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Hatlo’s Inferno

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My Favorite Comic Strip When I Was a Kid

While I was researching the subject of yesterday’s post, I came across one of Jimmy Hatlo’s “They’ll Do It Every Time” comic strips. At home, we subscribed to the Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer, where it appeared regularly in the color funnies section.

The general idea of the strip was memorializing the cartoonist’s pet peeves, which were legion. I particularly remembered the “Hatlo’s Inferno” strips, in which various doofuses one encounters in everyday life received the punishment that they deserved—for all eternity. The cartoon panel above shows a typical Inferno setting in the upper left.

According to journalist Bob Greene, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

Hatlo’s genius was to realize, before there was any such thing as an Internet or Facebook or Twitter, that people in every corner of the country were brimming with seemingly small observations about mundane yet captivating matters, yet lacked a way to tell anyone outside their own circles of friends about it. Hatlo also understood that just about everyone, on some slightly-below-the-surface level, yearned to be celebrated from coast to coast, if only for a day.

As a youngster, I loved cartoon strips like “Pogo,” “Dick Tracy,” “Li’l Abner,” and “Steve Canyon.” Looking back, they were infinitely more satisfying than what passes for comic strips today. Of course, there’s always “Peanuts.”

From Borges to 12th Century Persia

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It all started over half a century ago when I discovered the books of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. At two places within his Other Inquisitions: 1937-52, I saw intriguing references to a medieval Persian work, Farid-Ud-Din Attar. In “Note on Walt Whitman,” he wrote: “Attar, a twelfth-century Persian, sings of the arduous pilgrimage of the birds in search of their king, the Simurg; many of them perish in the seas, but the survivors discover that they are the Simurg and that the Simurg is each one of them and all of them.”

In the same volume, in the essay entitled “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” Borges writes:

From the study of Spanish [FitzGerald] he has progressed to the study of Persian; he has begun a translation of the Mantiq-al-Tayr, that mystical epic about the birds who are looking for their king, the Simurg. They finally reach his palace, situated in back of seven seas, only to discover that they are the Simurg and that the Simurg is all of them and each one of them.

I was fascinated by this brief summary, which lay fallow, but unforgotten, in my memory for more than five long decades.

Quite unexpectedly, when I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California campus on Saturday, by chance I listened to a reading by a local Persian poet, Sholeh Wolpé, who had translated Attar’s Mantiq-al-Tayr into English as The Conference of the Birds, as well as another work of Attar’s called The Invisible Sun. I was ecstatic that I could not only buy both works but have them signed by the translator.

Jorge Luis Borges has been, for me, a gateway to world literature. Through him I discovered G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Chuang-tze, Thomas De Quincey, the Icelandic sagas, W. H. Hudson, Blaise Pascal, and Emanuel Swedenborg. I quickly found that any name mentioned by Borges was worth following up on. Farid-Ud-Din Attar is one of them: I am currently reading Sholeh Wolpé’s translation of The Conference of the Birds with great pleasure. (You will see it mentioned in some future blog posts I am contemplating.)

And I am by no means finished with Borges. There are still some avenues which I hope I can follow, if I had but world enough and time.

Austerlitz at the Bibliothèque Nationale

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The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris

One of the treasures in my recent reading is W G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, in which the haunted main character, Jacques Austerlitz, attempts to track down his parents who were lost to him in the War. At one point, he visits the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Alas, he remains “oppressed by the vague sense that he did not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world.” I was on the top floor of Los Angeles’s Central Library when, fittingly, I read this beautiful passage.

As for himself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. … Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading room to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn.

Shades of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Library of Babel”!

A Half Century of Proust

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French Novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

There are a handful of writers who have been a major influence in my life. They include William Shakespeare, Jorge Luis Borges, Honoré de Balzac, and G. K. Chesterton. Also Marcel Proust, whose seven-volume In Search of Lost Time I am reading for the third time. God grant that I may have a fourth go at Proust’s masterpiece.

I have always felt that one of the things that makes fiction great is that the main characters are able to change within the course of the work. For example, in Hamlet, we see the Danish prince resolve to revenge his father’s death. This is followed by Hamlet waffling and even leaving the country. When he returns, he fights a duel that becomes a massacre as summarized by the song “That’s Entertainment!” from the 1953 MGM musical The Bandwagon:

Some great Shakespearean scene
Where a ghost and a prince meet
And everyone ends in mincemeat.

In Search of Lost Time is about a boy named Marcel (last name not given) who fantasizes endlessly about young women, most particularly about Oriane, Duchesse de Guermantes, whose family were originally based in the village of Combray, where Marcel spends his first years. Over seven volumes, we see Marcel pursue first Gilberte, then Albertine, then Mlle de Stermaria, and even the Duchesse de Guermantes.

In The Guermantes Way, the third novel in the series, Proust ponders the strange disconnect between desire and reality:

Thus did the blank spaces of my memory gradually fill with names that, as they arranged and composed themselves in relation to one another, and as the connections between them became more and more numerous, resembled those perfected works of art in which there is not a single brush stroke that does not contribute to the whole, and in which every element in turn receives from the rest a justification it confers on them in turn.

I never said that Proust is an easy read, In fact, his work is among the most difficult ever written. That does not deter me from reading and re-reading his work. It’s no picnic, but the rewards are great. For me, the rewards have been coming over the decades since 1976, when I first started reading him.

The Book Lover

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Part of My Library

I have always loved books. Perhaps, even, I have loved them too much. My two-bedroom apartment in West Los Angeles contains some six thousand books. Every room in my apartment has at least two bookcases, Although I am not now in a position to buy books the way I used to, I can’t get rid of them as fast as I bought them once upon a time.

Every walk I took ended in a bookstore, and rarely did I step back outside without buying at least one book. I am sure that, if I were not a book collector, I would have been able to buy a house. But then, I never really wanted to buy a house. I would be a terrible homeowner. I had doing yard work. I can’t fix anything. And I can’t imagine living the lifestyle of most homeowners. I am sure my neighbors would have ended up hating me.

On the other hand, books have saved my life. I was a sickly kid walking around for ten years with a pituitary tumor and severe frontal headaches. I was short for my age, pale, and absolutely zero when it came to sports. To compensate for my many deficits, I turned to books. In Cleveland, I took the 56A bus every week to the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library, stopping in on the way at Schroeder’s bookstore on Public Square, where I spent untold hours scanning the covers of the books on display.

My relatives didn’t think much of my being a bookworm. To my parents, books were innately messy unless they were all put away out of sight. Once, when my cousin Emil spotted me reading Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, he grabbed the volume from my hands and threw it on the floor. “That’s what I think of books!” he shouted.

But then I was the first in my family ever to graduate from college. And it was a prestigious Ivy League college to boot. And once I got a computer job in 1968, I was never unemployed for more than three months until the accounting firm where I was working in 2017 closed its doors.

No, in the end, I think I made all the right choices given the cards I was dealt. And I am happier for it.

Wildly Inconsistent

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If there is such a thing as “The Great American Novel,” I would identify it as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). There are numerous other candidates, but Melville’s is the only one I bothered to read three times. And I am still interested in reading it again (and again).

One would think that if the man wrote the greatest American novel his other works would be right up there in terms of their literary quality. Yet the man who wrote Moby-Dick also gave us such clinkers as Mardi; and a Voyage Thither (1849) with its vapid philosophizing and The Confidence-Man (1857) with its bland conning of the reader.

Mind you, Melville wrote some other real gems, among which I include his novelettes “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), “The Encantadas” (1854), “Benito Cereno” (1855), and “Billy Budd, Sailor” (published posthumously).

I am by no means finished reading Melville. I hope to tackle Pierre, or the Ambiguities; Redburn, His First Voyage; and Israel Potter. I may also dip into his long poem “Clarel,” but have no high hopes.

Attack of the Januarius Monsters

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Lobby Card for Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters

On January 2 of this year, I posted a blog entitled Januarius 2026 in which I stated my intention of reading only books written by authors new to me. At that point, I mentioned a number of authors I was planning to attempt. It is my sad task to tell you that I read only two of the books I mentioned: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel.

In all, I read twelve books in January. In addition to the two mentioned above, the list included, in order:

  • Peter Cheyney’s This Man Is Dangerous, introducing the character of Lemmy Caution, which was taken up by Jean-Luc Godard in his film Alphaville
  • Ludvík Vaculík’s Cup of Coffee with My Interrogator, A: The Prague Chronicles of Ludvík Vakulík, a Czech novelette about the last days of Communism in Prague
  • Miklós Vamos’s The Book of Fathers, a fat novel about twelve generations of Magyars surviving (or not surviving) two centuries of Hungarian history
  • Stuart Stevens’s Night Train to Turkistan: Modern Adventures Along China’s Ancient Silk Road, definitely a “Worst Journey” to Western China and the Uighurs
  • Marivaux’s Infidelities, an 18th century French play about true love
  • Patrick Marnham’s So Far from God: A Journey to Central America, including Mexico, another “Worst Journey”
  • Chris Nashawaty’s Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy-Stripe Nurses, an entertaining book about the film career of producer/director Roger Corman
  • Edward John Trelawney’s Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author by the man who was on hand for the last days of the two great English Romantic poets
  • Yuri Andrukhovych’s The Moscoviad, a humorous 1990s look at life in Moscow by a Ukrainian who didn’t think too much of Russians
  • George Woodcock’s Incas and Other Men: Travels in the Andes about a trip to Peru in 1956 by a Canadian professor and his wife

Three of the books were from Eastern Europe satellite countries, and they were of a higher literary standard than most of my other selections. The only other book I liked a lot was Trelawney’s Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, which made me resolve to read more poems by Shelley and Byron this year. I also liked the book about Roger Corman’s films: I’ve often thought that Corman was underrated.

So much for this year’s tidal wave of terror.

Januarius 2026

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Me in My Library in 2004

As in previous years, I have decided during this month of January 2026 to read books only by authors I have not previously read. Yesterday, I started with a bang with Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Underground Railroad.

I have code-named this annual project Januarius. If you look at the early January entries on my blog site, you will find numerous references to Januarius. I like the name because it suggests the Roman god Janus as well as the month of January.

Next on my list is a book edited by Keath Fraser entitled Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel. It contains selections from fifty-five authors on the subject of bad trips, including bad flights, bad roads, war, and other events that can wreck the best-planned journey. My intention is to discover new authors of travel books, travel being one of my favorite book categories. I hope to incorporate at least a couple of my finds in books I read later this month.

Tentatively planned are reads from Pierre de Marivaux, Apuleius, Ariel Dorfman, Péter Nádas, Louisa May Alcott, an obscure biography of the Emperor Tiberius (I forget the name of the author), and Valeria Luiselli. Typically, I finish between twelve and sixteen books in one month. (The joys of being retired.)

At the end of the month, I will post a list of the “new” authors I have read and their books. Stay tuned to this spot for the latest developments.

Quai des Orfèvres

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The Quai des Orfèvres, Former HQ of the French Police Judiciaire

Right across the way from the cathedral of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité is the Quai des Orfèvres, former headquarters of the French Police Judiciaire and office of Inspector Jules Maigret, Georges Simenon’s hero in some seventy-five mystery novels.

What better way to end 2025, I thought to myself, than to read a Maigret novel I had never read before. Since I have read most of them by now, that was not an easy decision to make. Fortunately, I dug deep in one of my book piles and came up with Maigret and the Apparition (aka Maigret and the Ghost), published in 1964 as Maigret et le fantôme.

The book starts with the shooting of a detective inspector from the 18th Arrondissement who was a friend of Maigret’s. At first, nothing seems to make sense; and there are no Sherlockian clues that give the crime away. Simenon’s Maigret novels are not tales of ratiocination à la Edgar Allan Poe. This is not the Anglo-Saxon world of crime: What Maigret adheres to is a Gallic combination of thoroughness and intuition. The solution eventually emerges only when he has looked hard at every detail in the case.

Famously, Maigret does not come up with any theories as he follows through on the investigation. The active principle here is not ratiocination, but se débruillier, to, in effect, “defog” the mass of evidence and suspects. As Google’s artificial intelligence summary has it:

Débrouiller (reflexive: se débrouiller) is a versatile French verb meaning to manage, cope, get by, sort out, or figure things out, especially when facing challenges, implying resourcefulness to overcome obstacles and find solutions, like “I can manage” (Je me débrouille) or “to sort out a situation” (débrouiller une situation). 

Apparently, it worked for Simenon, whose works continue to enthrall after many decades..

The Man Who Invented Christmas

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Scrooge and the Ghost of Marley

It is actually hard to imagine what Christmas would be like today in England and the United States if Charles Dickens had never written A Christmas Carol. There have been countless film versions of the story; and, today, virtually everyone over the age of twelve knows the story.

In this age of Trump, there have even been stories justifying Ebenezer Scrooge’s meanness as being somehow praiseworthy. Go figure!

The message of benevolence toward the poor and general loving kindness is something new in literature. While being guided by the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge sees two gaunt children clinging to him:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye!
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

This little scene casts a long shadow into our own time.

I have read Dickens’s novella perhaps a dozen times, always around Christmas time. The last reading was completed not an hour ago.