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In Praise of Minor Writers

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A Collection of Books by Arthur Machen (1863-1947)

Even if you have not read all the famous books by the universally acknowledged great writers, it is fun to root around the work of more minor writers. Such a one is Arthur Machen, born Arthur Llewellyn Jones in Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales. He is probably best known for his early horror stories, particularly The Great God Pan (1894), The Three Impostors (1895), and The Hill of Dreams (1907). You can read these with great enjoyment, but then, too, there are his essays, such as Dog and Duck (1924); his translations, such as The Memoirs of Casanova; and his three-part autobiography.

I have always found that if you cast your net widely, you will come up with a whole slew of interesting writers—and these will inevitably direct you to other works worth reading.

In addition to Arthur Machen, here are some of my other favorite minor British writers:

  • G. K. Chesterton is one of my favorite writers … period … for his novels, short stories, essays, and poems
  • Hilaire Belloc, friend of Chesterton, was born in France and wrote in a number of genres
  • Ernest Bramah, a tea merchant, author of stories starring the blind detective Max Carrados and the Chinese sage Kai Lung
  • Arthur Morrison wrote great mysteries and a very Dickensian novel The Hole in the Wall
  • Some great horror writers: W. W. Jacobs (“The Monkey’s Paw”); M. R. James (Ghost Stories of an Antiquary); Algernon Blackwood (“The Willows”); and Oliver Onions (Widdershins)
  • Richard Austin Freeman, author of the Dr. Thorndyke detective stories

I see that all the above authors were either late Victorian or Edwardian writers. And I notice that the list could have been at least five times as long had I tried harder. But then, I always thought that it was too tempting to go overboard on lists: no more than six bulleted items is best.

Bukowski Had It Right

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At the Corner of West 5th Street and South Grand in Downtown L.A.

It’s just outside the Central Library, a square (actually, just an intersection) dedicated to the Los Angeles writer John Fante (1909-1983). He is not well known outside of Los Angeles, In fact, he is not well known in Los Angeles either. Fortunately, Charles Bukowski made sure he was not forgotten:

I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer. I did most of my reading at the downtown L.A. Public Library, and nothing that I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me.”

Then one day I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was. I stood for a moment, reading. Then like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.

This was in Bukowski’s introduction to the book he describes, John Fante’s Ask the Dust.

Having read four of Fante’s novels, I have to agree. I have just finished Dreams from Bunker Hill, the last of the novels featuring Arturo Bandini, the author’s stand-in for himself. Toward the end of his life, Fante became blind from diabetes; and he dictated the novel to his wife, Joyce.

As I find myself at the Central Library fairly often, I take some pleasure crossing John Fante square and remembering the writer who gave us an inimitable portrait of Los Angeles in his novels.

The Destruction of the Jaguar

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After the Spanish conquistadores conquered the Maya peoples, they published one more work in Maya. It was called The Chilam Balam of Chumayel and consisted of a series of prophetic books looking pessimistically into the future. The poet Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno in The Destruction of the Jaguar wrote a poetic retelling of these prophecies. Below is the prophecy of Ah Kauil Chel:

What has been written
will be fulfilled.
Though you may not comprehend it
though you may not understand it
he will come who knows
how the ages unfold
like the stone steps
on the palace of the governor.
For now
the priests, the prophets
will interpret
what is to be fulfilled,
shall herald with sorrow
the destruction of the jaguar.

Is It Curtains for Trump?

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No, It’s Not Biden or the Justice Department This Time

It was during the 2016 presidential campaign at a stop in Sioux Center, Iowa, when Candidate Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? … It’s, like, incredible.” It was then that the Candidate began to believe in his own invincibility. All those rallies with adoring MAGA-hatted spectators must have further convinced him.

What Trump did not take into account were the people who did not like him. That number has been growing—slowly, perhaps—but steadily. So steadily that a grand jury delivered an indictment for 37 counts relating to the mishandling of archival materials that were stored at the ex-Prez’s compound at Mar-a-Lago.

Take note that it was not President Biden who indicted him, nor even the Department of Justice. It was a number of average citizens serving on a grand jury that were appalled by the Trumpster’s manipulative dealings with the National Archives, and by the fact that papers relating to the military strengths and weaknesses of the United States were being shown around to Mar-a-Lago visitors and members.

Was Trump showing any of these papers to his good friendsNorth Korean President Kim Jong Un? Recdcep Erdogan of Turkey? Xi Jinping of China? Vladimir Putin? Three of the above dictators may well be at war with us at some future date. Isn’t that espionage?

This could be bad news for the formerly thought-to-be-invincible former president. Am I surprised? No.

Scarebabes

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The Scary Flag of Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia

This post is about the things that scared me as a child. In it, I go back as far as I can in my memory banks, back to before I was two years old. There are three things that scared me around that age.

First and foremost was … would you believe … toilet training. We were living in the Hungarian Buckeye Road neighborhood of Cleveland, and my great grandmother was living with us. She was born in Felcsut (pronounced FEL-choot) in the province of Fehérmegye (don’t even TRY to pronounce that one) sometime around 1880. She was old school. Not only that, she didn’t particularly like me at that time because I was the son of that fuszóru Tóth (cock-nosed Slovak) who was my father. (She was later to love my brother me and me, but never my father.) Therefore, she was fairly brutal about my toilet training.

I remember my nightmares at the time. I was seated on the toilet and the walls of the bathroom would close in on me with the roaring sound of a steam locomotive. That occurred fairly regularly as I recall.

As an infant in the crib, I had a boogeyman which I couldn’t exactly describe, only that I knew him as the Lobogó (LOH-boh-goh), which is one of the Hungarian words for flag. It’s odd, because I wasn’t afraid of flags as such, just that word that sounded so sinister to me. My Mom would kid me that there was never any danger from the Lobogó.

Finally, I remember a series of nightmares I had in which I was being chased by a lion. My Mom and Dad must have taken me to the zoo, because how would I know about the existence of lions. This was at least two years before I ever saw a television set. It could have been in a fairy tale that my mother told me. She would make up wonderful stories about a fairy princess (tündérleány) in the dark forest (sötét erdő). A lion must have wandered into one of her tales.

The image above, which is the flag of Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia, combines the dread Lobogó (flag) with my lion nightmares. I particularly like the red eyes.

Sorry for all the Hungarian words, but at the time I didn’t know a word of English, or even that the English language existed.

Jidaigeki

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Posters for The Seven Samurai (1954) and Harakiri (1962)

When I first came to Los Angeles in 1967, it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with everything Japanese. That included Japanese films, Japanese food, Japanese literature, and Japanese women. My first long RTD (Rapid Transit District) ride was on the old #83 Wilshire Boulevard route from West L.A. to La Brea Boulevard, where the Toho LaBrea theater was located a couple blocks south. I even remember the film: It was Part One of Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy.

Here I was, a Hungarian kid from Cleveland, finding a kind of home in the Japanese community of L.A. I even moved to Mississippi Avenue in the Sawtelle Japanese district, where there were two Japanese restaurants, the O-Sho and the Futaba Café. They were my first introduction to the cuisine. I was pretty raw at the time: When I had my first cubes of tofu in miso soup, I thought, “I’ll bet these are cut-up shark fins!”

I used to hate seafood. I thought the fish there was picked up from floating debris atop polluted Lake Erie. Now on my own in Southern California, I found myself trying (and loving) sushi after five short years.

What I loved most, however, were Japanese jidaigeki (period films), particularly those set in the samurai era. My friends Alain Silver and Jim Ursini (who collaborated on the first book on samurai films to be published in the U.S.) and I would regularly go to one of the five Japanese movie theaters then existing in Los Angeles:

  • The Toho LaBrea screened films from the Toho Studio
  • The Kokusai and Sho Tokyo theaters played Daiei films—probably my favorite
  • The Kabuki played films from Shochiku
  • The Linda Lea (my least favorite) played films from Tohei

They are all gone now. It’s all part of the growing Americanization of Japanese-Americans.

The Kokusai Theater on Crenshaw South of Adams

In fact, Alain, Jim, an I wrote a column for the UCLA Daily Bruin called “The Exotic Filmgoer.” The articles were all signed Tarnmoor (which, curiously, is the name I go under for this blog). We wrote about the Japanese and other ethnic cinemas that existed back around 1970.

I still love jidaigeki, though they’re not usually to be found around town playing in movie theaters. I have a large collection of DVDs of samurai films, and watch the Japanese films on the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel when they are playing.

And I still love Japanese food, though sushi is getting to be priced beyond my means.

On Ranting

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The Opposite of Conversations

I have a friend who has been pretty much out of circulation for a quarter century. On an average of once a week, I give him a call. When I do, I have to brace myself for a series of rants on various subjects that are currently galling him. I would say he does about 90% or more of the talking, deftly segueing from one subject to another. He is capable of going on for hours if not stopped, usually by me—I am not overly fond of long telephone conversations.

At the same time, he is my best and oldest friend; so there is a reason why I continue calling him. Fortunately, this behavior mostly manifests itself over the phone. In person, surrounded by his family, the conversation is more of the give-and-take variety, which I prefer.

One of the dangers of living an isolated life is a tendency to go off into rants. If I did it, Martine would tell me in no uncertain terms to shove it. I guess he feels I am a safe person on whom to vent his grievances. And, as we age, the number of those grievances only increases.

I will continue to call him and listen—but not uncritically—to his rants. As soon as he mentions some subjects, such as artificial intelligence, or AI, I just ask him not to go there. He has nothing to say that he has not said a hundred times or more. But, as long as the grievance sticks in his craw, it will attempt to migrate to my ears as well.

Perhaps that’s just in the nature of friendship.

Mister Care Wack Dreams About Girls

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New York Bathing Beauties Circa 1960

I am enjoying a collection of the miscellaneous writings by Jack Kerouac during his 63 days atop Desolation Peak in Washington State’s Northern Cascades. I have particularly enjoyed the chapters he wrote for a projected (but never completed) novel called Ozone Park in the “Duluoz Legend” series of slightly fictionalized autobiography. Here is a quote from a deleted chapter from a work that Kerouac (called Mister Care Wack by a hobo friend named Slim) abandoned.

O Kerouac, you poor fool, wandering the streets of night in search of romance in the golden nothingness of existence! Foolish as men are, they’re never more foolish than when they’re 21 years old and actually think that they do exist to be loved somehow either by a personal God who bends over them like a Guardian Angel with those wings of a loving destiny (mayhap I still believe that) or by a woman and women He sends to soul-soothe their sad predestined hugeness of being (“I am Jack Kerouac, there’s something about me that never happened before, she will notice it”) and so they sit at the windows of night smoking Frank Sinatra cigarettes, vain as veritable d’Annunzios, beautiful as the sea, mistaken as lost angels, lovable as God, misunderstood as secret saints, yearny as young girls, masculine as rocks and immovable as self-faith. And this is the reason why they eventually do get loved, but not for the reason they imagine to be foremost, their melancholy which they take to be the penalty is really the reward and is gained. A woman sees a man wrapped in self-torture, and when he smiles there’s already no need for smiles and come-ons.

Thoughts of a lonely young man stuck on a mountaintop.

Tim Conway and Me

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Carol Burnett with Tim Conway

Although I hail from Cleveland, Ohio, I am not a big fan of what I and many of my friends call “The Mistake on the Lake.” There I one Clevelander I have always admired. No, not Halle Berry, though I find her incredibly beautiful. And not Paul Newman, who I admit was a talented film actor.

My choice is Tim Conway, who, although born eleven years earlier than me, had a childhood that curiously paralleled my own. Just as I was born to a family that spoke only Hungarian in the home, Tim spoke only Romanian. (Funny, he doesn’t look Romanian—but he was born Toma Conway to an Irish father and a Romanian mother, Sophia, who bore the Romanian equivalent to my mother’s Hungarian name, Zsófi.)

Like my mother, Sophia was born in the United States but taken to be raised in Europe. Like my Slovak father Elek, Daniel Conway adopted his wife’s language in the family circle. Thus, when Tim first attended school, he spoke mostly Romanian, just as I spoke only Magyar.

The parallels stop there. Toma had his name changed to Tim when he started in show business, as there was already a well-known British actor named Tom Conway. Whether playing in McHale’s Navy or The Carol Burnett Show, Tim Conway was one of the funniest men on television. I still watch The Carol Burnett Show on MeTV up to six times a week. Great stuff!

On Desolation Peak

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The Fire Watch Tower Atop Desolation Peak

In the summer of 1956, when I was 11 years old, Jack Kerouac spent 63 days manning a fire watch tower in Washington’s North Cascades, atop Desolation Peak. On the Road, which was to be the main source of his fame, followed by The Dharma Bums, were not yet published. The recently published Desolation Peak is a collection of Kerouac’s many writing projects—many of them fragmentary—while he scanned the horizon for fires during those 63 days.

Jack was desperately poor having spent all his money to get to Washington from Mill Valley. He began his job as a fire watcher with a total of 2¢.

This year I have become entranced by Kerouac. Like most of the members of my generation, I read On the Road while I was still in high school, and then stopped there. I have become newly fascinated by his work and am resolved to read all his work that I can find. That assumes I will live long enough, as Jack was a busy boy.

Below is a selection of what Kerouac called his “Desolation Pops.” In form, they resemble traditional Japanese haiku, but they do not adhere to the genre strict rules concerning the number of syllables per line. They’re still interesting. After all, English is a very different language than Japanese.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

(7)
A stump with sawdust
     —a place
To meditate

(11)
The clouds assume
     as I assume,
Faces of hermits

(24)
There’s nothing there
     because
I don’t care

(36)
Poor gentle flesh—
     there is
No answer

(42)
Wednesday blah
     blah blah—
My mind hurts

(55)
Rig rig rig—
     that’s the rat
On the roof

(59)
I called Hanshan            | A Zen Buddhist recluse
     in the fog—
Silence, it said

(60)
I called—Dipankara        | One of the Buddhas of the past
     instructed me
By saying nothing

(70)
Aurora borealis
     over Mount Hozumeen—
The world is eternal