Ever-Spreading Chaos

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Hungarian State Railways (MÁV) 4-2-4 Steam Locomotive

In Lászlo Krasznahorkai’s great 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance, a scheduled train that never shows up throws waiting passengers into a tizzy. A Hungarian novelist, Krasznahorkai is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (2025), the International Booker Prize, and numerous other international literary accolades. Here is a selection from the first page of George Szirtés’s excellent translation of the novel.

To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone any more since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible; which is precisely what people at the village station continued to do when, in hope of taking possession of the essentially limited seating to which they were entitled*, they stormed the carriage doors, which being frozen up proved very difficult to open.

  • Earlier in the paragraph: “[T]he only two serviceable old wooden-seated coaches maintained for just such an ‘emergency’ were coupled to an obsolete and unreliable 424, used only as a last resort.”

100 Years of the Mother Road

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Route 66 at Amboy in the Mohave Desert

If you’ve used the Google search engine today, you will have been reminded that this is the one hundredth anniversary of U.S. Route 66, the “Mother Road” that stretched from Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier two miles from where I live. Of course, now it’s California Route 2 between Centinela Boulevard and State Route 138 near Wrightwood.

As John Steinbeck wrote in Grapes of Wrath:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.

I have ridden three segments of the Mother Road. My favorite is in Arizona between Seligman and Oatman, where I visited Grand Canyon Caverns, which is run by the Hualapai Indian nation. The first time I took that road, I picked up a Hualapai hitchhiker who needed a lift to the Greyhound Bus Station in Kingman. We had a pleasant ride there until I discovered that the tribal police were waiting for him there to take him into custody. Apparently he had been to a wild party the previous night and did something to put him afoul of the law. I never did find out.

The other two segments were thus:

  • A short stretch in California between the Amboy Road and Kelbaker Road through the now deserted crossroads of Amboy
  • A very desolate stretch in New Mexico between Laguna Pueblo and I-25.

I don’t count the stretches of Route 66 that are coterminous with the Interstate system. It’s an entirely different feeling on the Interstate.

Belize It or Not

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The Village on Caye Caulker

Now that I am living on a fixed income, I daydream incessantly about travel. My latest pipe dream is about visiting Belize with Martine. She has decided she doesn’t like Mexico, so maybe Central America is more her style. I would love to spend a week on Caye Caulker in Belize, which is a 45-minute boat ride (or 10-minute flight by Cessna) from Belize City.

The advantages of Caye Caulker are beguiling to a traveler like me:

  • The island is made of coral and is very near the Belize Barrier Reef, second only to Great Barrier Reef of Australia in size.
  • It is a relatively inexpensive destination with few of the all-inclusive resorts that suck dollars from U.S. tourists in places like Cancún.
  • There are no cars, just bicycles and battery-powered golf carts.
  • The whole island is walkable.
  • At both the northern and southern extremes, there are interesting wooded areas for hiking.
  • There is an intriguing mix of places to stay, eat, and drink—with the main drinks being Belikin Beer and local rum.

On the minus side—though not really from my point of view:

  • There are no sandy beaches as the island is made of coral.
  • One must protect against ankle-biting sand flies in the hour just before sunset.
  • The water close to shore is full of irritating sea grass, necessitating water shoes for comfort.
  • It can be really hot and humid. (Hey, it’s the tropics!)

Most people who go to Caye Caulker go for the diving, snorkeling, and other water sports. None of these are interesting to me because I am too old for that sort of thing. It would be fun. however, to relax with a good book; splash around a bit in the water; try Belizian, Mayan, and Caribbean food; and take walks. If it’s too pokey for Martine, we could even spend a day or two in more heavily populated Ambergris Caye, which is 30-45 minutes north by water taxi.

Hatlo’s Inferno

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My Favorite Comic Strip When I Was a Kid

While I was researching the subject of yesterday’s post, I came across one of Jimmy Hatlo’s “They’ll Do It Every Time” comic strips. At home, we subscribed to the Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer, where it appeared regularly in the color funnies section.

The general idea of the strip was memorializing the cartoonist’s pet peeves, which were legion. I particularly remembered the “Hatlo’s Inferno” strips, in which various doofuses one encounters in everyday life received the punishment that they deserved—for all eternity. The cartoon panel above shows a typical Inferno setting in the upper left.

According to journalist Bob Greene, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

Hatlo’s genius was to realize, before there was any such thing as an Internet or Facebook or Twitter, that people in every corner of the country were brimming with seemingly small observations about mundane yet captivating matters, yet lacked a way to tell anyone outside their own circles of friends about it. Hatlo also understood that just about everyone, on some slightly-below-the-surface level, yearned to be celebrated from coast to coast, if only for a day.

As a youngster, I loved cartoon strips like “Pogo,” “Dick Tracy,” “Li’l Abner,” and “Steve Canyon.” Looking back, they were infinitely more satisfying than what passes for comic strips today. Of course, there’s always “Peanuts.”

Cleveland 1957-58

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Saint Henry Church and School Around 1957

I’m trying to recover some memories of the 12-year-old Jim Paris when he was in the 7th and 8th grade at Saint Henry School around 1957-58.

I was living at 3989 East 176th Street in the Lee-Harvard area of Cleveland, just west of Warrensville. Over the previous five years or so, I managed to pick up the English language and get over the whole class clown stage of my life when I was poised halfway between Hungarian and English. Television definitely helped, even though the language spoken at home was still Magyar.

Beginning in the 5th grade, I was one of the smartest kids in class—although Marianne Boguski always had the top grades. One day, I sneaked a peak at the teacher’s desk and found that my IQ was the highest in the class: 132. By the way, Marianne went to the University of Dayton where she majored in chemistry. Here she is, sitting in the first row left of the university’s chemistry club:

Marianne Boguski in 1966 at the University of Dayton

In this picture, she is not nearly as geeky as she looked when we were both at St. Henry. In fact, she looks a whole lot more presentable than I did at that age.

The word was out that there was a new Catholic high school in nearby Bedford. When I was in 8th grade, Chanel High School only had a class of freshman 9th graders. The only other Catholic high schools in the area were St. Stanislas, St. Edward, and St. Ignatius—all of which were geographically undesirable to a resident of Lee.Harvard.

Fortunately my grades and test scores were good enough to get me a full year scholarship, so my parents did not have to pay tuition.

In 7th grade, my teacher at St. Henry was Sister Beatrice OP, who was in her eighties but will still sharp as a tack. The next year, I had Sister Rose Thomas OP. The OP indicates that the sisters were members of the Dominican order. The OP stood for Order of Preachers.

Many of my friends who has Catholic educations had issues being taught by clergy or sisters. I did not. My teachers at both St. Henry and Chanel were dedicated, smart, and tough. No regrets there.

“A Night of Dark Intent”

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Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I came out to California in 1966 after getting my college degree at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.With Robert Frost, his movement was in the opposite direction: Born in San Francisco, he is best known for the poems he wrote while living in New Hampshire.

I had the good fortune of seeing Frost give a poetry reading at Dartmouth in the last year of his life. Then, years later, Martine and I visited his home in Franconia, New Hampshire in 2005.

The following poem is one of his most un-New-England works:

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves hooked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent,
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.

Treat Garlic With Love

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Garlic Bulbs and Cloves

Until relatively recently, I found garlic to be very annoying to handle. It didn’t peel easily, and it was too much of a pain to mince the peeled cloves. Then, quite suddenly, I underwent a change a few months ago. I said to myself, “I love the taste of garlic, so I should change the way I work with it.”

A few months ago, I purchased a hollow rubber tube from an Italian food store. I would put one unpeeled clove of garlic into it and apply pressure while rolling it on a cutting board. After pressure has been applied, it’s easy to strip off the outer papery protective skin with my fingers.

The next step was suggested to me by Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas (1990), in which we see the imprisoned mafiosi slicing the cloves of garlic with a single-edged razor blade. Then, I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, in which he comes out against using a garlic crusher, recommending instead slicing the cloves fine. Now this is what I do. In my favorite Spanish rice dish, I use eight cloves of garlic prepared this way. (BTW, I now use eight cloves of garlic in my recipe, and I don’t crush the cloves.)

One thing I do not recommend is using garlic powder or bottled garlic cloves. Garlic is an amazing spice with numerous health benefits, and nowhere have I enjoyed the flavor of garlic as in the dishes I prepare using the s-l-o-w method described above.

Today’s Spanish rice was the best yet. I owe the taste to the way I process the garlic, and by using fire-roasted Hatch chiles from New Mexico for a good burn.

If you want a device to help you peel the garlic, check out these on Amazon.Com.

Mob Scene at the Bookfest

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The Festival of Books One Hour Before Opening Time

It is six days now since I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which was held at the University of Southern California (USC) campus. By opening time at 10 AM, there were tens of thousands of people in evidence, many of them walking their dogs or pulling wagons stuffed with their progeny. There were even several people who thought I was the late actor Wilford Brimley brought back to life.

Originally, I had intended to visit the Festival on both Saturday and Sunday. After Saturday’s crowd, however, I thought I would spend Sunday far from any mob scenes. It was so bad that I could not see the books I wanted to see from the booths sponsored by such vendors as Vroman’s Books, the Kinokuniya Bookstore, and Book Soup. Those booths actually had lines of people waiting to see what was on sale.

Ever the skeptic, I could not believe that most of these people ever read any book worth reading. Most of the books that people had in their hands were of no appreciable literary quality.

In the end, I wound up spending most of my time at Small World Books’s Poetry Pavilion. A good thing, too! It was there I met Persian poet and translator Sholeh Wolpé, whose rendering of Farid-Ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds I eagerly devoured this last week and reviewed for Goodreads.Com.

One effect of listening to all those poets read their work (three per hour) has led me to include more poetry in my reading. I used to be all for prose, but now I begin to realize that poetry is a better way of expressing anything. Not that it’s easy to read poetry, but it is in the end likely to prove itself more rewarding.

The Stone Whistle

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It’s an odd-looking stone whistle. I have no memory of where I got it. Did I buy it? Did I find it? Did Martine find it and leave it on the desk in my library? (I never asked her.)

The oddest thing about it: The only way it sounds is if you inhale (not exhale) through what looks like the lips of the whistle creature—at the front of the above photo. The air comes from two locations, the largish hole at the rear and the smaller countersunk hole on top. The two little holes that look like eyes don’t go to deep enough to affect the sound.

I have adopted the stone whistle as a sort of good-luck charm, keeping it at my side when I’m reading. Several times a day, especially when I’m about to get up from my chair, I pick up the stone whistle and inhale. What goes through Martine’s head when I do this is anybody’s guess.

It’s just one of those meaningless little rituals that are part of my life, and of everyone’s life.

“They Shall Storm Your Streets at Last”

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F. L. Lucas is remembered more as a literary critic than as a poet. The amazing thing, though, is how scholarly writers like Lucas can write powerful poems, like the following one:

Beleaguered Cities

Build your houses, build your houses, build your towns,
Fell the woodland, to a gutter turn the brook,
Pave the meadows, pave the meadows, pave the downs,
Plant your bricks and mortar where the grasses shook,
The wind-swept grasses shook.

Build, build your Babels black against the sky –
But mark yon small green blade, your stones between,
The single spy
Of that uncounted host you have outcast;
For with their tiny pennons waving green
They shall storm your streets at last.

Build your houses, build your houses, build your slums,
Drive your drains where once the rabbits used to lurk,
Let there be no song there save the wind that hums
Through the idle wires while dumb men tramp to work,
Tramp to their idle work,
Silent the siege; none notes it; yet one day
Men from your walls shall watch the woods once more
Close round their prey.

Build, build the ramparts of your giant town;
Yet they shall crumble to the dust before
The battering thistle-down.