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Summer Reading

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During the Heat of Summer, My Mind Turns to India

Most people’s idea of summer reading is of some cheap paperback to be consumed on a beach towel or on a long plane, train, or bus ride. There are a large number of trashy novels written each year to satisfy this undemanding audience. My taste in reading material, however, is more of what you would describe as deep-dish.

When the temperature rises into the 80s F (30s Celsius), there are certain books that appeal to me. Looking back over July and August in the last several years, here is what appeals most to me during temperature spikes:

  • Books about India, such as those written by William Dalrymple, author of City of Djinns
  • The novels of William Faulkner set in Mississippi
  • The novels of Brazilian author Jorge Amado set in his native State of Bahia
  • The novels and short stories of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño
  • American and French noir novels
  • The Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald set in South Florida
  • Travel books such as those written by Freya Stark, who traveled extensively by herself in the Middle East

Sometimes, I go in the opposite direction: I recently read Chauncey C. Loomis’s Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, about a failed trip to discover the North Pole.

I am currently rereading William Faulkner’s Go Down Moses and have Jorge Amado’s Home Is the Sailor in my TBR pile.

Favorite Films: Chinatown (1974)

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Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown

Eddie Muller of the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) series Noir Alley thinks that Chinatown is the greatest film ever made about Los Angeles. I am inclined to agree with him. Last night, I saw it for the nth time and newly appreciated it for its dark beauty.

How is it that the ultimate film about L.A. was directed by a Pole? You might remember that five years earlier, Charlie Manson and his gang brutally murdered Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, who at the time was 8½ months pregnant. She was stabbed 16 times, killing herself and her unborn child. Polanski was away in Europe at the time working on a film project.

Roman Polanski Playing a Bit Part in His Film

So, yes, I think Polanski had an understanding of the dark side of Los Angeles, which came out in his film. In fact, it was Polanski who insisted that Faye Dunaway gets shot in the head at the end of the movie while attempting to escape her father and incestuous lover played by John Huston. Both the producer and scriptwriter wanted to have Dunaway shoot Huston at the end. Polanski disagreed, saying that his film was not an adventure for children.

Film is a collaborative art form. In consequence, there are so many ways a film can go wrong. This film didn’t. Even after decades, it comes across as fresh, interesting, and somber as it did 48 years ago when it premiered.

I even like the sequel, The Two Jakes (1990) directed by and starring Jack Nicholson.

An interesting side note: I knew the next-door neighbor to the Tate murder house on Cielo Drive. It was inhabited by Richard Anderson, a Hollywood actor who had a long and illustrious career and was also a delightful person.

Sosh

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This Picture Describes Succinctly What I Am NOT!

I used to work at Urban Decision Systems with a Vice President named Jay W. McBride, whom I liked and respected. Once, when I complained about another VP, Jay said that he was a “sosh,” pronounced like the beginning of the word “social.” As Jay was a lifelong Mormon, I wondered if this was a term used in his background to describe people who were essentially social butterflies.

One thing I am not is a sosh. That’s why I did not find the Covid-19 quarantine particularly onerous. I made a point to contact my friends regularly over the phone, but I did not attend any super-spreader events frequented by people who could not stay away from large groupings of their social cohort.

By now, I and most of my friends have been vaccinated. (Martine continues to be a holdout, but, like me, she’s not a sosh.) I have visited with my good friends from San Pedro and Altadena, and look forward to re-establishing several other connections.

But will I ever attend a large party? Perhaps. If I do, I will probably arrive late and leave early, as is my wont. I derive little pleasure from talking in person to many people, particularly if they are strangers.

Billionaires in Space

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Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos

I find it amusing that two billionaire CEOs have decided to put their lives on the line and fly their own ships into space. First, it was Jeff Bezos of Amazon; then, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group.

Another “billionaire” comes to mind as a good candidate for space travel—even though his orange hair and facial coloring suggests he might himself be a space alien. Just to be sure, we can put him on a ship to Jupiter. You could click here to find out what would happen to Donald J. Trump on the largest planet in our solar system.

Perhaps sending CEOs into outer space would be a good way of thinning the herd. I’m all for that!

The Most Expensive Real Estate in Argentina

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Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires

When former military dictator of Argentina Juan Perón died in 1974, he couldn’t be buried at Buenos Aires’s exclusive Recoleta Cemetery. It was most galling to his followers that his widow Evita did manage to be buried there with the rest of her family (née Duarte). Eventually, his body was moved to the grounds of his estate in the exclusive barrio of Olivos.

I have visited Recoleta during each of my three trips to Argentina. Why? It is actually the number one tourist destination in Buenos Aires—and it’s free. Just about everyone of note in Argentine history and culture is buried there. Adolfo Bioy Casares the writer is buried there, but the Argentina’s greatest writer, his friend Jorge Luis Borges, is buried in Geneva, Switzerland, where he died in 1986.

One of Many Bronze Commemorative Plaques Marking the Grave of Evita Perón

Among other famous denizens are past presidents such as Agustín Pedro Justo, Bartolomé Mitre, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Hipólito Yrigoyen, Julio Argentino Roca, Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, and Raúl Alfonsín. There’s famous boxer Luis Firpo; Isabelle Walewski, a granddaughter of Napoleon Bonaparte; warlord Facundo Quiroga; writer Silvina Ocampo and her sister, publisher Victoria Ocampo; and William Brown, Irish-born founder of the Argentinean Navy (widely known as Almirante Brown).

The Narrow Streets of Argentina’s Notable Dead

In fact, the last time I stayed in Buenos Aires, I stayed at a hotel right across the street from the west wall of the cemetery.

“A World Construed Out of Blood”

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The Best American Novel I Have Read in Years

I have seldom been so impressed by an American novel—especially a recent one—as I was by Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing. The young hero, Billy Parham, crosses back and forth three times between New Mexico and Old Mexico. Finding his parents killed and robbed of their livestock, he is not at home either in the United States or the mountains of Mexico.

McCarthy writes with an Old Testament intensity of the kindness and evil that Billy finds across the Rio Grande. At one point, he writes:

When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to destroy it.

After finding his family slain and dispersed, Billy manages to locate his younger brother, Boyd, and returns with him to Mexico looking for the horses stolen from his father. Boyd manages to impress the campesinos they meet, wins the nickname El Guërito, and is described by the author:

He looked fourteen going on some age that never was. He looked as if he’d been sitting there and God made the trees and rocks around him. He looked like his own reincarnation and then his own again. Above all else he looked to be filled with a terrible sadness. As if he harbored news of some horrendous loss that no one else had heard of yet. Some vast tragedy of the way the world was.

Author Cormac McCarthy

I have been impressed by McCarthy’s work before, when I read Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992). So far, I have read the first two novels of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which consists of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). After reading the next novel in the trilogy, I will backtrack and read his first four novels, which are set in the South. Then I will move on to No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006).

One little note: I would not recommend that you read The Crossing unless you know some Spanish. Much of the dialog set in Mexico is in untranslated Spanish. I was able to get by pretty well, though I had my Cassell’s Spanish Dictionary at my side. But if you can tolerate the language factor, I think you will be mightily impressed by McCarthy’s work.

Glorious [Bang!] 4th

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We Celebrate Our Independence by Playing at Terrorism

As I write these words, the air is full of explosions. Dogs and cats are whimpering as they hide under beds, tortured by their pet-loving owners who celebrate our independence with backyard barbecues and playing at being terrorists. I’m not sure that many Americans are giving any attention to the Declaration of Independence from King George III.

Ultimately we got our independence, but mainly because of help from France. You can read all you want about American history and not find a word about George Washington ever winning a battle. France helped us at a horrible cost to the French monarchy: their assistance bankrupted the treasury and was a major contributor to the French Revolution, which began shortly after we won our independence. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette paid for helping us by being publicly beheaded in Paris’s Place de Grève.

Ingrates that we are, we tend to downplay the French role in winning our freedom. When the British under Cornwallis were tied up at Yorktown, it was because Admiral François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, Marquis of Grasse-Tilly was backing up the Continental Army led by Washington and Lafayette.

Don’t think I’m feasting on escargots, Coquilles Saint-Jacques, and Pouilly-Fuissé because of this. I’m not celebrating at all, especially as it sounds like my street is being bombed.

The Giving Never Ends

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Many charities accomplish great things. Many others—and not everyone knows which ones—serve only to provide jobs for people who work for them. The coronavirus outbreak has made many charities frantic in their fundraising, seeing as how many people are now without disposable cash.

I am amazed at the number of television ads for charities that ask for a fixed monthly amount—usually $19 for some odd reason. They include such unusual ads as those as the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) which attempts to support holocaust survivors in Russia and Israel, for $19/month. Then there is the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), which saves abused dogs and cats (and whatever) from abusive owners who don’t feed and house them properly, for $19/month. This one gives you a garish “collectible” T-Shirt for your trouble.

If you do have some cash, you can easily be charged to death. Those repeating $19 charges never end, unless you make a concerted effort to stop them.

Thanks, I’ll Pass

Look, I’m not some horrible person who believes in abusing animals or elderly Jews. I’m sure some of that money goes for helping people and animals; but TV ads cost a lot of money. Instead of showing shivering, starving animals, I am sure the cameramen should first have refilled their water dish and fed them.

Then there are the telephone ads. Several years ago, when I was still working, I donated some money to a police relief fund. Ever since, I have been marked for a sucker and subject to repeated requests for cash—and not only for police, but for firemen and others. Yesterday, I received a call from a live person who talked over my voice pleading for him to save his breath because I wasn’t in a position to donate. He rudely hung up on me, angry that he hadn’t succeeded in making me snivel guiltily. Even the more responsible callers, try to wheedle a small donation out of me even after I said I wasn’t donating anything to anyone. This gets old fast.

Charities do buy sucker lists, so when you give to a charity, you will hear from at least a dozen others. I was never a philanthropist, but now I am on a fixed income. My guess is that the number of these calls, as well as desperate pleas in the mail, will not taper off anytime soon.

“Her Leopard Legs”

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A Poem by the Chilean Writer Roberto Bolaño

I never thought of Roberto Bolaño as a poet before, but his collection entitled The Romantic Dogs set me straight on that score.

LUPE

She worked in la Guerrero, a few streets down from Julian’s,
and she was 17 and had lost a son.
The memory made her cry in that Hotel Trébol room,
spacious and dark, with bath and bidet, the perfect place
to live out a few years. The perfect place to write
a book of apocryphal memories or a collection
of horror poems. Lupe
was thin and had legs long and spotted
like a leopard.
The first time I didn’t even get an erection:
and I didn’t want to have an erection. Lupe spoke of her life
and of what, for her, was happiness.
When a week had passed, we saw each other again. I found her
on a corner alongside other little teenage whores,
propped against the fender of an old Cadillac.
I think we were glad to see each other. From then on
Lupe began telling me things about her life, sometimes crying,
sometimes fucking, almost always naked in bed,
staring at the ceiling, hand in hand.
Her son was born sick and Lupe promised la Virgen
that she’d leave her trade if her baby were cured.
She kept her promise a month or two, then had to go back.
Soon after, her son died, and Lupe said the fault
was her own for not keeping up her bargain with la Virgen.
La Virgen carried off the little angel, payment for a broken
     promise,
I didn’t know what to say.
I liked children, sure,
but I still had many years before I’d know
what it was to have a son.
And so I stayed quiet and thought about the eerie feel
Emerging from the silence of that hotel.
Either the walls were very thick or were the sole
     occupants
or the others didn’t open their mouths, not even to moan.
It was so easy to ride Lupe and feel like a man
and feel wretched. It was easy to get her
in your rhythm and it was easy to listen as she prattled on
about the latest horror films she’d seen
at Bucareli Theater.
Her leopard legs would wrap around my waist
and she’d sink her head into my chest, searching for my
nipples or my heartbeat.
This is the part of you I want to suck, she said to me
     one night.
What, Lupe? Your heart.

Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs: 1980-1998 (New York: New Directions, 2006).

It’s Already Here

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Lone Fire Fighter in Midst of Rapidly Growing Brush Fire

We have become used to talking about climate change as something that’ll take place in the future. Sorry, but it’s here already. It’s not like the Cold War, when we were constantly afraid of a nuclear holocaust that never happened, because both sides acted fairly reasonably.

But this is not the same America any more. Half the voting population is cray-cray, thinking that Democrats eat babies in the nonexistent basements of pizza parlors (as qAnon believes). Yes, and water flows uphill; the earth is flat; and the sun revolves around the earth. Vladimir Putin looked and acted more reasonable than our last president, who sounds more and more demented every time he opens his mouth.

Who would ever have thought that we, as a country, could become a victim of Alzheimer’s? Yet, it appears that we have.

So what am I going to do about it? I will continue to vote reasonably even if the others won’t. They are accumulating very bad juju and will eventually pay the price for it. I have some faith that the world will eventually right itself even if we continue to make disastrous mistakes.

I guess that makes me an optimist. Who would have thunk it?