atlas(t): galleon trade edition

louise nevelson is a goddess

Photo via Wikimedia

'm Not Interested in Abstract Sculpture (sooo not!) so I wasn't going to see the Louise Nevelson show at the De Young (nodding in appreciation? NO!)

But then I interviewed Woff for a Hyphen magazine article (stay tuned) and she mentioned, among other, more idiosyncratic influences, Louise Nevelson as a role model in her "pomp" and confidence. So when I was there last weekend to see Mike's show, I took in the Nevelson as well, on coincidentally its last day.

Wow.

That was a great show, especially the first four rooms: one of those lovely, simple moments when the curators and the preparators and everybody gets their shit together and comes up with a complete experience that IS an experience ... but also shows off each individual piece to its best advantage.

Case in point: the entrance contained two pieces--a self portrait, and one of her "cathedral" walls of boxes. Each was set apart from the other, displayed in contrasting and theatrical styles. The cathedral piece stood against a wall and was placed so that the viewer had to stand right up before it without gaining distance; the self-portrait in front of a sheer screen and lighted dramatically from above, so that you could walk around the dividing wall and see the shadow of the piece from behind.

The second and third galleries were full of these black-painted-wood "cathedral" pieces, all stacks of open-faced boxes filled with found pieces of wood: lathe-turned table legs and the scraps of circular cut-outs, wedges, blocks, discarded moldings, etc. The genius of these two galleries was that each piece was set against a dark grey wall and lighted by two or three blue-gelled frenells. Far from obscuring the black-on-black piece, this color scheme turned out to be the best way to pick out the movement and blockage of shadow Nevelson built in. The modulation of shadow and surface that Nevelson plays with is so complete and sophisticated, that you don't need a high-contrast lighting scheme to make it come out. On the contrary, you need mood lighting. This was proven out by two later galleries which lighted black pieces in white to no great effect.

When I stood before the first cathedral piece in the entrance, I felt as if I was standing before a bank of speakers. I could almost hear music, the synesthesia of the experience was so strong. I had to concentrate hard, like when looking for the figure inside a 3-D dot graphic, but I could almost hear music throughout the exhibition.

Then I emerged from the faux-gloom into a room full of light, and white-wooden pieces of the "Dawn" series. After being dazzled for a moment, I noticed that, although strongly lighted, the pieces didn't create a high contrast between lighted surface and shadow. The white paint and varied forms of the sculptures' components reflected light in various directions around the pieces, modulating the play of light and shadow in remarkably complex and subtle ways.

The subsequent galleries, while impressive, weren't overwhelming. They were more a hodgepodge of miscellaneous great work, such as an entire room constructed on her scrap-box plan, plexiglas pieces, and paper reliefs. The first galleries, though were like the first two movements of a symphony, that tracked the sounds of night and daybreak.

Pompous? Probably, but what symphony isn't? Fabulous is more like it.

philippine history according to youtube

his is so awesome I want to cry.

It's a typical youtube homemade video of a song describing the conflict between Magellan and Lapu Lapu. It ends with Magellan asking for a doctor and telling his mama "don't you cry."

Now, wouldn't you want to die trying to bring Christianity to the Philippines ... or something ... and then being immortalized in a song like this? (Does anybody know who this singer is?)

NEXT!

Also, this history student made this video summary of the Galleon Trade for class. Love the music! Don't love the way history is taught: so that it leaches all the human idiosyncracy out of the stories and makes them a catalogue of dead numbers and dry anecdotes.

trader woff

This and other unattributed photos were stolen from www.wofflehouse.com, Woff's website.

rader Woff is here to speak, speak about the Galleon Trade.

Jenifer Wofford, by name, den mother, artiste, fearless leader, unspeakable admiral, grantwriter, ruffled trade, and the one to blame for all of this.

Speak, Woff! Tell us: what is the Galleon Trade?

... if we can find some other art spaces along the west coast of Mexico ...

Indeed! And how did you come up with this project?

It was 1998 and I barely understood what an internet was.

And where do you see cultural convergences among the three landing points of the project: Philippines, Mexico, and the Bay Area?

You have an incredible love of drama in both situations ... I don't know, good dancing skills? ... A real affinity for pork and salt?

Then talk about hybridity: in general, and especially with regard to the Philippines as a place of both race-mixing and cultural hybridity.

The tricky thing about talking about the Philippines, certainly from somebody who's a halfie herself, is ... it can become very self-congratulatory to talk about the wonderful future of hybridity. It's really narcissistic, too. ... At the end of the day, for me it's less about some nationalistic Filipino thing, for me it is more about the bigger condition of hybridity or about drawing connections across difference. Doing that through Filipino arts and culture issues for me feels the most--"authentic" is such a tricky word but I'll go ahead and use it--feels like the most authentic way for me to do it. I could do it in some ways just as easily through Malaysia, since I grew up there, and in some ways I have a lot deeper connections with that place, but it's a little trickier to make that fly. There's a very small Malaysian American community here, there's less of a network to actually make these kinds of parallels happen. --Also, I'm not Malaysian.

jeepneys

Jeepney! Almighty Jeepney!

Everyone's symbol of the Philippines, everyone's adjective. It's impossible to explain a jeepney--you have to see one. But once you've seen one, all you need to say is "jeepney" for the full force of its symbolism--its representativeness, its jumble and joy and color--to infect whatever word you're modifying.

The word itself contracts "Jeep" and "Jitney," the latter a form of share taxi found in the US and Canada in the early 20th Century.

Where did it come from?

(The piece continues here.)

It's also impossible not to fall in love with jeepneys. I did, my first hour in Manila--exhausted from a 16-hour flight and 13-hour jetlag, inside an air-conditioned taxi trying to muscle its way through morning rush hour to our accommodations--when the rising sun picked out the brightest things on an already colorful landscape, and all the things that people had tried to tell me about jeepneys before burst visually into my consciousness like ripe coconuts onto my hard, hard head.

The brightest things were moving targets full of people and I didn't manage to take a single picture that time, nor did I manage it for the rest of my trip in Manila, despite repeated attempts. My only halfway decent jeepney pictures are from the inside of one Zak took me on to get, in a roundabout way, to the Manalos' store.

It seems almost silly to point out the Filipino-representative nature of jeepneys; it's so overstated already. But do you notice something about all these youtube videos?

Yeah, they're all made by Ams of the non-Fil variety, or other flavors of white tourist. (Let's count me among them, since in the Philippines, I'm white. That's, after all, what counted to the Filipino strangers I encountered: the American, the money, and the white. Oh, and apparently I'm white because of the loves and enthusiasms the Philippines awakened in me. Jeepney! O, Jeepney!)

Filipinos I met didn't talk about jeepneys amongst themselves, and were almost reluctant to answer my questions. A cliché? A stereotype? Fil Ams were equally reticent, and undelighted. Used to it? The only Filipino youtube videos with the word "jeepney" in them were the excessively posted video of a band called "Sponge Cola," (?) who had an apparent hit with their song "Jeepney." There aren't any jeepneys in the video, but I have no idea if the song deals with jeepneys. (Well, there were also the inevitable personal videos made by Sponge Cola fans using photos of self and drawings of unicorns against the backdrop of the jeepney song.)

But Americans? A post-modern, transportative, artisan-fact like a jeepney is almost calculated to make GenX travelsters wet their shorts with cum-to-Jesus. Love. LOVE! How it bleeds American pop through its chrome skin! How it bedecks, deflowers, beflowers a supra-militarized past by dragging it into a dingy military relic! How it pollutes the air (you can hardly ride one for the fumes!)! The names of the jeepneys! They all have names! Love! How unselfconscious! Just like the na-ked-tives in National Geographic! We love that shit!

And the Catholicism of the jeepneys! They're so Catholic! With their virgin statues, and saintly names, and sometimes near-evangelical airbrushed Jesus. We love the Catholic in the foreign, since the US is so fundamentally post-Catholic, post-joy, post-passion, and post-tack. It makes the Philippines almost look like those weekends in TJ, or spring break in Cabo! Only better, because, without the frat boys (much)!

And, naturally, jeepneys can also be rolling carnivals of affect, being evidence both of poverty and pluck. Although an American would never decorate a moving vehicle thus without a guarantee of praise, attention, gallery space, and the possibility of grant monies, we can appreciate the sheer cultural wastage of decorating 200,000 + vehicles to be used purely for public transport, particularly if said vehicle is a microenterprise run by an undereducated family that barely speaks English.

Okay, I'm being a bitch. Truth be told, I'm annoyed that it turns out I'm a cliché of an American tourist, so in love with the Jeepney, the Jeepney, o!

But so be it! Let this rhythm of searched-for youtube videos be my love song to the Jeepney, the lovely Jeepney, the ironic Jeepney, the joyful Jeepney, the mortal Jeepney. May it live forever!

bill sorro

ne could be forgiven for thinking that I'm a bit of a pinoyphile, what with this whole Chinese-hapa-with-no-Filipino-connections-starts-a-blog-about-Filipino-stuff thing.

I'm not, as it happens, a pinoyfile (pinoypile?) but I do have a special connection with Fil Am history and culture--not because I sought it, but because the Bay Area Fil Am community runs like blood through Asian American history and organizing, in a way that no other individual ethnic community does. You can't ignore it, and you can draw from it.

My first job here in the Bay Area, the job that defined me to the community and defined my mission and vocation in life to myself, was at Kearny Street Workshop. KSW was so called because it had originated in the International Hotel, an SRO on Kearny Street that housed largely elderly Filipino American men who had been seasonal laborers earlier in the century.

The International Hotel fell victim to San Francisco's insane real estate politics in the 1960's. It was the last building standing of what had once been Manilatown, bordering on Chinatown, but had since been eaten up by the Financial District. The residents of the I-Hotel were one building away from being banished to Daly City, and they didn't go without a fight. The fight, as it turns out, took up the better part of a decade, and the eviction and Fall of the I-Hotel didn't happen until 1977 ... and among a city-wide upheaval that had the local sheriff imprisoned for three days for contempt of court for refusing to evict, etc.

The Hotel was razed but, because of in-fighting, the hole it left in the ground remained empty for 23 years. Then the I-Hotel was rebuilt, yes, and as an SRO for the elderly, with a Fil Am cultural center on its ground floor, in spite of the jockeying, and the partners backing out, and the neverneverland reality of San Francisco real estate politics, in great part because of Bill Sorro.

One of the leading lights of the Save the I-Hotel fight, Bill was a founding member of the I-Hotel Tenants Union, and remained a housing rights advocate and community leader for the rest of his life.

Bill Sorro died of prostate cancer on August 27, 2007. Read about him here.

Bill Sorro was pretty much my first contact in the San Francisco Fil Am community. He was a genuinely kind and generous man. When I met him, he didn't know me at all, or know my abilities or quality. But because I was working for the Asian American community, that was all he needed to know. He gave me respect, never talked down to me, never demanded any sort of literal or metaphorical accounting for my time or passion. He remembered my name from the first and had a smile and palaver for me every time I saw him.

Now that I'm a bit older and am watching young twentysomethings flop into the community like underfed puppies, I realize what a rare thing such generosity and respect for the rookies is. Getting people into the work was his thing, not so much getting them to respect his work. And of course, as a result, he had the most respect of all.

Many of his peers have been passing this clutch of years, many of them people I knew and liked and worked with. But, although I never really knew Bill all that well, I felt a pang at his death unlike the regret I've felt for the others. He was a truly bright and warm presence.

There will be a memorial celebration this Saturday, and an exhibition about his life runs through Oct 6. I'll post about the exhibit when I see it.

leah cabullo

Detail from Jenifer Wofford's Kandingan, 2004.

oday I paid a visit to Galleon Trade captain Jenifer Wofford's home studio. More will be posted soon about La Woff, but there was one strangely lovely story that came out today that needs to be on this blog.

Apparently, in the spring of 2000, a southern Philippine Islamic terrorist group staged a mass kidnapping from a beach resort on Sipadan. The hostages were held for ransom for months, while the kidnappers dragged them around the jungle ahead of the Philippine authorities and added to their number with further kidnappings.

But in July 2000, one of the newly added hostages, a German woman with a complex of medical conditions that made her captivity a matter of life and death--even if her captors had not been capable of beheading her--became a minor local cause celebré, being the cause of a defingerization.

A freelance script writer named Leah Cabullo, who was on Jolo island, where the hostages had been taken, along with a passel of journalists, decided one night to

cut off a piece of her left middle finger and use her blood to write a letter appealing to Islamic extremists to free an ailing German woman among 40 hostages held in a southern Philippine jungle.

... Cabullo, a Manila-based freelance writer in her 30s, refused to leave her rented room at a retreat house in downtown Jolo and spoke with other journalists covering the 80-day standoff through a window. Blood was scattered at the lobby outside her room.

"I cut my finger as a sign of deep sincerity," she said.

The letter appealed for the release of 56-year-old German housewife Renate Wallert, ... who suffers from hypertension, a chronic anxiety disorder and other ailments.

Rosa Banagudos, a caretaker at the retreat house, said Cabullo was rushed to the Sulu provincial hospital for treatment after the bizarre act. The detached portion of the left middle finger was placed in a bottle filled with alcohol.

"I was still sleeping when I heard her scream," Banagudos said. "I rushed to her room and saw her hand bloodied. I didn't see what she used to cut her finger."

According to a friend of Cabullo, the severed portion of the finger would be sent to Robot and Susukan with the appeal letter, written in blood on white linen paper. The offering would be delivered by a courier sometime on Tuesday.

Note: "Robot" was the nickname of the terrorist commander. Delicious, no?

There's not much else to be found about this story on the internet, in any language. I even checked the Filipino Google, but no dice. Not even any follow-ups, although you'd think that the press would fall all over themselves to find out if it worked.

And the funny thing is, according to Woff, it did work. All the stuff I found chez interwebs about the hostage crisis never mentioned Cabullo as a reason, but Renate Wallert was released less than two weeks after Cabullo's sacrifice. This article attributes that to payment of a ransom, but her husband and son remained with the kidnappers until a month later (for the husband), and nearly two months later (for the son). It's not clear how much ransom money played a part in the men's releases.

This article from Asia Week has only confusion to report about Renate Wallert's release:

The 85th day dawned with the release of the first Westerner, ailing German Renate Wallert. The Europeans say neither they nor Libya agreed at the time to pay a ransom for Wallert. In the Philippine and German press, it was reported that $1 million was paid. Sources allege Aventajado raised $1 million through local businessmen and sent Dragon to make the payment. They also allege Aventajado asked Germany for a refund, but that officials refused. Aventajado denies all of the above: "That is not true."

The article doesn't mention Cabullo.

Well can I believe that Cabullo got Renate released ... and well, too, can I understand Woff's fascination with the story--which prompted her to center her installation Kandingan around a drawing of the only photograph she could find of Leah Cabullo ... holding up her maimed hand.

There's something inside that wants an extreme act like this to be able to affect people. I'd just call someone like Cabullo crazy to the creepyth degree. But then, if you're dealing with Islamic fundamentalist kidnapping beheaders--who risk their lives and international relations for arbitrarily chosen ransom sums, and then waste statesmen's time bickering over how to divvy up the take--how do you prove your sincerity, really, truly?

None of this stuff--terrorism, kidnappings, beheadings--is really capable of shocking anyone anymore. It's too commonplace and understandable ... or else too commonplace and permanently beyond understanding. What's shocking is that a civilian figured out how to speak terrorese from the point of view of the powerless. It seems crazy, but it also seems like she was the only who got through--or cared to get through.

Between a crazywoman and a transported, orgasmic Saint Theresa-type, Cabullo wants to strike me as the latter. Catholic redemptions are not far from the imagination when thinking about weird Filipino phenomena, for obvious reasons. Something wants there to be the closest thing we have in real life to magical realism: some kind of inspired, gritty communication, some kind of understanding-beyond-understanding, to exist in fanatical jungles and distant motherlands.

How strange and beautiful and creepy such things are. I wonder what she's doing now. I hope she hasn't been declared mentally incompetent.

wwii

verywhere I go in Manila, I'm reminded of World War Two and its aftereffects. I guess that's what happens when you live in a city whose very appearance, skyline, traffic flow ... the very quality of life inside and outside its buildings ... are defined by the thorough destruction that city experienced during a war.

... not to mention the country's constitutional regime, its political and social structure, its cultural obsessions, its naughtiness ... and the idiomatic American English people speak here ...

The building we're staying in, Sy-quia Apartments, is defined by the fact that it's one of the few art deco buildings to have survived the bombing in WWII. Outside, it's another corrugated-metal-awned dirtfest a la Manila. Inside, the floors are mahogany, the grilles are art deco, the ceilings are high.

The apartment I'm staying in, Chiqui Mabanta's, was featured in a number of design spreads (the left pic is mine, can you tell?) Downstairs in this building is the renowned, underground art salon and residency space The Living Room that is hosting the Galleon Trade artists for the duration of our stay. The building is full of artists and design types. It's typical of what I'm talking about: outside is ugly, shabby Manila. Inside is beautiful, historical, culturally updated Manila on mahogany floors.

WWII and history are hidden to American eyes in America because they are literally invisible. History is the hidden engine that has gotten us to where we are and most of us are just passengers anyway. WWII and history are hidden in Manila to American eyes because they are so obvious, and so huge, that we don't know how to see them.

Everywhere I go, everywhere: in the cabs, in the museums, along the park, to the bathroom, everywhere I go WWII is waiting. You can't see it in the photo above, but some of the magazines arrayed on the coffee table--as a design element--are of course vintage. What vintage? LIFE, ca. 1940 ...

... with its spread on the Atlantic fleets and the names of the ships! (Most of the ships are named after places by the way.)

Carlos Celdran explained in one of his tours that Manila was rightfully called "The Pearl of the Orient" before the war: modern, busy, the Asian city of firsts, beautiful architecture, varieties of wealth and enterprise ... the gateway to Asia in every sense.

Then the Americans bombed the shit out of it and this is what it looks like now:

Well, grain of salt. Colonialism effects a lot of comfort, because colonizers want all the comforts of home. And a great deal of the "beautiful" architecture of prewar Manila was European. The loss of soul Celdran tells us accompanied the loss of Intramuros, the old Spanish city center, was the loss of an old colonial center which had supplanted another colonial center, and was supplanted by yet another colonial center.

What the governor general giveth, the governor general bombeth away. It's the giving and the taking, the arrogance of building a pearl city in the Orient in your own image, and then destroying it again to suit your own agenda, wherein lies privilege. Lots and lots and lots of Filipinos lived here the whole time, wandering in and out of construction sites and rubble, incidental to the whole process. Does it sound ridiculous for them to object to the destruction of structures the building of which they never sanctioned in the first place? When do they get to say, "stop! This step was one step too far"?

I'm thinking a lot about privilege these days, types and expressions of privilege, and it seems to me that the biggest and most operative expression of privilege is the ability not to see it. It? The privilege, of course, and the effects, or lack of effects, that the operation of power has on that which belongs to the privileged. This is privilege on a massive, national scale, where a nation becomes involved in a world war, which, by virtue of that nation's power never touches its own land (with the exception of Hawai'i, of course.)

Everywhere else I've traveled in my life, WWII has left marks: physical, architectural marks, structural marks, and psychic marks. My mom wears a deep scar behind her shoulder blade where doctors cut into her lung when she was six to drain the fluid pneumonia had collected. Chung King was blockaded by the Japanese, so medicines couldn't get in and my mom had gotten sicker than necessary. They operated on her without anesthesia.

Everyone of my age group in Germany when I was there had a story from their parents' childhood, or grandparents' young adulthood about the war. It's only Americans whose stories from that era are during the war and not about it. For us, the war was Daddy going away for awhile--or forever--and not our lives interrupted, our houses bombed, our food supplies stopped, and rapine and disease raging through our neighborhoods. We didn't come out of the war with images of our babies tossed onto bayonets.

The result? Among other, more complex things: Manila is a centuries-old city where most of the buildings age out at less than sixty. There are a lot of such cities around the world, where the building materials start out shabby and temporary. This, far from a fresh start, is a constant, sore reminder of what was lost and a decade of national trauma.

And unlike in ancient times, when a place is razed now, the civilization does not simply cease to exist, its people and uses dispersed to the subtle graveyard of cultural syncretism. The global civilization it is part of goes on around it and it has to run to catch up. All late twentieth century urban ugliness is either reparing what WWII destroyed, or catching up to the progress that WWII brought into your neighborhood. It's a doubling effect: the trauma of war and the trauma of catching up; the load that everyone--but we Americans--has to carry.

me tarzan, you jane

wo new terms:

Diaspora Freeze: the way a culture or aspects of a culture freeze in time or progression in a diaspore community. Separated from the culture of origin, the markers of the culture of origin cease to be facets of a living culture. They freeze into symbols, or orthodox usages whose integrity confers authenticity upon those who maintain it.

Examples would be the Elizabethan English spoken by some Canadian islanders, or the failure of Latin American Spanish to pronounce "c" as "th" (a linguistic shift that happened in Europe since the establishment of Spanish colonies in the new world). This also happens with politics, as with Cuban Americans who emigrated during the revolution, or evidenced by statues of Sun Yat Sen in Chinatowns all over the world.

Diaspora Drift: the distance between the frozen diaspore culture and the progressed culture of origin.

For example, the now-capitalistic regime of China compared to the nationalistic, Taiwan-orientation of earlier generations of Chinatown immigrants.

***

We came up with this walking back from one of the hugest indoor malls I've ever seen yesterday. (Apparently, this one is only moderately large for Filipino standards.) Stephanie said there must be a sociological term for this and I suggested we just make one up. Thus. So.

***

Romeo shows off his Tagalog, which Stephanie praises. No, he says, it flows, but he speaks "like a three year old caveman."

I joke in the background that that's what my Chinese sounds like, "me Tarzan, you Jane." But there it is, the looooong streeeeeetch between origin and diaspore, where the connective tissue grows thinner with each succeeding--not generation--but year.

Where the gesture or phrase that I know has to stand still---to stand in for the living way, a consensus molding of every word and moment, that happens back in the motherland with what is supposed to be our shared culture. But I have no membership in this daily shaping. I have to freeze it to keep it and they have to change it to keep it alive.

*** update

Mike tells us that when talking to cabbies, he speaks like a ten-year-old, which is when he left the Philippines. That doesn't fly, though. They don't like being told what to do by someone who uses ten-year-old manners. They prefer it when he butches up a bit. Hmmm ...

my imagination stops me before i have begun

For 250 years, from 1565 until 1815, Spanish galleons laden with the riches of the Orient--silks, porcelain, and spices--sailed annually from Manila in the Philippines bound for Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico.

his is why I could never be a historian. I like to read history, but sentences like this throw me entirely off of reading and into my imagination. (And that was only the second sentence of this short piece.) Annual trans-Pacific trade expeditions! Did they have a firm sailing date? Probably within a few weeks, depending on weather. But they must have needed to sail at the same season every year to get the right winds and currents.

Imagine! The entire trading community of that region of southeast Asia must have been galvanized by that deadline. Imagine the overland caravans that grew to time their arrival in Malaysia, or various ports along the Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese shores. Imagine the Chinese customs inspectors all up and down the coast, taking their pound of flesh, and then having their palms greased. Probably flotillas set off from as far away as the Indian subcontinent to sail around the Malay peninsula and Indonesia to get to the galleons in Manila.

There were no wristwatches back then; people understood the fluctuations of seasons and time was different. Were deadlines different? Or were there nervous litter riders with portable travel-sun-dials checking the time of day everytime they stopped to water the horses?

Imagine the fat or thin merchants (from Chengdu? Kabul? Teheran?), sweating in their caravans. Imagine one sees a team of brigands descend upon him: would he have been more fearful of them killing him and taking his goods, or of them delaying him enough that he would just miss the flotilla? And would there have been merchants worth holding up the flotilla for? Agents charged with bringing in the entire shipment of a particular dye, for example, that you could only get in a mountainous region of central Asia?

Or did they wait for no man, no one caravan or trader? Was it all about the marketplaces, where the agents of the crown--living in comfort in Spanish style villas near enough, but not too near, the port--fluently and mutually insulted middlemen to collect any number of small contributions to an overall shipment of, say, tea? Were there auctions? Warehouse visits? Were there the equivalent of tradeshows, where merchants set up booths with samples of their best wares, to entice buyers to come to their warehouses and contract for bulk?

Was there somebody who yelled at his inferiors when the deadline was surpassed? Or was the deadline always met?

Did it just happen when it happened? Did tradesmen, arriving a day, week, or month after the flotilla left, just shrug their shoulders and get lodgings for a year, selling off their wares bit by bit to small-time merchants until the galleon trade buyers started getting interested again?

Was it chaotic or well-organized? Was it organized at all, or did they just trust to enterprise, greed, serendipity, or just the fact that trade never stops and a flotilla can go whenever it pleases, full-loaded with whatever? Did they receive goods throughout the year and house them until the flotilla went? I can't imagine that deadlines did not act, as deadlines do, as a sort of grain of sand in the oyster, accreting the lovely substance around itself and leaving the other surfaces only lightly layered with pearl.

But Wikipedia says that they sailed "once or twice" in a year, which, if I had read that first, would not have tripped my fancy quite so much. This is why I can't be a historian.