Hatlo’s Inferno

Posted on by | Leave a comment

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.”

Cleveland 1957-58

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Saint Henry Church and School Around 1957

I’m trying to recover some memories of the 12-year-old Jim Paris when he was in the 7th and 8th grade at Saint Henry School around 1957-58.

I was living at 3989 East 176th Street in the Lee-Harvard area of Cleveland, just west of Warrensville. Over the previous five years or so, I managed to pick up the English language and get over the whole class clown stage of my life when I was poised halfway between Hungarian and English. Television definitely helped, even though the language spoken at home was still Magyar.

Beginning in the 5th grade, I was one of the smartest kids in class—although Marianne Boguski always had the top grades. One day, I sneaked a peak at the teacher’s desk and found that my IQ was the highest in the class: 132. By the way, Marianne went to the University of Dayton where she majored in chemistry. Here she is, sitting in the first row left of the university’s chemistry club:

Marianne Boguski in 1966 at the University of Dayton

In this picture, she is not nearly as geeky as she looked when we were both at St. Henry. In fact, she looks a whole lot more presentable than I did at that age.

The word was out that there was a new Catholic high school in nearby Bedford. When I was in 8th grade, Chanel High School only had a class of freshman 9th graders. The only other Catholic high schools in the area were St. Stanislas, St. Edward, and St. Ignatius—all of which were geographically undesirable to a resident of Lee.Harvard.

Fortunately my grades and test scores were good enough to get me a full year scholarship, so my parents did not have to pay tuition.

In 7th grade, my teacher at St. Henry was Sister Beatrice OP, who was in her eighties but will still sharp as a tack. The next year, I had Sister Rose Thomas OP. The OP indicates that the sisters were members of the Dominican order. The OP stood for Order of Preachers.

Many of my friends who has Catholic educations had issues being taught by clergy or sisters. I did not. My teachers at both St. Henry and Chanel were dedicated, smart, and tough. No regrets there.

“A Night of Dark Intent”

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I came out to California in 1966 after getting my college degree at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.With Robert Frost, his movement was in the opposite direction: Born in San Francisco, he is best known for the poems he wrote while living in New Hampshire.

I had the good fortune of seeing Frost give a poetry reading at Dartmouth in the last year of his life. Then, years later, Martine and I visited his home in Franconia, New Hampshire in 2005.

The following poem is one of his most un-New-England works:

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves hooked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent,
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.

Treat Garlic With Love

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Garlic Bulbs and Cloves

Until relatively recently, I found garlic to be very annoying to handle. It didn’t peel easily, and it was too much of a pain to mince the peeled cloves. Then, quite suddenly, I underwent a change a few months ago. I said to myself, “I love the taste of garlic, so I should change the way I work with it.”

A few months ago, I purchased a hollow rubber tube from an Italian food store. I would put one unpeeled clove of garlic into it and apply pressure while rolling it on a cutting board. After pressure has been applied, it’s easy to strip off the outer papery protective skin with my fingers.

The next step was suggested to me by Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas (1990), in which we see the imprisoned mafiosi slicing the cloves of garlic with a single-edged razor blade. Then, I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, in which he comes out against using a garlic crusher, recommending instead slicing the cloves fine. Now this is what I do. In my favorite Spanish rice dish, I use eight cloves of garlic prepared this way. (BTW, I now use eight cloves of garlic in my recipe, and I don’t crush the cloves.)

One thing I do not recommend is using garlic powder or bottled garlic cloves. Garlic is an amazing spice with numerous health benefits, and nowhere have I enjoyed the flavor of garlic as in the dishes I prepare using the s-l-o-w method described above.

Today’s Spanish rice was the best yet. I owe the taste to the way I process the garlic, and by using fire-roasted Hatch chiles from New Mexico for a good burn.

If you want a device to help you peel the garlic, check out these on Amazon.Com.

Mob Scene at the Bookfest

Posted on by | Leave a comment

The Festival of Books One Hour Before Opening Time

It is six days now since I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which was held at the University of Southern California (USC) campus. By opening time at 10 AM, there were tens of thousands of people in evidence, many of them walking their dogs or pulling wagons stuffed with their progeny. There were even several people who thought I was the late actor Wilford Brimley brought back to life.

Originally, I had intended to visit the Festival on both Saturday and Sunday. After Saturday’s crowd, however, I thought I would spend Sunday far from any mob scenes. It was so bad that I could not see the books I wanted to see from the booths sponsored by such vendors as Vroman’s Books, the Kinokuniya Bookstore, and Book Soup. Those booths actually had lines of people waiting to see what was on sale.

Ever the skeptic, I could not believe that most of these people ever read any book worth reading. Most of the books that people had in their hands were of no appreciable literary quality.

In the end, I wound up spending most of my time at Small World Books’s Poetry Pavilion. A good thing, too! It was there I met Persian poet and translator Sholeh Wolpé, whose rendering of Farid-Ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds I eagerly devoured this last week and reviewed for Goodreads.Com.

One effect of listening to all those poets read their work (three per hour) has led me to include more poetry in my reading. I used to be all for prose, but now I begin to realize that poetry is a better way of expressing anything. Not that it’s easy to read poetry, but it is in the end likely to prove itself more rewarding.

The Stone Whistle

Posted on by | Leave a comment

It’s an odd-looking stone whistle. I have no memory of where I got it. Did I buy it? Did I find it? Did Martine find it and leave it on the desk in my library? (I never asked her.)

The oddest thing about it: The only way it sounds is if you inhale (not exhale) through what looks like the lips of the whistle creature—at the front of the above photo. The air comes from two locations, the largish hole at the rear and the smaller countersunk hole on top. The two little holes that look like eyes don’t go to deep enough to affect the sound.

I have adopted the stone whistle as a sort of good-luck charm, keeping it at my side when I’m reading. Several times a day, especially when I’m about to get up from my chair, I pick up the stone whistle and inhale. What goes through Martine’s head when I do this is anybody’s guess.

It’s just one of those meaningless little rituals that are part of my life, and of everyone’s life.

“They Shall Storm Your Streets at Last”

Posted on by | Leave a comment

F. L. Lucas is remembered more as a literary critic than as a poet. The amazing thing, though, is how scholarly writers like Lucas can write powerful poems, like the following one:

Beleaguered Cities

Build your houses, build your houses, build your towns,
Fell the woodland, to a gutter turn the brook,
Pave the meadows, pave the meadows, pave the downs,
Plant your bricks and mortar where the grasses shook,
The wind-swept grasses shook.

Build, build your Babels black against the sky –
But mark yon small green blade, your stones between,
The single spy
Of that uncounted host you have outcast;
For with their tiny pennons waving green
They shall storm your streets at last.

Build your houses, build your houses, build your slums,
Drive your drains where once the rabbits used to lurk,
Let there be no song there save the wind that hums
Through the idle wires while dumb men tramp to work,
Tramp to their idle work,
Silent the siege; none notes it; yet one day
Men from your walls shall watch the woods once more
Close round their prey.

Build, build the ramparts of your giant town;
Yet they shall crumble to the dust before
The battering thistle-down.

The Angel and the Idolater

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Here in its entirety is “The Parable of the Buyer of Nothing” from Farid-Ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds about which I posted yesterday. Attar’s Sufi beliefs are a far cry from the doctrinaire conservatism which we associate with Islam. In fact, in one line of the work, Attar writes, “These lofty words are an antidote for anyone sickened by extremism’s poison.” And to think this was written in the twelfth century!

One night as Gabriel rested in Paradise, he heard the Blessed Beauty respond “Here Am I” to a supplicating, prayerful voice. The angel thought, I don’t know who this person may be, but he must be a pure man, dead to his ego and alive in his soul.

Curious, the angel searched the Seven Heavens for the name of this man, but could not find it. He then searched the earth and the oceans, the mountains and the fields, and still failed to find the supplicating soul. Gabriel then hastened back to the Almighty, and again heard the Blessed Beauty’s “Here I am.” The angel’s head spun from envy and he went off again searching the earth once more, but to no avail. Finally, the angel pleaded: “Great One, guide me to this supplicating servant. Who is he?”

The One on High replied: “Go to Rûm, and seek him in a temple of idolaters.”

The angel hastened back to Earth and found a man crying and praying before an idol. Gabriel was moved by what he saw and returned to the Almighty, sobbing and begging: “Self-Sufficient One, unveil this mystery to me. He is praying to an idol, but it is you who in your grace answers him.”

The Blessed Beauty replied: “This man’s heart is darkened by ignorance. He does not know he has been misled. He has committed this error unknowingly, but I do not commit errors. I will now guide him to the Path. My benevolence will lead him to repentance.”

The Almighty then opened the Path to the man’s soul and liberated his tongue so that he could speak the Beloved’s name.

Know that this is the way of the Almighty.
That Great One needs no reason for what it does.
If you have nothing to offer the Great Court,
don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.
Over there the market isn’t keen on only pious deeds.
At the Great Court, nothing is also accepted and bought.

From Borges to 12th Century Persia

Posted on by | Leave a comment

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.

I Am Not Wilford Brimley

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Wilford Brimley (1934-2020) or Jim Paris (b. 1945)

No, that is not a picture of me—but it might as well be. Apparently, I am a dead ringer for a deceased character actor named Wilford Brimley, who appeared in such films as True Grit (1969), The China Syndrome (1979), Cocoon (1985), The Firm (1993), and Timber the Treasure Dog (2016). So if you should meet someone who looks like the above photo, please don’t come up to me and ask if I’m Wilford Brimley. I am James Alex Paris, an entirely different person, one with no acting experience whatsoever, even though strangers seem to think I am an actor.

I did act in one short student film about half a century ago, but that was my filmography in toto.

The one thing which throws people off is that I have the same facial expression as Brimley had. He didn’t smile much, and neither do I. (Among other things, my teeth are decidedly not photogenic.) As is well known among my friends, I eschew all contact with strangers. When a stranger addresses me in public, my standard response is in Hungarian until they go away with a confused look on their face.

Among other things, Wilford Brimley was decidedly NOT Hungarian. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and was born of a bona fide Western American than I am, having been born in Cleveland, Ohio.

Brimley was a pretty good actor, but I do not take credit for any of his roles. Just as I hope his estate doesn’t take credit for any of my blog posts.