On the Mean Streets of DTLA

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The Dash B Bus to Chinatown

The Dash B Bus to Chinatown

Today, as usual, I took the Expo Line train to downtown L.A. (or DTLA), as it is being called colloquially. It was a strange ride: During the last half hour of the trip, a black passenger was loudly swearing at and berating the woman he was with, and cursing at everything and everyone else along the way. The other passengers just became ever more absorbed in their reading or their smart phones. They did not want to draw any irate loony-bird attention to themselves.

When we pulled into the 7th Street Metro terminal, I made a beeline for the Central Library. I returned all the books I had checked out and took the elevator to the third floor Literature and Fiction section, where I spent a couple hours reading James Ellroy’s Blood on the Moon, the first volume of an early trilogy featuring Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins of LAPD Homicide.

Just before 12:30, I made my way to Conference Room A for my weekly Mindful Meditation class, taught by Giselle Jones of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. I have become dependent on these weekly sessions to help keep my feet on the ground. Also, they give me a feeling of tranquillity which lasts for hours.

After the session, I grabbed the Dash B bus to 1st Street, where I was planning to transfer to the Dash A bus to Little Tokyo. Opposite me on the sideways bench seating was a slim young barefoot black woman who was stunningly beautiful. She seemed to be looking straight at me and talking, but I never could understand what she was trying to say; and she got off after a couple of stops.

In Little Tokyo, I made my way to Weller Court, where there were a number of Japanese restaurants. I had a bowl of spicy chashu ramen at the Hot Pot Galaxy and walked over to the Kinokuniya Bookstore, where I bought a book by the Dalai Lama.

From Little Tokyo, I made my way to the Santa Monica Rapid 10 bus stop opposite Union Station and waited the usual maximum time for the next bus to appear. I was dropped off at Bundy and Idaho, from where I walked back to my apartment.

 

 

Advancing the Schmilblick

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Some Untranslatable French Expressions

Some Untranslatable French Expressions

I think we tend to seriously underestimate the French. (Oh, drat, I split another infinitive!) Here are a few expressions that you might find interesting.

Faire avancer le Schmilblick

That strange word means nothing more or less than “thing.” When having a conversation, comments not deemed to be helpful are described as not advancing the Schmilblick along. If you speak excellent French, here is a YouTube video describing the origin of the term.

C’est le petit Jésus en culotte de velours

You’ve just had an incredibly smooth wine. It was, in other words, “as smooth as Baby Jesus in velvet knickerbockers.” (You can’t say that about an American beer.)

Avoir le cul bordé de nouilles

You are incredibly lucky—such that your ass is surrounded by noodles.

Il pète plus haut que son cul (ou tête)

There are two variants to this one, both describing someone who is incredibly pretentious. The way Martine and her mother described it, “He tries to fart higher than his own head.” Others say  “higher than his own ass.” Perhaps Martine’s version is the way they say it in Normandy.

Serendipity: The Winds of Change

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The Book Is the Same, Only the Reader Has Changed

The Book Is the Same, Only the Reader Has Changed

The thing about re-reading books you first encountered decades ago is to feel the winds of change in your life. When I first read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, I was a high school student looking forward to leaving Cleveland to go to college. The book was a revelation to me, and re-reading it at this late stage in my life shows me sitting on the porch of our house at 3989 East 176th Street, turning the pages and marveling at a book written for kids like me. It’s a good feeling: I accept that 16-year-old kid. He was all right.

Following is a quote that pretty much describes my feeling at re-reading The Catcher in the Rye:

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. You’d have an overcoat on this time. Or that kid that was your partner in line last time had got scarlet fever and you’d have a new partner. Or you’d have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you’d heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way – I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d feel like it.

Well, unlike Holden, I am in fact much older; but that’s okay. Better, in fact, than the alternative.

 

Costa, Sierra y Selva II

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Physical Map of Ecuador

Physical Map of Ecuador

This is a kind of continuation of a blog I wrote a couple of years ago about Peru. In so many ways, Ecuador is a continuation of Peru—in terms of physical geography. Even a cursory glance at the above map shows that there are three distinctive zones vertically dividing the country:

  • Costa. This is the Pacific coast. While in Peru, much of the coast is a rainless desert, much of the Ecuadorian equivalent is a mangrove forest (I suspect perhaps mangrove swamp is a more appropriate term.). Guayaquil, the country’s largest city, is on the coast.
  • Sierra. The brown and purple zone occupying the center are the mountains and volcanoes of the Andes. This is where my brother and I will travel. The altitude ranges from 8,000 to 15,000 feet. The capital, Quito, is in this zone.
  • Selva. The pale green zone to the right of the Andes consists of jungle and a number of tributaries feeding the Amazon. Thanks the the mosquito population and the prevalence of Zika, I have no intention of seeing the Oriente region, as it is frequently called.

When I was in Peru, I spent a good part of the trip along or near the coast—especially since I fell in love with the raffish charms of Lima and the beauty of Arequipa and its volcanoes.

 

Ideo-Bursts and Promisoids

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The Whole Medium Is IMHO Suspect

The Whole Medium Is IMHO Suspect

About a year ago, I signed up for Twitter. But then, when I found out I was supposed to “follow” three existing Twitter accounts, I suddenly lost interest, so I never finished my application. About once a week, Twitter e-mails me to finalize my application … but I never will.

Why? A certain Prezidenchul candidate has adopted Twitter as his preferred method of communicating with the world, and I suddenly saw what was wrong with the whole setup. Standing at the microphone (broken or not), Donald Trump thinks in limited bursts of thought that are compatible with the character limit on tweets. He jumps from one tweet-length position to another. This effectively prevents him for discussing such nasty things as details that may substantiate his short ideo-bursts.

On the other hand, these same tweets endear him to his fans, who are not into such mundane things as facts. They are, if anything, practitioners of identity politics: Trump re-connects with his base, and since they identify with him, that connection is all that counts.

When you go into details, you could wind up betraying your base. So, the idea is to just skip around, making short promisoids without pinning himself down on any one of them. Promisoids good, facts bad!

So I think I will never complete my Twitter application process. And here, in considerably more than 140 characters, is why.

 

Playhouse 90

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Rod Serling with Playhouse 90 Logo

Rod Serling with Playhouse 90 Logo

Almost sixty years ago to the day—on October 4, 1956—CBS presented its first Playhouse 90. It was called “Forbidden Area,” written by Rod Serling, directed by John Frankenheimer, and starring the likes of Charlton Heston, Tab Hunter, Diana Lynn, Vincent Price, Victor Jory, and Charles Bickford.

As he did later with Twilight Zone, Serling takes us to the heart of the Cold War and a projected Christmas Eve nuclear attack by the Soviet Union on major cities across the United States. Charlton Heston is trying to discover why eight B-99s of the Strategic Air Command suddenly disappeared without a trace from radar screens.

Playhouse 90 was live television: There were no rehearsals. While American viewers were watching, the actors were acting. As difficult as it was, this was the Golden Age of Television. Now there are hundreds more channels, dozens of content providers, and tens of millions more viewers, what they are watching is nowhere near as good as during those heady days of the 1950s and the early 1960s.

I love television as it used to be. As it is today, I would rather leave the remote to Martine and go read a good book.

Tonight, the UCLA Film & Television Archive put on a double bill of Playhouse 90 episodes written by Serling. It was introduced by Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, who gave an excellent speech about why those days were the artistic pinnacle of television as an art medium.

Borges, Milton, and the Rose

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“A Rose and Milton”

“A Rose and Milton”

What do these writers have in common: Homer, John Fante, Benito Pérez Galdós, John Milton, and Jose Luis Borges? For at least part of their lives, all were blind. So when Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges honors Milton, it is by way of acknowledging a common fate. The name of this poem is “A Rose and Milton”:

A Rose and Milton

From the generations of roses
That are lost in the depths of time
I want one saved from oblivion,
One spotless rose, of all things
That ever were. Fate permits me
The gift of choosing for once
That silent flower, the last rose
That Milton held before him,
Unseen. O vermilion, or yellow
Or white rose of a ruined garden,
Your past still magically remains
Forever shines in these verses,
Gold, blood, ivory or shadow
As if in his hands, invisible rose.

Of course, Milton could not see the color of that last rose he beheld. He could not see whether that last rose was spotless and perfect. Whatever that rose was, it was unperceived by the great poet who held it in his hands; it might as well have been invisible, or, just as well, resplendent in its glory.

The poet talks about being allowed by Fate to handle that last rose that Milton held. I could just see the ironic smile playing on Borges’s face. Very Zen, in effect.

Meanwhile, Back in the Ukraine

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Battle on January 10, 2014 at Kiev’s “Euromaidan”

Battle on January 10, 2014 at Kiev’s “Euromaidan”

The one Ukrainian author I have read is Andrey Kurkov, a Russian who lives in Kiev and considers himself Ukrainian. He is best known for three mystery novels, the first two of which feature a penguin named Mischa: Death and the Penguin, Penguin Lost, and The Case of the General’s Thumb.

During the 2013-2014 revolution that sent President Viktor Yanukovych to Russia requesting asylum from Putin, Kurkov kept a diary of daily events in Kiev, the Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine. It was published in 2014 as Ukrainian Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev. His mystery novels have a wry sense of humor which also carries over to this diary:

Posters and signs have been put up all over the country with images showing that all Ukrainians, after the signature of the Association Agreement with the EU, will become homosexuals. Even in the metro, each time you take an escalator, you have to pass dozens of these posters. In Kiev, he propaganda campaign is considered laughable, but I am afraid that in the east and in the provinces, people will naively believe that universal conversion to homosexuality is the condition imposed by Europe on Ukraine for the signature of the treaty. (November 28, 2013)

And: “Yesterday, Parliament announced an open forum day. Everyone was given the chance to speak. Or, in other words, no one listened.” (February 5, 2014)

Ukrainian Author Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov

Ukrainian Author Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov

Since it declared its independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukraine has had a succession of governments that could only be described as a combination of thuggery and rapine—in fact, pretty much the sort of governing we could expect from a Donald J. Trump. You can see in Kurkov’s penguin mysteries the dysfunctionality of Ukrainian politics at work. Now, in the diaries, we see Kurkov losing sleep whether he would be dragged out of his flat by security forces, tortured, and killed.

Fortunately for us, he wasn’t. I look forward for his other works to be translated from Russian to English.

 

Getting Ready for Halloween

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On Reading Ghost Stories

On Reading Ghost Stories

For several years now, I have been reading collections of horror stories published by Dover Publications. Apparently, there are so many of them, that I haven’t come anywhere near reading all of them. Here is a partial list of titles in this series:

  • Algernon Blackwood: Best Ghost Stories
  • J. Sheridan LeFanu: Best Ghost Stories
  • Bram Stoker: Best Ghost and Horror Stories
  • Arthur Conan Doyle: Best Supernatural Tales
  • Robert Louis Stevenson: The Body Snatcher and Other Tales
  • Hugh Lamb (ed.): A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror
  • Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto
  • Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol
  • John Grafton (ed.): Classic Ghost Stories (I just finished this one tonight)
  • Algernon Blackwood: The Complete John Silence Stories
  • Bram Stoker: Dracula
  • E. F. Bleiler (ed.): Five Victorian Ghost Novels
  • Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (In four editions!)
  • Hugh Lamb (ed.): Gaslit Horror and Gaslit Nightmares
  • J. Sheridan LeFanu: Ghost Stories and Mysteries
  • M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
  • Ambrose Bierce: Ghost and Horror Stories
  • James Reynolds: Ghosts in Irish Houses

And this only takes us through the letter “G” in the alphabetical list of ghost titles. I have read almost all of these, and I have yet to find a bad collection (though some individual short stories may not be up to the general level).

I strongly recommend that you check out the excellent website of Dover Publications. The books are relatively inexpensive to begin with, but once they have our e-mail address, you will receive many attractive offers.

Then you, too, can shudder and shake your way through the dread month of October.

 

Dark Light Verse

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Another Discovery of Great Material from the Futility Closet

Another Discovery of Great Material from the Futility Closet

I am always amazed by what I find on the Futility Closet website. The following are light verses with a somber subject by Jocelyn Henry Clive “Harry” Graham (1874-1936)—journalist, military hero, lyricist for light operas, and humorous verses employing the darkest of humor. Here are a few selections  taken from Futility Closet’s posting of June 9, 2011:

Tender-Heartedness

Little Willie, in the best of sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burned to ashes.
By and by the room grew chilly,
But no one liked to poke up Willie.

Aunt Eliza

In the drinking-well
(Which the plumber built her)
Aunt Eliza fell–
We must buy a filter.

Waste

I had written to Aunt Maud,
Who was on a trip abroad,
When I heard she’d died of cramp
Just too late to save the stamp.

Compensation

Weep not for little Léonie,
Abducted by a French Marquis!
Though loss of honour was a wrench,
Just think how it’s improved her French.

Mr. Jones

“There’s been an accident,” they said,
“Your servant’s cut in half; he’s dead!”
“Indeed!” said Mr. Jones, “and please
Send me the half that’s got my keys.”

He wrote in one preface:

Fond parent, you whose children are
Of tender age (from two to eight),
Pray keep this little volume far
From reach of such, and relegate
My verses to an upper shelf,–
Where you may study them yourself.