A large chunk of Eastern San Diego County is occupied by the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest in California’s state park system. I used to go hiking and tent camping there with my friends.
The Vallecito Stage Depot, which is located in the general park area, was an important stop on the first official transcontinental route, serving the San Diego-San Antonio (‘Jackass’) mail line (1857-1859), the Butterfield Overland Stage Line, and the southern emigrant caravans. This was at least a full decade before the first transcontinental railroad connected the Eastern U.S. with San Francisco.
Little known outside the State of California, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is a scenic destination with the town of Borrego Springs in the middle and near the museums and restaurants of mile-high Julian, California. To the east is the Salton Sea and desolate Imperial County.
Kumeyaay Indian Morteros at Anza-Borrego
The original inhabitants of the area were the Kumeyaay Indians, who also called parts of northern Baja California home. One keeps running into evidences of their habitation of the area on the park’s many trails.
I have just finished reading the first volume of Konstantin Paustovsky’s Story of a Life. In Chapter 14, we are introduced to a geography teacher at the high school Kostik (short for Konstantin) attends in Kyiv named Cherpunov. Paustovsky describes his collection:
Bottles filled with yellowish water, corked and sealed with sealing wax, stood in rows on the classroom table. They had labels, inscribed in an uneven elderly hand: ‘Nile,’ ‘Limpopo,’ ‘Mediterranean.’
There were bottles of water from the Rhine, the Thames, Lake Michigan, from the Dead Sea and the Amazon, but however long we looked at them they all remained equally yellow and uninteresting.
Curiously, there is one such collection in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, on the Snæfellsness Peninsula. It is called the Library of Water. Although I have been in Stykkishólmur twice, I have never bothered to visit it. Perhaps because I suspected what Paustovsky was to find out after Cherpunov’s young wife ran off and the old teacher quit.
‘Do you remember Cherpunov?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well, I can tell you now that there was never anything in his bottles except ordinary water from the tap. You’ll ask me why he lied to you. He rightly believed that he was stimulating your imagination. He attached great value to it. I remember him telling me that it was all that distinguished man from the beasts. It was imagination, he said, that had created art, it expanded the boundaries of the world and of the mind, and communicated the quality we call poetry to our lives.’
One of my favorite poets at last weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was Katie Farris, who read from her works on Saturday, April 20, at the Poetry Stage. Her recently published collection—Standing in the Forest of Being Alive—brought together her experiences with third-stage breast cancer, the global Covid pandemic, and an America at the point of heading for a messy divorce. Here is her explanation of how it all came together:
What drew me to her poems was her debt to Emily Dickinson and William Blake, two of my all-time favorite poets. In fact, there is definitely something of Emily in her work—without the sometimes obscure wording that sends the reader back to the beginning to make sense of the poet “telling it slant.” Below is the first poem from her collection:
Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
To train myself to find in the midst of hell what isn’t hell.
The body bald cancerous but still beautiful enough to imagine living the body washing the body replacing a loose front porch step the body chewing what it takes to keep a body going—
This scene has a tune a language I can read a door I cannot close I stand within its wedge a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning world? o train myself in the midst of a burning world to offer poems of love to a burning world.
Poet Dr. Hala Alyan at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival
She is not only a poet and novelist, but also a clinical psychologist. As she read selections from her most recent poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, Dr. Hala Anyan’s dark eyes flashed; her shock of brown curly hair fluttered in the breeze; and her voice modulated from quiet to powerful. She is a Palestinian-American born in Carbondale, Illinois. But her poems are never far from her ancestral home in a conflicted land.
Even as she read her poems, we heard the loud sounds of a demonstration at the University of Southern California (USC) loudly protesting the horrors of the Israelis’ revenge on the Palestinians. And now we hear that graduation ceremonies at USC have been put on hold during the crisis.
Naturalized
Can I pull the land from me like a cork? I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim. I won’t say where he was born. I’ve already said too much. Look, the gardenias are coming in. Look, my love is watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites. He likes to understand. He plays devil’s advocate. My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza. It’s so hot under that hospital elevator. There’s no room for a child’s braid. In the staff meeting, I stretch my teeth into a country When they congratulate me on the ceasefire. As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath. As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic. It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a coffin. They like me when I spit my father from my mouth. There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth. I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain. I break a Klonopin* with my teeth and swim. The newspaper says truce and C-Mart is selling peaches again. Woolly in my palms. I’ve marched on the street too few times. I’ve ruined the dinner party with my politics. Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos. There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed in thirty minutes flat. I stop jogging when I’m tired. Nothing can justify why I’m alive. Why there’s still a June. Why I wake and wake and the earth doesn’t shake.
” Klonopin – Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine. It is approved for the treatment of panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia), as well as certain types of seizure disorders.
It is no surprise that the three poets whose readings I most liked at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival Poetry Stage were all women. They represented three different life paths which, while typically feminine, were universal in their humanity.
The first is Maggie Millner, born in upstate New York, an instructor in writing at Yale University. The poem is from her poetry collection entitled Couplets.
1.12
There are many ways, of course, of telling it. But each account obscures
some other version equally true. One is that I lied to everyone I knew.
Another—this one I really do believe— is that for years I loved him more than me.
I can conjure even now our first apartment’s tile: white diamonds in their blue argyle
frieze around the sink, the dirty grout I’d scour with a toothbrush while he was out
at work. I can count four bathmats over eight years, hear the record player catch
every time we stood up from the table. And I can still feel the invisible
moat we both lived in, on the other side of which we knew lay torment, exile, wreckage,
the anarchy of singledom. Loss upon loss. I remember testing it, the moat: throwing across
a rope to check its breadth, twice to the waist wading in before retreating, shamefaced,
reining myself back. To him it was a sea I think entirely impassable. To me
it was a dizzying ravine that circled us for years, then cut between.
After several consecutive wet weekends, this last weekend was ideal for a big get-together. And that’s exactly what happened at the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) where the 2024 edition of the Los Angeles Times Book Festival took place. I do not recall being in such a crowd scene for decades. In fact, it was so crowded that I couldn’t buy more than three books because the booths that interested me the most were jammed with people.
The only reason I could tolerate the crowds is that they were there honoring books and reading, which are sacred to me. Never mind that most of them read nothing but crap. The important thing is that they were coming together to honor an activity that is disappearing from our anti-intellectual culture.
This time I noticed for the first time that so many of the booths related to self-publishing. And, since no one ever heard of these authors, their booths were, for the most part, unvisited. Well, they are part of the publishing world, too, and with luck a handful of them may make it to the big time.
As with last year, I spent most of my time at the Poetry Stage, where there was a different poetry reading every twenty minutes. There, I made the acquaintance of three women poets I will be discussing later this week.
The one that got away, however, was the Salvadorean poet Yesika Salgado, who spoke at the Latinidad Stage in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. She was magnificent. I couldn’t buy her book because the line to buy a copy and have the poet sign it was approximately a hundred persons long; and I was by that time exhausted and ready to return home.
I guess I should have spent more time at the Latinidad Stage. Even though my Spanish is pretty punk, the people in attendance were into their poets in a big way, and Yesika is a real force on the L.A. literary scene, as this YouTube video will show:
What with bookstores becoming rarer than hen’s teeth and the average American seemingly unable to read anything more daunting than the label of a beer can, I am becoming ever more determined to support books and reading. Therefore, I shall be spending the weekend looking at books, buying books, and attending talks by authors as well as poetry readings, My next post will be on Monday, April 22.
The Los Angeles TimesFestival of Books has become a huge event that brings together readers of all stripes. I even forego my usual sneering at readers of bodice-ripper romances: They, too, are readers—like me in one way, unlike in all others.
When I am not scanning book titles, I go for rest to the Poetry Pavilion, where there is a new poet every twenty minutes during the day. The pavilion never fills up like some of the other stages with big name celebrities, but it is (1) more comfortable and (2) more rewarding. Although I don’t read as much poetry as I should, it is always interesting to hear poets reading their own work.
Next week, I will write posts about those poets that interested me the most.
It was the summer of 2017 and the temperature soared above 100° Fahrenheit (38° Celsius) every day. It was Martine’s idea to visit the New Mexico desert during the summer, and we both paid a high price for it in terms of discomfort.
One of the high points of our trip was revisiting the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. I’m not entirely sure that I believe in UFOs; but, if they exist, the Roswell museum does the subject full justice. Plus they have t-shirts to die for in their store.
Fear Not! I Did Not Enter Through the Exit
I have always enjoyed visiting dinky museums in small towns. I will never forget the Eastern California Museum in Independence, California, where there is on view a full set of coyote dentures for a patient who had no patience with local dentists. Martine and I greatly enjoyed BOTH Loch Ness Museums in Scotland: the Loch Ness Center and Nessieland. And that despite the fact that I do not believe the monster exists!
One museum I did not visit was the Iceland Phallological Museum in Reykjavík. Anyone who has driven in Los Angeles traffic does not have to go out of his or her way to see multitudinous dicks of every variety. And you don’t have to pay admission for that!
The Rue de l’Aude in the XV Arrondissement of Paris
I am fatally in love with the novels of Patrick Modiano. This evening, I re-read his The Black Notebook, published in France in 2012 as L’Herbe des nuits. His fatally lost characters end up wandering the streets of Paris, trying to recover lost memories. Meanwhile, I try following their path using an old copy of Paris Pratique par Arrondissement.
The following is from page 75 of my Houghton-Mifflin edition:
And I was afraid I would be waiting for her in vain that night. Then again, I often waited without knowing if she’d show. Or else she would come by when I wasn’t expecting her, at around four in the morning. I would have fallen into a light sleep, and the sound of the key turning in the lock would startle me awake. Evenings were long when I stayed in my neighborhood to wait for her, but it seemed only natural. I felt sorry for people who had to record appointments in their diary, sometimes months in advance. Everything was prearranged for them, and they would never wait for anyone. They would never know how time throbs, dilates, then falls slack again; how it gradually gives you that feeling of vacation and infinity that others seek in drugs, but that I found just in waiting. Deep down, I felt sure you would come sooner or later.
Today, as I was re-reading Patrick Modiano’s The Black Notebook (2012) with its labyrinthine reconstructions of an imperfectly remembered past, I thought of a poem by Charles Baudelaire that gave me the same feeling, It is called “The Swan”:
The Swan
I
Andromache, I think of you! The stream, The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief, The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears, Made all my fertile memory blossom forth As I passed by the new-built Carrousel. Old Paris is no more (a town, alas, Changes more quickly than man’s heart may change); Yet in my mind I still can see the booths; The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals; The grass; the stones all over-green with moss; The _débris_, and the square-set heaps of tiles.
There a menagerie was once outspread; And there I saw, one morning at the hour When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky, And the road roars upon the silent air, A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked On the dry pavement with his webby feet, And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground. And near a waterless stream the piteous swan Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while Filled with a vision of his own fair lake): “O water, when then wilt thou come in rain? Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?” Sometimes yet I see the hapless bird — strange, fatal myth — Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens, With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face, As though he sent reproaches up to God!
II
Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed. New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks, And suburbs old, are symbols all to me Whose memories are as heavy as a stone. And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul, The image came of my majestic swan With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime, As of an exile whom one great desire Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you, Andromache! torn from your hero’s arms; Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride; Bent o’er an empty tomb in ecstasy; Widow of Hector — wife of Helenus! And of the negress, wan and phthisical, Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog The absent palm-trees of proud Africa; Of all who lose that which they never find; Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck; Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade. And one old Memory like a crying horn Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost…. I think of sailors on some isle forgotten; Of captives; vanquished … and of many more.
Tarnmoor 
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