“Untranslatable Sensations”

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Brazilian Writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

In August 2023 I wrote: “Clarice. I love her name. I love her high cheekbones and penetrating gaze. And most of all, I love the beauty of her thoughts and writings. She wrote in Portuguese, but she was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine. To escape the horrors of the Civil War between the Red and White Russians, her Jewish parents fled with their infant daughter to Recife in northeastern Brazil. At an early age, it was discovered that she could write well enough to be published. And she became one of the great women novelists and short story writers of the 20th century.”

Now I am reading her second novel, The Chandelier (1944), which is strange, arresting, and beautiful by turns. Here is a paragraph. Its strangeness is very Clarician.

She was thinking untranslatable sensations distracting herself secretly as if humming, profoundly unaware and stubborn, she was thinking a single swift streak: In order to be born things must have life, for birth is a movement—if they said that movement is necessary only for the thing giving birth and not for the thing that is born that’s not right because the thing that gives birth cannot give birth to something outside its nature and thus always gives birth to a thing of its own kind and so it is with movements too—in this way stones were born that have no power of their own but were once alive otherwise they wouldn’t have been born and now they’re dead because they don’t have movement in order to give birth to another stone.

The REAL Wizard of Oz

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L, Frank Baum (1856-1919)

Lyman Frank Baum is the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its many equally wonderful sequels. Over the last several months, I have been reading these sequels in publication order, roughly one per month. At this point, I have read nine of the fourteen volumes, having just finished The Scarecrow of Oz (1915).

I don’t generally like books written for children, but I make an exception for the Oz books. They are brilliantly inventive, full of colorful characters, and in general great fun to read.

The Oz Books

I feel that Baum has not received sufficient credit as the master of American literature that he is. The Danes love Hans Christian Andersen; the Swedes adore Pippi Longstocking; the British admire Lewis Carroll’s Alice books; and so on.

After reading the first three or four books, I began to notice a slight diminution in quality. Baum kept creating more characters, and then attempted to bring them all together in an increasingly extended denouement. This was most evident in Ozma of Oz (1907), when not only Billina the Hen was a character, but also each of her multitudinous chicks. Eventually, Baum saw his mistake and limited his denouements to more manageable lengths. In The Scarecrow of Oz, the love fest at the end was limited to a couple of chapters.

So I suggest that if things aren’t going your way, pick up a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and start reading it. You will feel better for it; and you will be introduced into one of the most fascinating fantasy worlds in all of literature.

Pumpkinspicemas

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Well, October is here. That scent in the air is Pumpkin Spice. It’s everywhere! In vacant lots there are pumpkin patches with towering bounce houses. Vacant stores are full of Halloween costumes and other accessories for those All Hallows Eve parties.

And when November comes, the pumpkins and bounce houses are packed away to be replaced by Christmas tree lots.

The sad thing is that, with the current economy in tatters, there are all too many vacant lots and empty retail establishments. Instead of lending a celebratory tone to the oncoming holidays, there is this grim feeling that there are too damned many vacancies.

For some reason I am unable to determine, Los Angeles is building ever more empty commercial properties, now that retail seems to be dying. Sometimes I think they should change the name of the city to “For Lease.”

All along the E Line train route that I take to go downtown on most Thursdays (not today: it was too hot again), large office buildings and apartment towers have sprung up. Is the space fully leased? Not a chance!

Life After Summer

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When I was a child, I looked forward to summer. School was out and I could play. Times have changed: With global warming, we look forward to ever hotter summers—where the heat is more menacing and longer-lasting. Today I found out there is even the prospect of rain within a few days, as Tropical Storm Rachel wheels to the right over Baja California and presents us with the possibility of several days of showers.

I feel someone stupid writing so much about the weather, But then, never before has the weather affected me in this way. I sit here shirtless to avoid sweating with a ceiling fan above me to dry me off.

When my physical therapy sessions come to an end, I look forward to going more places, no longer avoiding some valley destinations as being too fiercely hot. Even my favorite hot-weather refuge, Chace Park in Marina Del Rey, has been too uncomfortable because of a Santa Ana wind backing the desert heat westward over the Pacific shore.

Vanitas Vanitatum

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The Brontë Sisters as Painted by Their Brother Branwell

The painter wiped his own image out of his painting of his more famous sisters. The sister on the left is Anne, who signed her two novels under the pseudonym of Acton Bell. Those two novels were Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). She was an early feminist who dealt in her two novels with the issues of parenthood and relationships respectively. Unfortunately, she died young, at the age of 29.

Here is one of her poems, which illustrates the intensity of feelings which pervades her work. The title is from Ecclesiastes 1:2: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas

In all we do, and hear, and see,
Is restless Toil and Vanity.
While yet the rolling earth abides,
Men come and go like ocean tides;

And ere one generation dies,
Another in its place shall rise;
THAT, sinking soon into the grave,
Others succeed, like wave on wave;

And as they rise, they pass away.
The sun arises every day,
And hastening onward to the West,
He nightly sinks, but not to rest:

Returning to the eastern skies,
Again to light us, he must rise.
And still the restless wind comes forth,
Now blowing keenly from the North;

Now from the South, the East, the West,
For ever changing, ne’er at rest.
The fountains, gushing from the hills,
Supply the ever-running rills;

The thirsty rivers drink their store,
And bear it rolling to the shore,
But still the ocean craves for more.
’Tis endless labour everywhere!
Sound cannot satisfy the ear,

Light cannot fill the craving eye,
Nor riches half our wants supply,
Pleasure but doubles future pain,
And joy brings sorrow in her train;

Laughter is mad, and reckless mirth–
What does she in this weary earth?
Should Wealth, or Fame, our Life employ,
Death comes, our labour to destroy;

To snatch the untasted cup away,
For which we toiled so many a day.
What, then, remains for wretched man?
To use life’s comforts while he can,

Enjoy the blessings Heaven bestows,
Assist his friends, forgive his foes;
Trust God, and keep His statutes still,
Upright and firm, through good and ill;

Thankful for all that God has given,
Fixing his firmest hopes on Heaven;
Knowing that earthly joys decay,
But hoping through the darkest day.

A Grim Future?

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Wild Surf Destroying Beachside Homes in Dana Point

Southern California has had a rough time of it over the last two years. First there were the two January 2025 fires that destroyed two Los Angeles neighborhoods: Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Now, over the last several weeks, there was the El Niño from hell that led to the beaches from Los Angeles to San Diego counties being all but destroyed by high tides caused by a seemingly endless series of Central Pacific tropical storms.

A corollary is the superhot summer of 2026 that refuses to quit. Today the beach was hotter than the Coachella Valley. Technically, this is autumn; but it doesn’t look like it. The only thing that’s different is that the humidity is way down.

What¹s next? A killer earthquake along the San Andreas fault? The complete desertification of the California coast so that it resembles the Atacama in Chile? More wildfires? Monster flooding? Killer heat waves that make L.A. resemble a 350° oven (177° Celsius)? Will AI lead to massacres of innocent humans? Are there, in fact, any innocent humans?

Another summer like this one would make me think seriously of moving to Nome, Alaska, or Ushuaia, Argentina (which lies a mere 600 miles, or 966 kilometers, from Antarctica.

But then one tends to look mat the future by straight-lining the disasters of the past. Nature doesn’t work that way. With all our science, we have no idea what will happen next, and when, and how disastrous. Any forecasting based on this year’s events is (hopefully) jejune.

Witches, and Other Night-Fears

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The Cemetery in Hanover, New Hampshire

First of all, my apologies to Charles Lamb for appropriating as the title of this post the name of one of his pieces in The Essays of Elia, which I have been reading over the last several days. Since this is Spooktober, I thought I would write here about two things that scared me when I was younger.

The first was a framed picture of a large thatched Hungarian cottage with a peasant woman fetching water from an old style well. That was all well and good, but the shadow cast on the cottage’s wall from the surrounding foliage looked just like an evil old man with a threatening leer and his hand reaching out to grasp me. It was hanging in our living room, and I had a view of it from our couch.

I wish I could find a copy of that picture. Though it was once a popular subject among Hungarian immigrant families, it was definitely pre-Internet.

The other fright was in my four years at Dartmouth College. All four years, I spent in the dormitory known originally as Middle Wigwam Hall, then as McLane Hall (and it has since been re-named, I understand). It was one of three three-story dorms on a bluff over the Connecticut River. To get to town or the center of campus, I had to walk almost a mile past the Tuck School of Business and the Thayer School of Engineering past the Hanover, New Hampshire cemetery.

In the years I was in college (1962-1966), that road was not lit. I always felt weird trudging past the cemetery at night, particularly in winter, within sight of a lot of old graves. Especially when the walkway was coated with a layer of slippery ice, as it often was.

Somehow, I managed to survive. Sometime later this month, I will post how I got over my fear of heights.

An Ode to Breakfast

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A Full English Breakfast

Since I am reading Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia (1823), I thought I would look at some of his poems. There I found this encomium on the subject of the morning meal.

Breakfast

A dinner party, coffee, tea,
Sandwich, or supper, all may be
In their way pleasant. But to me
Not one of these deserves the praise
That welcomer of new-born days,
A breakfast, merits; ever giving
Cheerful notice we are living
Another day refreshed by sleep,
When its festival we keep.
Now although I would not slight
Those kindly words we use, “Good night,”
Yet parting words are words of sorrow,
And may not vie with sweet “Good morrow,”
With which again our friends we greet,
When in the breakfast-room we meet,
At the social table round,
Listening to the lively sound
Of those notes which never tire,
Of urn, or kettle on the fire.
Sleepy Robert never hears
Or urn or kettle; he appears
When all have finished, one by one
Dropping off, and breakfast done.
Yet has he too his own pleasure,
His breakfast hour’s his hour of leisure;
And, left alone, he reads or muses,
Or else in idle mood he uses
To sit and watch the venturous fly,
Where the sugar’s pilëd high,
Clambering o’er the lumps so white,
Rocky cliffs of sweet delight.

Bibliothecaphilia

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Stacks in the London Library

Books are a major part of my life. I am grateful that I discovered a love for books before all the digital simulacra have taken over the minds of the populace. Therefore I was delighted to discover this passage in a piece by Charles Lamb entitled “Oxford in the Vacation” in his Essays of Elia (1823). The word “Bodleians” is a reference to the libraries of Oxford University, about which more can be found by clicking here.

What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage; and the odour of their old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid the happy orchard.

I will keep these words in mind as I take the train downtown tomorrow to Los Angeles’s Central Library, which is celebrating this year its centennial at its present location.

Stille Nacht

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Nazi POWs in Italy

The title of this blog is German for the well-known Christmas carol, “Silent Night.” It tells of an incident during the Nazi retreat in Tuscany where things could have gone south very fast, but didn’t. The tale is from Iris Origo’s excellent War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944.

In the afternoon, while I am with the children in the garden rehearsing the ‘Sleeping Beauty’, I hear a lorry drive up, and some of these same German troops come tramping, fully armed, into the garden. They do not look attractive. I go up to them, not without some inner apprehension, and ask them what they want. But the answer is unexpected: ‘Please—wouldn’t the children sing for us?’ The children sing O Tannenbaum and Stille Nacht (which they learned last Christmas)—and tears come into the men’s eyes. ‘Die Heimat [The Homeland]—it takes us back to die Heimat!’ So they climb into their lorry and drive away.