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Malibu in My Lungs

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The Franklin Wildfire in Nearby Malibu

When the dry Santa Ana winds blow in from the desert, every tree, every cactus, every bush is at risk of being involved in a wild conflagration that eats up vast tracts of land. Such is the Franklin Fire in Malibu, which, after a week of rampant destruction, is only 54% contained.

Alas, a good part of the ash from that fire is contained in my lungs. It causes my nose to run, punctuated by mammoth sneezes that shake the walls of my abode. As the crow flies, I am only a few miles from Malibu Canyon, ground zero for the worst damage.

I have driven Malibu Canyon Road many times en route to Malibu Creek State Park, which is where the M*A*S*H television show was filmed.

After I was on crutches for two years, I had a crutch-burning party at Tapia Park around 1969. Unfortunately, the flames have destroyed Tapia Park where I celebrated being able to walk again without sticks.

If we get some rain soon, I will be able to go through the day without forcibly expelling ash from my lungs every few hours.

Psychological Experiments

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John Cleese on Lawyers

I just finished reading John Cleese’s Professor at Large, which reprises a number of talks he gave at Cornell University while he was a visiting Professor-at-Large there over a period of some eighteen years. I broke out laughing when I read the following:

CLEESE: I had to switch to law [at Cambridge University] because there was almost nothing else I could switch to:

INTERVIEWER: So, you’re saying law is easier?

CLEESE: Well, law was kind of easier for me because I am fairly precise with my use of words and I can think in terms of categories, which is all law is—until you start practicing, and then it’s about villainy and low cunning.

I’ll tell you my favorite joke about lawyers because it actually involves universities. The psychological departments of universities are using lawyers now, instead of rats, in their experiments. There are three reasons for this. One is that there are more lawyers than rats. Second, there are some things that rats just won’t do. And thev third is is that there was a bit of a problem because sometimes the experimenters got fond of the rats. And I want you to know that joke has nothing to do with the fact that I am going through an expensive divorce at the moment.

A Bulletin from the Ministry of Silly Walks

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John Cleese of Monty Python Shows You How

He’s not just one of the funniest men who have ever lived. He also has a brain, a very good one, in fact. For a number of years, he served as a Professor-at-Large at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. During that time, he showed up occasionally and delivered some fascinating talks, which were collected and published in a book entitled Professor at Large: The Cornell Years.

His first talk was about his reactions to a book by Guy Claxton about creativity. It was called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind:

It’s a book that addresses a danger that has been developing in our society for several years. This danger is based on three separate wrong beliefs. The first is the belief that being decisive means taking decisions quickly. The second is the belief that fast is always better. The third is the belief that we should think of our minds as computers.

Now, of course, there are situations where you have to think fast, like how to avoid a car driving on the wrong side of the freeway. It seems, however, that many American businessmen have made something of a fetish out being articulate and quick on the draw.

Creativity just cannot be made to order:

The point is, we just don’t know where we get our ideas from, but it certainly isn’t from our laptops. They just pop into our heads. The greatest poets and scientists freely admit that they have no control over the creative process. They all know that they cannot create to order. They can only put themselves in favorable—usually quiet—circumstances, bear the problem in mind, and … wait. Indeed, the whole creative process is so mysterious that academic psychologists who studied creativity in depth in the ’60s and ’70s eventually just gave up because they couldn’t get any further—they literally couldn’t explain it.

Seeing as how John Cleese and his five Monty Python associates are among the most creative comics of the last half century, I can only assume that the man knows what he is talking about. Even if he walks silly.

Don’t Toque to Me About Chefs!

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Making a $45.00 Tower of Exotic Foodstuffs

The following is a repost from December 20, 2014.

The problem with American restaurants is that there are too many chefs and not enough cooks. Ever since the Food Network went on the air, people started paying too much attention to people with large white toques who like to mess around with food, forming little towers of quinoa with raspberry sauce and maybe a small amount of meat or fish. The less the foods appear to go together, the more renown the chef is likely to earn for his or her daring.

It’s become an epidemic. The tutsi-fruitsie is king. The ice tea is contaminated with passion fruit or other petrochemical waste. Side dishes avoid the usual rice or potatoes and provide instead broccolini with mashed yeast and ground Murano glass and Galena lead pellets.

Whenever I see some Culinary Institute of America (CIA) chef wearing a towering white toque, I know I’m in for a pretentious soaking. On the other hand, when I see what Hungarians call a szakács or szakácsnő (cook, masculine or feminine gender respectively), I know I am likely to have an excellent meal. There must be no toque or other sartorial trimmings. I want a good, honest cook who knows how to prepare food. And no little towers!

As for the Food Network, I hope they switch over to running “Antiques Roadshow” or “Pawn Stars.” Or maybe they can talk about Kim Kardashian or some other celebrity twinkie. They certainly have not done anything to improve the quality of food in this country.

Clarice Lispector in the U.S.

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The Jewish-Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

If Clarice Lispector were alive today, she would be celebrating her 104th birthday. The strikingly beautiful author with the high cheekbones and wild Scythian eyes was one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century, joining such titans as Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, and Wislawa Szymborska.

In my e-mail today was a message from New Directions Publishing, which publishes some twenty titles by Lispector in English translation. It contained a link to a video entitled “Dias de Clarice em Washington.” It is 29 minutes long in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

During the 1950s, Clarice was married to a Brazilian diplomat named Maury Gurgel Valente who was posted to the embassy in Washington. From her house in Bethesda, Maryland, she took part in diplomatic social functions and raised a family, as well as writing a number of books and short stories … until it all became too much for her, and she filed for divorce, after which she returned to Brazil.

I urge you to see this video and see what a great writer must do when she is pulled between her marriage and her art:

Clarice Lispector (R) and Sons

The End of the Tether

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This is a difficult subject to treat because I myself am reaching the age at which one can pay most grievously for mistakes made earlier in life. I have just finished re-reading Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether, about a British sea captain in Malayan waters who has passed up a peaceful retirement to help out his daughter, who had married unwisely.

Although Captain Whalley in his youth was one of the most brilliant sea captains in the South Seas, he has grown old and forced himself to take on a rickety steamship in need of repair. The owner is a nervous former lottery winner who serves as the ship’s engineer. While he spends every spare hour evaluating possible winning lottery numbers, Captain Whalley, with the help of a native serang, handles the sailing of the vessel.

Unknown at the outset is that Captain Whalley is going blind, and it is primarily the Malay serang who is responsible for captaining the ship. As one can guess, things do not end well.

As I approach eighty years of life on earth, I see many of my friends in their retirement years similarly afflicted as a result of difficult situations that over time have gone critical. I earnestly hope that I will not be one of them.

For one thing, I did not save up enough money for retirement, having spent obscene amounts of money on books. Today I have a fantastic library of five or six thousand volumes. But what happens if I should suddenly die? That would leave Martine in the position of trying to find out how to turn my library into cash, if possible. This at a time when there are precious few bookstores around that could buy hundreds of books at a time.

At least I don’t buy books any more. The Los Angeles Library and my Amazon Kindle account for most of the books I read.

I owe it to the people I love to whittle away at my library, however it pains me. Alas, I am mortal. I have made mistakes. I will pay for those mistakes.

Beautiful Soup

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When the weather turns cold and it starts to get dark early, I like to cook a nice big pot of soup. It makes me think of Lewis Carroll’s song from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

BEAUTIFUL Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beau- ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau- ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo- oop of the e- e- evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
Pennyworth only of Beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

Beau- ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau- ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo- oop of the e- e- evening,
Beautiful, beauti- FUL SOUP!

But then, Lewis Carroll is talking about turtle soup, and that’s not something I would care to cook, even if it is a Mock Turtle.

Martine used to love my soups, but recently she decided that soup makes her think of being ill. When she gets one of her spells of irritable bowel syndrome, she lives on Progresso’s Chicken with Wild Rice soup and Gatorade.

Needless to say, my home-made concoctions in no way resemble canned soup, even premium canned soup like Progresso.

My most recent creation was a Minestrone with chicken stock, Great Northern Beans (canned), carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, fennel, onions, garlic, and macaroni. Unfortunately, it had one small jalapeño chile pepper who was a good deal higher on the Scovill scale than by rights it should have been. It was almost as hot as a habanero chile.

The soup was still good: It’s just that I had to water it down some so as not to burn my gullet.

Vodka and Zakuski

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Zakuski: Hors d’Oeuvres to Go with Vodka

It’s a culinary tradition in Slavic countries such as Russia and Ukraine: When you drink vodka, you eat zakuski, which literally means “something to bite after.” It sounds like a delicious culinary tradition. Except for one thing: I’ve never had vodka.

After reading Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (2012), I just might get myself a bottle. Throughout the novel, the characters are dealing with a strange anomaly. The inland city of Lviv has strange incidents of seagulls, starfish, a stench of seaweed, and salt water crabs appearing in various places throughout the city.

Several residents band together to try to identify the problem, which they do after the consumption of a whole lot of vodka and zakuski. Their Lviv is a magical city in which the hand of the late Jimi Hendrix is buried in a local cemetery, having been supplied by the KGB with the help of Lithuanian operatives. Why? Apparently to study the speed of the spreading of rumors in Soviet society.

This is the fifth work of fiction by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov that I have read. They are all of them sweet and gentle—especially as they come from a land that is now mired in a brutal invasion by Russian forces. I cannot help but think that Kurkov’s whimsy can be as deadly to Putin’s aims as any weapons in his arsenal. Anyhow, let’s hope so. I have a lot more of Kurkov that I want to read; and I hope he continues to live a long and productive life.

The Opinionator

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We all have opinions—in fact, lots of opinions. Some of them are based on actually existing situations, and many are so wrong-headed as to be laughable. And yet, try to go up against someone else’s opinions, and you are likely to make an enemy for life. Attack an opinion, and you are in effect attacking the person who holds it.

I have been wrong about many things. So much so that I tend to regard my opinions as penciled on a scratch pad rather than cut into stone with all capital letters. At age 21, I was all gung-ho for the American participation in the Viet Nam War. I was also a devout Catholic who attended Mass every Sunday. I thought that seafood was terrible (understandable when one was raised on the shores of Lake Erie).

Nowadays, if you impugn any of my opinions, you are likely to be met with a shrug. I do not see an attack on what I believe in as an attack on me. All my friends think some of my opinions are out of line. They’re just different. That’s all.

I look back and find that many of the people I’ve loved in this life held (and still hold) beliefs that were opposed to mine. I guess not everyone I meet is a carbon copy of me. For that I am thankful!

“That First White Age”

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Welsh Poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

Bruce Chatwin introduced me to Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan. This poem goes by the rather clumsy name “Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae: Liber 2 Metrum 5.” For a 17th century poem, it is remarkably approachable today.

Happy that first white age when we
Lived by the earth’s mere charity!
No soft luxurious diet then
Had effeminated men:
No other meat, nor wine, had any
Than the coarse mast, or simple honey;
And by the parents’ care laid up,
Cheap berries did the children sup.
No pompous wear was in those days,
Of gummy silks or scarlet blaize.
Their beds were on some flow’ry brink,
And clear spring-water was their drink.
The shady pine in the sun’s heat
Was their cool and known retreat,
For then ’twas not cut down, but stood
The youth and glory of the wood.
The daring sailor with his slaves
Then had not cut the swelling waves,
Nor for desire of foreign store
Seen any but his native shore.
Nor stirring drum scarred that age,
Nor the shrill trumpet’s active rage,
No wounds by bitter hatred made,
With warm blood soiled the shining blade;
For how could hostile madness arm
An age of love to public harm,
When common justice none withstood,
Nor sought rewards for spilling blood?
Oh that at length our age would raise
Into the temper of those days!
But — worse than Etna’s fires! — debate
And avarice inflame our state.
Alas! who was it that first found
Gold, hid of purpose under ground,
That sought out pearls, and dived to find
Such precious perils for mankind!