Times have changed since the reliable old rotary telephone joined the Model T and the locomotive cowcatcher. It used to be that people generally answered the telephone and cooperated with pollsters. Then the world of telephony changed. Nowadays it is not unusual for robocalls selling gonzo vacation packages, suspicious medical insurance, and such to outnumber the calls to which we actually like to respond. Moreover, with Caller ID “Spam Risk” notification, it has become downright difficult for pollsters to get a live respondent.
What happens when one gets through to me? I just say “I don’t respond to polls or surveys” and hang up before the caller can inhale.
Then, too, the multiplication of cell phones has made it chancy to poll a household with no landline and multiple cell phones. I have both a landline and a cell phone. The latter is off most of the time because I was annoyed by receiving numerous robocalls in Mandarin Chinese; so I just use my cell phone to call out when traveling.
There is an interesting PBS website called “The Problem with Polls” that gives you an idea of the problems faced by research organizations.
What surprises me is how polls that wildly contradict one another continue to be news. My assumption is that instead of a one-digit margin of error, it is probably closer to ±25% or more.
Yesterday, Martine and I attended the 30th Magyar Majális és Tavaszi Fesztivál at the Grace Hungarian Reformed Church in Reseda. This is perhaps the fifth or sixth year we have attended, and each time I was powerfully reminded of my Hungarian roots. I, who speak Hungarian most of the time to confound strangers with whom I do not wish to converse, was surrounded by friendly people speaking, for the most part, the Magyar tongue.
And with the continuing decline of European ethnic restaurants in Los Angeles, it is also the best place in Southern California to find good Hungarian home cooking. Martine had her beloved crémes pastry—sort of a sweet Hungarian cheesecake. I had my favorite gulyás leves (Hungarian goulash soup).
I get very sentimental about my Hungarian roots. Maybe because I am surrounded by non-Hungarians. It requires an effort to keep up my mother tongue for the actual purposes of communication. My pronunciation is right on the money, but my vocabulary and grammar are atrocious. That’s because I essentially ceased using Hungarian as my main language at the age of six.
The Program for the Festival
As I continue to age, I expect to see myself reading more Hungarian literature and seeing more Hungarian movies. The Hungarian Reformed church in Reseda is not really my religion, though it was my mother’s. My parents decided that all boys born into the Páris family were to be Catholics, like my Slovak father; and all girls, to be Hungarian Reformed Protestants. As it turned out, I have only one sibling, my brother Dan.
This afternoon the thought suddenly hit me that, in the Los Angeles night, it never really gets dark—or altogether quiet, either. I have experienced total darkness only once, when the lights in the Cave of Balancanche near the ruins of Chichén Itzá in Yucatán were turned off to show the turistas why the Maya thought that caves were portals to Xibalba, the “place of fright,” the underworld.
I used to love camping in the desert during the winter months, finding the nighttime in places like Death Valley, Hovenweep, and Chaco Canyon a magical experience. Seeing the myriad of stars in the sky without interference from city lights is something I recommend to all. When was the last time I saw stars in Los Angeles? How about … never?
In addition to the all-pervasive light pollution, there is constant noise, not only from the heater and refrigerator, plus an all-pervasive high-pitched electronic susurrus, but from the city around us. Whenever a motorcycle or a performance car races down the street, a number of car alarms go off and screaming until the automatic shutoff kicks in.
Also, I live within 2-3 miles of three major hospitals: UCLA Ronald Reagan, UCLA Santa Monica, and Saint John. In an average night, we hear several ambulance sirens carting the sick to local emergency centers.
Despite all this, I somehow manage to clock 8-9 hours a night of fairly solid sleep.
I wish I could say the same for Martine. To avoid nightmares, Martine must take a sleeping pill that gives her only 4-5 hours a night, or even less. At a certain point during what I call the Hour of the Wolf, Martine just lies in bed trying without luck to drop off into slumberland.
One of my favorite poets at last weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was Katie Farris, who read from her works on Saturday, April 20, at the Poetry Stage. Her recently published collection—Standing in the Forest of Being Alive—brought together her experiences with third-stage breast cancer, the global Covid pandemic, and an America at the point of heading for a messy divorce. Here is her explanation of how it all came together:
What drew me to her poems was her debt to Emily Dickinson and William Blake, two of my all-time favorite poets. In fact, there is definitely something of Emily in her work—without the sometimes obscure wording that sends the reader back to the beginning to make sense of the poet “telling it slant.” Below is the first poem from her collection:
Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World
To train myself to find in the midst of hell what isn’t hell.
The body bald cancerous but still beautiful enough to imagine living the body washing the body replacing a loose front porch step the body chewing what it takes to keep a body going—
This scene has a tune a language I can read a door I cannot close I stand within its wedge a shield.
Why write love poetry in a burning world? o train myself in the midst of a burning world to offer poems of love to a burning world.
It is no surprise that the three poets whose readings I most liked at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival Poetry Stage were all women. They represented three different life paths which, while typically feminine, were universal in their humanity.
The first is Maggie Millner, born in upstate New York, an instructor in writing at Yale University. The poem is from her poetry collection entitled Couplets.
1.12
There are many ways, of course, of telling it. But each account obscures
some other version equally true. One is that I lied to everyone I knew.
Another—this one I really do believe— is that for years I loved him more than me.
I can conjure even now our first apartment’s tile: white diamonds in their blue argyle
frieze around the sink, the dirty grout I’d scour with a toothbrush while he was out
at work. I can count four bathmats over eight years, hear the record player catch
every time we stood up from the table. And I can still feel the invisible
moat we both lived in, on the other side of which we knew lay torment, exile, wreckage,
the anarchy of singledom. Loss upon loss. I remember testing it, the moat: throwing across
a rope to check its breadth, twice to the waist wading in before retreating, shamefaced,
reining myself back. To him it was a sea I think entirely impassable. To me
it was a dizzying ravine that circled us for years, then cut between.
After several consecutive wet weekends, this last weekend was ideal for a big get-together. And that’s exactly what happened at the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) where the 2024 edition of the Los Angeles Times Book Festival took place. I do not recall being in such a crowd scene for decades. In fact, it was so crowded that I couldn’t buy more than three books because the booths that interested me the most were jammed with people.
The only reason I could tolerate the crowds is that they were there honoring books and reading, which are sacred to me. Never mind that most of them read nothing but crap. The important thing is that they were coming together to honor an activity that is disappearing from our anti-intellectual culture.
This time I noticed for the first time that so many of the booths related to self-publishing. And, since no one ever heard of these authors, their booths were, for the most part, unvisited. Well, they are part of the publishing world, too, and with luck a handful of them may make it to the big time.
As with last year, I spent most of my time at the Poetry Stage, where there was a different poetry reading every twenty minutes. There, I made the acquaintance of three women poets I will be discussing later this week.
The one that got away, however, was the Salvadorean poet Yesika Salgado, who spoke at the Latinidad Stage in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. She was magnificent. I couldn’t buy her book because the line to buy a copy and have the poet sign it was approximately a hundred persons long; and I was by that time exhausted and ready to return home.
I guess I should have spent more time at the Latinidad Stage. Even though my Spanish is pretty punk, the people in attendance were into their poets in a big way, and Yesika is a real force on the L.A. literary scene, as this YouTube video will show:
What with bookstores becoming rarer than hen’s teeth and the average American seemingly unable to read anything more daunting than the label of a beer can, I am becoming ever more determined to support books and reading. Therefore, I shall be spending the weekend looking at books, buying books, and attending talks by authors as well as poetry readings, My next post will be on Monday, April 22.
The Los Angeles TimesFestival of Books has become a huge event that brings together readers of all stripes. I even forego my usual sneering at readers of bodice-ripper romances: They, too, are readers—like me in one way, unlike in all others.
When I am not scanning book titles, I go for rest to the Poetry Pavilion, where there is a new poet every twenty minutes during the day. The pavilion never fills up like some of the other stages with big name celebrities, but it is (1) more comfortable and (2) more rewarding. Although I don’t read as much poetry as I should, it is always interesting to hear poets reading their own work.
Next week, I will write posts about those poets that interested me the most.
It was a strange experience for me to relive the few hours my brother and I spent Visiting Bombay Beach and Slab City, those strange communities along the eastern edge of the Salton Sea. I keep wondering to myself what it would be like to live there, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I couldn’t survive there.
What if there were an emergency? And, with my lack of a pituitary gland as the result of a long-ago tumor, I do occasionally have emergencies. Would I be able to get my hands on Hydrocortisone HCL or Prednisone in time for me to avoid sinking slowly and lethargically into the boundary between our world and what, if anything, lies after?
And that’s only one thing. What about making the daily trip to Niland to get the necessary 5 gallons (or 19 liters) of water required for drinking, cooking, and washing? What about starting from scratch because some mentally unbalanced or drugged neighbor decides to set my encampment on fire?
I imagine that life in a place like Slab City has its moments, but it also has its anxieties and moments of outright fear. Check out this video about the Slabs from a visitor from abroad:
Ruhi Cenet’s Negative Take on Slab City
Sometimes there is a high price to pay for the type of freedom that Slab City represents. Whether it is “the last free place in America,” as it calls itself, or just one of the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno remains to be seen.
I thought I would have negative feelings about the residents we met in Bombay Beach and Slab City, but I don’t. What I felt was compassion.
Somewhere in Slab City there is a 30-acre (12-hectare) area dedicated to large scale art installations and going under the name of East Jesus. There is no knowing where East Jesus begins and Slab City ends: Boundaries are not a big thing here. There seems to be more of a structure to EJ as it is run by a 501c3 Nonprofit Organization called the Chasterus Foundation.
East Jesus is an experimental, sustainable, habitable art installation started by Charlie Russel in 2006. East Jesus is a sprawling 30 acre museum dedicated to large-scale art. We charge no admission and rely solely upon small donations that fund our mission to preserve, protect, and continue the work of Charlie Russell. Our artist residency program gives up to a dozen low-income artists at time the space, tools, and supplies to create permanent large scale works using reclaimed materials. A member of the California Association of Museums and the only registered art museum in Imperial County, we welcome thousands of guests per week to see the possibilities of a world without waste where every action has the potential for self expression.
In 2014, we formed the Chasterus Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit; in 2016 we purchased our land from the state of California with the intent to keep Charlie’s dream alive and to inspire others to see a life for their waste beyond the landfill.
Together, the inhabitants of East Jesus and offsite members provide a refuge for artists, musicians, survivalists, writers, scientists, laymen and other wandering geniuses.
We are dedicated to providing a working model of an improbable improvised community at the edge of the world. We are most interested in low-tech solutions, unresolved theories, non-linear advancement, and creative reuse.
We strive to document the results of these endeavors, sometimes simply by their existence. Our documents are sometimes nails, concrete, and sweat. We are partially an exhibition space for those problematic projects taking up your warehouse space, partially a build space for those problematic projects taking up the desert.
One of our guiding philosophies is “do as thou wilt”; another is “do no harm”.
What intrigued me about the organization’s website was a page called “East Jesus Survival Guide” in which we find the following tidbits:
By visiting East Jesus, you do so AT YOUR OWN RISK and assume all liability for any property damage, injury, illness, or death that occurs. By setting foot here, you and your heirs release all claims into perpetuity.
-0.5) WITH AN EVER-INCREASING NUMBER OF VISITORS, the expense of keeping shop is growing. If you ask to come camp out for a night or two, we ask that you please give us a CASH donation (or paypal, or venmo.) This helps pay for the peat moss, water, food, and helps defray the cost of all the little things you probably take for granted, like wireless internet, One Jillion Megawatts of power in the middle of fucking nowhere, and that spoon of mine you forgot to return that one time. Buying a t-shirt is so last year, but there are still a few I need to unload. $20 each. But don’t forget to stick some cash in the donation box or help out while you’re here. We are watching. Bringing a warm beer or some piece of rusty iron covered with dog shit you found in the desert and thought was “cool” does not exempt you from this.
0) RULE ZERO IS: DO NOT PISS US OFF. Any questions? Refer to Rule Zero.
0.5) PACK IT IN, PACK IT OUT / LEAVE NO TRACE. Be prepared to take everything you brought back out with you. The surrounding area, where you may be camping, is pretty trashy, but this does not magically give you permission to leave more trash. In fact, I expect you to leave your campground a tad neater and cleaner than you found it. Don’t leave plastic bottles and tampons in the fire pits, kids. Hell, do you live in a county with comprehensive recycling? Consider taking some souvenir trash home with you!
I don’t think I would survive long in East Jesus. If it isn’t the desert heat, it is having to rub shoulders with people who are at the frayed edge of acceptability.
Right in the middle of Slab City is a gaudy hillside painted in neon colors with all the Christian mottos you can think of. It is primarily the work of Leonard Knight (1931-2014). After his demise, however, volunteers have stepped in to maintain the giant art installation—and they’ve done a good job of it. Former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer once paid tribute to it as “a unique and visionary sculpture… a national treasure… profoundly strange and beautifully accessible, and worthy of the international acclaim it receives.”
Although my brother and I are about as far from Evangelical Christianity as it is possible to be, we were both awed by the mountain’s primitive beauty and evident sincerity.
The Star Attraction of Slab City
It’s worth a trip to Slab City if for no other reason than to look around Salvation Mountain. There’s no admission charge or any pressure to donate, but it’s worth contributing to the upkeep of such a fascinating work. As the Folk Art Society of America stated, it is “a folk art site worthy of preservation and protection.”
If you’re interested in reading more about the place, you can check out the Salvation Mountain website.
Tarnmoor 
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