Three books. Three Trips.
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, and Their Race to
Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts,
by Joshua Hammer.
Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicolas Ray,
by Nicca Ray.
Footfalls from the Land of Happiness A Journey
into the Dances of Bhutan,
by Karen Greenspan
Reviewed by Jan Schmidt
Recently I read three implausibly-related books: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer, about Abdel Kader Haidara, a bad-ass librarian if there ever was one; Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicolas Ray, a Memoir By Nicca Ray of her dad the noir film director; and Footfalls from the Land of Happiness A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan by Karen Greenspan.
The first book came to me as a surprise from my son Dave Hall. The New York Times nonfiction bestseller The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is exactly what The Washington Post quote on the cover says: “Part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract, and part out-and-out thriller.” Abdel Kader Haidara began collecting manuscripts in Mali when he realized that thousands, ultimately some 370,000 manuscripts dating back to the Middle Ages, were being stored in family homes for centuries. Most were written in Arabic but some in Songhay and Tamasheq, disproving the accepted theory that Africans had no written language. |
Once he gets the funds, Haidara builds a library and negotiates with people about letting go of their historical treasures. Then he has to inventory them, preserve them in temperature and humidity controlled vaults, digitize them so people can find them online if they can’t get to Mali to see the originals. At the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, I worked as Curator and did similar work, only I collected, preserved, and made accessible materials about dance. My collecting journeys never extended to fifty-mile camel rides into a desert to cajole possible donors into letting their centuries-old collections to come to me. Signing donation agreements with Mikhail Baryshnikov in his office was as bad-ass as my collecting got, though, at the time, I thought navigating the lawyers’ squabbles about picayune details constituted an insurmountable hardship.
Abdel Kader Haidara, who had survived such impossible odds to create these libraries in Timbuktu, then had to smuggle the ancient manuscripts to safety in the south. Al Qaeda terrorists, in partnership with the Tuareg separatists, took over northern Mali with weapons they liberated from stashes in Libya after Gaddafi’s fall. Once they took over Northern Mali, the Tuareg nationalists and Islamists struggled, leaving the land in the hands of the Islamists. The descriptions of life under the extremists and Haidara’s trying to protect and move these collections were terrifying. The author Hammer writes that Malian history was in a “constant state of flux, periods of openness and liberalism followed by waves of intolerance and repression... with strains of anti-intellectualism, religious purification and barbarism had coursed through the city repeatedly.” Well, doesn’t that sound familiar? Isn’t this the history of the USA—a country locked in a battle between Puritan forces and free-thinkers, with the added atrocity of racism? I ripped through this book—thrilling, frightening, educational, and joyful. |
Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicolas Ray, a memoir by Nicca Ray of her dad the noir film director, another harrowing story, has a personal connection to me. Not only is Nicca Ray a friend, but her father was a film hero of mine. In case you need a refresher: Nicholas Ray directed films including They Live by Night, Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean, and the infamous Johnny Guitar with the gun-toting women—Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge.
Nicca Ray’s life story dovetails with her father’s, as she takes us careening through decades starting in the forties of American film and music history, her father’s multiple wives and children, alcohol and drugs, Hollywood, McCarthyism, Chicago Seven trials, and Nicca’s own parallel life speeding through later decades on drugs, punk music, then, finally into sobriety. On page 276 she picks an apt detail to evoke her un-sober world: “When I came to the words Nicca-is-a fucking-whore were scrawled across my legs and arms in black Sharpie. I thought I’d made it into punk-rock-dom.” |
On page 41, Nicca has this most delicious sentence that kept my mind spinning for days. “. . .The New York Dolls whose members dressed to the nines in leopard print platform boots, thick white tights and silvery glitter body suits, wore their hair in long teased masses reminiscent of the hair bands that would come along a decade later.” This is the kind of slippage of time I can relate to. Though an editor might have switched the word “reminiscent” to “prefiguring”—possibly more accurate—it would be less indicative of the weird case of our present in the twenty-first century looking back on hair bands that are certainly now all “reminiscent,” even if some of them were “prefigured” by the New York Dolls.
Clean and sober at age twenty, Nicca later discovers the alcoholism and drug addiction of her father and finds their struggles to be mirrors into each other. She relates a nerve-racking ride, sloshing back and forth through the decades—hers and his. Each of their drug-addled timelines are chock full of “reminiscent” and “prefigured” stories and mirror most recovery stories, which are “reminiscent” of any writer’s attempt to contain a life in words. The relationships among the multiple wives and their children sent me spinning, especially as Tony, son of Nick and his first wife Jean, married Nick’s second wife Gloria, making him half-brother/step-father to another of Nick’s children. Not to mention multiple bipolar disorder diagnoses and general chaos. The book had me whiplashed, but, like any wild ride, it was exhilarating and exciting. |
So, now, if you need something to balance these crazy highs, try Footfalls from the Land of Happiness A Journey into the Dances of Bhutan by Karen Greenspan. Buddhist dance is just the thing to focus your mind again. This book grabbed me immediately in Chapter One when Karen writes that the common greeting in Bhutan is “Kuzuzampo La” or “how is your honorary body after long sleep?” Right. Good question.
Bhutanese geography and history, Buddhist thought, and traditional and sacred dance combine to form fascinating picture. Unlike Nicca Ray’s heady swirl of time and drugs, this is a steady, strong, evocation of that world as told through dance. From her foreword about meditation, Karen writes: "What is dance if not mindfulness of the body in action?” She gives full accounts of folkdances, dance dramas, and the sacred dances of monks called cham. These dances and festivals could go on for days. |
Karen Greenspan also learns the dances. so she can understand them via her own body. She writes that everyone is a dancer in Bhutan and tells the story on page 51 of stopping at a road block, “I decided to use the time to practice the dance I had just learned. All of a sudden, the middle-aged driver Dawa came running over to correct my hand and finger positions. He was quite emphatic and precise about my finger placement.”
Stunning photographs document the colorful costumes and masks, as well as the faces of onlookers. These dances intertwine a history from pre-Buddhist Tibetan folk religious rituals to the present. From this kingdom in the Himalayas that measures Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product, Karen Greenspan had many teachers and mentors who guided her through the experience of dance into an understanding of the multiple levels of meaning, including wisdom and compassion.
All this talk made me think of something I heard recently: my ego is not my amigo.
Karen, who is also a friend, did much of her research for this book, besides her trips to Bhutan, at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. There she used a collection of videos of dances from Bhutan that, as Curator, I was part of acquiring and making available on the Library’s website. Over the course of many trips, Core of Culture recorded over 300 separate dances with 500 hours of video. You can see them by going to digitalcollections.nypl.org. Then click on Featured Collections: Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and Moving Image Archive and search Bhutan.
So these three startling books—seemingly unconnected—melded for me into a full world of experience. While sheltering-in-place or as Governor Cuomo calls it “ON-PAUSE” (or as we say in our home: ON PAWS) these books allowed me to do the traveling I otherwise couldn’t, through time and through various countries, global and interior, ancient and present. Try em.
Stunning photographs document the colorful costumes and masks, as well as the faces of onlookers. These dances intertwine a history from pre-Buddhist Tibetan folk religious rituals to the present. From this kingdom in the Himalayas that measures Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product, Karen Greenspan had many teachers and mentors who guided her through the experience of dance into an understanding of the multiple levels of meaning, including wisdom and compassion.
All this talk made me think of something I heard recently: my ego is not my amigo.
Karen, who is also a friend, did much of her research for this book, besides her trips to Bhutan, at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. There she used a collection of videos of dances from Bhutan that, as Curator, I was part of acquiring and making available on the Library’s website. Over the course of many trips, Core of Culture recorded over 300 separate dances with 500 hours of video. You can see them by going to digitalcollections.nypl.org. Then click on Featured Collections: Jerome Robbins Dance Division Audio and Moving Image Archive and search Bhutan.
So these three startling books—seemingly unconnected—melded for me into a full world of experience. While sheltering-in-place or as Governor Cuomo calls it “ON-PAUSE” (or as we say in our home: ON PAWS) these books allowed me to do the traveling I otherwise couldn’t, through time and through various countries, global and interior, ancient and present. Try em.
*
Related virtual upcoming event: The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dance Division, is hosting a free online discussion with author Karen Greenspan about her book on dance of Bhutan on July 20, 2020, 5:30 to 7 p.m. Click here for full details. [N.B. You are visiting an archived back issue. Greenspan kindly wrote an article on the dance of Bhutan, as mentioned above, The photos are, in our humble opinion, fantastic. See Performance, Issue#13]