On Fossicking for Books

It was the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell that first allowed my latent book collector soul to surface. I had found Justine, half hidden in the stacks of an ancient forgotten library in Bangalore, and recognized the author only as Gerald Durrell’s brother. Having read enough of GD’s early childhood books (a trilogy, if I remember right, starting with My family and other animals, and I’m sure the other two will come back to me, or not, forcing me to check wikipedia), I realized that Lawrence Durrell was none other than the writer brother Larry. But what I read was an entirely different class of literature, and LD enmeshed me into his Alexandrian world.

Of course, in those days, I couldn’t afford to buy new books, even if I could find them, and my only hope was to search for books in the few used bookstores of Bangalore. Over the years, I formed a routine of periodically conducting ‘sweeps’ of the bookstores, and at one point even made a rough guide to the used bookstores of Bangalore. It was a curious routine, no doubt familiar to many aficionados of used book stores, the constant searching seeking for the right title. The element of the hunt. The apt word is fossicking, very common in Aussie slang, meaning to sift through the land for gems. After a while, it became more and more an art to fossick for books, to let your eye glide over the stacks, not even consciously reading the titles, automatically eliding the innumerous copies of romance novels and the thrillers, till, by chance, or by design, a book’s title jumps out of the stack, suddenly snapped into focus and then you reach for it, dreamily, while little waves of satisfaction mounts in your heart. It was a hobby, and a distraction, a few hours of losing myself in the hunt.

It became my mission to find all the four novels of Durrell’s quartet, in the same edition that I’d first encountered them. It wasn’t easy. I found Justine fairly easily, I think it was more popular than the others for some reason, but as time went by I slowly added to the set. Clea and Mountolive came next, while Balthazar proved elusive. I eventually found Balthazar in another edition, and this set off the search all over again. But this time I only found Mountolive. When a friend bought me a new edition of the Quartet, all four in the same volume, so shiny and complete, I was happy, but the thought of the missing volume never really left my mind. And when I did find Balthazar in the old edition, my hopes were dashed to find that the book was so beaten up that a sizeable chunk of the novel had somehow disappeared.

My well worn rounds of the used bookstores came to a halt when I moved to Israel for two years. Not realizing, not really understanding what it meant to be in a country where the main language was not english, I really hadn’t given the book situation any thought till I got there, and found myself anxiously browsing the tiny tiny english sections of even the major bookstores. And since I lived in the middle of the desert, hardly a multicultural hotspot in amenities if not with people, books in English became a luxury. I did manage to find one really good used book store with a pretty large (by Israeli standards) English books section and that kept me going, and the occasional trips to Tel Aviv was a source of much joy. The worst part of leaving Israel was leaving the books behind. I sold most of them back to the same bookstore in Ber Sheva, and they didn’t give me money- they only offered me book credit. So in the end, I exchanged my multisplendoured collection for a single edition of Don Quixote, a book I’d never read. It seemed oddly poetic to replace many novels with arguably the first modern novel. But by and large, till I got back to India and subsequently Australia, times were grim. Australia was a revelation. A huge Borders bookstore at my doorstep, where one could conveniently buy just about anything, if one was willing to pay the steep prices. And it was very weird. Books that I had sought for years, and bought feeling like I’d stumbled across a rare treasure, despite their battered and timeworn looks, were now available to me in fresh first hand guises, mocking me with their first world availability. It was all there in the open, it was like fossicking in a jeweller’s shop.

Of course, Sydney also had some used bookstores, and I did do the rounds there as well, but they were oh so orderly, books neatly classified into themes and sections. No chance of stumbling upon an unexpected book, only unexpected copies. This curiously lessened my inclination to prowl through the bookstores in Glebe and Newtown, though each visit was still enjoyable. My collection built up pretty quickly. Rather than fossicking for literature, I was looking for natural history books, mainly books on Australian spiders. I’m happy to report that at the end of four years, I eventually managed to find pretty much all the different books on Australian spiders. While the spider books were truly found objects, the other books were all neat and modern, and would have stood out in my old collection in Bangalore, different in their crispness.

And then in Mexico. Being in a spanish speaking country, and a country that loves literature is very frustrating. I found tons of authors I’d never heard of, writing books that seemed to me supremely interesting if only I could approach them. My spanish is still struggling, every page is littered with words that force me to scurry through the dictionary, every sentence is slow to read. I know that I’m merely impatient, the language will come with time, but for a year, my reading has shrunk again. Occasional book orders from Amazon, while they help, are almost beside the point for a book fossicker. There is no element of finding, of seeking: there is only the pointing and clicking and having your wish gratified, and there is definitely no shade of the unexpected find, or the incongruous discovery. In Xalapa, there are a couple of bookstores that have a section (a shelf!) of english books hidden in the far corners (curiously, among the spiders), but really nothing you wouldn’t find in the book exchange shelfs of backpacking places. And this was the situation, till I found the streets with the old books in Mexico City.

I have been going up to Mexico City pretty frequently, but it’s always been for some specific thing or the other, and rarely spent any time being a flâneur. But this time round, I had a few hours to spare, and we were staying downtown in the hotel with the most amazing roof ever, and wandered off looking for a bookshop. At a street intersection, on a whim I asked a guy who was handing out leaflets where I could find some bookstores, and he casually said that there were dozens a few blocks behind the cathedral. And so I found Calle Donceles. The name rang a bell, an internet friend had been to Mexico City a while ago and had written about this street (sadly, the report is offline), and I started walking along the street. No luck. I found a couple of Christian bookstores, not surprising since it was just behind the cathedral, but after an hour of walking I was ready to call off the search. I walked back the same way, and just as I was about to turn back the way I came, I decided to follow the road on the other direction. And then I hit pay dirt. A small section of the street was the books section. Atleast ten old/used bookstores stood clustered around each other, and as soon as I entered one of them, I instantly felt at home. The books were mostly Spanish, but I found entire shelves with books in English. And the books were highly disorganized, with all sorts of titles making unlikely neighbours. The strange thing was I found so many of the same titles that I frequently encountered during my sweeps in Bangalore. I guess at some point all these extremely popular books had dispersed all over the world, dispersed explosively and settled in odd nooks and crannies. Old friends, in familiar editions peeked out of the shelves. I found books, that I would have bought in a heartbeat, if I hadn’t already got them. I spent only two hours among the bookshelves, but the minutes flew by me, the reverie descended, and almost without thinking I added books to the collection already forming. Some were books by favourite authors that I’d never read, and some were entirely new titles, and yes some were even text books that would have cost an arm and a leg first hand. I cannot imagine how much richer this place will be when I finally can read Spanish with fluency, because each cavernous bookstore held so many treasures.

Despite the thrall, I had to rush through the bookshops, making only a sort of reconnaissance, and storing away their locations for later foraging. All the old habits came back to me, the manner of searching, the relaxation that comes despite the awkwardly tilted head, and always that smell, the pervasive smell of the old books. And then, in that small section, a dead end in that labyrinth, among all the yellowing paperbacks, a shelf half hidden by packs of unpacked books, I found a copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Balthazar. With all pages intact. It was like meeting an old friend after many years, and picking up where you left off, and that all the time in between eliminated. The Quartet is complete now.

Distant Peak

Road clouds

Fandango at Patio Muñoz

I went to a fandango the other night at the Patio Muñoz in the center of Xalapa. This patio, is like a set of small houses with a shared courtyard space, and it’s now a cultural hub, with workshops of painting and music. It has a small entrance, a long vividly painted corridor, and then an opening.
In the centre of the opening is the old washing areas, complete with sinks and basins.

There are periodic fandangos held here, mostly to raise money for some cause or the other. I don’t even remember the cause this time. But these fandangos are well respected, and some of the best names in the business turn up to play here.

What they play is a type of music called the Son Jarocho.

Son Jarocho is a traditional musical style of Veracruz, Mexico. It has historically been played from the northern state of Manny to central Veracruz, including Veracruz port and its hinterlands, hence the term for people or things from this region. It represents a fusion of (primarily Huastecan), Spanish, and African musical elements, reflecting the population which evolved in the region from Spanish colonial times. Lyrics include humorous verses and subjects such as love, nature, sailors, and cattle breeding that still reflect life in colonial and 19th century Mexico. Verses are often shared with the wider Mexican and Hispanic Caribbean repertoire

One of the more peculiar instruments they play is called the Quihada: it’s made from the jaw of a donkey or a horse.

Here’s a link to a video of what it sounds like .
I’ve heard a tremendous buzz around two groups, the first, Sonex, who recently won a National Geographic contest to play along with Ojos de brujo. But since their music has since diverged from the pure folk sound –for example, instead of using a wooden box, the drummer uses a electronically tricked out wooden box, and the violinist uses an electric violin– the purists are generally upset.

Same story with Son de madera, who’s founder Ramon runs the workshop here in Patio Muñoz. His group recently released an album with Smithsonian Folkways, called Son de mi tierra.

In these events, it usually starts with a concert, where various groups do their thing, but most people are there for the actual fandango, where everybody gets together and plays the song together.

There is a small wooden stage called the tarima where the dancers dance, with their hells thumping on the boards to provide a percussive accompaniment to the many small guitars.

I went to a fandango in Veracruz once, and took this photo very close to the centre of this vortex of sound, and immediately understood why playing the Jarana is so addictive, it’s an unbelievably potent participatory experience. You’re surrounded by this huge crowd of guitars, and the songs are very earthy and very familiar, but every guitar adds to the mix and mingled with the pounding of the tarima by the dancers, everything becomes hypnotic. The fandango goes on all night, depending only on the number of players left, and the enthusiasm of the dancers.

Bugs

For the past few months, I had these strange tick-bite like red marks popping up out of the blue all over me. I am -shall we say- very familiar with ticks, spending two years in the forests of India will do that to you, and I was quite sure that these were not ticks. And besides, these days I hardly do field research that involves crawling through the undergrowth. It’s all bring the critters back to the lab for me from now on. Anyway, I did my usual obsessive googling, turned up all sorts of weird causes, including the super bug MRSA, but none of the symptoms matched perfectly. I wasn’t too concerned because the marks kept fading away, only to reappear a month or so later.

Yesterday, it was driving me batty, not the itchiness per se, but the fact that I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were, when suddenly D says, oh I know, they’re Chaquistes.
I froze. What the hell are Chaquistes? I asked.
She said, you know…they’re bugs.
What’s the english name, I asked, not wanting to fight a foreign speaking bug.
She said..um… they’re called Noseeums.
No see ums? I repeated, sure that this was an elaborate leg pull, especially since I work with insects and spiders and such, and I have a non-layman’s knowledge of insects.
She said, yeah, that’s what they are called, because they’re so small, and you don’t see them.

I turned to google with an audible humpf, but lo- they are Noseeums. Little blood sucking midges.

Only the females bite and suck blood. They need the protein in this blood to make their eggs. No-see-ums will take blood from mammals, birds, and reptiles. Male no-see-ums are nectar feeders and do not bite. While the bite is not painful, it becomes very itchy. Some people get a red spot 1-2 inches wide! Try not to scratch the bites; it makes them itch longer and can make the bites get infected.

So now everything is clear. Every time there’s a prolonged set of rainy days, I keep getting bitten by these things, except I never see them, and only see the mysterious marks.