Reading in Albania, Part 2

In the end, I also brought the Lonely Planet’s 30 pages on Albania. Also the out-of-print 1996 Blue Guide to Albania. I read them on the plane to Rome. The Lonely Planet reassured me that Albania is lovely now, all safe and beautiful, really, very safe, don’t worry, well, of course, except perhaps for Tropoja district, and Bajrum Curri – you might not want to go there. This was of course, exactly where I was headed. For comfort, I turned to the Blue Guide, usually a bastion of ancient history, which informed me in no uncertain terms that women should NOT travel to the north of Albania, and that for pregnant women, it was a death sentence. It said that travelers typically move with dynamite in their luggage to get past the landfalls, and that the only hotel in Bajrum Curri doubles as the mortuary, with dead bodies in the hallway a distinct possibility.

But this guide is from 1996 – the height of a horrendous financial collapse and ensuing trouble in Albania. I decide to ignore it. I am going to the mountains. They called me years ago. I am late.

Travelers typically move with dynamite in their luggage to get past the landfalls, and the only hotel in Bajrum Curri doubles as the mortuary.

I will find this Alfred Selimaj I have read about on the internet, and if I don’t, I have packed a tent. It’s not that I’m so confident. It’s just that I’m sure of my ultimate unimportance. Who would bother to murder me? And anyhow, from Edith Durham, I know the rules of murder in the highlands, and the laws of hospitality. I decide to ignore the travel guides, and travel by what little I know. And anyhow, I have knitting needles.

The end of the story? I shouldn’t have worried. Albania is beautiful, and the Albanian people are the kindest, most tolerant and generous I have ever encountered. The knitting did indeed come in handy. On the second night of my stay with the Selimaj family, Alfred came into the kitchen to find his mother and me sitting happily at the enormous table, both with hands full of knitting, identically posed with yarn wrapped around our necks and fingers. This is knitting, Albanian style, as Sose insisted I do it. I had the grace to blush. And the Edward Lear? One of Alfred’s numerous cousins was a young boy named Mund. It became a game between us that if he found me sitting anywhere, he would pull out my notebook, push a pen into my hand, and demand “Scroo-te!” DRAW. I drew him elephants being chased by mice, a soccer game, a hot air balloon, several tigers, and at least one rabbit skiing downhill. A peacock. And the Kosovar poetry of Azem Shkreli? On my first day, lolling about on a green flat island of tiny alpine flowers between two streams of impossibly blue water, overlooked and guarded by my beautiful mountains, I opened and read:

A day appeared

Not to bring you here

Not to take me away

And settled on my brow.

It arrived secretly

Neither brighter

Nor darker than the others.

It just happened

That simple day

And passed and took root

Somewhere at the end of silence.

Catherine Bohne lives in Brooklyn, and has begun rather doggedly frequenting Albania. She has worked at the Community Bookstore of Park Slope Brooklyn since 1995, and owned said bookstore since 2001. Lots of information is available about her online, accompanied by more than a few regrettable photographs. You can follow her doings at the “Messing About” section of www.communitybookstore.net, or the (coming soon) journal section of www.journeytovalbona.com.

Reading in Albania Pt. 1

“Once, only, I was awakened suddenly, by something falling on me – flomp – miaw – fizz! – an accidental cat had tumbled from some unexplored height, and testified great surprise . . . .”

– Edward Lear in Albania

In three days, I am getting on an airplane, and going to Italy, with the firm intention of traveling further, by boat, to Albania. Repeat after me: I am going to Albania. Repeat after me, repeat, because  . . .  NO ONE goes to Albania. But I am. In three days.

Why am I going? I am going because some months ago, I started reading Lawrence Durrell’s dreamy and lyrical account of living on Corfu in the 1930s (Prospero’s Cell). Corfu, of course, is one-and-a-half miles off the coast of Albania, which in turn made me remember a certain scene from my childhood. Cue: Me. Eleven years old and just able to raise chin over the rail of the boat, on which my father, mother, and I—bundled up like refuges against the January chill—are crossing, from Brindisi (in Italy) to Greece. The boat, little better than an African Queen-style inelegant chugger, pulls remorselessly away from the Italian coast. It plods and chumms away, down the Adriatic. With a child’s concentration, I stand at the rail watching the world move past. Civilized Europe falls away. The landscape shifts to weird green craggy mountains, waterfalls . . . darkness. Silence. Mountains, forests. No sound. No lights. No people. “Dad,” I whispered, “What is that?” Staring at the dark green silence of the place. My father, taller than I could see at the time, answered from his comforting height: “That’s Albania, Catherine. No one can go there.” And my little eleven year old heart thought: I’ll go there.

So now I am. I have an $82 airmiles ticket, and not much else beyond that. There are no guide books to Albania. No friendly Rough Guide, or Tony Fodor’s. So: to prepare for going, I have been reading High Albania by M. Edith Durham. After a certain amount of admirable philosophical and historical reflection, the author of this 1909 account begins: “I left Scutari at 5 a.m, piloted by a native who [knew that] The Vali, at that hour, would still be asleep.” The Vali, of course, being the Ottoman police. Quaint, strange, out of date, but Edith Durham remains (as she was during the first half of the 20^th century) the authority on the region. From her I learn the ancient rules of blood feuds. An eye for an eye, until some mediation can occur, at which point  fancy knitted socks can be appeasing. I am also reading Edward Lear in Albania, by, well, Edward Lear. The father of nonsense verse spent his life as (did you know this?) a landscape painter, and as Italy became clichéd, set off in 1848 for wilder climbs. And where could be wilder than Albania? He had a hard enough time trying to sketch: every time he put pencil to paper, a dervish would leap up yelling “Scroo! Scroo Shaitan!” [It draws, the Devil Draws!], but he found that if he wore a fez, the natives would at least stop throwing rocks at him. I am thinking that perhaps I need a fez, but I know this is 100 years out of date.

But what can I do? A hundred years of history have intervened, but they haven’t been prolific of literature. I’ve read Ismail Kadare: The Siege is a wonderful book, but set in the 1400s – I know how Skanderbeg felt about the Ottomans. (“Poorly” is an understatement).

I am heading off to a land that time seems to have forgotten. I’ve been reading the history, but what do I take to arm myself? Well, remembering my Zia Francesca in Croatia, who, it’s true, knitted cabled and bobbled socks to amaze, I bring a book on knitting fancy socks. And because they’re small and might impress, or be appropriate, two Green Integer Books: Heart of Darkness, which I ought to have read already, and Blood of the Quill, poetry from Kosova. Further, because ten years ago, Jason Goodwin reported that All Albanians know it: Childe Harold (Byron died in the fight for Greek Independence – but his troops: Albanian.) According to Goodwin, the Albanian people haven’t forgotten him yet. Also, a book on sailing (I’m going to the mountains, but am also contrary by nature), Tudge’s The Tree, and The Lighthouse Stephensons by Bella Bathhurst . . . . To make sure, no matter what I meet, that I don’t forget earth, and sea, and light.

I am amused, and I am frightened. But I am answering the long-ago and now-again call of those mountains. It’s taken me a long time to remember. But I am going. I AM going.

Catherine Bohne lives in Brooklyn, and has begun rather doggedly frequenting Albania. She has worked at the Community Bookstore of Park Slope Brooklyn since 1995, and owned said bookstore since 2001. Lots of information is available about her online, accompanied by more than a few regrettable photographs. You can follow her doings at the “Messing About” section of www.communitybookstore.net, or the (coming soon) journal section of www.journeytovalbona.com.

Six Meditations On Re-Reading

By Wythe Marschall
1.

When I read, I try to read quickly, swimming across a river of ink. It is only later that I can return and wade more slowly, learning its depths, and whirlpools and fords, oxbows and overhanging cypress branches, and look for life in the riverbed—where the juiciest ideas and quotations often wait, buried like crayfish, for some alien hand to pull them up.

2.

Reading a history, the history of anything, I encounter all sorts of strange names—toponyms (where is Palestrina, where Palestina, where the Palladium?) and demonyms (who were the Messipians? the Nvikhs?). On first sight, these names bounce right off my eyes, jumping off the page only long enough to demonstrate their foreignness before falling back into a blur of letters that, in the contemporary American orthographic world, just don’t go together.

But each time I encounter these same strange names, they acquire a little more meaning, body, sound, importance, and (of course) familiarity. Like a ghostly, only sometimes-visible family, they become part of my own idiolectic orthography. I can now tell you, for example, about a specific man named Mastarna, who was perhaps also a man named Servius Tullius, and why you might want to know about him or them. Among other reasons, he/they purportedly invented the census—a way to read a whole society at once.

3.

At one point, thanks to reading various fragmentary histories, I could wax vaguely poetic about 弘法大師, Kobo Daishi, founder of Shingon Buddhism. Now all I recall is that he is familiar, part of a family of characters in the general history of Japanese religion; his name is part of a family of signs that I recognize. The words I once read about him have blended together so that they do not—cannot—conjure the man, the historical person, but only the solid impression that such a man existed.

My Kobo Daishi mosaic, I could say, is smeared with silt. I have not read of him in years. The only “fact” I now recall about him is that he liked founding little shrines all over western Japan, and I remember that because I lived it, in very small part. In one of his shrines, on a slope of Miyajima, a holy mountain in the bay of Hiroshima, I looked into the dancing heart of a flame that has burned since the master himself was alive, circa CE 806. Now it’s herds of overly friendly, goatish little deer who rule Miyajima. They’ll eat your phone out of your pocket, if you let them.

Like learning a new language, learning history consists of scanning the same symbols over and over again until they speak. And even as you hear them, they are already changing. Seeing a deer stumble unexpectedly out of the woods once made me think of Bambi, a terrifying work of art. Then I went to Miyajima. Now deer make me recall monks and forgotten facts about esoteric Buddhism. Reading books has changed how I read the world, but the world has effaced what I’ve read.

4.

While first-reading, I make marginal notes, skip around or (in novels) re-read the pages I last read each time I pick a book back up. Reading becomes a mosaic, a challenge that simply cannot be completed to perfection, but can and should be tackled with vigor. My jumps within texts and between texts are motivated by excitement. Excitement is nonlinear.

Often, I think, we are taught in school—and proceed to teach our students—that to read is to create a list of mental bullet points which will be useful on a test. In fact, a first-reading seems to create in my mind not an analysis, not a bullet-pointed outline of any sort of cogent argument, but a feeling—a textual music of words and impressions.

5.

But re-reading consists not only of approaching the same information again, but doing so after the brain has had time to pore over its first, imagistic impression of a text. How long does the brain need? I don’t know and don’t presume to hypothesize. Probably depends on the brain and the material being re-read. Everybody Poops is a fine book, but we probably don’t need as long to “get” it and develop its themes in our own lives (pooping, poop) as we do after reading, say, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (meaning, ethics/aesthetics, logic, whathaveyou).

When I go back to a line of thought again and again—say, the conversion of the pagan Roman Imperium, to the two competing strains of orthodox Christianity (Nicene and Arian), and to various Gnostic churches during the fourth century CE—I seem to mysteriously understand the first readings at once upon starting the second. It is as if my brain had waited to see if I would ever really need to understand why the Council of Nicaea was convened, or if I was only bluffing  during my first reading.

The process of re-reading can certainly help solidify data—names, dates, themes—but it is the river in toto—the theme, the reason to have started pursuing a story in the first place—that we really want to understand, all of a sudden, when we read. The river is the reason that I re-read, not its tributaries (trivia).

6.

And yet, of course, knowledge is never attained to some perfect degree. The river, a different river each time it’s stepped in or even gazed at, continues to move millions of gallons of water, millions of data, millions of words, forward in time. Translations are corrupted; Wikipedia is fallible—and yet we read and re-read. The river never freezes; it’s never clean. And yet, eventually, trying to pick up in Text Z where we left off from Text A, we dive back into the ink.

Wythe Marschall can be found here.