A shoemaker’s shop. Custom-made, fashionable leather orthopedic shoes are displayed in a row behind the glass window. The shoemaker and his partner, a young man and woman, stand relaxed in the doorway. He wears a shirt with white-and-blue horizontal stripes, giving him the look of a French sailor, or a waiter on San Francisco’s Belden Place. Her arms are folded, and she leans casually against the doorjamb, listening. They are talking to a third man, who holds a bicycle with one hand and a small notebook in the other, in which he has written the shop’s address. He gestures with the book, and then lifts one foot, nods toward his sneaker’s rubber sole. My feet are unusual, he is saying. There have never been such feet as this, such difficulties, such geological formations. Steppes, I have, crags and badlands, regrettably placed mountains. Footquakes.

It is no problem, says the shoemaker. He is barefoot, himself.

A bit of cross-blog pollination. A friend and I are doing periodic posts on things we happen to be reading. Here’s the latest, on Gyula Krúdy, a pre-WWII (and mostly pre-WWI) Hungarian writer sweet as summer berries, and deeper than he appears at first.

Gyula Krúdy: Seduction and Innocence

Stunning how completely the Iranian trials replicate their Soviet models. From Juan Cole, quoting a translation of official Iran news radio:

Asked if his current position was under the effect of his imprisonment, (former vice president Mohammad Ali) Abtahi said the situation in the prison helped him to reach a conclusion about the recent incidents. Abtahi said he had no problems and concerns in the prison and praised his “courteous and polite interrogators.” He added that his friends who have not been arrested yet share the same idea. He concluded, however they “have not the courage to express the same ideas.”

This is horrifying. More so because we have seen this before, seen generations of brilliant intellectuals and dissidents wiped not just off the planet, but out of history, out of memory. Now again.

Don’t forget the Greens.

Joseph O’Neill, as part of the Atlantic’s four-part Border Crossings collection of essays:

There is a venerable tradition of being critical of nationalism and its assumptions. Nationalism proposes that a person’s freedom is justly maximized if the obligations limiting that freedom are set by the group with which he has most in common—i.e., his nation. A Frenchwoman’s freedom is best entrusted to a French government. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, proposes that, as an ethical and therefore political matter, a person can belong only in a global community. Therefore a person’s freedom is qualified by obligations to others arising irrespective of the nationality or proximity of the other, or—nodding to the contribution of Emmanuel Levinas—l’autre.

…Writers, in order to produce something truly worthwhile, must be ruled only by their deepest impulses, which can come from anywhere and lead in a million valuable directions. But it does seem that those who internalize the new world have every chance of writing something newly interesting.

Read the whole essay here.

This is like blog candy. Or no, not candy, more like a wine club, where something new and delectable comes in the mail whether you’ve remembered to look for it or not, and it might not be to your liking but it will always be worth tasting…

Or something. In any case. The folks who do the National Book Award are doing a blog countdown of their 60 77 winners over 60 years (celebrating their 60th anniversary, natch). An entry a day, on one of the biggies. Today, one of my favorites (and I realize one of the only in the list I’ve actually read), Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm:

He was obsessed by the paradoxical guilt of those who have nothing, in a postwar America where having mattered a great deal. “If you don’t have anything you’re nothing,” Mr. Dennis tells Barbara Loden in the film Wanda. “You might as well be dead.” Algren would have been moved by Wanda’s plight, though he chose, famously, Simone de Beauvoir, and a taste for women who think abstractly leaks through in The Man with the Golden Arm. The men, Frankie and Sparrow, are all action and hustle, and their thoughts are dominated by plans, constantly modified. The women—Zosh, Violet and Molly-O—are more dreamily cut off from their environment, like the limp, white curtain, a singular image of freshness, that hangs in Molly-O’s window…