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Monthly Archives: June 2021

Watch Your Toes

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I Say This Because I Can’t Dance … At All!

When I was born, for some reason I was lacking the gene for moving in time with the music. I discovered this failing when I took Hungarian folk dance lessons—in costume—when I was six years old. My partner was my cousin Peggy, who must have thought me an awful drip. I think I left my boot prints all over her pretty dancing shoes.

I never even went to our high school’s senior prom. (I have no idea who I would have invited.) Strangely, I got an invitation to another school’s prom, the one that our family friend’s daughter, Norma Gosner, was attending. Actually, I did all right, because everyone was dancing the twist back then. As you know, the twist is pretty much a no-contact dance in which the two participants merely gyrate in place. Or so it seemed to me.

Once, when I was in my thirties, I even went to a square dancing class in Santa Monica. It was a disaster, never to be repeated.

Except once, when I attended a wedding party held in my brother’s barn in Hackensack, Minnesota. My brother tells me I danced well, but I’ll never know because of all the Jack Daniels and Moonshine I had swilled preparatory to the event. I have no memory of that night.

So I suggest that if you want me to dance with you, you had better get me liquored up first.

Svetlana: Circles of Hell

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A Great Writer Who Manages to Look Like an Average Person

I have now reach three books by Svetlana Alexievich and regarded all of them as superb:

  • Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2014), about the lives of average Russians after the fall of Communism
  • Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (1997)
  • Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (1991)

Reading each of those books was a profound experience. Very rarely do I ever re-read works of nonfiction, but I can conceive of myself re-reading all three of these books. Why? Because all of them struck me as being definitive, while all three of them represented multiple points of view. In her own words:

I’ve been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.

There is something about Russian history that elicits both admiration and dismay:

If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath – an eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions – Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man.

I look forward to visiting more of these circles of hell in Svetlana Alexievich’s company. There are two more of her books available in English that I have not read: one about the role of women in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, and another on the role of children in the same conflict.

Her work has been translated into 45 languages and published in 47 countries.

The Missionary and the Space Alien

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My Guess: Even This Space Alien Is Too Humanoid

In science fiction films, there tends to be two views on encounters with space aliens. One is the romantic view, as exemplified by Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and Cocoon. In these films, the space aliens are benevolent and almost humanoid. Then there is the realistic vision of War of the Worlds. In this film, we don’t even get a good look at the aliens because they come out shooting from the get-go.

What with all the recent press about UFOs espied by military planes (see picture below), the subject has come up: What is the first encounter going to be like? I don’t think we are likely to encounter humanoids or anything even resembling them. They are probably not even likely to breathe our atmosphere.

I have this picture in my mind of a Christian missionary attempting to convert space aliens to his religion. How is that conversation likely to go? Will the space aliens crucify the missionary because that’s what they think he wants? How would the Christian religion look to a completely alien mind associated with a non-biped without the usual eyes, ears, nose, hands, and feet? I would think space aliens would laugh at what we would consider to be organized religion.

It would certainly sober up many Evangelicals in particular. But then, they are used to not believing in the evidence of their senses, given their political preference.

The image from video provided by the Department of Defense labelled Gimbal, from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it is tracked as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. “It’s rotating.” The U.S. government has been taking a hard look at unidentified flying objects, under orders from Congress, and a report summarizing what officials know is expected to come out in June 2021. (Department of Defense via AP)

The interesting question is this: How would one go about reconciling the beliefs of space aliens with those of Earthlings, of whatever religious background? Oh to be a fly on the wall of that “conversation”!

The Great Yes and the Great No

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This posting originated on Blog.Com on August 16, 2009.

Today, as I was walking along the beach in Venice, I started thinking about sand castles. Then I saw this gem of a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933). If you have ever read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, you will remember Cavafy as the “poet of the city” who is not named but whose spirit pervades Alexandria, the city where he was born and lived much of his life. In his own words:

I am from Constantinople by descent, but I was born in Alexandria—at a house on Seriph Street; I left very young, and spent much of my childhood in England. Subsequently I visited this country as an adult, but for a short period of time. I have also lived in France. During my adolescence I lived over two years in Constantinople. It has been many years since I last visited Greece. My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt. I know English, French, and a little Italian.

Here is one of my favorite poems of his:

Che fece …. il gran rifiuto

 

To certain people there comes a day
when they must say the great Yes or the great No.
He who has the Yes ready within him
immediately reveals himself, and saying it he goes

against his honor and his own conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Should he be asked again,
he would say no again. And yet that no—
the right no—crushes him for the rest of his life.

Rejoining Society

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The Vaccine: E-Ticket to Normality?

Having been vaccinated for Covid-19, I have, in effect, rejoined society. I am now visiting my friends who have likewise been vaccinated. Not coming with me, however, is Martine, who refuses to be vaccinated.

Martine is no anti-vaxxer who believes that nano-sized microchips are injected into the body with each shot. She is simply afraid of most medications, whether in pill or injectable form. Her doctor wants her to take Vitamin D3 supplements, but she gets an adverse reaction if she goes beyond a minimal dose.

I have long suspected that the Covid-19 Vaccination Record Card is going to be a useful piece of paper, whether for travel or work. Despite the efforts by Republican governors to outlaw mandating the card for this purpose, I think they will fail. Until I got the vaccine, even my own doctor did not want to see me: I had several “visits” in the form of telephone calls.

It is my hope that eventually Martine will get vaccinated. Martine’s family comes from Normandy in France. She therefore has what the French call a tête de Normande, in effect a head like granite block—impervious to argument. Perhaps she will eventually see the light, but she won’t take action based solely on my urging.

“We Died for the Revolution”

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Female Russian Honor Guard, 2018 Victory Day Parade

I have been slowly making my way through Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, in which she interviews everyday Russians about how their lives have changed since the fall of Communism. Alexievich did something it is not even possible to do in America today: She interviewed people of all political stripes, including even those who sided with the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Imagine a book in the U.S. that interviewed not only liberal Democrats, but qAnon and Oath Keeper supporters who showed up in Washington on January 6. I don’t think such a book can be written.

The following passage is from an embittered supporter of Communism:

In my day, people didn’t ask those kind of questions. We didn’t have questions like that! We … imagined a just life without rich or poor. We died for the Revolution, and we died idealists. Wholly uninterested in money … My friends are long gone, I’m all alone. None of the people I used to talk to are around anymore. At night, I talk to the dead … And you? You don’t understand our feelings or our words: “grain confiscation campaign,” “food-groups,” “disenfranchisee,” “committee of the poor,” … “repeater,” … “defeatist.” It’s Sanskrit to you! Hieroglyphics! Old age means, first and foremost, loneliness. The last old man I knew—he lived in the adjacent courtyard—died five years ago, or maybe it’s been even longer … seven years ago … I’m surrounded by strangers. People come from the museum, the archive, the encyclopedia ,,, I’m like a reference book, a living library! But I have no one to talk to … Who would I like to talk to? Lazar Kaganovich [one of Stalin’s henchmen] would be good … There aren’t many of us who are still around, and even fewer who aren’t completely senile. He’s even older than me, he’s already ninety. I read in the papers … [He laughs.] In the newspaper, it said that the old men in his courtyard refuse to play dominoes with him. Or cards. They drive him away: “Fiend!” And he weeps from the hurt. Ages ago, he was a steel-hearted People’s Commissar. He’d sign the execution lists, he sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths. Spent thirty years by Stalin’s side. But in his old age, he doesn’t even have anyone to play dominoes with … [After this, he speaks very quietly. I can’t tell what he’s saying. I only catch a few words.] It’s scary … Living too long is scary.

Marketing Metastasis

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It All Started with Coca Cola

In 1985, the Coca Cola Company came out with New Coke, which never really took off. To recover from their gaffe, they decided to keep the old formula as Coca Cola Classic. In the process, they discovered that taking over more shelf space with other products bearing the Coke logo was a win-win for the Corporation. So now today you can buy Coke with exclusive new chicken liver flavor, with crushed pretzels, with overtones of sulfuric acid, and with extra corn syrup.

At the same time, all the other old brands have similarly metastasized. Ritz Crackers. Doritos. Ocean Spray. Reese’s. Cheez-It. Cheetos. Triscuit. The list goes on and on. Note, however, that the brands involved in multiplying themselves are products with a long shelf life. You can’t achieve the same success with celery, parsley, Gravenstein apples, or dragon fruit.

When I had to buy some Ocean Spray cranberry juice a couple of weeks ago (it’s good if you have a urinary tract infection), I had a hard time find just plain original cranberry juice. Needless to say, I was not swayed by the new Clam*Berry flavor or the one with sauerkraut flavoring added.

I suppose the idea is to make smaller brands scared by the multiplicity of variations—though what happens when you run out of all the popular variants?

Even Trader Joe’s has gotten into the act, with a kind of dill pickle flavored popcorn. It really wasn’t very good.

At some point, a lot of these *NEW* flavors will be duds. Then maybe we won’t be presented with so many weird options.

The Definition of Victory

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The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA

I thought that today I would like to present one of Emily Dickinson’s simpler poems. Emily (1830-1886) is one who was well acquainted with defeat, yet who was victorious in the greatness of her literary output.

Success Is Counted Sweetest

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

 

My First Girlfriend: Joycey

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Now Imagine She’s Only Five Years Old

The year was around 1950. I was a five-year-old boy living at 2814 East 120th Street in Cleveland, right in the middle of the Hungarian neighborhood. All the houses on the street were two-family homes in which the upper story was rented. It was around then that I met the love of my life, Joycey, who was my age.

We did all the usual things: played doctor and looked at each other with moonstruck eyes. What I loved most about Joycey was, to be precise, the back of her knees. The picture above is of a grown-up woman, because I could not find the same picture for a little girl. I would probably have been arrested if I tried.

Although her name sounds vaguely Anglo, Joycey spoke Hungarian just like me. I don’t remember exactly how our “relationship” ended, though it was probably in 1951 when two major events happened:

  • My brother Dan was born and
  • We moved out of the Hungarian neighborhood because the teachers were complaining that I couldn’t speak English

I don’t think I ever knew Joycey’s last name. It was like we were two ships passing in the night. But it was nice while it lasted.

The Isle of California

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The Mural “Isle of California” (1972) When It Was Newly Painted

Near the West Los Angeles Post Office is the Village Recording Studio at 1616 Butler Avenue. On its back wall is a mural entitled “Isle of California” showing what remains when most of California has fallen into the ocean. It was painted in 1972 by the L.A. Fine Arts Squad consisting of Victor Henderson, Terry Schoonhoven, and Jim Frazin.

Of course, Southern California will not just fall into the ocean after “the Big One.” What is west of the San Andreas Fault will be displaced northwards, separating itself horizontally from the area east of the fault.

I saw today a fascinating quote from J. B. Priestley in Carey McWilliams’s Southern California Country: An Island on the Land:

There is something disturbing about this corner of America, a sinister suggestion of transience. There is a quality, hostile to men in the very earth and air here. As if we were not meant to make our homes in this oddly enervating sunshine…. California will be a silent desert again. It is all as impermanent and brittle as a roll of film.

Oddly, that’s what I felt shortly after I moved here. The feeling was reinforced by the Sylmar Earthquake of 1971 and the Northridge Earthquake of 1994.

The Same Mural Today: Badly Faded With Earthquake Reinforcing Bolts

Well, Southern California is still here. And I’m still here. The place still feels a bit unreal to me, but I have fallen in love with it. So if the whole place should happen to fall in the ocean after all, I’m a goner.