By the seaside

Been reading, me. Weighty tomes - one metaphorically heavy; the other 480pp 0.35kg = Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2011) by Philip Mansel [Guardian].

In reviewing Michael Crummey's Sweetland,  I touched up on a rather inclusive and open acceptance of the diversity of sex and its practice in rural 20thC Newfoundland . . . plenty of native nookie and the results of these liaisons are accepted even if marital non-paternity is known or suspected. I rather enjoyed his description of the end of days in a Newfoundland Outport and noted that another of his works was borrowboxable as e-book. The Innocents (2019) develops the story of a microscopic maritime community  in 19thC Newfoundland. Two subadult children are left alone after their newborn baby sister, their mother and then father are all carried off within a few weeks of each other. The kids have learned some aspects of living and making a living [salt cod, furs] in super-adverse conditions: the ice piles up in their remote cove each winter; they plant root vegetables and forage berries in the Fall; they eat fish in abundance.  

The perennial problem in such edge communities is spreading out the calories and vit-C so that they are available 12 months a year instead of 12 weeks. For the orphaned childer, this necessity is met by the twice yearly visit of the same trading schooner: bringing salt, shot, fish-hooks and flour in the Spring and taking cod-planks in the Fall. A couple of times, the sea delivers a Robinson Crusoe bonus to the kids by wrecking a ship out there and washing the debris [hats, coats, rum, cordage] ashore. Survival is the driving theme but nookie and the results of these liaisons also stitches together the teenage lives. The ending is happy: for some definitions of happy.

Diversity, inclusion and sex are also central to Philip Mansel's Levant his history of the Near East  in 19thC & 20th. He focuses on three jewels in the crown of Levantine cosmopolitanism: Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut. I worked with a fellow in the 1980s who had, as a student, achieved the epitome of sophisticated cool in 1974: (snow powder) skiing on Mount Lebanon in the morning and water-skiing off a Beirut beach in the afternoon. On 13th April 1975 a random act of sectarian violence kicked off 15 years of Lebanese Civil War. 

In 1975, the population in Lebanon was ~2.5 million, over the next 15 years, +1 million fled and 150,000 were murdered by the neighbours. Same thing happened in Smyrna in 1922 [bloboprev]. Same thing (on a much smaller scale) occurred in 1882 Alexandria. In the background, and profiting from the disruption, were citizens and emporia of The Great Powers. Before the sht ht the fan, these three cities were kind of wonderful to inhabit - if you had a bit of money [a little hard currency could go a long way]; if you were a little bit gay [CP Cavafy R]; if you couldn't accept every word of your vicar, imam or patriarch. In Smyrna you could read a french newspaper, in an armenian café, eating greek pastries, while wearing a smart suit from your jewish tailor. Women could also sit in the same café sans hijab; a thing impossible even 10 km into the city's hinterland.

The Beloved's grandfather, some sort of Christian (Maronite?) left his crappy Lebanese valley orange grove with his brothers and migrated via Beirut and Alex to West Africa 100 years ago. His three daughters grew up in multicultural colonial West Africa in the 1940s. By 2000, they all finished up, for reasons, in Ireland. It was a wonder to watch them making houmous: bickering in English, French, Hausa about garlic and salt. Always too much food but so much kindness and welcome as well. Smyrna and Alexandria are now as boring, parochial and monoglot as the small town with the big cathedral where I went to school in the 1960s. Beirut is rebuilding itself from the rubble as the last bastion of The Levant - where cultures clash and get into bed with each other and synergies result.