Today, for the first time in six weeks, I took the MetroRail E Train downtown to attend the Mindful Meditation session at the Central Library. The reason for my absence? In early June, I broke my collarbone; and it is only now that I feel well enough to attend.
And the weather for my first day back was a lulu. It was 90º Fahrenheit (32º Celsius), with the humidity making it feel even more sweltering. As I have no pituitary gland to control my adrenaline, I took extra hydrocortisone at breakfast and lunch and drank plenty of liquids, including a bill bowl of Vietnamese phó with filet mignon and noodles for lunch.
Usually, I check out three or four books from the library. Today, I didn’t check any books out, not wanting to carry a book bag with my recuperating right arm Instead, I looked at several travel guides to Cambodia and Laos before the guided meditation session began. (I’ve been reading a lot about neighboring Thailand lately.)
After I ate at the 505 Spring Street food court (in air-conditioned comfort), I trudged the three blocks south to the 7th Street Metro Center station at 7th and Flower Streets. As the elevator was out of service (again), I laboriously took the stairs down to the tracks and waited two minutes for the train to Santa Monica.
All in all, it was a positive experience. This first time back, I wanted to err on the side of caution; and I’m glad I did.
He wrote hundreds of novels during the fifty years while he was active. There were 75 novels featuring Inspector Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, plus 28 short stories. According to Wikipedia, he also wrote some 117 romans durs, literally “hard novels,” usually grittier than his Maigret works.
I have just finished reading Le destin des Malou (The Fate of the Malous, 1948) about the young heir of a bankrupt developer who must make his way in the world after realizing that most of his family are completely unsympathetic. In the end, his hero Alain reminds me of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac from Père Goriot as he resolves to conquer Paris as he stands on the heights of Père Lachaise cemetery overlooking the city. It is nothing short of a masterpiece.
I’ve read approximately half of Simenon’s work—at least half of what he published in his own name. I couldn’t find a bibliography of what he published under various pseudonyms. Although much of his work could be classified as genre fiction, I am beginning to think that perhaps, in our time, the best fiction falls into that category.
In a letter to the author, André Gide compared his roman durLa veuve Couderc (Ticket of Leave, 1942) to The Stranger by Albert Camus, “In my opinion, your book goes much further, and without seeming to—which is the height of Art.” Maybe that’s why Simenon is sadly underrated as an author of mysteries and police procedurals. I like that expression “goes much further, and without seeming to.”
That’s why I am now considering Georges Simenon the equal of other great 20th Century authors. I love reading his works, sometimes even multiple times. I’ve been reading his work for half a century now, and I am deeply grateful that he was so prolific.
On the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to return to reading books on American history. The fact that I refrained for so long was due to my contempt for Donald Trump and the voters who elected him to office in 2024.
Consequently I am halfway through a biography of Andrew Jackson (Jon Meacham’s American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House). Recently, I thought of “Old Hickory” as a precursor of the Trump madness. Now I begin to think that, although Jackson was highly conflicted, a slaveholder, and responsible for gross injustices toward the American Indian population of the Southern states, he was by and large an honorable man of his time and place.
For one thing, he was an excellent general, responsible for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the English during the Battle of New Orleans. He served two terms as President of the United States, and did not attempt to loot the country for his personal benefit.
He was probably one of the unhappiest of our nation’s leaders. His beloved wife Rachel died before he was sworn in as president. He had a close relationship with his Andrew and Emily Donelson, who served as his personal assistants. But then a vicious petticoat war between the Donelsons and the wife of his Secretary of War, who was a personal friend, poisoned much of his first term.
Somehow he maintained his popularity among the voters. That was because he firmly believed in following the will of the majority, even if meant stepping on the toes of men like John C. Calhoun, his vice president, or Henry Clay—both of whom craved the presidency for themselves.
I am only halfway through the biography, but have decided to continue reading one or two American histories or biographies a month for the foreseeable future. Since I am rapidly on the road to recovery after my broken shoulder, I shall look for a copy of Bernard DeVoto’s 1846: The Year of Decision for my next read in this series.
Although I live two miles from Santa Monica Beach, I don’t go there to read: It’s too hard to concentrate when sand is getting into your shorts. But since today is the first day of summer, I thought I would give you some idea of what I tend to read during the hot months of the year.
For the most part, my summer reading tends to be on the light side. On the other hand, that’s also when I tend to tackle William Faulkner and other difficult 20th century writers.
Below are six categories with samples of my summer reading during the last three years (1923-1925).
India
I just recvently finished Heinrich Zimmer’s Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Some other titles include Somadeva’s Tales from the Kathāsaritsāgara and Anita Desai’s Diamond Dust and Other Stories. I’ve always thought Desai’s fiction was underrated.
Latin America
These include Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (Mexico) and Cesar Aira’s Fulgentius (Argentina). See also under Mystery,
Mystery
I enjoyed the Brazilian writer Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s Pursuit and Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason’s The Darkness Knows. Indriðason is one of my favorite mystery writers, and I’ve read everything of his that’s been translated into English.
Noir
Summer is a great time to read books by writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. Recently, I read Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black and Waltz Into Darkness and John Fante’s Dreams from Bunker Hill.
Sci-Fi
Recent reads were William Gibson’s The Peripheral and the Russian Sergei Lukyanenko’s Twilight Watch.
Travel Classics
This is one of my favorite summer categories, including such titles as Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta; Allen Ginsberg’s South American Journals January-July 1960; and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010.
The Goddess Slaying the Monster Buffalo (Māmallapuram)
I have just finished reading Heinrich Zimmer’s Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (Washington DC: Bollingen Foundation, 1946), edited by Joseph Campbell and with contributions from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. It was fairly heavy going for most of its length. Curiously, the most interesting chapters were the first (The Parable of the Ants) and the last (a Hassidic tale). Even if the rest of the book proves way too erudite for you, and if you just aren’t geared up to read Sanskrit, I suggest you check out these two chapters.
Hinduism with its armies of gods, demons, demigods, semigods, and hemigods has always fascinated me, though I always found myself slogging through too much detail. Tales from the Indian scriptures always fascinated me, but I could rarely remember what I read a mere few hours later.
Nonetheless, I will try to read more of this material, including, perhaps, an abridged edition of India’s great epic, TheMahābhārata, which consists of some 200,000 couplets. Wish me luck!
Argentinian Poet and Writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
I am certain that French literary scholars are raising their hackles because of my interpretation of the term explication de texte. The type of close reading that the term implies includes style and is rarely used with literature that is translated from another language.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote in Spanish, but I have been reading his work in English translation for over half a century. I thought it would be fun to take a paragraph from one of Borges’s stories and, by my own idea of a close reading, give you an idea why the Argentinian is one of my favorite writers.
The story I have chosen is “Three Versions of Judas” as printed in Andrew Kerrigan’s translation of the American edition of Ficciones. Here is the story’s opening paragraph:
In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulchre; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Dem hemlige Fraharen appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version, called Der hemliche Heiland, executed in 1912 by Emil Schering.)
Whew! The following notes rely heavily on Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes’s A Dictionary of Borges [ADOB] (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd, 1990) and my searches on the Internet.
Basilides: “An early Gnostic from Alexandria who integrated Pythagorean and Cabbalistic traditions with the Christian faith.” ADOB
Nils Runeberg: Fictional character.
conventicles: secret or unauthorized religious assemblies.
fiery sepulchre: Refers to the sixth circle of Dante’s Inferno, where heretics were punished by eternal flames.
heresiarchs: Borges loves this word and uses it frequently. It refers to the originators of heretical beliefs.
Satornibus:Could refer to Saturninus of Antioch, “who held that the angels, archangels, powers and dominations were created by the Supreme Unknown, the Father, but that the world and everything in it, including man, was created by seven of the lowest angels.” ADOB
Carpocrates: “A second-century Neoplatonist from Alexandria, the founder of a heretical sect which believed in the dualism of good and evil, denied the divinity of Christ and held that the soul is imprisoned in the body from which it strives to be free.” ADOB
Liber adversus omnes haereses: Translated as A Book Against All Heresies. As Nilos Runeberg is a fictional characters, all his works are nonexistent.
Syntagma: “The earliest collection of heretical doctrines by Justin Martyr. Another text of the same title, also directed against heresy, was written at the beginning of the third century by Hippolytus of Rome….” ADOB
Lund: Lund University in Sweden was founded in 1666.
Swedish and German titles: Runeberg was a fiction, as are his books. As is translator Emil Schering.
Note also the use of subjunctive verb forms: might have directed … would have destined him … might have augmented … might have been preserved … might have perished.
And I have barely begun analyzing this paragraph, which was designed to flummox lazy readers and excite explorers of strange literary byways like me.
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.
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.
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.
I was unusually restless today. I started three books and gave up on two of them. The one I continued on was a re-read from fifty years ago, G. K. Chesterton’s All I Survey, first published in 1933. There was a time in the 1970s when I read everything I could find by Chesterton. Today, my shelves hold over a hundred titles of his work, including duplicates. There are few authors whom I enjoy reading so much, probably because he always makes me feel so good.The following is the first paragraph of his essay entitled “On St. George Revivified.”
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living. Without some such contrast or comparison, without some such shifting of the point of view, we should see nothing whatever of our own social surroundings. We should take them for granted, as the only possible social surroundings. We should be as unconscious of them as we are, for the most part, of the hair growing on our heads or the air passing through our lungs. It is the variety of the human story that brings out sharply the last turn that the road has taken, and it is the view under the arch of the gateway which tells us that we are entering a town.
Tarnmoor 
You must be logged in to post a comment.