Hello Darkness My Old Friend

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Los Angeles at Night

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.

You Freud, Me Jane?

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Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)

Sometimes it takes years, even decades, for a great film to be recognized. Such is the case with Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, which confused and rattled the critics of the period. According to the New York Times, “an inexplicably amateurish script.” The L.A. Times was no more accepting: “As a story it seems naggingly improbable and, as drama, a nightmare from which the spectator constantly pulls away, struggling to wake up in a less disordered universe. No question, though, that it is at least fitfully effective“

Fitfully effective? How about ahead of its time. Both the Sean Connery character (Mark Rutland) and the Tippi Hedren character (Marnie Edgar) are obsessed in different ways. Marnie is a thief who cannot bear to be touched by men. Mark, on the other hand, is obsessed with using the tools of popular psychology to “cure” Marnie. In a way, both characters are equally out of it.

What escaped the 1960s critics was that Marnie was a strikingly beautiful film, perhaps the most beautiful color film ever produced. From the moment we see Marnie from the rear wearing a black wig walking down a train station platform with a yellow bag full of money under her arms, we are hooked. At least, I was.

Even the obvious fakery that Hitchcock seems to throw at us seems to actually add to the story in this instance. When Mark drives Marnie to her mother’s Baltimore row house, we see an obviously painted backdrop of an ocean freighter at the end of the block. In the foreground, several little girls are skipping rope while singing:

Mother, Mother, I am ill
Call for the doctor over the hill.
In came the doctor,
In came the nurse,
In came the lady with the alligator purse.

In the end, Mark and Marnie drive off and take a left just before the painted backdrop, where moments ago it seemed there was no exit.

Tolstoy’s Journal

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Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Toward the end of his life, Count Leo Tolstoy wrote entries in a journal. He was a desultory writer by this time, frequently skipping days, weeks, and even months. Many entries end with the expression “If I Live,” highlighting to Tolstoy that he was approaching the end of his life. Most of his entries are about man’s relationship with his Creator and frequently end with short criticisms of what he wrote, such as “Stupid,” “Not clear and not what I want to say,” “I have not succeeded,” “Again, not what I want to to say,” and “I feel that there is something in this, but I can not yet express it clearly.” But then, even when he is struggling, Tolstoy is worth reading. Following are several excerpts from the first 80 pages.

Oh, not to forget death for a moment, into which at any moment you can fall! If we would only remember that we are not standing upon an even plain (if you think we are standing so, then you are only imagining that those who have gone away have fallen overboard and you yourself are afraid you will fall overboard), but that we are rolling on, without stopping, running into each other, getting ahead and being got ahead of, yonder behind the curtain which hides from us those who are going away, and will hide us from those who remain. If we remember that always, then, how easy and joyous it is to live and roll together, yonder down the same incline, in the power of God, with Whom we have been and in Whose power we are now and will be afterwards and forever. I have been feeling this very keenly.

§

I am alive, but I don’t live…. I lay down to sleep, but could not sleep, and there appeared before me so clearly and brightly, an understanding of life whereby we would feel ourselves to be travellers. Before us lies a stage of the road with the same well-known conditions. How can one walk along that road otherwise than eagerly, gaily, friendly, and actively together, not grieving over the fact that you yourself are going away or that others are going ahead of you thither, where we shall again be still more together.

§

I was going from the Chertkovs on the 5th of July. It was evening, and beauty, happiness, blessedness, lay on everything. But in the world of men? There was greed, malice, envy, cruelty, lust, debauchery. When will it be among men as it is in nature? Here there is a struggle, but it is honest, simple, beautiful. But there it is base. I know it and I hate it, because I myself am a man.

Anza-Borrego

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Me at the Vallecito Stage Depot in 2014

A large chunk of Eastern San Diego County is occupied by the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest in California’s state park system. I used to go hiking and tent camping there with my friends.

The Vallecito Stage Depot, which is located in the general park area, was an important stop on the first official transcontinental route, serving the San Diego-San Antonio (‘Jackass’) mail line (1857-1859), the Butterfield Overland Stage Line, and the southern emigrant caravans. This was at least a full decade before the first transcontinental railroad connected the Eastern U.S. with San Francisco.

Little known outside the State of California, Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is a scenic destination with the town of Borrego Springs in the middle and near the museums and restaurants of mile-high Julian, California. To the east is the Salton Sea and desolate Imperial County.

Kumeyaay Indian Morteros at Anza-Borrego

The original inhabitants of the area were the Kumeyaay Indians, who also called parts of northern Baja California home. One keeps running into evidences of their habitation of the area on the park’s many trails.

Water from the Limpopo

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The Library of Water in Stykkishólmur, Iceland

I have just finished reading the first volume of Konstantin Paustovsky’s Story of a Life. In Chapter 14, we are introduced to a geography teacher at the high school Kostik (short for Konstantin) attends in Kyiv named Cherpunov. Paustovsky describes his collection:

Bottles filled with yellowish water, corked and sealed with sealing wax, stood in rows on the classroom table. They had labels, inscribed in an uneven elderly hand: ‘Nile,’ ‘Limpopo,’ ‘Mediterranean.’

There were bottles of water from the Rhine, the Thames, Lake Michigan, from the Dead Sea and the Amazon, but however long we looked at them they all remained equally yellow and uninteresting.

Curiously, there is one such collection in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, on the Snæfellsness Peninsula. It is called the Library of Water. Although I have been in Stykkishólmur twice, I have never bothered to visit it. Perhaps because I suspected what Paustovsky was to find out after Cherpunov’s young wife ran off and the old teacher quit.

‘Do you remember Cherpunov?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, I can tell you now that there was never anything in his bottles except ordinary water from the tap. You’ll ask me why he lied to you. He rightly believed that he was stimulating your imagination. He attached great value to it. I remember him telling me that it was all that distinguished man from the beasts. It was imagination, he said, that had created art, it expanded the boundaries of the world and of the mind, and communicated the quality we call poetry to our lives.’

Three Poets: Katie Farris

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Poet Katie Farris

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.

Three Poets: Hala Alyan

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Poet Dr. Hala Alyan at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival

She is not only a poet and novelist, but also a clinical psychologist. As she read selections from her most recent poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, Dr. Hala Anyan’s dark eyes flashed; her shock of brown curly hair fluttered in the breeze; and her voice modulated from quiet to powerful. She is a Palestinian-American born in Carbondale, Illinois. But her poems are never far from her ancestral home in a conflicted land.

Even as she read her poems, we heard the loud sounds of a demonstration at the University of Southern California (USC) loudly protesting the horrors of the Israelis’ revenge on the Palestinians. And now we hear that graduation ceremonies at USC have been put on hold during the crisis.

Naturalized

Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim.
I won’t say where he was born. I’ve already said too much.
Look, the gardenias are coming in. Look, my love
is watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites.
He likes to understand. He plays devil’s advocate.
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
It’s so hot under that hospital elevator.
There’s no room for a child’s braid. In the staff meeting,
I stretch my teeth into a country
When they congratulate me on the ceasefire.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a coffin.
They like me when I spit my father from my mouth.
There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth.
I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain.
I break a Klonopin* with my teeth and swim.
The newspaper says truce and C-Mart
is selling peaches again. Woolly in my palms.
I’ve marched on the street too few times.
I’ve ruined the dinner party with my politics.
Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos.
There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed
in thirty minutes flat. I stop jogging when I’m tired.
Nothing can justify why I’m alive. Why there’s still
a June. Why I wake and wake and the earth doesn’t shake.

” Klonopin – Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine. It is approved for the treatment of panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia), as well as certain types of seizure disorders.

Three Poets: Maggie Millner

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Poet Maggie Millner

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.

Where Reading Is Honored

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Yes, It Really Was That Crowded

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:

My Annual Book Orgy

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Where I Will Be This Weekend

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 Times Festival 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.