Fin Keegan

We were newly-minted parents, living three miles from the World Trade Center. On September 11th, 2001 we saw, from our Brooklyn bedroom, the Twin Towers smoking black in strangely equal plumes and then, loudly, unbelievably, vanishing.

Before they fell, with the second plane having already hit, I went out to buy water and supplies. Our Polish neighbour, a refugee from the war, stood in a smock and hairnet on her stoop. Bewildered, she stared up, over the facing row of brownstones and trees, at the pair of now-chimneys and their pitch-black exhalation.
     She had been laundering in her basement all morning: her industry made of our respective yards a telling contrast. “What has happened?” she asked, both vowels and consonants still shaped by a long-swallowed-up Middle Europe.
     I told her that fires had broken out: nothing about the planes, the express intent connoted by a second strike. How to tell her, of all people, that a new and dreadful chapter of human history had just been opened before our eyes? But I should have–and also assured her of the supplies I was getting for ourselves and the baby.
     At the store Ling, the Malyasian shopkeeper, and I pooled our information. Behind me a child, standing with her mother and little brother, burst out crying: their father worked at the World Financial Center.
     We worked to persuade her that it was the adjacent World Trade Center that had been hit. We all knew, the child as much as the mother and wife, that he was, in any event, gravely endangered.
     A few days later, through smoke swirling in massive arc lights, I saw up close what the titanic forces of hatred had unleashed on our city: savage minds had twisted like pipecleaners the mighty steel and concrete–and confidence–of downtown Manhattan.
     And since? Only a poet could come closer than Peggy Noonan has:

For something like four years 9/11 was for me a bruise in my heart. Someone would refer to it or I’d see a picture in a newspaper and I’d experience it as a pressing on the bruise, and I’d hurt. My feelings were immediately accessible and immediately there. This year for the first time it is not a bruise but a scar–jagged, less open to remedy, comparatively numb. My heart has healed and is ever altered

Quote: Peggy Noonan The Storm Before the Balm Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2005

PENELOPE FITZGERALD experienced a dream denied to all but a lucky few: her debut novel was accepted by the first editor to read it. Within a year the book was published, to be swiftly followed by further and better books: a year later she had won the Booker Prize and captured a loyal, readership which was to grow steadily over the following years. Her final novel sold 100,00 copies in the United States alone. Until her recent death at 83, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most widely admired writers in the English language.
      The difference of course–when is there not a difference–was that Penelope Fitzgerald was in her sixty-fourth year when this career began. Though resolutely English–daughter of a Punch editor, granddaughter on both sides of Anglican bishops–this debut novelist was as far from the Beatlish perception of sexagenarian dotage as was the late Quentin Crisp: Penelope Fitzgerald was, and remained to the day of her death, one of the world’s sharper tacks…Read MORE of my review of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.

Thomas Adès continues to dazzle and I only wish, as one who has yet to see or hear his (by all accounts, remarkable) Tempest, that his record label was as prolific as he.

“Concentric Paths” is his latest: a Violin Concerto in three movements:

1. Rings
2. Paths
3. Rounds

I have posted some customized soundlinks below, preferable to their BBC Proms equivalents in that they isolate the music from the framing, spoken material:

• Thomas Adès - Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’ (20:30)
  • Recorded at the Royal Albert Hall: Sept 6th, 2005
  • Anthony Marwood (Violin)
  • Chamber Orchestra of Europe
  • Thomas Adès, Conductor
• BBC Introduction
• ‘Concentric Paths’ with Intro and Outro

The Introduction link, which includes some insightful remarks from Marwood, is worth a click, as is the composer’s Programme Note.

Note: According to Radio 3, the official links shall expire on September 13th, 2005. I am hoping that mine outlive theirs–but my apologies if they have shuffled their mortal code.

Mortimer Zuckerman draws a telling comparison between a natural disaster that befell a key swing state in an election year and one that, well, didn’t:

Contrast [the response to Katrina] with the hurricanes that struck Florida last year, when federal officials pulled off a tour de force, pouring billions of dollars to help distressed residents while tractor trailers with ice, water, and other supplies waited on the state’s borders until the storm passed. As soon as it did, help was rushed to the areas hardest hit, with National Guard troops on the scene quickly, directing traffic, and keeping looters out of damaged neighborhoods. President Bush was on the scene then within 48 hours. The suspicion now will not easily be eradicated that the difference was that it was an election year

Source: M. Zuckerman: Uncalm after the storm, US News and World Report, Sept 7th, 2005

It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now

–Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish Council, Jefferson, Louisiana
Source: Meet The Press, NBC, Sept 4th, 2005

Feeling Quixotic, I sent the following letter to Pennsylvania Avenue on September 3rd:

Your performance, Mr President, and those of your appointees in Homeland Security/FEMA, has been a national disgrace, leading to needless suffering and death.

Since January 2000, you, your policies, and your administration, have failed to a degree that, as of this writing, imperils the well-being of the Nation. You are no longer fit to lead us. Once order has been restored–and not only dignity, but basic human rights, have been returned to the innocent victims of this artificially-compounded disaster–you and your cabinet should resign and make way for a restorative, cross-party government

Since resignation is unlikely, the onus falls on responsible Republicans and Democrats to act. And that means impeachment.