun months earlier towards understanding how to book a reading with Shakespearte & Co (Mondays only and months in advance.)

I contacted a writer of historical fiction that I have always wanted to meet. She is also a textile artist. We have communicated by email over time and yes, Barbara Chase- Riboud, author of the puissante Sally Hemmings and other poignant investigations into the lives of women at once powerless (Venus of Hottentot) and influential (Sally Hemmings.)

Turning the corner from my hotel, I ran into Gallimard's offices. I emailed a scout I met ten years ago while producing a limited edition book in France's book village Montolieu and asked him if he had a contact at Gallimard. He did and would not only give me the name of his close friend, the foreign rights acquisition editor, but also invited me to use his name.

Everything bodes well. Stay tuned if you are interested.

The Dutch Resistance Museum: an hour of powerful sentiments unrolls across days

Luckily, a sign at the beginning of the museum explained something I would have had to deduce from the entire display: In 1941, the Dutch were divided about the German occupation, most complacent as the Germans made a great show of befriending the Dutch, "fellow Aryans." Nazi moves against the Jews were small and incremental. First registration, then a fence around the neighborhood, finally the yellow star and segregation, but all of it gradual, regrettable but not alarming. But when several hundred Jews were rounded up for deportation, the Dutch seemed to wake up, went out onto the street and mounted a general strike. Then, when the Germans brought violence against Dutch resistors, the population moved toward resistance very quickly. Actions accelerated. The Franks, Ann's family, went into hiding in 1942 for instance, where they remained for two years until they were betrayed.

In comparing the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC to the Dutch Resistance Museum, I have to say that the two museums are equally powerful in presenting the horror of the Holocaust, each using completely different methods.

The architecture of the Holocaust Museum reinforces the feeling of dehumanization, with railcars and barracks in the concentration camps reproduced effectively. A vast pile of shoes, men's, women's and children's in a jumble, made--as Peter Brook's theater troupe discovered as well--for a powerful nonverbal punch in the gut.

By contrast, the Resistance Museum, leads one through a broken-up kaleidescope of spaces, each refracting and opening into each other, leading one deeper into the story.

Scrolls of personal stories mounted outside the glass cases and projecting into the aisle, with large photo of each young person, told of individual acts of resistance by both Jew and Gentile. These men and women and their stories personified the kind of courage we must each doubt we possess unless we are tried. Many of these individuals paid for their heroism with their lives.

An illegal bank, an illegal forger of papers, an illegal printing press, illegal crystal radios, doors concealed behind bookshelves, men dressed as women with scarves wrapped around their adam's apple: these elaborate systems were put into place within a year, escalating in sophistication. These Dutch individuals, contemporaries of my parents, put together a system of resistance that took my breath away. Code numbers in letters as small as an ant printed painstakingly on a cigarette paper…so much at stake.

The main road where I walked from Waterloo Pelin to the museum, Plantage, holds a theater that was used as a detention and deportation center for Jews. On the other side of the street, we noticed a colorful day care center. The museum explained that this very day care center smuggled Jewish children out of Amsterdam. When a tram would pull up to the stop in front of the daycare center, the brave women would rush toward the tram with babies under each arm, or two children by the hand and leap on. Everyone on the tram would smile, while the Nazis on the other side of the
street were none the wiser. Six hundred children were saved this way.

The hardest part came at the end, not only the totting up of the sheer volume of Jews exterminated (photos remind you: men, women and flossy haired children, all clueless, faces all vaguely familiar, mishpookah) but also the terrible winter after France and Belgium were liberated, when the Dutch had no food at all. Twenty thousand people died of starvation. The houses in the Jewish quarter, later demolished for being unsalvageable after being empty for so long, were stripped for fuel. People boiled garbage for soup, gleaned every edible scrap, to survive that terrible winter, a despair much like the concentration camp survivors Elie Weisel described, forced by their captors to march through the winter snow, starving and inadequately clothed, as their liberators approached from the other direction.

Unlike the darkness of the Holocaust Museum (I was alive when this happened, a baby; my father, a medic with Patton's Army, never spoke of his experiences liberating concentration camps,) the Dutch Resistance Museum, released me with a glimmer. These people DID resist, like the Dane, like Jews in Warsaw. Photos showed not only survivors of the camps returning to sit on their streets, to begin the search for their loved ones, as well as the Dutch citizens greeting allied forces, the end of the nightmare.

A postscript surprised me. Apparently it wasn't until a neo nazi group arose in the 1960's, that members of the Dutch resistance began to tell their stories. It wasn't until the 1980's that the museum was organized to tell the story. Copies of two graphic novels illustrated by Heuve, the Tintin artist, tell the story both from the pov of a Jewish family and their good friends and neighbors, ordinary people drawn into becoming Dutch resistors.

This reminded me of the fact that survivors of the Irish Potato Famine didn't tell their children the story of what had happened, out of shame perhaps that such a terrible thing had visited them. It wasn't until nearly a century later that the Irish came to own their history of abuse by the British which deepened the deadly outcome of the potato famine.

Three million dead and one million and a half forcibly shipped off on death ships to other continents, if I remember my numbers correctly.

De Kat, the Cat: the windmill that produces colors

Wednesday was going to be a sunny day, the weather projections forecasted, and so we planned our trip to Zaanse Schwanz [sic]for that day. There, the brochure promised, we would find a village which had been an industrial center with over 1000 windmills. Nine were left. One of them, Der Kat, The Cat, still ground rock and wood, bark and roots for dyes and pigments. Is your heart racing? Then you will want to come along with us.

The banks of the river, lined with the nine windmills, evoked something between a possible history--travels along one's DNA I call it--and a Miyazaki film, for where else would you find the stirring spectacle of working windmills?

To our regret, the mustard windmill was closed for repairs but we had out sights set on De Kat. Our host Todd told us that, when it is windy--they went in February--so much power is freighted, the windmill is almost frightening. Indeed we found choppers, pounders and grinders all on the main floor, whose levers clearly generated a great deal of force when operative.

Display cases--all of this set into the larger wooden structure--gave us a tour of their products, as well as a history. When tiles were ground, a red dye was generated which was used to color the canvas windmill sails with their "summer" colors. Nearby a windmill was dressed in its winter sails, a dark rich brown, perhaps burnt umber. Not surprisingly, De Kat produces fresh sails for other windmills.

The second floor was a marvel of gears, all of them at a distance from each other today, but clearly movable, to connect together to create motion in several directions. Yes, it is true: the miller is the only one permitted to run the windmill.

De Kat's miller has worked five days a week for the past forty years. When I asked naively if there was going to be a demonstration, the step-in miller pointed out the obvious with a smile. No wind, no work.

The top floor, with a small galley around the workings, let out in three directions to a outside porch. Even with a desultory wind turning the sails, anyone standing on the far side would be decapitated. The downward rush of a blade casts a large shadow with a whoosh. An interval of sunlight and then the downward blade was forecast by shadow and sound.

The gift shop offered little bottles of pigment labeled "artificial" The display cases outside had a small sign saying that anyone interested in the pigments ground on site could ask at the desk. Within minutes of asking, we were conducted into the inner sanctum marked private. Here, in a pleasant room about the size of Rembrandt's etching studio, a central table stood for workshops and negotiations, packages of both pigments and dyes stacked neatly along the walls, glass
vials affixed to each showing the color of the actual powder. Hanks of wool, silk, linen and cotton hung from the ceiling demonstrating the color each dye would produce.

Workshops are held regularly at De Kat. Paint samples drying on plywood were the products of students from the art department at a nearby university.

I bought several kinds of umber produced at De Kat for my friend, the painter Mollie Favour, and a small glass grinder for making the powder into pigment by mixing it with linseed oil. (I'm sure this instrument has a name.) I also bought indigo and sandalwood for my friend Judith Thomas and I. Wode, which I would also like to explore was too expensive to buy without immediate plans to use it. Cochineal which comes not only from Mexico, but also from Spain, seemed frivolous as I plan to go with Judith to Eric Mindling's dyeing tour in the Oaxaca Highlands where they raise cochineal.

The Turkish Hamman

We were greeted by a beautiful friendly woman in a flowered headscarf and taken through our options. She and I each spoke a little French and so we communicated this way. We chose a program from the middle of the menu: 40 euros, plus towel and robe (6,) and a scrubby glove we would need (6.)

"You have slips?" she asked us. On the phone, no one had said we needed slips or we would have brought them.

"N'importe pas," she assured us.

Nonetheless, this language issue gave us a lot of laughs. We arrived stripped down in a central room where a zaftig bathlady waited: everyone else had on underpants, the "slips" we could easily have kept on. She scrubbed us all over with our glove with a piney smelling soap and showed us into a steam room.

Two young women who had just gotten their Bac degree were celebrating a day off from the preschool where they taught. They told us about a Dutch politician who showed up at the protest in NY at Ground Zero against the mosque. He insulted Muslim women by not only asking why they had to wear scarves but referring to headscarves as 'dirty rags," which seemed to all four of us not only as racism but also highly sexist with its veiled allusion to menstruation and to scrubwomen. Do you have to be a woman to feel the sexism in that racist slur?

I had to rinse the caustic piney soap off early as it wasn't agreeing with my skin. After coming out of the steam, we were shown into a room with marble slab tables where we each received a vigorous if superficial massage with oil-infused hot water. After we showered, we were each given a dish of mud to slather on our bodies. Another room with benches and buckets allowed us to spend time attending carefully to our hair, feet and nails. We imagined that, with someone at home watching the kids, a woman might spend hours on a Sunday at the hammam--why not?

After, feeling tight and toned, we retired in our robes to the salon near the door where cushioned couches were ringed with large hammered trays on stands as coffee tables.

A group of Muslim women were enjoying animated conversation with each other and the attendants at the end of the day. How beautiful they were! We remembered that Ramadan was coming to an end with the full moon (or perhaps earlier.) We ordered a pot of strong mint tea and a small plate of sweets: baklava, carmelized sugar and nuts, almond and nougat based pastries--tiny tastes that we shared--rolled into crescents (10 euros.)

In the dressing room, a young women coated her entire body in a white creamy paste. What is it? I asked. A masque, she answered and took herself off to wait the required number of minutes while the masque dried.

I slept twelve hours after dinner and the hammam.

Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement

This was a difficult day I am not going to write about. Into every holiday, a little rain must fall: a failed fast, a silenced bell tower, a closed Portuguese synagogue, time in pharmacies, aching feet…..

Museum Canal Boat

Today we took a canal boat to three museums, a lovely way to view the city. A ticket allows you to get on and off at any of a dozen stops on the loop.

The tour of Ann Frank House is structured much like the Rembrandt House in that a modern building alongside connects to the actual house and warehouse where Otto Frank ran his pectin business and the family went into hiding.

As we went up the staircase to the actual house, I felt like I was going up to my grandmother's which was also above retail/commercial. Both Judy and I admitted that when we were young, the Holocaust seemed like ancient history while, as we have aged, the events have telescoped in, so that--by now--they seem appallingly close…which they are.

Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived, said that Ann's early diaries were much like any girl's, full of boys and giggling confidences. But after they went into hiding in the Annex, where they lived for two years, the diaries became very deep, as anyone who has read them knows. He said he had no idea that his daughter had such profound thoughts and emotions. He drew the conclusion that parents never really know their children's innermost thoughts.

Ann decorated her room with cutouts from magazines. A photo of Scarlett O'Hara and another of a dark haired actress playing piano allowed me to imagine that Ann had pictured herself as a grownup adult through such images. She tells her diary (Dear Kitty) that she planned to become a famous writer. Since she died only two weeks before liberation, and before, while they were in the Annex, official word had gone out that collections and memoirs were being avidly sought for publication. In the annex, she began the novel that she planned to write based on her diaries which she called, The Annex.

When that light was snuffed out, it lit up the world.

Although my father was a medic with Patton Army, and helped liberate the concentration camps, he never once mentioned it. I have often reflected that his world view--he was strict father and a powerfully disciplined researcher in Archives his field of neurosurgery--must have been shaped by that experience. He said more than once that--while he loved individual humans--he had a profound contempt for humanity.

To my surprise, the Rijkesmuseum has only three Vermeers. Of course there are only a couple dozen in the world.
Still…

Van Gogh Museum (and I have seen a comprehensive Van Gogh show earlier) revealed a young insecure artist who spent so much of his life as an artist copying the styles that blazed through "his set" like pointillism and Japanese prints; he also copied actual works by earlier artists. Everyone learns their own way; this way--copying, trying what others are doing--is timehonored. He was a fortunate artist in the support his brother Theo gave him to the end. I am not a Van Gogh scholar and yet it seemed to me that it was only after Arles, when he was institutionalized, that his voice came through in the boldstrokes we have come to associate with Van Gogh at his best: crows and wheatfield, starry night, olive grove.

At the end of the day, exhausted, we went to the extraordinary art deco Tuchinsky [sic] Theater to see the film, The American, which seems to be occasioning conversations in Amsterdam from the newspaper and bookstore windows. For me, it was a reprise of Up In the Air, with George Clooney stuck in a meaningless life, finding and then losing love. In a memorable sequence, the observant village priest accuses Clooney's character, and all Americans, of not knowing history. And here I thought that was a human trait.

Lost in Amsterdam

My friend Judy from Findley Lake, our family’s home, arrived around noon and wanted to head right out. Directional coordinates are difficult in a semicircular city where street names change often. And so we promptly got lost which– as every intrepid traveler knows–is (within limits) the best way to discover a city.

Around the corner, we spotted an unusual quilted down garment in the window of a store Riele. Within minutes, the shopgirl was showing us how chic Amsterdammers keep warm (for it is autumn here.) A khaki colored oiled/waxed linen kilt with a big belt and buckle at the hips captivated me. (If only I were 30 pounds thinner.)

The “thing” that drew us into the shop pulled over the head and covered shoulders to below the breasts with a folded neck that could be pulled up to the ears. A down skirt, with curving quilt lines, had an attached knit top that allowed you to place the skirt anywhere on your trunk. (For those who don’t know, I had a down company with two design partners in Aspen in the mid-70!s and thus am alert to any innovations in down design.)

We had a map, Judy and I, but the six-point type naming the streets and canals presented a challenge to our middle-aged eyes. As it worked out, we spent our time in the old original city, much of it highly commercialized.

Nonetheless, we wandered along the Singelgracht Canal lined with the tulip mart. We stumbled into Spui (said Spow,) a square, lined with hip boutiques, and found the American Book Center and its attendant literary center The Treehouse.

I had communicated earlier with their director Donna DuCarme who said that she was planning very little for September and besides, getting people to come to a reading would be an issue. We just missed their show on erotica, which would have been interesting to see in a city so uninhibited about sexual identity.