Although I hail from Cleveland, Ohio, I am not a big fan of what I and many of my friends call “The Mistake on the Lake.” There I one Clevelander I have always admired. No, not Halle Berry, though I find her incredibly beautiful. And not Paul Newman, who I admit was a talented film actor.
My choice is Tim Conway, who, although born eleven years earlier than me, had a childhood that curiously paralleled my own. Just as I was born to a family that spoke only Hungarian in the home, Tim spoke only Romanian. (Funny, he doesn’t look Romanian—but he was born Toma Conway to an Irish father and a Romanian mother, Sophia, who bore the Romanian equivalent to my mother’s Hungarian name, Zsófi.)
Like my mother, Sophia was born in the United States but taken to be raised in Europe. Like my Slovak father Elek, Daniel Conway adopted his wife’s language in the family circle. Thus, when Tim first attended school, he spoke mostly Romanian, just as I spoke only Magyar.
The parallels stop there. Toma had his name changed to Tim when he started in show business, as there was already a well-known British actor named Tom Conway. Whether playing in McHale’s Navy or The Carol Burnett Show, Tim Conway was one of the funniest men on television. I still watch The Carol Burnett Show on MeTV up to six times a week. Great stuff!
In the summer of 1956, when I was 11 years old, Jack Kerouac spent 63 days manning a fire watch tower in Washington’s North Cascades, atop Desolation Peak. On the Road, which was to be the main source of his fame, followed by The Dharma Bums, were not yet published. The recently published Desolation Peak is a collection of Kerouac’s many writing projects—many of them fragmentary—while he scanned the horizon for fires during those 63 days.
Jack was desperately poor having spent all his money to get to Washington from Mill Valley. He began his job as a fire watcher with a total of 2¢.
This year I have become entranced by Kerouac. Like most of the members of my generation, I read On the Road while I was still in high school, and then stopped there. I have become newly fascinated by his work and am resolved to read all his work that I can find. That assumes I will live long enough, as Jack was a busy boy.
Below is a selection of what Kerouac called his “Desolation Pops.” In form, they resemble traditional Japanese haiku, but they do not adhere to the genre strict rules concerning the number of syllables per line. They’re still interesting. After all, English is a very different language than Japanese.
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
(7)
A stump with sawdust
—a place
To meditate
(11)
The clouds assume
as I assume,
Faces of hermits
(24)
There’s nothing there
because
I don’t care
(36)
Poor gentle flesh—
there is
No answer
(42)
Wednesday blah
blah blah—
My mind hurts
(55)
Rig rig rig—
that’s the rat
On the roof
(59)
I called Hanshan | A Zen Buddhist recluse
in the fog—
Silence, it said
(60)
I called—Dipankara | One of the Buddhas of the past
instructed me
By saying nothing
(70)
Aurora borealis
over Mount Hozumeen—
The world is eternal
For many years now, I have begun each morning making a pot of Indian black tea, which I drink with a bit of honey (usually Mexican mesquite honey) and a squeeze of lime. By afternoon, what remains in the pot becomes iced tea—up to three glasses full. I try not to drink the entire contents of the pot every day, because tea acts as a diuretic. But in hot weather, I violate this rule of thumb.
Usually, I drink my iced tea without anything added. Sometimes, especially when there is company, I will fill a pitcher with iced tea and add artificial sweetener, the juice of a whole lemon, and a jigger of high quality dark rum, preferably Ron Zacapa Edición Negra from Guatemala or Myers’s Original Dark Rum from Jamaica. The rum is for flavor only and is not enough for intoxication.
My mother has told me that, as a baby, I used to sip from her coffee. Now I will not touch coffee, and do not even like coffee-flavored ice creams or candies. And when it comes to carbonated sodas, I rarely drink more than one glass every couple of weeks, usually at a restaurant.
That doesn’t quite make me a man of one beverage, but it comes close. I also like unsweetened mineral water, fruit juices, tomato juice, and lemonade. Put everything else I drink against hot and iced tea, however, and the tea I drink outweighs all my other options, except maybe for plain water, and that only during heat waves. (Too much tea, and I pretty much have to live in the bathroom.)
What is it about Indian black tea that appeals to me so much? It’s difficult o find the exact words, but good tea has a clarity of flavor that satisfies without causing satiety. For years, I have been buying Ahmad of London loose teas by the pound, usually:
Darjeeling, the best Indian black tea
Ceylon from Sri Lanka
Assam, Baruti and Ghalami varieties mostly in cold weather
Occasionally, when traveling, I will drink an English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast tea from tea bags. In Asian restaurants, I drink end enjoy green tea. But thank you, no Earl Grey please!
I have just finished reading Volume II of Thomas Hodgkin’s monumental Italy and Her Invaders, which tells of the Hun and Vandal invasions and the Herulian Mutiny that unseated the last of the Western Roman Emperors in CE 476. In essence, it tells of the painful last twenty-five years of the Empire, during which most of the emperors were murdered in a year or two.
There was no benefit to wearing the imperial purple in those last few years. A couple of days ago, I posted a blog in which Apollinaris Sidonius explained why it was no fun in being chosen as emperor.
Those last years of the empire were no fun. Not only were the invading Huns and Vandals brutal, but the empire itself was brutal to its own citizens, taxing them to death to pay for the huge military required to protect the borders.
It makes me think about our own situation. Our problem is not barbarian invasions (unless you don’t particularly like Canadians or Latin Americans), but our seemingly unbridgeable political divisions. The insurrection of January 6, 2021, was, to me, very like Gaiseric and the Vandals’ sack of Rome in CE 455. They may have been barbarians in the end, but they were our very own native-born barbarians. The result, in the end, is no better than the sad end of Rome.
I keep thinking of a poem by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy entitled:
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Middle School Greek Dancers at St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church
I remember a time when most foreign-born Americans were of European ethnicity. My father, Elek Paris, was born in what is now the Republic of Slovakia; and my mother, who was actually born in Ohio, was taken to Hungary to be raised by her grandparents. For the first five or six years of my life, I thought that Hungarian was the language of the United States.
What inevitably happens has happened. The children of European-born immigrants see their parents’ culture, religion, and language as something quaint which they are being reluctantly marshaled into accepting. The three-year Covid-19 lockdown has brought this tendency into sharper focus.
Yesterday, Martine and I attended the annual Greek Festival at St Nicholas in Northridge for the first time since 2019. Sure enough, the tours of the church were more perfunctory; the calamari was more breading than squid; and there were fewer people able to do the traditional dance steps. I noticed much the same at the two Hungarian festivals we attended this month. Only the Grace Hungarian Reform Church in Reseda had anything like the same quality of food and entertainment as before the lockdown.
Our neighbors downstairs are refugees from Putin’s Ukrainian invasion. I notice that their two little daughters are addressing their mother in English instead of Ukrainian.
When I first came to Los Angeles, there were at least half a dozen Hungarian restaurants. Now there are none. If I want real Hungarian food, I’ll either have to cook it myself or visit my brother more often. (He’s a far better cook than I am.)
If Martine and I expect to find more authentic ethnic events, we will have to concentrate on the Asian and Latin American ethnic events, as they have arrived in this country more recently.
Solidus of the Emperor Petronius Maximus (Mar-May455)
I am greatly enjoying the second volume of The Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire, written by Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866). This is the volume that tells of the Huns and the Vandals. More and more, I am fascinated by classic 19th century British and American historians.
The following excerpt is from Apollinaris Sidonius, a fifth century Roman poet, diplomat, and bishop. He is writing about the emperor that followed Valentinian III, who was assassinated for his part in the murder of Aetius, the last great Roman general, who defeated Attila and the Huns at Chalons in CE 451.
I received your letter … dedicated to the praises of your patron the emperor Petronius Maximus. I think, however, that either affection or a determination to support a foregone conclusion has carried you away from the strict truth when you call him most happy because he passed through the highest offices of the state and died an emperor. I can never agree with the opinion that those men should be called happy who cling to the steep and slippery summits of the state. For words cannot describe how many miseries are hourly endured in the lives of men who, like [the Roman dictator] Sulla, claim to be called Felix [fortunate] because they have clambered over the limits of law and right assigned to the rest of their fellow citizens. They think that supreme power must be supreme happiness, and do not perceive that they have, by the very act of grasping dominion, sold themselves to the most wearisome of all servitudes; for, as kings lord it over their fellow men, so the anxiety to retain power lords it over kings.
This afternoon, I once again took a walk on the UCLA campus and visited the Fowler Museum. There were two new exhibits that fascinated me, particularly the work of Myrlande Constant of Haiti. It was a strangely satisfying mix of Hieronymus Bosch and Haitian vodou (aka voodoo). On her website, the artist talks about the influence of vodou flags on her work:
Within the vodou community the flag is a sacred ritual object that identifies the hounfour and honors the spirits with whom it is associated. The sparkle of the sequin or mirror used to capture the attention of the iwa started in the temples. Drapo voudou (sequined sacred flags) are unfurled at the beginning of a ceremony. They are power points that are used for both identification and transformation. When the flag is unfurled it signals the congregants to come to order -the sacred is about to come home to roost. The spirits will soon walk next to (or in) the market woman.
As I looked around the exhibit, I found myself drawn to details rather than to the overall design, which in any case I could ill understand as I am not a practitioner of vodou. Here are a couple of examples:
Like all the works on display, the art was covered with sequins, beads, and other shiny objects. The result was that I found myself immersed in detail. Is that Baron Samedi or Papa Legba on horseback? I don’t know, now why that woman at the lower left is exposing her buttocks.
Making frequent appearances were Catholic saints and angels, though in the world of vodou, everything has a different meaning.
Sometimes, it is useful to immerse oneself in a culture one doesn’t understand. The mysteries have a role to play in our lives—a role which, I believe, is ultimately benign.
Today was a perfect day to go downtown. Instead of the usual bright sun and searing heat, we had a heavy marine layer with a light drizzle. The temperature could not have gone over 68º Fahrenheit (20º Celsius).
I started by returning three books at the Central Library and picking up three other books to read in the next month or so:
Argentinian Juan José Saer’s The Regal Lemon Tree
Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Street Kids
Nina Revoyr’s Southland
From the library, I hoofed it to the Grand Central Market, where I had a delicious everything bagel with smoked sturgeon at Wexler’s Deli, which specializes in smoked fish.
Then it was on to the Last Bookstore at 5th and Spring. I picked up nice copies of two Sir Walter Scott novels at a good price: Kenilworth and Woodstock. I’m perhaps the only person I know who has the patience to read one of Sir Walter’s long and dilatory novels. Although he is not much read today, partly because he wrote in a difficult South Scottish dialect, I have always loved reading his novels. So I’ll have to consult the glossary at the rear of both books frequently. No problem there.
With my books in tow, I walked south on Broadway to 7th Street, past the abandoned old movie theaters where I used to watch all-night triple features with my old friend Norm Witty, then cut right on 7th Street to the Metro Rail station at 7th and Flower Street.
It was a good day, and I look forward to reading some good books.
This is a poem about a famous photograph of a Salvadoran refugee and his child found drowned in the Rio Grande while attempting to cross it near Matamoros. Poet Brenda Cárdenas refers to the Mayan goddess Ix Chel in the course of her poem. She bases her work on a drawing by Erik Ricardo de Luna Genel which I have not been able to find. Below is the photograph:
Cien nombres para la muerte: La hilacha/The Loose Thread
Ix Chel, skeleton moon at her loom, wipes her furrowed forehead, daddy longlegs dangling like loose threads from the corners of her eyes dark as ditches. She stitches crossbones into skirts, weaves skulls into blankets she will trade with travelers. “Mantillas, rebozos!” she’ll sing unfurling her wares for parents to wrap around babes she has guided from their mothers’ oceans to Earth.
Under one moon, a Salvadoran father and mother cannot wait any longer in the winding lines of starved asylum seekers ordered to halt. So their daughter, not yet two, wraps her tiny arms around the bough of papi’s neck, clings to his trunk as he wades into the big river, swims strong as salmon, against churning currents.
But when he spills her on the bank, warns her to wait, and lunges back into the torrent for mami, the little one panics, follows. Under one sun, the river carries them away, defying the border it never meant to become.
Ix Chel’s waning crescent finds them first, face down in the mud, wrapped together in the black shroud of papi’s shirt. And from her great jug, holding all the waters of heaven, she spills storms to wash away the lines we’ve carved, dug, drilled, the walls we’ve built in chain link, barbed wire, concrete, and steel between desert and desert, river and river, earth and earth, between father and mother, mother and child under one moon.
Today was another Hungarian festival, this time it was the Tavaszköszöntő at the First Hungarian Reformed Church of Los Angeles. Although I can speak Hungarian (ungrammatically), I have a difficult time understanding the language when all the long agglutinative words are strung together in paragraph lengths.
Still, just letting the language wash over me, while understanding only bits and pieces, sends me back to my roots. As a child born in the Hungarian neighborhood of Buckeye Road in Cleveland, Ohio, I did not even know that English existed as the language of my home and neighborhood was strictly Magyar. Listening to spoken Hungarian makes me feel as if I were being washed by the gentle waves of the Danube as it flows through Budapest.
This is the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon, which resulted in millions of Hungarians being assigned to Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia. One cannot go to a Hungarian gathering without seeing a map of the pre-Trianon borders of Hungary. It has led to a mythology of the lost cause, which is perfectly enshrined in the Himnusz, the Hungarian national anthem. Here is a YouTube video of the Himnusz:
Here are the lyrics in all the stanzas of the Himnusz:
Verse 1 O God, bless the nation of Hungary With your grace and bounty Extend over it your guarding arm During strife with its enemies Long torn by ill fate Bring upon it a time of relief This nation has suffered for all sins Of the past and of the future!
Verse 2 You brought our ancestors up Over the Carpathians’ holy peaks By You was won a beautiful homeland For Bendeguz’s sons And wherever flow the rivers of The Tisza and the Danube Árpád our hero’s descendants Will root and bloom.
Verse 3 For us on the plains of the Kuns You ripened the wheat In the grape fields of Tokaj You dripped sweet nectar Our flag you often planted On the wild Turk’s earthworks And under Mátyás’ grave army whimpered Vienna’s “proud fort.”
Verse 4 Ah, but for our sins Anger gathered in Your bosom And You struck with Your lightning From Your thundering clouds Now the plundering Mongols’ arrows You swarmed over us Then the Turks’ slave yoke We took upon our shoulders.
Verse 5 How often came from the mouths Of Osman’s barbarian nation Over the corpses of our defeated army A victory song! How often did your own son aggress My homeland, upon your breast, And you became because of your own sons Your own sons’ funeral urn!
Verse 6 The fugitive hid, and towards him The sword reached into his cave Looking everywhere he could not find His home in his homeland Climbs the mountain, descends the valley Sadness and despair his companions Sea of blood beneath his feet Ocean of flame above.
Verse 7 Castle stood, now a heap of stones Happiness and joy fluttered, Groans of death, weeping Now sound in their place. And Ah! Freedom does not bloom From the blood of the dead, Torturous slavery’s tears fall From the burning eyes of the orphans!
Verse 8 Pity, O Lord, the Hungarians Who are tossed by waves of danger Extend over it your guarding arm On the sea of its misery Long torn by ill fate Bring upon it a time of relief They who have suffered for all sins Of the past and of the future!
It is a powerful anthem. Hearing it sung at the festival today, I felt like taking my sword and riding to the border to stop the Turkish invader in his tracks. It is such a powerful hymn that it is forbidden to be sung at international sporting events—which just adds to the Hungarian sense of grievance.
Tarnmoor 
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