Zest for Living

There are many reasons for the extra intensity of attention paid to Tim Russert's death (none of which I feel is excessive, by the way). He is a beloved member of the very corps covering his demise; he has earned the broad affection of the public; he was cut down in his prime, at the top of his game; it is an election year, and he is Mr. Election; it was a couple days shy of Father's Day, and he is Mr. Celebrating Fatherhood; and so on. But one of the less acknowledged reasons is that TR is one of those individuals (like another famous man who shares those initials!) who clearly possesses an unusual zest for living -- who always seems to be enjoying himself. That is a very special quality, that people respond to strongly.

Book critic Michael Dirda published an essay a few days ago about why, if he could be a fictional character, he would be James Bond. For men, that would be a popular answer; but it isn't my answer. I would be Archie Goodwin, the operative and narrator in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels, superbly incarnated by Timothy Hutton in the Nero Wolfe television series. Archie's being a real snappy dresser certainly has something to do with my admiration -- but of course, James Bond is no slouch in that department either.

No, what really gets me about Archie is that Russert-like zest. Archie Goodwin operates with pleasure and confidence in his world, and he projects a real charm because of that. Watch how Timothy Hutton plays him -- that jaunty walk and swing of the arms! The spiffed-out wardobe is simply an extension and expression of Archie's good humor. He enjoys being at the exact point where he has situated himself.

And isn't that Tim Russert all over? He loved politics, the media, the world of Washington, getting to communicate with the public, hobnobbing with the real players and being one of them; and it showed. He situated himself just right -- and that cannot be too common; I've never managed it. William Kristol wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times (my bolding):

Tim was now a big shot, and he rather enjoyed being a big shot. But he was just about the nicest big shot in Washington — decent and unpretentious, remarkably kind and genuinely thoughtful.

In my book there is nothing whatsoever wrong with being a big shot or liking being one, if you can do it in that way.

I can only aspire to projecting Archie Goodwin-like qualities, and to some extent I believe that I do, based on feedback that I get. My inner melancholy is too strong for me to think that I am actually truly zestful -- but that must also be true of some of the apparent Tim Russerts and Archie Goodwins out there; it is not always possible to know this. Managing to be zestful in the world counts for a lot in itself; public selves are as real as private selves.

My Wardrobe: White Bucks

I had been without a pair of white bucks for a while (although I do have a pair of white nubuck wingtips, which I'll feature another time). These are shoes that for obvious reasons don't last forever! So the time had come for a purchase, and I found these neat J. Crews:

I love how these look with a seersucker suit and other summer classics. I even have a little "bunny bag" of chalk to touch them up with. It all makes me feel very F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Reading Diary

I completed the Willem Elsschot Three Novels volume. The Leg, Elsschot's short sequel to Soft Soap (published 14 years later, in 1938), is an interesting riff on the expiation of guilt, in which the slick entrepreneur Boorman undergoes a crisis of conscience over an outcome that actually has little if any connection to anything he may have done -- not that what he did do wasn't lousy, it was, plenty of room for guilt there, but he creates an idee fixe out of a specious cause-and-effect. Laarmans, his protege, gets the worst of it...Laarmans reappears in the last of Elsschot's 11 short novels, Will-o'-the-Wisp, a mysterious and affecting tale of three foreign sailors looking for a woman who has given them a false address; Laarmans becomes their guide. Martin Seymour-Smith has well said that in this short novel "Elsschot...achieves a tenuous, sad sense of human brotherhood, of broken dreams, of sweetness"; it strikes me as a small classic of European literature...I re-read the Malcolm Gladwell essay on The Man in The Grey Flannel Suit that I link to in the post below. Gladwell's key point is that Sloan Wilson's Everyman protagonist Tom Rath, with typical human resilience, does a good job of overcoming his World War II trauma, as reflected in this introspective passage:

...all these facts were simply incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. That, [Tom] had decided, was the final truth of the war, and he had greeted it with relief, greeted it eagerly, the simple fact that it was incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. Things just happen, he had decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind.

But Gladwell perhaps undercuts his conclusion by reasonably pointing out that "by our standards [Tom] and almost everyone else in the novel look like alcoholics." Perhaps that is evidence that Tom is not coping so well? -- or perhaps it is just a reflection of the social norms of the time, but in that case, maybe the society as a whole was not coping very well. Sloan Wilson seems very un-self-conscious about all the drinking he describes, and that falls in line with much other work of the time. John Cheever's characters drink like fish, too. And remember, in the television series Bewitched, Darrin Stephens's usual nightly request to his witch wife after arriving home from another hard day in the advertising trenches -- "Sam, pour me a double"? The new advertising series Mad Men re-creates this drinking culture, but of course it cannot help doing so with calculation; the documents of the era are most revealing about the drinking because they're not trying to make a point about it...Speaking of re-creations of eras, Nancy Franklin in the June 9/16 New Yorker reviews the new Seventies-based series Swingtown, and does not find it very laudable compared to Mad Men:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2008/06/09/080609crte_television_franklin?currentPage=1

Franklin, always a droll and readable critic, puts her finger on one bit of laziness that frequently drives me crazy in movies and television:

...to a serious fault, [Swingtown] makes use of the most overplayed music of the period. “Dream Weaver,” “Dancing in the Moonlight,” “Come and Get Your Love,” and other such beige tunes are thrown one after another onto the soundtrack, until your ears are crying. With few exceptions, the songs are not integrated into the show—the characters don’t hear them. They’re there just to pander to viewers of a certain age.

You hear this sort of aural shorthand in movies set in the Forties, with Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" or the Andrews Sisters's "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" standing for the entire decade despite the fact that they were only two popular tunes among many.

The Business Fiction Project

I haven't read all that much fiction that is mainly about the business world, although of course much fiction touches on that world. Business fiction can be situated in the world of workers, the world of managers and capitalists, the world of entrepreneurs; there are plenty of possibilities. And although these subjects are not exactly neglected as material -- there is a large academic literature on business themes in fiction -- it is easier to think quickly of novels on many other subjects than it is to think of great business novels.

I looked back over my life-list to see what I had read that might qualify for this project, and there were only nine novels.

William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes
Christopher Knowlton, The Real World
Louis Auchincloss, Diary of a Yuppie
Walter Kirn, Up in the Air
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
Willem Elsschot, Soft Soap
Willem Elsschot, The Leg

The Howells novels I read many years ago, and need to re-read; both are great. (A reinvigorated Howells project is inevitable; he's the American Trollope, my kind of novelist.) The Knowlton (by an author who has not published at book length again) and the Auchincloss (by a celebrated author who is very prolific) are artefacts of the Eighties; my memories of them are a little imprecise. Kirn's Up in the Air is an unusual novel about a "road warrior" consultant obsessed with his frequent flyer miles; I liked it very much. Then We Came to the End, as I've mentioned earlier in the blog, underwhelmed me for such an acclaimed novel. Soft Soap is very impressive, and I'll write more about its interesting short sequel The Leg in an upcoming "Reading Diary."

The real surprise among this group is Sloan Wilson's titularly famous The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, to which my attention was directed by a terrific Malcolm Gladwell essay in The New Yorker a few years back:

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_08_a_trauma.html

Wilson reveals himself in this novel as a writer of stature: the prose, characterization, and complex contrapuntal plotting are all excellent. If this is a representative sample of "popular fiction" of that time, I need to read more of it. (The film version with Gregory Peck is less good.)

The business world has generated plenty of interesting work in film and television lately: Mike Judge's wonderfully funny film Office Space; the British and American versions of The Office (neither of which I've watched yet); the closely related, and underrated, Fred Savage sit-com Working; Laurent Cantet's marvelous films Human Resources and Time Out (the latter one of the very best movies of the past decade); the new AMC series Mad Men (happily renewed for a second season).

More about all this moving forward; just laying out the "parameters" of the project here (to use biz-speak).

Proper Appreciations

Like everyone else, I am terribly saddened today by the death of Tim Russert. He was a fine journalist and by all accounts a lovable guy, and his genuineness was unmistakable (like that of Charles Kuralt before him, another self-created television news persona not spit out by some focus group). As William Kristol has noted at The Weekly Standard website, the tributes that are pouring in -- from his colleagues, from politicians, from the public -- seem completely real and heartfelt. I just spent an hour at the MSNBC website watching some of the interviews an obviously stricken Keith Olbermann conducted today -- with Barbara Walters, Bob Schieffer, Tom Brokaw, Bob Costas, and others -- and they are very moving.

I have been struck in recent years by the oft-maligned (and oft fairly maligned) media giving the newly deceased their due. Oh, sometimes coverage can spill over into a kind of hagiography, as when Reagan died (RR wasn't that universally beloved; the Reagan years were extremely divisive, and the press glossed over that at his passing). But more often, the obituary responses have been balanced and perceptive. I wouldn't have anticipated either Gerald Ford or George Harrison (to take two wildly disparate examples) getting a proper appreciation -- a joked-about accidental President and the least celebrated Beatle -- but they actually did get that, and more (which pleased me since I like them both). It has been kind of heartening when this happens.

"Dude, you look like a bond trader!"

So said one of my fellow brokers when I was in commercial real estate sales -- and it's my favorite sartorial compliment ever. Although I can deploy my business wardrobe to look tweedy, trad, Euro-capitalist, banker, preppie, attorney, corporate raider, and so on, one of my preferred looks is definitely "slick salesguy" -- positively Gordon Gekko-ish with the contrasting white French cuffs and spread collars, the ventless double-breasted suits, the braces, the brash links, the tassel loafers. Why this style should particularly appeal to me, I'm not sure; but I have a lot of fun with it.

I used this photo, pilfered from somewhere on the Internet, as my avatar in several menswear forums, before I switched to the Eliot Ness photograph I posted here last month. All the key elements are present, and I like the jauntiness.

Maxim

If my nearly 50 years have taught me one lesson above all, it is this: at the first sign of trouble, bail!

Web Forums

Web forums are, for me, what looks like a good idea, hiding a very bad idea. The impulse to reach out to others who share your interests is, naturally, strong for many of us. And the Internet appears to provide a miraculous way of doing that across all boundaries of geography and other limitations. So far, so great.

But there are catches. Forums are for the expression of opinions, of course, but those who share interests are hardly likely to share the same opinions. So there will be disputes. Email is famously lacking in the cues that sustain us through conversations-over-a-beer with friends whose opinions differ from our own; email often brings out the worst in people. When you add to that the anonymity of hiding behind handles and often-to-some-extent-created personas, the risks grow greater.

Certainly I am susceptible to those difficulties, and forums do not always bring out my best. I'd say that many men, in particular, fare poorly in that regard, because of a competitive and combative streak (which I share); and of their nature many forums that interest me will be male-dominated (do men like this format better than women?). They will also frequently descend to pissing contests.

So almost always at some point in time, a given forum stops being fun for me. A spirited debate, sometimes one I've started, can get nastier and nastier, until I wonder, how did we get here? (knowing full well that I own my part of the mess).

Then it's time to get out.

I hope blogging will not be like that -- although I know that bloggers burn out, too. But mine is a modest blog with a small readership, unlikely to generate any demands I can't handle (indeed, unlikely to generate any demands at all, except for self-imposed ones).

Flip-Flop Nation

On my Sunday morning rounds today, which took in Atlantic Bread Company, Qdoba, the Fox River Mall including Jos. A. Bank, and Barnes & Noble, I noticed (and counted) that despite dismally wet and initially cool weather, flip-flops outnumbered other male footwear (including other styles of sandal) by about three to one on guys of all ages. Time for a Memo to the Male American Nation: Fellas, this has gotten completely out of hand. Your toes just aren't that appealing. And for those of you over 40, this is outright undignified; save it for the beach (and then avoid the beach: very few males over 40 look good there).

I own a couple of pairs of sandals myself, although I don't get much use out of them unless I'm in Mexico: a pair of black leather slides from Lord & Taylor, and a pair of brown closed toe "dress" sandals from Kenneth Cole. I hold onto these in case of a need arising; they both look fairly decent for footwear of this kind.

But the sudden ubiquity of cheap flip-flops in every possible situation -- spare me.

UPDATE (5/7/2009): As noted in a later post, I eventually relented and bought a nice pair of Clarks flip-flops, for the sake of Walt Whitman-ian contradiction and as an "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" gesture. I don't wear them much, but occasionally the mood takes me. I still think flip-flops are too ubiquitous, as complained of in the original post, but every now and then I see a guy pull the look off. I always make a mental tip-o'-the-hat when I see men get away with clothing choices that shouldn't work or that don't generally appeal to me.)

Willem Elsschot

As part of my Dutch Literature Project, I borrowed a volume by the Flemish writer Willem Elsschot (1882-1960) from the Cofrin Library at University of Wisconsin Green Bay. (All the public universities in Northeast Wisconsin joined to offer a shared library card for community users; it's great having that access.) The volume, published in the Biblioteca Neerlandica series in 1965, is blandly titled Three Novels. The translations are by A. Brotherton.

"Three Novels" might be stretching it a bit; that sounds like a lot of material. The first, Soft Soap, which I just finished, is 139 pages, which certainly qualifies as a compact novel; the second, The Leg, is 57 pages, and the third, Will-o'-the-Wisp, is 40 pages, so those are at most novellas or long short stories. As I have noted in my prior excursions into Dutch literature, Soft Soap doesn't read in the least like a conventional novel. Oh, it has characters, and a theme, but no real plotting or suspense or the other common characteristics of a "novel." It reads more like a fictional demonstration of a truth -- and a brilliant demonstration at that.

Soft Soap, which shares characters with other productions in the Elsschot fictional universe, is set in the Antwerp business world of the 1920s. It is one of the best fictions about business I've ever read -- I'll pick that subject up in a later post. Elsschot's two "perpetrators," Boorman and Laarmans, "soft soap" (and sometimes near-blackmail) businesses into ordering stacks of what looks like an independent publication but is in fact fully paid for marketing literature. This is not an uncommon practice even today; the book has a decidedly timeless feel in a business sense. Boorman, and Laarmans as his protege, are shrewd operators as salesmen, and as a marketer Boorman is in fact a puffer of genius; he can extemporize copy that sounds great (pure b.s., of course, but that's marketing for you). It is the borderline legitimacy and near humanity of these skunks that makes Soft Soap more complex than an Onion-type satire.

Martin Seymour-Smith in his Guide to Modern World Literature says of Elsschot, "He is an unsensational, sophisticated, parodic, tender realist of genius: a delightful writer, and a major one. Elsschot is full of subtle feeling..." Now that is a lot of adjectives, but it also seems like a completely accurate description after reading Soft Soap. I'll be reading all of Elsschot that exists in English translation.

So the Dutch Literature Project has spawned a sub-project on Willem Elsschot; and Soft Soap also falls squarely in my Business Fiction Project. This is an entirely characteristic progression for me. As Yogi Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!" I interpret that to mean, take all of them.

Reading Diary

Reading time suffered this week because of a heavy load at work, so it was a joy to get back to Trollope this morning. Last weekend while reading Can You Forgive Her? I was very moved by the reconciliation scene between Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser; in recent weeks Trollope has brought chills to my spine, laughter to my lips, and tears to my eyes. This week I was reminded anew how good he is observationally, as in this comment of Glencora's about her infatuation with Burgo Fitzgerald:

When I saw him the other night he was just as handsome as ever — the same look, half wild and half tame, like an animal you cannot catch, but which you think would love you so if you could catch him.

I have never read a better expression of why women go for the "wrong" men.

My Wardrobe: Black Split-Toe Lace-Ups

On the theory that a guy simply can't have enough black shoes, I have been adding to my collection. These Hugo Boss black split-toe lace-ups arrived this week. Studly-looking shoes!

They are a replacement for a pair of Cole-Haans that are of lesser quality (although perfectly acceptable for weekend wear until the soles go). The Cole-Haans are "corrected grain leather," the kind that looks bright and sort of pre-polished. I'm wearing the Cole-Haans with jeans today and they actually look pretty sharp, but the Bosses are way finer shoes, and I like the elongated styling. On the Cole-Haans, the split line is shorter; the longer split line on the Bosses is more elegant to my eyes.

Television Series: Getting Hooked

The first few episodes of any television series that is truly serial in nature form the crucial stretch during which a viewer is hooked. I noted in my post about Hill Street Blues just how good its pilot episode is -- and all the early episodes follow suit, there's scarcely a weak minute. This week, I have been re-watching the early first season episodes of Northern Exposure, and they both set the tone of that series beautifully (verging toward the precious without quite landing there) and slip in casual references that will play out hugely later on (Maggie's boyfriends and their fates, the founding of the town by Cicely and Roslyn).

Let me assess some other first episodes I've watched recently, what with all the complete season DVD box sets being issued lately.

Epitafios -- From my notes: "I can vacillate on whether I'm going to commit to a series. I watched the first episode of HBO's Spanish language serial killer series Epitafios the other night, for example, and I'm not sure I'm going to go the distance. Plus: the Buenos Aires setting (there's a city that fascinates me!). Minus: it seemed sort of sub-David Fincher. So I don't know. It was a library borrow so I have no sunk investment." (I haven't watched another episode yet.)

Big Love -- From the same notes: "I'm also not sure whether I'm going to continue with Big Love (after viewing the first two episodes). It's well acted to be sure, but my problem is I just don't get it. My thinking was well captured by a poster at the Internet Movie Database:

One thing I don't get and I don't think is adequately explained is why would someone want more than one wife. The financial and other burdens are enormous, as the show illustrates. There are allusions to religious reasons, but that's about as far as it goes.What is the upside? What would compel someone to do this? What is the motivation? What is the motivation for these women to enter into such an arrangement? These things go largely unexplored. What sane person would say I would like to buy three houses all in a row, make them a compound, have three wives (and then find three women willing to do this), have a bus load of children, and then spend most of my life trying to cover this up??"

(I haven't continued with this yet either.)

All Creatures Great and Small -- A great first episode, introducing young vet James Herriot to the Yorkshire town that will become his home. Plenty of warmth, especially when James is offered the job he seeks. Unlike Dr. Fleischman in Northern Exposure, who resists Alaska to the end, James will flourish in his new surroundings. (I'm nearing the end of my viewing of the first season.)

Monarch of the Glen -- "I've launched another series with the first two episodes of Monarch of the Glen on DVD. So far it strikes me as very much Northern Exposure in the highlands, which is not at all bad; another obvious antecedent is All Creatures Great and Small, another show with wacky locals to spare. It remains to be seen if Monarch of the Glen, which seems determinedly light in tone, can ever pull off the trick of being actually moving, as those two series do. One less than hopeful sign is that Richard Briers's Hector, the family patriarch who occupies a roughly equivalent position in the show's scheme to Barry Corbin's Maurice in Northern Exposure and Robert Hardy's Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures, is far more purely cartoonish (and less engaging) than those two complex and oddly endearing gentlemen.

Still, only two episodes into a seven season series; plenty of time." (Unresumed as yet.)

The Sopranos -- I'll write about this separately later. Phenomenal first episode. (I'm also nearing the end of my viewing of the first season.)

It's easy to see that the shows whose early episodes don't "grab" me languish and fall behind in my viewing queue.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

This 1975 spy thriller directed by Sydney Pollack was already at the top of my Netflix queue when word came of Pollack's death. He was a very respectable presence in Hollywood, as director, producer, and actor; I especially liked him as an actor. (Indeed, I thought I had a nifty trivia question to which Pollack was the only answer -- "Name an actor who has worked with Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, and Woody Allen" -- until I realized that Shelley Duvall also qualified.)

I had long wanted to see Three Days of the Condor because it is described as one of the "paranoid thrillers" of the early Seventies, but I can't honestly say that it matches up to the definitive examples directed by Alan J. Pakula (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men). Pollack was always a craftsmanlike director, but I haven't yet seen a film of his that got my juices flowing.

It's the little things that make the difference. Owen Roizman's cinematography in Condor is effective, but scarcely at the brilliant level of Gordon Willis's work in the three Pakula films. Dave Grusin's music does nothing for Condor atmospherically -- it's just throwaway pop jazz -- while Michael Small's music in the first two Pakulas and David Shire's in the third contribute hugely to the ominous atmosphere of those movies.

Three Days of the Condor is based on a well-regarded novel by James Grady which I haven't looked at, but the plotting seems a little weak. Robert Redford's spy-on-the-run "reads" one situation involving a mail delivery really stupidly, so that key scene seems forced. The whole business about his roping in "innocent bystander" Faye Dunaway seemed to me a dramatic cul-de-sac, although it occupies a huge portion of the running time.

Where Condor pays off is in some of the dialogue exchanges. Redford has two great scenes late in the film, one with Max von Sydow as a civilized Belgian hit-man, the other with Cliff Robertson as a CIA executive; the latter scene is prescient in the way that Robertson lays it on the line about Peak Oil and resource depletion -- looking forward to roughly where we are now.

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

For Gothic atmosphere on film, Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase can scarcely be bettered. I remember very well the first time I saw this film. One summer during the early Seventies, ABC ran a series of black and white classics from the Forties era in prime time, between four and six in all (my memory's a little hazy). One was Portrait of Jennie, another was The Spiral Staircase; right now I forget the rest (and I haven't had much luck finding details about this venture). The series was my real introduction to classic American cinema, film noir, and the possibilities of black and white cinematography, so I will be forever grateful to whoever it was at ABC that came up with the idea.

The Spiral Staircase is based on a mystery novel by Ethel Lina White (who also wrote the novel on which Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is based). Frankly, the mystery angle doesn't amount to much, at least in the movie; an astute viewer should be able to figure out the identity of the killer by process of elimination fairly early on. A serial killer is picking off all the physically and mentally challenged young ladies in a wholesome American town in 1916; the obvious next target is a mute girl who works as a companion to a dowager who lives in a magnificent old house with several other family members and servants on premise. There are only so many people the killer could be; once you get it down to two and eliminate the one the folks in the movie are suspicious of, you're done!

But the real joy of the movie is in the sheer skillful spookiness of the direction. The widow's house on the "dark and stormy night" of the action provides Siodmak with wonderful opportunities for shadowy and threatening mise-en-scene, not one of which he wastes. The look of the house perhaps bears a slight indebtedness to the Amberson mansion in Orson Welles's The Magnificent Amberson, which had appeared a few years before and which no gifted film-maker like Siodmak could fail to profit from. But the mature mastery of technique here is quite unmistakable.

Siodmak had an odd directorial trajectory -- he "careered from career to career," to borrow a phrase from Stephen Sondheim. He began making films in his native Germany and later in France in the Thirties; spent 12 years (1941-1952) cranking them out in Hollywood (including such noir classics as The Killers, Criss Cross, and The Dark Mirror); them moved back to Europe and closed out his career with twenty more years of film-making in Germany, France, and England (with only a couple of U.S.-financed projects). About half his Hollywood films, mostly very good indeed, are the visible portion of this output; the rest are currently almost impossible to see, so it is very hard to assess Siodmak overall.

Offbeat Travel Books

I finished these two excellent books, both with "Lost" in the title, a while back, but at least wanted to acknowledge their distinction with a quick note. The ideas for both books are marvelous and original -- not an easy accomplishment in an age of exponentially proliferating travel books!

Daniel Kalder's brashly funny Lost Cosmonaut explores some (there are lots) of the obscure republics of Soviet Europe: Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia. The surface of Kalder's narrative is "disrespectful" and politically incorrect, which some readers dislike, but I felt that one level deeper he actually conveys an existential empathy with his destinations that is, as he aptly puts it, "anti-touristic":

The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable...The anti-tourist seeks locked doors and demolished buildings...The anti-tourist travels at the wrong time of year...The anti-tourist is interested only in hidden histories, in delightful obscurities, in bad art...The anti-tourist values disorientation over enlightenment.

And of disorientation, Kalder provides a-plenty.

Riccardo Orizio's Lost White Tribes is also thoroughly disorienting, taking on as it does the rich subject of colonial "left behinds," stragglers of history who never returned to their homelands. We get pockets of Dutch in Sri Lanka and Namibia, ex-Southern Confederates in Brazil (where slavery was legal until 1888, 23 years after the War between the States ended), French in Guadeloupe, Germans in Jamaica, and Poles in Haiti. These remnants are themselves disoriented, probably permanently. Some have become inbred; they are largely poor; most pine for a "golden" past they can never know; their relations with both their countries of residence and of origin are tenuous at best.