One That Got Away

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Enroute to Mexico with Neal Cassady in On The Road, Jack Kerouac falls for a young woman he sees briefly in Michigan. Considering Kerouac’s dismal track record with women, maybe it was a good thing she didn’t join him.

I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops. She was dull. She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do. “And what else do you do for fun?” I tried to bring up boy friends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done—whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. “What do you want out of life?” I wanted to take her and wring it out of her. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she wanted. She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother’s for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear—something like the one she wore last Easter, white bonnet, roses, rose pumps, and lavender gabardine coat. “What do you do on Sunday afternoons?” I asked. She sat on her porch. The boys went by on bicycles and stopped to chat. She read the funny papers, she reclined on the hammock. “What do you do on a warm summer’s night?” She sat on the porch, she watched the cars in the road. She and her mother made popcorn. “What does your father do on a summer’s night?” He works, he has an all-night shift at the boiler factory, he’s spent his whole life supporting a woman and her outpoppings and no credit or adoration. “What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?” She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

No Skin in the Game

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UCLA Students Protesting Israel’s Actions in Gaza

What with all the campus protests of Israel’s attacks on the Palestinians of Gaza, I am reminded of Hamlet watching the murderous King Claudius tear up at ancient Greek tragedy:

What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing—no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i’ th’ throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?

I am somewhat amused by all the campus protests. It’s not at all like the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, because American college students, for the most part, have nothing to gain or lose by doing so. In all likelihood, they will not be drafted and shipped off to Rafah to confront the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.

No doubt, Bibi Netanyahu is a villain, as are the West Bank settlers depriving the Palestinians of their land. But then, there’s plenty of villainy to spread around, when one considers the horrors of Hamas’s October 7 attack on innocent Israeli citizens.

Have there been any campus protests on behalf of the Rohingya? the Chechens? the Ukrainians? Granted, the United States supplies Israel with arms, but we are not participating in or even encouraging what looks like genocide to me. It does not look to me as if the protesting students had any skin in the game.

Perhaps the protests erupted because it’s spring, and “dull and muddy-mettled rascals” like to kick up a row from time to time.

Goodnight Sweet Prince

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Martine’s Favorite Roger Corman Movie

This is a reprint of a blog posting from May 17, 2016. Martine and I were dismayed to hear of the passing of Roger Corman, who died in Santa Monica at the age of 98 on May 9 of this year. It never ceased to amaze me that one could produce and direct so many interesting films while working in what the film industry has called “poverty row.”

The first time I ever heard of him was when I was a student at Dartmouth. At that time (the mid 1960s) I subscribed to Films and Filming. One issue contained an article entitled “The Crown Prince of Z Films,” referring, of course, to Roger Corman. I was intrigued by what I was hearing of the cheapster director who made so many interesting films for American International Pictures. What I liked most were the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, usually starring Vincent Price.

Perhaps my favorite was The Masque of the Red Death (1964), about the attempt by a group of dissipated nobles to escape the plague. There were others in the series, including House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963), and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).

When I first met Martine in the late 1980s, I discovered that she was a hard-core Corman addict, liking such films as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and the original The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which was shot in under a week on a shoestring budget. There are in all about a dozen films he directed that are worth seeing and hold up well over the years. (He also made not a few clinkers, but that’s showbiz!) After he stopped directing around 1970 he continued to produce films and was responsible for some 300+ films over his half century career.

Roger Corman (1926-2024)

Other than the Poe features, I also enjoyed I, Mobster (1958), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Intruder (1962) starring William Shatner, Tales of Terror (1962), X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) starring Ray Milland, The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967), and Bloody Mama (1970).

Corman introduced us to Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Bruce Dern, to name just a few. In his films were such stars as Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre.

Perhaps I had a misspent youth, but I sure enjoyed it—and continue to do so….

Lake Worth

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My Home for a Few Months in 1946-47

When I was about one year old, my parents decided to move to Lake Worth, Florida. It was more of its own city then: Now it’s more like a suburb of West Palm Beach. I don’t know why they decided to do this, and I was never curious enough to ask. I have no memories of the place before a 1950 visit with my mother when I was five years old. And my only memories of that visit was discovering a weed with a nettle at one end and straight enough to use as an arrow with my toy bow, and also of the train ride there.

The only proof I have of my residence in Lake Worth is a picture of me at the age of one wearing no clothes and peeing into a bucket. I would insert that here except that I once got into trouble by doing just that. Oh well, I suppose there are a lot of sickies who would get off on that, so WordPress would be in their rights.

Our stay in Florida came to an end because of my father’s easily upset digestion. When your job is disposing of the rotted bodies of dead alligators, it’s difficult to keep one’s lunch down. So it was back to Cleveland we went where Dad, who was a master machinist, could get a job that was more in his line.

When he retired, he and my Mom bought a condominium in Hollywood, Florida, in the same complex where my Uncle Emil and Aunt Annabelle lived. It was more to his liking to live in Florida as a retiree than as a young man with a foreign accent trying to get a job anywhere in the South.

Although I visited Florida a number of times, I never liked the heat and humidity. There’s something about always being sweaty that didn’t appeal to me. Even after buying the condo, my folks preferred to spend their summers in Cleveland, which I thought was only marginally better.

“No Surprise”

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A short Emily Dickinson piece that shows that poetess from Amherst has, at times, ice in her veins and steel in her nerves.

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.

The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.

Endlessly Wandering the Streets of Paris

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Auteuil in Paris’s 16th Arrondissement

Of recent French authors, the one I am most addicted to is Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature. Since I first read his Out of the Dark (1998) for an Internet French Literature group ten years ago, I have read most of his work and am still hungry for more, though there are only a few titles left to go. And, no doubt, I will probably start re-reading them.

Scene of the Crime (2021) is one of his most recent novels, which I just finished today. Jean Boesman experienced some fascinating but very dicey people back in the 1960s and is haunted by the memory. He has been sought after by several of them for knowing where some swag from past smuggling has been hidden, but he successfully avoids them. Nonetheless, he still endlessly goes over his relationship with the young women in the group. As he says at one point, “We are from our childhood as we are from a country.”

That country was the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. I cannot read Modiano without a map book of Paris on my lap, following his characters wanderings and evasions through the most walkable city on Earth.

In Scene of the Crime, I tracked Boesman through Boulogne-Billancourt (where Modiano was born), Auteuil, Pigalle/Place Blanche, the Quays along the Seine, and Saint Lazare.

None of Modiano’s books are particularly long: Most can be completed in one or two sittings. I usually take a little longer, because I am following the action on a map of Paris.

Trianon

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The Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary

Looking back at the treaties that ended the First World War, it appears that the Hungarian half of the Kingdom of Austria-Hungary was made to pay the heavier price for what was essentially the Emperor Franz Joseph’s decision to go to war against the Serbs for assassinating the heir to the throne in Sarajevo. According to Wikipedia:

The treaty regulated the status of the Kingdom of Hungary and defined its borders generally within the ceasefire lines established in November-December 1918 and left Hungary as a landlocked state that included 93,073 square kilometres (35,936 sq mi), 28% of the 325,411 square kilometres (125,642 sq mi) that had constituted the pre-war Kingdom of Hungary (the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy). The truncated kingdom had a population of 7.6 million, 36% compared to the pre-war kingdom’s population of 20.9 million.Though the areas that were allocated to neighbouring countries had a majority of non-Hungarians, in them lived 3.3 million Hungarians – 31% of the Hungarians – who then became minorities.

How Trianon Chopped Hungary to Bits

Pieces of Hungary went to Yugoslavia, Romania (the largest chunk, all of Transylvania), Russia, Czechoslovakia, and even Austria. What did Austria lose for its participation in the war? Essentially, Bohemia (to Czechoslovakia) and the much of the Tirol (to Italy). The new borders of Hungary became to larger of the two green areas in the above map.

I can understand separating out the Slovenians, Croatians, Russians, and Slovaks; but a great injustice was done to the Hungarians of Transylvania, who are treated as second-class citizens of Romania.

Magyarság

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Members of the Kárpátok Folk Dance Troupe

Yesterday, Martine and I attended the 30th Magyar Majális és Tavaszi Fesztivál at the Grace Hungarian Reformed Church in Reseda. This is perhaps the fifth or sixth year we have attended, and each time I was powerfully reminded of my Hungarian roots. I, who speak Hungarian most of the time to confound strangers with whom I do not wish to converse, was surrounded by friendly people speaking, for the most part, the Magyar tongue.

And with the continuing decline of European ethnic restaurants in Los Angeles, it is also the best place in Southern California to find good Hungarian home cooking. Martine had her beloved crémes pastry—sort of a sweet Hungarian cheesecake. I had my favorite gulyás leves (Hungarian goulash soup).

I get very sentimental about my Hungarian roots. Maybe because I am surrounded by non-Hungarians. It requires an effort to keep up my mother tongue for the actual purposes of communication. My pronunciation is right on the money, but my vocabulary and grammar are atrocious. That’s because I essentially ceased using Hungarian as my main language at the age of six.

The Program for the Festival

As I continue to age, I expect to see myself reading more Hungarian literature and seeing more Hungarian movies. The Hungarian Reformed church in Reseda is not really my religion, though it was my mother’s. My parents decided that all boys born into the Páris family were to be Catholics, like my Slovak father; and all girls, to be Hungarian Reformed Protestants. As it turned out, I have only one sibling, my brother Dan.

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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Los Angeles at Night

This afternoon the thought suddenly hit me that, in the Los Angeles night, it never really gets dark—or altogether quiet, either. I have experienced total darkness only once, when the lights in the Cave of Balancanche near the ruins of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán were turned off to show the turistas why the Maya thought that caves were portals to Xibalba, the “place of fright,” the underworld.

I used to love camping in the desert during the winter months, finding the nighttime in places like Death Valley, Hovenweep, and Chaco Canyon a magical experience. Seeing the myriad of stars in the sky without interference from city lights is something I recommend to all. When was the last time I saw stars in Los Angeles? How about … never?

In addition to the all-pervasive light pollution, there is constant noise, not only from the heater and refrigerator, plus an all-pervasive high-pitched electronic susurrus, but from the city around us. Whenever a motorcycle or a performance car races down the street, a number of car alarms go off and screaming until the automatic shutoff kicks in.

Also, I live within 2-3 miles of three major hospitals: UCLA Ronald Reagan, UCLA Santa Monica, and Saint John. In an average night, we hear several ambulance sirens carting the sick to local emergency centers.

Despite all this, I somehow manage to clock 8-9 hours a night of fairly solid sleep.

I wish I could say the same for Martine. To avoid nightmares, Martine must take a sleeping pill that gives her only 4-5 hours a night, or even less. At a certain point during what I call the Hour of the Wolf, Martine just lies in bed trying without luck to drop off into slumberland.

You Freud, Me Jane?

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Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)

Sometimes it takes years, even decades, for a great film to be recognized. Such is the case with Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, which confused and rattled the critics of the period. According to the New York Times, “an inexplicably amateurish script.” The L.A. Times was no more accepting: “As a story it seems naggingly improbable and, as drama, a nightmare from which the spectator constantly pulls away, struggling to wake up in a less disordered universe. No question, though, that it is at least fitfully effective“

Fitfully effective? How about ahead of its time. Both the Sean Connery character (Mark Rutland) and the Tippi Hedren character (Marnie Edgar) are obsessed in different ways. Marnie is a thief who cannot bear to be touched by men. Mark, on the other hand, is obsessed with using the tools of popular psychology to “cure” Marnie. In a way, both characters are equally out of it.

What escaped the 1960s critics was that Marnie was a strikingly beautiful film, perhaps the most beautiful color film ever produced. From the moment we see Marnie from the rear wearing a black wig walking down a train station platform with a yellow bag full of money under her arms, we are hooked. At least, I was.

Even the obvious fakery that Hitchcock seems to throw at us seems to actually add to the story in this instance. When Mark drives Marnie to her mother’s Baltimore row house, we see an obviously painted backdrop of an ocean freighter at the end of the block. In the foreground, several little girls are skipping rope while singing:

Mother, Mother, I am ill
Call for the doctor over the hill.
In came the doctor,
In came the nurse,
In came the lady with the alligator purse.

In the end, Mark and Marnie drive off and take a left just before the painted backdrop, where moments ago it seemed there was no exit.