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Lost in the Mayle

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Pick a place, imply that it is a paradise, write several best-selling books about it, maybe invest in real estate there for the inevitable onrush of rich twits—and you could be said to have wrecked the place for good. I am referring here to Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and its 10,000 sequels.

Some thirty years before Mayle started in on his demolition quest, M F K Fischer spent some time with her two daughters in Aix-en-Provence and wrote a far better (though not so well-known) a book with her Map of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964). Fisher obviously loved Provence, but she (M F K stands for Mary Frances Kennedy) was not afraid of presenting it warts and all.

When she first visited Aix, France was still suffering from the war. The town was full of misshapen beggars, many of whom were from Poland and other places that suffered the brunt of Nazi invasion. She tells one story of a French pianist whose house quartered several German officers. Her expensive piano was not to be touched by the pianist, but she was expected to appreciate the musical efforts of her tenants.

I have always loved books about travel, but I have always preferred books which were honest. There are thousands of puff pieces about the four corners of the earth, but they pall rather quickly. To give one example, Jonathan Raban’s excellent Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings was not only about travel, but about its author’s life coming apart in the process. The following quote from a review in The Guardian explains it all:

“Journeys,” says Raban, somewhere towards the end of Passage to Juneau, “hardly ever disclose their true meaning until after – and sometimes years after – they’re over.” This book was conceived of as a piece of work, but the professional project is, in the end, wholly subsumed by a floodtide of personal crises that leave the author gasping for air. Did he contemplate keeping them off stage and sticking to the route he’d blithely plotted, back in his Seattle study? Perhaps – but like any good captain, Raban elects in the end to go down with his ship. Passage to Juneau is not the book Raban set out to write. It’s richer, rawer and far, far more rewarding than that.

For this reason, I’ll take M F K Fischer over Peter Mayle any day of the week. I highly recommend her book.

Glory Days

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There are many possible pathways through a life. For many, the high point of their lives came early, in high school or college. As they settled down into family life, they rarely ever cracked a book or veered in a different direction. When one talks to them, most of their talk is of their glory days—and their present lives are a long comedown.

Although I was a high school valedictorian who was accepted for a four-year scholarship at an Ivy League college, I never felt I had any real laurels upon which to rest. The first seven years of my life were spent in a Hungarian household, where the Magyar language was the only one spoken. This gave me a slightly different outlook from most others. As I learned English and began to see myself as an American, I also saw myself as something of a hyphenated American who had his feet in two cultures.

During my high school and college years, I was walking around with a pituitary tumor that gave me severe headaches as it pressed against the optic nerve. So my glory days of youth were spent mostly in pain. When I was successfully operated on after I graduated in 1966, I looked like an 11-year-old rather than a college graduate. You can imagine how that affected my self-image.

In the intervening years I had two careers: first, as a computer programmer and director of marketing for a demographic data supplier, and then as a computer specialist and office manager for two tax accounting firms. In both professions, I saw myself as a mercenary who was actually after different game.

Now that I am retired, I am coming into my own as a writer here on this WordPress site. Oh, I am no “influencer.” I have no intention of getting you to buy crap, or anything else. If I am selling anything, it is my thoughts and feelings as a human being living in difficult times. I feel good and am considerably happier than I was during my youth.

It looks as if I am now living through my glory days.

The Geography of Los Angeles

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One thing about Los Angeles is its distinctive geography, much celebrated in literature and film. You can always tell when some New Yorker just deplaned at LAX and started spouting inanities that displayed an ignorance of this geography. That’s what happened when I read Megan Abbott’s neo-noir thriller Die a Little. There were a few names like “Pico Boulevard” (which everyone here just calls Pico), the giant doughnut at Randy’s in Inglewood, even several restaurant names like the Apple Pan and Ciro’s—but they just didn’t hold together. It’s as if she was using a map and a guidebook and just pasting the places together.

Take Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall (1977) with its tone-deaf attacks on L.A.

After all, it’s been more than 35 years since Alvy Singer hilariously dissed the city in “Annie Hall,” saying that people here “don’t throw their garbage away, they make it into television shows” and that “the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.”

I can only hope he enjoyed the mashed yeast he ordered on the Sunset Strip.

When you read Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald, you get a feeling for the crumbling sandstone of the coastal mountains, the transverse mountain ranges running west to east, the vast distances going from one point to another, as well as the odd architectural vibe of the place. When I first came out here in 1966, I was confused by all the stucco and chicken wire architecture, until I experienced my first real earthquake in 1971.

You can always tell when an east coast writer is slumming in Southern California. It doesn’t come across as real.

The Januarius Project 2022

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Near the beginning of every year, I set aside a month dedicated to reading authors I have never read before. The reason is to keep my book choices from becoming stale as I stick to the same set of “canonical” writers. So far this month, I have completed four books:

  • Pete Beatty’s Cuyahoga, a tall tale of Cleveland, Ohio (the city of my birth) set in 1837.
  • Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, a study of how the Marquis de Sade’s fiction morphed into modern-day porn.
  • Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another, a travel classic by a famed war correspondent and former wife of Ernest Hemingway.
  • Nic Pizzolatto’s Galveston, a superb, but bleak neo-noir novel about a hit man on the run to a city about which he has fond memories due to an early relationship.

It’s still early in January. I am currently reading Megan Abbott’s Die a Little and have plans to read works by George Meredith, William Beckford, Walter Kempinksi, Sam Wasson, Lászlo Földényi, Ben Loory, Elizabeth Hardwick, among others. According to past experiences doing this sort of thing, I will end up liking about half of the Januarius finds enough to read other works by them.

One result is that I find myself reading more books by women authors, which is a good thing.

Horror Journeys

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If you read Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir, you should probably start with the penultimate chapter entitled “What Bores Whom?” In it, she muses about a large group of hippies staying at her hotel in Eilath, Israel’s port on the Gulf of Aqaba. The gilded youth were mostly strung out on hash, and their conversation was mostly about how so-and-so was squashed out of his or her gourd. And then, quite suddenly, we get Martha’s thoughts about travel:

Thinking of those kids at Eilath has given me a new slant on horror journeys. They are entirely subjective. Well of course. If I had spent any time analyzing travel, instead of just moving about the world with the vigour of a Mexican jumping bean, I’d have seen that long ago. You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. I offer that as a universal test of travel, boredom, called by any other name, is why you yearn for the first available transport out.

Travels with Myself and Another gives us four journeys, all of which are quite horrorshow. But they are by no means boring, though I would have given money to have stayed at home. First there was her trip with then-husband Ernest Hemingway to China in the middle of her war with Japan. That was followed up by a boat trip in the Caribbean in 1942, at a time when Nazi U-Boats were sinking hundreds of ships there. The longest chapter is about a solo trip to Africa, starting in Cameroon, stopping in Chad and the Sudan, and finally a jaunt through East Africa in a Land Rover which she drove herself. Finally, there is a short chapter about a visit to Moscow around 1972 to visit Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of poet Osip Mandelstam—during which she could not get a single decent meal.

Although all four of her journeys are truly horrible, the author seems to revel in her difficulties. In a way, they make her observe more clearly. And her book is a travel classic despite all the “discomfort, fatigue, strain.”

I think I will read some of her war correspondence next to see how she regards travel when she is being fired upon.

Among the Orc-Minded

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I have been spending some time in Middle Earth the last few days, watching Sir Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. It made me think of much I don’t like about my fellow Americans, particularly white males. With their scruffy look, tattoos, and exaggerated machismo, I see many of them as little better than Tolkien’s orcs. Take this quote from The Lord of the Rings:

Much of the same sort of degraded and filthy talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong. [Italics mine]

Look at our movie heroes. How many of them remind you of the figure above? Sly Stallone, Vin Diesel, Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson, Russell Crowe—all could be cast as Middle Earth villains. The tent-dwelling homeless population of Los Angeles all look like orcs. It’s a look they tend to strive for: The “No one messes with me” look. I mean, who would want to? Even the police are not eager to make contact with males who look mean and diseased at the same time. Would you even want to share a police cruiser with one of them?

As for myself, I’m not into aggressive squalor. I’d prefer to throw in my lot with the elves, hobbits, wizards, dwarves, and men of Middle Earth.

Missionary Position

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I am currently reading Martha Gellhorn’s Travels with Myself and Another. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because she was not only an ace war correspondent, but also the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. In the middle of a trip across Africa, she writes the following:

On the face of it, missionaries here are a doomed lot. They have been in Africa for over a hundred years and even if conversion to Christianity is merely a head count, I doubt they are a roaring success. I wouldn’t preach anything to the blacks, not anything at all. If they want our kind of medical care, it should be given to them, but ideally by trained black doctors, though that may disturb the Darwinian balance of their world and their lives. A child is born each year; the hardiest live. The survivors have to be strong enough to endure this appalling climate and land. Much better to teach the women birth control. But I think nothing will be taught or learned for a very long time, and I do not consider this a disaster by any means. Who are we to teach? Leave them alone is my cry; let them find their own answers. We cannot understand them and the answers er have found haven’t been anything to cheer about, for look at us….

Things To Do in Iceland

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I’ve been to Iceland twice—in 2001 and 2013—and I hope to go again. People don’t have any concept of what the country is like. One hears the old chestnut that “Iceland should be called Greenland and vice versa.” With global warming, I suspect that both countries will in future be free of most ice. Below are a few highlights if you are thinking of visiting my favorite country in Europe:

  • Fish is always the cheapest and most interesting thing on the menu, and you’re never far from the ship that brought it to port.
  • If You Don’t Like Fish, don’t worry. Icelanders eat tons of hamburgers, hot dogs (which they call pylsur), and pizza.
  • The Interior of the Country is a picturesque and mostly uninhabited wasteland.
  • Icelandic Sagas from the 12-13th centuries A.D. are the best things to read, followed by the novels of 1955 Nobel prizewinner Halldor Laxness.
  • Islands off the coast of Iceland make great destinations, particularly Heimaey and Flatey. The first had a famous volcanic eruption in the 1970s, and the second was the site of a medieval monastery.
  • English is the Second Language of most Icelanders under the age of 70, so communication is no problem.
  • Iceland Is Expensive, particularly if you want to rent a car. Not to worry, there’s good long distance buses.
  • Waterfalls and Rainbows are everywhere, making it the most scenic country in Europe—if it can be said to be part of Europe.
  • Volcanoes are all over the place, and many of them are active. Don’t be surprised if you see one erupting during your trip.
  • Reykjavík contains half the population of Iceland, yet it’s small and quite walkable (if the weather isn’t foul).
  • The Westfjords are a bit out of the way, but shouldn’t be missed. Great hiking and incredible coastline views.
  • Northern Lights can be seen in the winter, but you can’t be 100% sure of a sighting.

How (Not) to Celebrate New Years

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A traditional way of celebrating New Years Eve in France is by setting cars alight. According to the BBC, as of some 12 hours ago, a total of 874 cars have been set on fire. I’m sure that’s kind of like a firecracker, but multiplied out, that’s got to be about 10 million dollars in damages.

Far better is a series of two cartoons from Brooke McEldowney in his “9 Chickweed Lane” series. The first cartoon ran on December 31 and was a bit confusing:

It all came clear with today’s cartoon:

I loved this set of images. We make a jump from one reality to another. Actually, it’s the same reality: Just a different template overlaying it. BTW, the look on the little girl’s face is priceless.

So let’s take that leap without incinerating any automobiles, if you please.

Biggest Goops of 2021

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Nicki Minaj: This Dingbat Takes the Cake

After coming out against Year-in-Review news stories, I thought I’d contradict myself by highlighting the stupidest people of the past year. Think of it as Stupidity-in-Review, which is not quite the same thing.

NICKI MINAJ pops right up to the top of my list. During a global pandemic, she refuses to get vaccinated because of the (unnamed) cousin’s friend in Trinidad whose testicles became swollen and became impotent as a result. Well, that goes smack against the experience of my grand nephew’s proctologist’s accountant’s client who had no problems whatsoever—except for the painful anal probe when he was kidnapped by a UFO.

JANUARY 6 INSURRECTIONISTS run a close second. If most were tried for treason and executed, there would be a lot of rental units in the basement apartments of their mothers that would suddenly become available in Red States.

GWYNETH PALTROW. Speaking of Goops, there’s this actress who is actually trying to own the term without quite understanding what it means. With her belong many nabobs in the WELLNESS COMMUNITY who don’t understand that their belief systems do not deter potentially fatal viruses.

DONALD J. TRUMP who still thinks there are 70 million idiots just waiting to do his bidding. Hey, America knows how to forget losers.

QANON, yesterday’s favorite conspiracy source, has been outed thanks to an HBO documentary series, and is now running out of steam fast. (Reminds me, I need to go to the basement of the pizzeria to munch on some fresh babies.)