My first real job was an odd one: Over a period of a year, I had to proofread and edit two dictionary databases. In the process, I began to collect strange words such as septemfluous, rotl, crwth, and medioxumous. The last of these means of or relating to the middle class of deities. This post comes from Philip Matyszak’s amusing book The Classical Compendium. It consists of some classical deities of which you have likely never heard:
Viriplaca. The goddess who reconciled wives with their husbands after a quarrel.
Vervactor, The god who ensured a favourable first ploughing of fallow land.
Vallonia. As you might expect, the goddess of valleys.
Terminus. The god of boundary stones.
Sterculinus. The god of manure spreading [and of Fox News?]
Rumina. The goddess who protects nursing mothers.
Nona. The goddess who, with Decima, presided over the final months of pregnancy.
Meliona. The goddess of bees and honey.
Laverna [and Shirley?]. The goddess of thieves and conmen.
When I first arrived in Southern California at the tail end of 1966, I was pleasantly surprised by how crisp and clean it looked. Coming from grungy red-brick Cleveland, coated with decades of industrial grime, I really felt I was making a new beginning.
Cut to today. The city is crawling with bums (excuse me, “the homeless”) who think nothing of spreading garbage all around. The trash cans are all filled to overflowing, and alleyways are festooned with human excrement.
It seems that every year there are more men living in tents and ratty looking old Winnebago RVs parked up and down the streets. There has been a bum encampment now for upwards of ten years right across the street from my apartment. When I go to the local Seven-Eleven, there are scruffy men asking for “spare change.”
There are also a few women in these encampments, but their appearance usually begins a new round of competition for their favors, marked with nights of cursing and violence.
I still love L.A., but am dismayed that politicians don’t seem to want to face the problems that confront them. On one side, they face opposition from woke liberals who think they should be left alone, and the majority of the population, which would rather see them housed somewhere else. Considering that most bums are not into following rules regarding alcohol and recreational drugs, or any kind of personal hygiene, the latter is not a viable option.
Times are tough when vagrancy is considered the norm.
I like to think of Elizabeth II’s reign as paralleling most of my life. I remember as a 7-year-old boy watching her coronation in 1952. As I recall, they didn’t yet have the ability to broadcast live from across the Atlantic, so I probably saw it several days later. Even as a kid who looked askance at most of the goopy girls he knew, I thought that the new Queen of England was a real looker.
Today as a 77-year-old, I still see her with the eyes of youth. In her final days, she was a little hunched over lady, shrunken from osteoporosis. But then, at my age I am no dashing Lochinvar—and never was.
Elizabeth lived a long life, and a distinguished one. She has little to regret from her seventy years as queen. Even the Diana episode: I always felt that the Princess of Wales was one of those people who are not comfortable in their own skin and who consequently cannot have a happy marriage. Even had she married Dodi El Fayed, I think the result would have been the same.
Poor Charles III. I can’t see him having a happy, successful, or long reign. I shouldn’t be surprised if he winds up abdicating like Edward VIII.
As the heat dome over the Western US continues, I continue to make like a lizard. Unlike a lizard, however, I seek shady cool places rather than sunny rocks or cacti for my perch. Today, I even went to see a movie: Bullet Train with Brad Pitt was no winner—but at least I sat for three hours in air-conditioned comfort while the people outside the theater looked decidedly wilted.
My dinners lately were very appropriate to a desert dweller. Several days ago, I went to the Persian market across the street and purchased Persian lavash flatbread, French feta cheese, and Turkish pickled vegetables (2 varieties). For breakfast today, I made two quesadillas with flour tortillas, Monterey Jack cheese, and pickled rajas de jalapeño. Despite the hot morning, I had my usual cup of hot Indian black tea with honey and a squeeze of lime.
Tomorrow, while Martine braves the dead hot air of downtown LA, I will probably make my way once again to Burton W. Chace Park in Marina Del Rey to catch stray breezes while reading O. A. Bushnell’s 1963 novel Molokai, about the Hawaiian leper colony. During that time I will constantly hydrate myself with mineral water to keep from getting dehydrated.
With the continuing heat dome over Southern California, Martine and I took a chance and went to the Long Beach Greek Festival at the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Church. Although it was as hot as Hades, I’m glad we went. The food was good, there were tons of tasty Greek pastries, and the church itself was outstanding.
The church was not as wealthy as Saint Sophia in downtown L.A. or Saint Nicholas in Northridge, but it was beautifully painted with what seemed to be hundreds of saints and angels. And, unlike many Greek Orthodox churches, most of them were identified in both Greek and English.
There were a few surprises, the most prominent one being an Eskimo—actually an Aleut—called Saint Peter the Aleut:
Saint Peter the Aleut, aka Cungagnaq
For an Aleut to be a Greek Orthodox martyr requires a leap of faith. And for Cungagnaq, it came in 1815 when the Spanish, who were uneasy about the Russian occupation of Alaska, captured him near San Francisco and had him put to death at the instigation of some Catholic priests who were upset that he was a heretic. Read about it on Wikipedia.
Just about every square inch of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin church was covered with images of Christ, Mary, and the saints and angels. The effect was quite stunning. Martine and I spent an hour studying the sacred images.
I might be an indifferent lapsed Catholic, but the simplicity and sincerity of the church held my respect and even awe.
When I was younger, Ernest Hemingway was considered a literary god. After his suicide in 1961, the colossus of his reputation began to be chipped away. After re-reading his Green Hills of Africa (1935), I begin to understand why.
Literary reputations are a tricky business. Who reads Thomas Wolfe any more? Is he even in print? What about James Jones and Herman Wouk? I can even foresee that my beloved William Faulkner’s rep might come in for revision by a younger generation less than enchanted by his difficulty.
What hurt Hemingway for me, especially as I developed a more adult taste in literature, was primarily his pose of machismo. In Green Hills of Africa, he is the Great White Hunter, even though it is one of his companions who kills the trophy rhino and kudu.
Even worse if Hem’s practice of never referring to his wife by name. If the edition I read did not rectify it in the captions to the illustrations, I would have known her only as P.O.M.—Poor Old Mama. What was poor about her? Pauline Pfeiffer Hadley Hemingway was bright and understanding. There were no bitter recriminations, even though the safari was mainly Ernest’s little red wagon.
PKT3042 – 208725
AUTHOR – ERNEST HEMINGWAY
1995
NOTED AUTHOR RETURNS FROM AFRICAN TRIP
New York: Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Hemingway shown as they arrived in New York, April 3, on the liner Paris. They have spent the last three months in East Africa hunting lions. Mr. Hemingway, the author of numerous books, states that Africa reminded him of Spain and that he would like to return.
But really, P.O.M. this and P.O.M. that? And never once Pauline or Hadley? If I were her, I would have knocked his teeth out with his own typewriter for refusing the acknowledge her individuality. It’s as if I would refer to Martine in my blogs as P.L.F.G.—Poor Little French Girl (she was born in Paris).
What Hemingway had going for him was his literary style. Joan Didion used to study his short stories as a model for her early writings. Until, that is, she surpassed him.
Of course, Hem refers to himself a couple of times as Poor Old Poppa, but not 100% of the time as he does with Pauline.
John Wayne and James Caan in Howard Hawks’s El Dorado
Today’s poem was actually a part of one of my favorite Westerns: Howard Hawks’s El Dorado (1966), which is a remake of the same director’s Rio Bravo (1959) starring the same actor, John Wayne. The lines are spoken by James Caan, in his first major role. Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote it, spelled it as one word: Eldorado—and that’s the name he gave to the poem.
Unlike Poe’s knight, I have found El Dorado to be in many places: Iceland, Scotland, Mexico, the Andes in South America, and even—appropriately—parts of the American Southwest.
Eldorado
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old –
This knight so bold –
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell, as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow –
‘Shadow,’ said he,
‘Where can it be –
This land of Eldorado?‘
‘Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,‘
The shade replied,
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’
I have discovered that the best way to survive a hot spell in Southern California is to make like a lizard. We have neither insulation nor air conditioning in the 75-year-old apartment in which we live. All day long, the hot sun heats up the building, and the building holds the heat until just before dawn. We have fans, but use them primarily in the evening, when the inside temperature spikes.
So how does one make like a lizard? For starters, don’t be in much of a hurry—about anything. While Martine went downtown, where it is even hotter, I drove to Trader Joe’s in the Marina, put together a simple picnic lunch, and parked at the end of Mindanao Way at Chace Park. At the peninsula on which the park sits, there is always a cool breeze, a breeze that suddenly disappears a few hundred feet inland.
I sat in a shaded pavilion at a picnic table, ate my lunch, and re-read Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa. I managed to be comfortable while, in the next pavilion, a group of loud ex-con types were laughing and shouting. They made a snarky comment about my straw hat, which did not faze me because a good straw hat from Latin America is also part of making like a lizard.
Am I beginning to resemble a lizard? I don’t think so, not yet anyhow. What’s more, I have no interest in sitting atop a rock in the hot sun as lizards are wont to do. The species to which I belong seeks the shade.
Tarnmoor 
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