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About Tarnmoor

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History

In my years as a blogger, I have gone under several different names:

  • Solnabanya for the defunct Yahoo! 360. That is the name of the village in Slovakia where my father was born. It means “Salt Mine,” and refers to a world-famous salt mine where my father started working at the age of ten. He loaded great leather bags with brine, which was hauled up by donkeys to a chute where the water was sent to an evaporation building. I visited this salt mine with my parents in 1977.
  • Tarnmoor at Blog.Com, which had a much smaller readership. Tarnmoor is a pseudonym that was shared by Alain Silver, Jim Ursini, Herman Melville, and me. Melville wrote several pieces under the name of Salvatore R. Tarnmoor. Silver, Ursini, and I wrote a column for the UCLA Daily Bruin under the name “The Exotic Filmgoer,” signed by Tarnmoor, about foreign cinemas in Los Angeles.
  • Ixtaccihuatl at Multiply.Com is named after one of the two volcanoes just east of Mexico City. The more famous one is Popocatepetl. When Multiply decided to pull out of the American market and concentrate on Southeast Asia, I decided to migrate here to WordPress.Com, where, once again, I am Tarnmoor.

As to my own personal history, I am a computer software expert and network administrator working for an accounting firm in West Los Angeles. I was an English major at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, then coming out to the Left Coast to study Motion Picture History and Criticism at UCLA’s graduate school. I stopped short of getting a degree because of the ugly faculty politics and went on in the computer field, where I am ensconced for the time being.

Generally speaking, I write one blog a day, more or less. I live in West L.A. with my girlfriend Martine. I hope you enjoy what I write, and I always look forward to hearing from anyone who doesn’t want to engage me in a political debate, particularly if they are Right Wingers.

Subject Matter

I write mostly about politics (with a decidedly anti-conservative slant), history, literature, film, travel, photography, and humor. Sometimes I just meditate. Most of the time, I bloviate—or should I say blogulate?

Favorite Books

The following is a list from my profile on Goodreads.Com. It is in no particular order, but it’ll give you an idea where my head is at:

Marcel Proust: A la recherche de temps perdu (re-read every 10 yrs)
William Faulkner: Absalom Absalom; Light in August; Go Down Moses; The Hamlet
Honore de Balzac: Père Goriot; Lost Illusions
James Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson LLD
Gyula Krudy: Krudy’s Chronicles
Jorge Luis Borges: Labyrinths; Ficciones
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude
Icelandic Sagas, particularly: Njals Saga, Egils Saga, Eyrbyggja Saga, Grettir’s Saga, and Laxdaela Saga
Nikolai Leskov: Tales
G K Chesterton: Essays, Poetry and Fiction
Shakespeare: Plays; Sonnets
Franz Kafka: Novels & Tales
Machado de Assis: Epitaph of a Small Winner
Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts; Between the Woods and the Water; Mani
Lucian of Samosata: Dialogues
George Mackay Brown: Poems; Hawkfall
Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now; Last Chronicle of Barset
Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne: Essays
Sir Walter Scott: Journals; Old Mortality; Heart of Midlothian
Plato: Dialogues
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Confessions, Emile
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot
Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Georges Perec: Life A User’s Manual
Poems By: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges
Thucydides: Peloponnesian War
Herodotus: Histories
Fernando Pessoa: Book of Disquiet

22 thoughts on “About Tarnmoor”

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  10. Hello–It was lovely for my sister and I to come across your recollections of Papa Bach’s. We are the children of Ted and Eva, and I have had several encounters over the years with people for whom the bookstore played a significant role in their life. I met Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for the Doors, around 2001, and he talked to me about how he and Jim spent many happy hours there. I lived much of my early childhood in the store, and it is always wonderful for me to think about how I must have often crossed paths with people like you, Ray, Jim, many other cultural luminaries, and many, many others whose lives were impacted in small and even very large ways. Thank you for your heartwarming tribute! Luther Riedel

  11. Hello Tarnmoor! How are you? My name is Fernando from Buenos Aires, Argentina and I would love to contact your friend David Benestly because I want to interview him for a new art website that I’m working. Do you know where I can contact your friend? Best wishes to you, Fernando. P.S.: I love your blog!!

  12. Hi, my name is Julie and I just finished reading your posts on growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, specifically the Buckeye Road area. My birthday’s coming up and feeling nostalgic, I googled my childhood homes, schools, churches, etc. and somehow, I came upon your blog, or should I say it just appeared. Reading your memories brought tears to my eyes so I thought I’d reach out and say “hello”. Buckeye Road was a great place to live and grow as a child and I have many fond memories. And I am Hungarian. I even attended Harvey Rice for 2nd grade. Anyway, thanks for your memories which triggered more of mine. Thank you and take care. ~ Julie

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