This Is Asia. That's Europe Over There.

On the road again. What a place is Istanbul--history
everywhere you look.

I am in Istanbul. That is correct. Istanbul, Turkey. I have come to teach English, with my teaching duties scheduled to begin tomorrow. Today is Sunday. The mosques are closed, but I think just about everything else is open. For everyone and everything in Istanbul except the mosques, Sunday is just another work day. I have today off, but my two roommates, also teachers, are both giving classes as I sit writing this and waiting for a hard-boiled egg on the kitchen stove.

I flew from Los Angeles on Sunday, September 8th, arriving the next night local time. L.A. to Istanbul is 11 hours if you're flying nonstop, as I did two years ago when I flew from L.A. to Tbilisi, Georgia on Turkish Airlines. I assumed I would be flying Turkish Airlines again, since Istanbul was my final destination this time and not a stopping-off spot.  But I didn't make my flight reservation until the last possible moment, and by then Aeroflot was cheaper than Turkish Air, so I went through Moscow. Kind of too bad, not only because Turkish Airlines would have been direct, but also (not to knock Aeroflot's in-flight meals, they're okay) Turkish Airlines has the best airplane food I've ever experienced this side of Air France.

There is always at least one crisis involved whenever I travel anywhere, and this trip was no exception. I'd been using my bank debit card all summer instead of cash, and continued to do so on this overseas journey -- I arrived in Istanbul with only my Mission Federal Credit Union Mastercard in my wallet. No cash. At passport control they told me I had to go to the visa office for a $20 tourist visa to get me out of the airport. When I tried to use my MFCU debit card to pay for the visa, it was rejected. They sent me to the transit desk, where a Turkish airport guy took me upstairs to the HSBC bank to try their ATM. No dice; the ATM rejected my card.

I was in a panic. Stuck in Istanbul, with no money and no way of getting any? I sat, paced, fumed while the Turks tried to figure out what to do with me. There was some rumbling about sending me back to Moscow. "How would I pay for that?" I countered.

Just as I was about to ask someone to call the American consulate, I remembered something. Last year, when I flew to China and tried to get some cash in Beijing, the moment Mission Federal's central computer saw a transaction being attempted on my card in a foreign country, it shut my account down. The computer assumed that my card had been stolen.

One of the Turkish guys at the transit desk let me borrow his cellphone (mine was dead) and I called my credit union. Sure enough, that was what had happened. MCFU's computer had seen a transaction coming from a foreign country and had shut down my account. We got it straightened out over the phone, but it took me two hours to get out of the airport. Happily, the young man whom my new employers had sent to meet me had not quite yet given up on me: he was still standing beyond customs, holding up a card with my name on it (misspelled, but close enough.) By midnight I had been escorted to the apartment I am now sharing with two other teachers. After 17 hours on the road, I collapsed right into bed, having landed "on my feet" one more terrifying time.

Istanbul has history woven into its bones, and for obvious reasons.

Istanbul divides Europe from Asia, standing as it does athwart the Bosporus, a narrow body of water that connects the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea. There has been a city here since forever. In ancient times it was called Byzantium. In A.D. 330 the Romans came in and named the city Constantinople, after the Emperor Constantine. The descendants of the Romans ran the show here until 1453, when the Ottoman Turks took over. The city was renamed Istanbul. The Ottoman Turks ran the show until after World War I, then a certain Kemal Mustafa Attaturk (Turkey's version of George Washington, father of his country) got rid of them and founded the modern Turkish republic in 1923.

With the Bosporus as a neighborhood landmark, Istanbul is divided into two halves: "Asia" and "Europe." I, and the language center for which I will be teaching, are located on the "Asia" side of the water. But the "Europe" side is only about forty minutes away by bus. That's not because the distance is so great, but because the traffic is so horrible. In the photo above you will see the suspension bridge that connects Europe with Asia, and you can traverse the water that way by bus or car, but they tell me that the ferry is a much more pleasant way to travel from one continent to the other.

We spent last week in training at New York Studio, which used to be Berlitz and is one of many language-teaching centers here. This is where we'll be teaching, when we aren't on-site at any number of businesses around the city. The school uses the same methodology as Berlitz, and we had three days to learn it. There were five of us in my training group, myself, three young women from the UK, and another lady, Turkish, who already teaches in Istanbul but is coming to work for NY Studio and had to learn its methods. Our instructor, a woman named Demet, took us through our paces. It was a lot of information to absorb in three days. I took a lot of notes but my head is still swimming with it. My first class is tomorrow evening. I will be teaching business English to a group of advanced students. I haven't taught adults since I was in training for my TEFL certificate more than ten years ago, and I'm more than a little nervous about it. All the teaching I've done for the past two years has been with children.

Istanbul is a city of 20 million people. The Turks are mostly very friendly; when I go into a store to make a purchase, I usually get a nice smile and a "thank you." Same at the outdoor market they have on Fridays between our apartment and the school. Some of us stopped there last Friday after class and bought some fruits and vegetables. The vendors want you to buy their stuff of course, so they hand you free samples. One guy handed me a couple of figs. Figs aren't my favorite fruit, but I ate them to be polite, and found that these figs, anyway, were delicious. We're all on tight budgets of course, and Kirsten, one of my fellow trainees, said she intends to do most of her food shopping at the outdoor market because everything is very cheap there, and some of the stores are quite expensive. She got a big bag of tomatoes, potatoes and onions for four Turkish lira, about two bucks.

Yesterday was Saturday. We went to the center in the morning to observe other teachers conducting their classes. Then in the afternoon, Kirsten and I, along with Lizzie, another new teacher, took the bus across the Bosporus to Taksim, Istanbul's old city center over on the European side of the water. It was hot all week, but it's been cooler this weekend, although it's supposed to get hot again tomorrow. Taksim was jampacked with tourists and shoppers. There is a pedestrian street right in the middle of the old city, and people were literally crammed in there elbow-to-elbow, milling around, shopping. Some sort of political demonstration was cooking up, apparently. I'm not sure what it was about, but the police were taking no chances -- cops in riot gear outnumbered the demonstrators at least 100 to one. There were platoons of police all over the place, wearing helmets and body armor and carrying riot shields, rifles and machine guns. But there was no trouble that I heard of and of course the cops ignored us. And just about everyone except the demonstrators -- a man I asked on the street said they represented the Kurdish political party -- ignored the cops, as many of them as there were. We shopped, dropped in at NY Studios' Taksim center, met with another friend, shopped some more, ate and drank, sweated and got jostled a lot. All in a day's tourism.

Finally, about 8 p.m., we piled into a Dolmus, (the kind of seven-passenger van/taxi that the Russians call a marshutka) and made the trip back over the bridge and across the water to the tip of Asia, where we live. The trip back took more than an hour. I simply cannot describe Istanbul's traffic. Just think "constipation" and put it in terms of headlights, taillights, brake lights, lurch-and-stop, peristaltic lane changes and lots of honking. It was after nine p.m. by the time I got back to my apartment. The van dropped us near our school and then I had to hike down the hill toward my new home. As I struck out on foot, my feet aching and my backpack whacking my spine, behind me one of the local mosques began droning out the call to evening prayers.

You can set your watch by the mosques in this part of the world. In fact I find that I don't need an alarm clock here. Quite promptly, around 5:40 a.m. each morning in mid-September, I'm greeted by the early-morning call to prayers from a mosque around the corner from our apartment, on a boulevard which it shares with everything else you might expect: grocery stores, restaurants, shoe outlets, women's clothing shops, plumbing supply places and Domino's pizza. Also Papa John's. About the same time the mosque sends me my wake-up call, I also hear from the seagulls. We're a short walk from the Sea of Marmara here, although I'm told the beach is too dirty for swimming. The Black Sea is about forty-five minutes in the other direction. Doesn't matter whether we can swim or not; as a native Californian, the sound of seagulls is the sound of home to me. Just as the smell of the sea was the smell of home to the Greeks in Xenophon's March of the Ten Thousand.

Which happened somewhere in this part of the world, as I recall. Seagulls and history. Never mind that I can't read the billboards. If you have a sense of your own cultural heritage, there's a homey feel to this place.

Educating Me

I went to college a long, long time ago, and I did manage to get a four-year degree. For the record, my B.A. is in History and Journalism (I double-majored at San Diego State, the only time I ever even attempted to be an "overachiever.")

But, for the most part, I have been an autodidact throughout my life, with all the pleasures and pitfalls that entails.

Welcome home, old friends from my childhood.

Autodidacts pick up a lot of information, but since they do most of their studying without professional guidance, they often wander astray into weird areas, you know, like astrology, or worse, the strange, dark world of conspiracy theories.

One of my favorite authors, Henry Miller, was mostly self-taught, and he read hugely. But he never managed to divorce himself from some pretty odd stuff, including the aforementioned astrology. (Miller also took Oswald Spengler seriously, something no discriminating student of either philosophy or history would ever do.) Then you have Bobby Fischer, chessmaster genius, school dropout and total kook.

But these guys were geniuses, with all of the dangers that lie that way. I'm just an average guy who, like my hero Miller, has read a lot and continues to. (Why not? Reading and sleeping are two of the cheapest activities I know.)

For a few short years when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer. Honestly, I did. Outer space fascinated me,  and besides, I was growing up in the 1960s, when the race to the moon was in the headlines. Many boys of my generation dreamed of becoming astronauts, and I did too, for a while. But it was a short-lived dream. By the time I was 12 or 13 I had realized that I didn't have The Right Stuff. Somebody else was going to have to take that trip to the moon for me.

But that didn't mean I couldn't gaze at the stars and dream. I read every book on astronomy I could get my hands on, and between the ages of 11 and 14, went through three telescopes.

That dream died about the time I was starting high school. You see, I'm hopeless at mathematics, and the modern astronomer is a mathematician who works mostly at night. I flunked basic algebra in the 11th grade. So much for my becoming any kind of scientist.

But one discipline connects to another, and my boyhood interest in astronomy led to a concomitant interest in the science of physics. Einstein and Niels Bohr were among my childhood heroes. Now, I was never, ever going to become competent at physics. Not with my complete incompetence at math. In fact my experience of failure in high school algebra was related to my interest in physics: you had to pass algebra before you could take physics. My plan was to take algebra during my junior year, then take physics my senior year. Well, having flunked algebra, there would be no physics class for me. I took humanities and sang in the school choir instead.

But when I was still in junior high school, at the tail end of the 1960s, I bought a three-volume set of paperback books, Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov (New York: Signet Books. 1966.) These little books were so cool-looking. Their covers featured colorful, sixties-style "op art." The three volumes were subtitled, respectively, Motion, Sound and Heat; Light, Magnetism and Electricity; and The Electron, Proton and Neutron. Had I any aptitude for this stuff at all, I might have become a classic nerd.

But I had none. And although I possessed these books for many years, I never managed to read them. Poets seldom make scientists, despite the occasional exception like Loren Eiseley.  My acquaintance with the world of science remained largely a question of reading biographies of guys like Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer. The science was lost on me because the math was lost on me.

On the other hand, there are examples in history of people with a childhood or youthful interest in science or engineering who go on to become creative artists. Poet W.H. Auden thought he wanted to be a mining engineer until a friend suggested to him one day that he should write poetry. Norman Mailer majored in engineering at Harvard, many years before he wrote his breakout novel The Naked and The Dead  in 1949. Many years after that, Mailer's training in the field of engineering would stand him in good stead when he wrote Of A Fire On The Moon, a book about the U.S. space program.

My childhood interest in astronomy and physics, hopeless though it might have been, has influenced my own poetry since I began to write poetry just about the same time my dream of becoming an astronomer was waning. And so, at age 57, I am now force-feeding myself those very three books by Isaac Asimov that I purchased as a teenager but could never get myself to read, chiefly because their plenitude of mathematical equations, even on casual glance, would send me into a confused slumber.

My strategy is simple: concentrate on the narrative and skim over the math, which is going to be lost on me anyway. I have already finished the second volume of the trilogy, Light, Magnetism and Electricity and have now backed up to volume one, Motion, Sound and Heat. Yes, yes, I know that these books were published nearly 50 years ago and are no doubt quite dated (they mention things like typewriters, film cameras and record players, which we don't have any more) but it doesn't matter. They're basic, and they reinforce a lot of stuff that I picked up as a child but have long since stopped thinking about.

I am hoping to avoid my father's fate, you see. In his final years, my father made so little use of his brain that it turned to mush. I was his caregiver as he sank into dementia, uninterested in much of anything beyond large-print westerns and John Wayne movies. I don't want to go that way, although I still might; after all I'm up against some powerful genes. I've always been told that if you keep your mind busy, your mind will remain clear. At least up to a point. So, as I approach 60, I am reading through those very books on science which I relished (but did not read) as a boy. It's edifying. It's a jog down memory lane.

And maybe, just maybe, it might help me hang on to my memory.

Classics that Clunk

Sometimes my reading follows no pattern at all. I've described it as "brownian motion," like the bouncing-off-each-other of certain subatomic particles that seems random even to physics.

I'm living in Moscow. Just a couple of weeks ago I visited the house in which Tolstoy lived here when he was a child. (I believe he hated it.) You might think I'd be prompted by such experiences to read Tolstoy.

Well, been there, done that, as we used to say. There is very little of Tolstoy's fiction that I haven't already read. I've read War & Peace and Anna Karenina at least three times each. Both are on my Kindle, but I probably won't bother with either again. I brought along with me to Moscow my Penguin edition of The Cossacks and Other Stories, which includes the remarkable late novella Hadji Murad...but again, I've read all of that before.

"He wrote as if writing were
a painful duty."

So...what was I reading during my first couple of weeks back in Russia, after all these years?

Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Dreiser (1871-1945) was an American novelist possessed of a peculiar sort of genius.

He couldn't write worth a damn. Even his admirers admitted the fact. I was prompted to read Sister Carrie after reading an essay on Dreiser by the great scholar and critic Joseph Epstein. Of Dreiser's famously clodhopper prose style, Epstein writes, "Finding aesthetic fault with Theodore Dreiser is easy, a game the whole family can play. The very first sentence of [Dreiser's novel] Jennie Gerhardt contains an obvious tautology, where Jennie is referred to as "a young girl of eighteen," (as opposed, one wants to shoot back at the author, to an old or perhaps middle-aged girl of eighteen?") Epstein goes on to cite four or five "strenuous cliches" that turn up "before the novel's first paragraph of seven sentences is complete."

H.L. Mencken, an admirer of Dreiser's, nonetheless famously noted that Dreiser had "an incurable antipathy to the mot juste."

Oscar Wilde once remarked of Henry James that he wrote "as if writing were a painful duty." If Wilde could make a crack like that about Henry James, I can only wonder what he would have said about Dreiser. I managed to get through Sister Carrie, but noted in my journal along the way that reading Dreiser's prose is "like swallowing cod liver oil."

True. But ... believe it or not, there IS such a thing as "good bad writing." Having said that faulting Dreiser's prose style is "a game the whole family can play," Epstein adds further down that making fun of Dreiser's prose is "snobbery, a game no one in the family should play," and he has a point. If a writer has good instincts, and Dreiser did, he or she can compel without charming, create human portraits, dramatic moments and what might be called spiritual or psychological honesty without possessing the niceties of a fine style.

Sister Carrie was a groundbreaking novel for its time. Published in 1900, it overturned some Victorian conventions with its frankness regarding human weakness and the realities of urban life. Some critics objected to what they called the book's "immorality" -- Dreiser's heroine Carrie Meeber lives out of wedlock with two men and suffers no punishment for it. In the 19th century, such "sinning" had to lead to comeuppance or something was out of whack.

Dreiser was having none of such sentimental treacle, and thus earned a reputation as one of the founders of the "realist" school. His urban landscapes are unsentimental, unforgiving, unstinting and capricious. If the plot of Sister Carrie contains few surprises -- the reader watches Carrie triumph while her lover George Hurstwood sinks into degradation and despair -- it also comprises a brutally honest narrative about what it's like to be poor in the big city, sparing no one and nothing. The novel was filmed twice, including a 1952 production starring Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones.

You wonder. What is it about "good bad writing?" How can something poorly-made still manage to work? It's a mystery to me. The young Ernest Hemingway, who had been reading the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, once asked his friend Ezra Pound if he had any clues into how Dostoevsky could "write so badly and make you feel things so strongly?" With typical Poundian candor, Pound is supposed to have responded by admitting that he had never read "the Rooshians." 

It's a mystery.

As far as I know, Hemingway could not read Russian (I can't either) and knew Dostoevsky through the English translations of the indefatigable Constance Garnett, who starting around the beginning of the 20th century translated just about all of the Russian classics that she could get her hands on. So how did Hemingway know that Dostoevsky was writing badly, if he had to read him in translation? Maybe Constance Garnett was a good enough translator to make badness "come through." I've read her stuff -- just about every English-speaker who doesn't know Russian but is curious about Russian literature has. And I have managed to find Dostoevski as exasperating as he is brilliant, so I guess old Constance did a good job. Those "in the know" will assure you that Dostoevsky's writing is slipshod. Vladimir Nabokov, the great prose stylist who wrote in both Russian and English, absolutely could not abide Dostoevsky.  My Russian friend Nadya, at one time a great reader, loves to talk about the immortal Tolstoy, but if you bring up Dostoevsky she tries to change the subject. As a Russian cultural patriot, I think Nadya finds Dostoevsky slightly embarrassing.

And I don't think this is fair. Dostoevsky belongs to the same tradition as Dreiser: that of writers who wrote in a way that discerning critics might find malodorous, but who nonetheless, as Hemingway pointed out, have the ability to reach deep into your soul and pull things out. But in Dostoevsky's case external circumstances are an important part of the story. Tolstoy could afford to write beautifully. He was extremely wealthy, owned a large estate about 250 miles south of Moscow and possessed the aristocratic leisure (after all, he was COUNT Leo Tolstoy) to take his time with his writing, polish, adjust, edit, polish, and then polish some more. I think I read somewhere that his wife Sonia copied out the entire body of War & Peace three times.

Dostoevsky had no such advantage. He was not wealthy and had to rely on his pen for a living. Consequently he was subject to editors' deadlines -- and was always behind deadline, as writers invariably are -- so that if his writing often appears slapdash, it's because it was: Dostoevsky had to write quickly, and he did. Deadlines are not the friend of fine writing, take it from a former newspaperman who knows what he's talking about.

Speaking of newspapers -- a powerful symbol of the transitory in Sister Carrie -- critic F.R. Leavis once noted that Theodore Dreiser seemed to have learned English from a newspaper. It was as if, Leavis pointed out, Dreiser had no native language of his own. Well, there's the cliche that a workman is only as good as his tools. And it's usually true. But there is also an ineffable quality called transcendence, which seems to be the exclusive property of genius. I don't know how to describe it, except to say that when you're in its presence, you'll know. You'll know it when you look at Michaelangelo's David or listen to Handel's Messiah. Okay, Michaelangelo and Handel are two of "the big guns" -- as genius goes, Dostoevsky and Dreiser don't quite run in their crowd. But whoever passes out genius sometimes passes it out in larger and sometimes in smaller portions. Another mystery. There's no question in my mind that the twin D's had it, each in his own quirky way, and each for all time.





 

Papa's Got A Brand-New Blog

Heads up, Night Thoughts At Noon fans (both of you.) I have been recently humming On The Road Again (again.) Yes, old KD has broken his old record for peregrination: I've taken up residence in my third foreign country in less than two years. In 2011 I went off to teach English to school children in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 2012 I left Georgia and went to teach in China.

One of my favorite Moscow neighborhoods
...long before I came along.

Well, now I'm in Russia. Arrived in Moscow a week ago Friday, April 26.

In Georgia, and in China, I made my observations about life and work in those countries on the Night Thoughts At Noon page. But Russia has been a part of my life for so much longer, and my experiences here of so much more profound impact on me, that I've decided to create a new blog, exclusively to keep track of my Russian life "this time around."

Entitled Moscow Days, Moscow Nights after a blog entry I put on Night Thoughts some years ago to talk about my experiences in Russia during the 1990s, my new blog is located at http://kelleyinmoscow.blogspot.ru.

My everyday, non-Russia-related rantings and ravings will continue to appear in this space.

 

Confessions of a Hodad

Yesterday on one of our local cable channels here in southern California, I was watching one of my favorite movies, Riding Giants. It's a beautiful (and sometimes scary) documentary about surfers. Not just any surfers, mind you, but big wave surfers, that especially-nervy subculture of the surfing subculture that gets its thrills from the quasi-suicidal: surfing the world's biggest waves: Mavericks in Santa Cruz, California. Waimea Bay on the north shore of Oahu in Hawaii. Teahupoo, Tahiti, where the waves are so big and so treacherous that a surfing contest there was recently canceled --evidently it was decided that the surf was too dangerous for anyone except maybe the Lord Poseidon himself ... and most Greek scholars that I have talked to are unaware that Poseidon ever surfed. Gods are usually too smart to be daredevils; hubris and its twin brother stupidity are pretty much human foibles.  

The test pilots in The Right Stuff talked about "pushing the envelope" all through that film. The surfers in this film are a living testimony to pushing the envelope. In this subculture, the more frightening a wave gets, the more bound-and-determined some surfer is going to be to develop a new twist on the technology of the sport which will allow those who dare to ... well, dare.



Sigh.

I'm hooked on this stuff. Stoked, as surfers say. I will watch any surfing film that comes along. Another favorite is Step Into Liquid, in which some especially focused adrenaline-junkies go so far as to have themselves taken 100 miles out to sea off the coast of my native San Diego in a boat, there to have themselves towed via jet-ski to where they can zip down waves close to 100 feet high, some of them on special, hydrofoil-equipped surfboards that allow them to coast along just above the water as they ride waves the size of bank buildings.

Me? I don't surf at all. I don't think I could if I tried. Oh, I took a few lessons a few years ago. My teacher was a fellow named Randy Couts. Randy is actually well-known in the surfing world, or used to be. He was a competition surfer who was giving surfing lessons to kids one summer about ten years back, when I was a newspaper reporter in Chula Vista. I read about his surfing school in the San Diego paper, then called him up and asked if he might give me some lessons. He readily agreed, and we met at Coronado Beach on a few contiguous Saturdays, where he drilled me on how to lie on the board, paddle out to the line, watch for a set of waves, launch yourself upon one and then try to execute one of the trickiest moves this side of bowing a Stradivarius properly: finding the "sweet spot" on the board which will allow you to leap into a crouching position and then rise to a standing position on the wave without tipping over and falling into the drink.

I even bought a surfboard from Randy. I was that serious about this stuff. My board is long-gone; when my second wife divorced me it got left behind in her garage. I bought a wet suit, too; it's in a cardboard box in my sister's attic.

I'm a capable-enough swimmer, but I've never been able to completely overcome a fear of the ocean which has haunted me since I was eleven years old and got caught in a rip current at Silver Strand State Beach, just a mile or two south of Coronado. I damn near drowned on that summer day in 1967. An alert lifeguard saved my bacon, but after that I was always afraid to go out in the water any higher than my shoulders. Randy cajoled me into putting this fear aside for our lessons; as we floated on our surfboards within view of the famous Hotel del Coronado, he assured me that the water where we sat was only about eight feet deep.

It was early September: late summer, and the waves were still suitable for beginners. A month later, autumn was coming on and with it, bigger waves. Randy and I met at the beach one last time, sat there talking and looking at the sets from the shore, and did not venture out.

I tried to "solo" once, going out to Coronado with my surfboard and without Randy. That was a couple of months later. Failure: I rode in on a couple of waves, on my stomach, without trying to stand up on the board, and went home. I've never tried to surf again.

The surfing subculture defines a "hodad" as ... well, a phony. Someone who pretends to be a surfer but isn't. I guess I could give myself a not-guilty on the accusation of technical hodadry -- I have never tried to pass myself off as a surfer. I'm something much worse: a wannabe. I would love to be a surfer. I just don't have the nerve. (And, I'm 57 years old.)

Now, I have fantasised about being everyone from Beethoven to Ernest Hemingway. But not in my wildest imaginings have I ever tried to see myself as Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning or Matt Wilkinson. Even if I ever did work up the nerve to try surfing again, you would never find me within screaming distance of big waves. I'd stick to places like Imperial Beach and San Clemente, and even those places only on days when the surf was no higher than my head.

Good film. Let these guys (or their stunt
doubles) take the risks. I'll watch.

Oh, but the vicarious has its attractions, the safety of one's living room being only the most obvious. I'm never going to hang ten or shoot the curl, but I can by-god sit on my sofa and watch the pros do it. Nothing wrong with envy. I have seen The Endless Summer at least ten times, and while I laugh with the cognoscenti at such dopey sixties fare as Ride The Wild Surf or the Frankie-and-Annette beach romps, one of my favorite feature films is Big Wednesday, directed by John Milius in 1978. Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt and Gary Busey play a trio of surfing pals growing up before, during and after the Vietnam war, reuniting near the end of the story for the big waves of Big Wednesday.

I've never met legendary surf filmmaker Bruce Brown, who made The Endless Summer in 1966, but I can claim a six-degrees thing with him: his son Dana directed a film in 2005, Dust To Glory. It's not a surfing film, but rather a documentary about the famous Baja 1000 auto race. I've never met Dana Brown either, but one of the participants in the 2004 Baja 1000 was Scott McMillan, the son -- and grandson -- of two of San Diego County's most prominent realtors, and I interviewed Scott in 2005 for a newspaper article about the race and the film.

That same year I requested a surfing calendar as an office Christmas gift, and for a year I actually subscribed to Surfing magazine. That's probably as close to the Pipeline as I'm ever going to get. Oh, if I can swing it one day I might drive up the coast to Huntington Beach or wherever the hell it is they hold that annual surfing competition, just to watch. Or maybe I'll cruise up to Tourmaline, just south of La Jolla, and watch the weekend warriors go at it.



If I squint just right, this might be me. Those waves are about my speed.

I'd love to be out there with them, one of them, paddling to the line, talking surfing the way ballplayers talk baseball.

But I'm afraid a dream is what it's going to remain. That day at Silver Strand during the Summer of Love is not going to be banished from my memory, I fear. Oh, well. Facing our mortality is part of becoming more mature, as is facing the fact that we're never going to be what our heroes were. Maybe that's why they remain our heroes.

As Clint Eastwood said many years ago in Magnum Force, "A man's gotta know his limitations."

I think I'll just toddle off and enjoy The Endless Summer one more time. That's another advantage to being an eternal wannabe: in my living room, the surf's always up.

 

Self-Portrait, 2013

I "interviewed" myself two years ago. I decided to do it again, just to see if anything has changed.

Self-Portrait, 2013

Q: If you had to live in just one place – without ever leaving – where would it be?

A: Two years ago I wasn’t sure. I demurred at the suggestion of Paris, which is not really that big a city. Now, in 2013, I think I would say Paris. And it’s not a romantic-dream thing either, like in the Woody Allen film Midnight In Paris, where the hero gets to actually meet Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Picasso. The 1920s are not coming back, nor is the Belle Epoque, but I have been to Paris several times and it is as beautiful as everyone says it is. Who knows, maybe I’d finally get down to learning French.

Q: You don't speak French?
A: Nope. My dad did, but I don't.
 
Q: Are you writing anything these days?
A: Yeah, this stupid blog. Gives me something to do. I’m editing a friend’s novel, which gives me something else to do, and looking for another overseas teaching job, which gives me yet something else to do. Actually, I have gotten back to work in a tentative way on a novel I began writing in 2010.

Q: Care to say anything about it?

A: Why not? It involves the CIA, but has nothing whatsoever to do with espionage.

Q: Do you prefer animals to people?

A: Sometimes, not usually. Animals are great because they have no guile and they don’t know what the word “betrayal” means. On the other hand you can’t talk about baseball, cooking, Steven Spielberg or Proust with them. Oh, you could, but the conversation would be a bit one-sided. Having said that, I agree with Truman Capote that people who tell you they love animals are often very cruel to people. Hitler loved dogs.

Q: Are you cruel?
A: I try not to be. Sometimes I fail. Cruelty is the most abominable of vices. I can think of nothing that makes me angrier than cruelty of any kind, and one of my problems with the British is that so much of their "comedy" is based on cruelty. Graham Greene has a short story called The Destructors, which we were required to read in high school. It's about a bunch of shitty little English brats  who completely wreck and gut a poor old man's house just for fun. I think the British find that story funny, but I certainly didn't.  I am sometimes verbally cruel, especially when I’m angry. This has become less of a problem since I gave up drinking hard liquor, which gives me a tongue like an adder.I always regret my cruelties immediately. Me and my big mouth have hurt people I love way too many times.

Q: Do you have many friends?

A: No. Most of my friends are dead. There are maybe five people I more or less trust.

Q: What qualities do you look for in friends?

A:  Obviously patience is a biggie. If you’re going to be around me, you’d better have patience, and I have little of it.  Impatience is my worst quality. Understanding, a much tougher demand, is something else I look for. Mostly, I want my friends to understand that they must under no circumstances interrupt me when I'm watching the opening day of baseball season, or one of my favorite movies. Don't get between me and the flat screen if there's anything running on cable that has Audrey Hepburn or Genevieve Bujold in it.

Q: Are you often disappointed by a friend?

A: I’ve had some unpleasant surprises from people I considered to be friends. But friends change as do we all, and sometimes I find that I like the later version of a friend less than the earlier one.

 Q: Are you a truthful person?

A: I think so. That’s not to say that I always tell the truth, but I’m a miserably poor liar, so I usually just don’t try it. I wouldn’t have made a good actor, although some people have told me that I should have been an actor. I disagree. If I say something and I don’t mean it, you can tell. It’s easier to lie as a writer of course; no one can see your face when you do it. But I don’t like lying, it makes me uncomfortable and gives me guilt, especially if I’m lying to someone I love.

Q: Do you believe in God?

A: Yes, but I think that “yes” raises more questions than it answers. I believe in God, but on the surface of it anyway, it sometimes seems as if God and I don’t have much use for each other. That could be just more of my impatience. Atheists are always talking about how much cruelty and misery religion has caused. I don't see that atheism has a great track record for spreading, peace, love and joy either. I wouldn't want Robespierre, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha or Kim il-Sung coming down my chimney on Christmas Eve. I  don't see much difference between Truly Convinced fundamentalists and Truly Convinced atheists. Both think they have the True Answer, and people who are convinced that they have the True Answer often become killers in the name of it. I envy people who claim to have a personal relationship with God. At 57 I'm still not sure who He is. But I believe He is there. I guess I believe because I believe in a world of colors. Belief comes in many colors. Unbelief only comes in one color: gray. You know, like the gray of East Berlin, which I once visited. And anyway, as Bob Dylan wrote, "negativity won't pull you through."

Q: How do you like to occupy your spare time?

A: I love to read. I always have. Reading coalesced for me when I was about six, and I’ve never stopped.  I love to cook, and often read cookbooks for fun.

Q: What are you reading these days?

A: I’m studying the history of philosophy.

Q: Why philosophy?

A: Because I never took a philosophy course when I was in college, and it’s a big, fat gap in my education. But it’s something we should know something about.

Q: Have you learned anything that you consider important or useful from the study of philosophy?

A: Yeah, that a lot of philosophers were smarter than me. But I wonder how many of them read cookbooks for fun?

Q: Reading anything else?

A: I’ve been reading some of the poetry of James Merrill, and I think he’s just amazing. Recently I read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, so now I understand a little bit more about Abraham, "The father of faith," than I did before. And I’m re-reading Of Human Bondage, which is a great classic, but to read Somerset Maugham means trying to overcome one of my most basic prejudices: I just hate the way the British talk. Goddamn it, people, talk English! Nobody says “I shall” anymore. And if one more of his characters starts out a sentence with "I say," or describes something as "frightfully" this or "dreadfully" that, I'm gonna scream. I'm also reading Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton, a memoir about his experiences of being under a death sentence from the Iranians for having published a novel that many Muslims considered an insult to Islam.

Q. Refresh my memory. When did that happen?
A: How soon we forget. In 1988 Rushdie published The Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini, the madman who was running Iran at the time, pronounced the fatwa, or death sentence, on Rushdie's head. Rushdie lived in England -- still does, as far as I know -- and spent years in hiding. I was in Brazil when all of this happened, and immediately ordered a copy of the book in a gesture of solidarity with Rushdie. There was no Amazon.com in those days; I had to place the order by snailmail and wait.

Q: Was the book worth the wait?
A: The gesture was. I read the book more than 20 years ago and remember little about it. Some people claimed that they found it unreadable. I don't remember any overt blasphemy, but I do remember a less-than-flattering portrait of an old kook who bore an uncanny resemblance to Khomeini, which might have been what all the fuss n' feathers was really about.

Q: Of what are you most afraid?

A: Homelessness. Death, too, of course, but death is something you only have to deal with once. The idea of ending up homeless scares the shit out of me. I see homeless people all the time, as do we all, and try to hand them a couple of bucks when I can. Then I think of the song Eleanor Rigby and my heart sinks into my shoes. There but for the luck of the Irish go I.

Q: You're not Irish. Your last name is French.

A: Uh-huh, but that's on my Dad's side. My father's people were canucks -- they came down from Quebec in the early 20th century and wound up in Massachusetts, where my father was born. My biological grandmother on my mother's side was Irish. Her family name was Russell. They came from County Meath. You know The Book of Kells? Kells is in County Meath. Can't get more Irish than that.

Q: Where was your mother born?

A: England. Blackpool. My grandfather Winrow brought her to America when she was a girl. He was a Brit. He was born in 1879 and was in the British merchant marine for years. He met his first wife, his Irish wife, on a merchant ship bound for Peru. She died in 1921, when my mom was three months old. He met his second wife, the woman I knew as “Grandma,” in Pennsylvania.

Q: England, Ireland, Peru, Pennsylvania. How did you end up in southern California?

A: Grandpa Winrow came west in 1929 to join a friend of his in a business venture, which I understand was to have been regular air cargo freight service from the west coast of the U.S. to South America. But one of my family's curses is its ill-timing (and mine is absolutely the worst.) You can probably guess what happened: 1929. The stock market crashed, Grandpa Winrow and his buddy were wiped out, and the family was mired in San Diego County. Eighty years on, there are only two of us left here now, myself and my sister Carla. And I'm looking to get out.

Q: Why would anybody want to leave a beautiful place like San Diego?

A: The family's gone, and the family homestead, a house my grandfather bought in 1941, was sold after my father's death in 2005. There's nothing left here for me but memories. If you saw the Woody Allen film Radio Days, you might remember its poignant ending, in which Allen, as voice-over narrator, reminds one and all that memories fade with each passing year. All this played out against Kurt Weill's September Song, to me the saddest song ever written.

Q: Did you know either of your grandfathers?

A: No. Grandpa Winrow died six years before I was born, in the very same room in which my father would die 56 years later. I don't even know what Grandpere Dupuis looked like. My dad probably didn't know, either. My paternal grandfather ran off and deserted his family when my father was a little boy.

Q: What shocks you, if anything?

A: Well, we already talked about cruelty. Cruelty shocks and disturbs me. And any work of art, be it film, book or whatever, that is deliberately mean-spirited or makes light of mean-spiritedness. Very hip people thought David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet a sophisticated spoof of something. I saw only ugliness. I hated every minute of it.

Q: Have you been to the movies lately?

A: As a matter of fact I went to a movie yesterday. First time I’d gone to a movie theater to see a first-run film in seven years. My pal Charlie and I went to see Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln.

Q: What did you think?

A: I was ambivalent about it, and so was Charlie. We agreed that the movie gave us too many emotional cues, which can lead to a viewer’s feeling manipulated. But that’s Steven Spielberg. Remember Saving Private Ryan? Also, it should have ended with Day-Lewis walking off into the night on his way to Ford’s Theater. But it went on beyond that. Every American schoolkid knows that Booth shot Lincoln. We didn’t need to be shown that again. The film was about the passing of the 13^th Amendment, which abolished slavery just before the end of the Civil War. That’s where it should have ended I think.

Q: Do you exercise?

A: I have to, these days. I don’t have a car anymore. When I’m in California, I pretty much get around on a bicycle.

Q: What happened to your car?

A: When I went overseas to teach school about 18 months ago, my sister sold it. I asked her to.

Q: What’s the most hopeful word in any language?

A: Love.

Q: And the most dangerous?

A: Love.

Q: Have you ever wanted to kill anybody?

A: Yes, but never for more than five minutes, which wasn't enough time to actually do it.

Q: What are your political interests?

A: I have none. I don’t vote any more, and only look at the newspaper to check the obituaries and the baseball scores.

 Q: If you could be anything, what would you like to be?

A: Financially independent, just like everyone else. Other than that, I don’t know. Invisible, maybe. That could be a lot of fun.

Q: What are your chief vices? And virtues?

A: Well, I hardly drink any more, and I never did do drugs. I don’t gamble. You couldn’t pay me to watch TV. I guess the only vice I have left is cigars. And smokeless tobacco. Virtues? I think if I have a chief virtue, it’s gratitude. As W.H. Auden put it, “Let your last thinks all be thanks.”

Q: Do you have a particular guiding principle that you live by?

A: Yeah.  If it looks too good to be true, it is.

There Is Joy In Mudville

It's warm today here in southern California, even though the calendar says it's still winter.

That's what everybody likes about southern California.

Along with the warm weather of early March comes a piece of very good news for Los Angeles Dodgers fans.

Sandy Koufax is back in Dodger blue. Yes!

Sandy Koufax imparts wisdom to youth.

Koufax was signed by the old Brooklyn Dodgers for $10,000 as a "bonus baby" in 1955, (the year I was born), retired from pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1966 after a string of amazing seasons, and is (deservedly) a legend. He is the greatest lefty who ever pitched for the Dodgers, and maybe the greatest lefty, period. (I would answer "yes" to the latter, because Koufax has been one of my gods since I was a  child.) But I don't want to spark any baseball debates, and by the way, my friends who are San Francisco Giants fans are hereby excused.

I'm usually the last one to hear news. I don't read newspapers, I don't watch TV news, and I avoid Internet news websites. But I do watch baseball, and when it's not available on TV, I listen to it on the radio. Yesterday I was listening to the Dodgers play the Angels in a spring training game on KLAC AM 570 out of Los Angeles, and KLAC laid some joy on me.

Sandy is coaching Dodger pitchers in spring training again. This is good news for the Dodgers.

And for me.

Koufax and the Dodger organization have had their estrangements over the years. The reclusive Koufax has distanced himself from the Dodgers more than once, although for many years after his retirement he showed up at spring training camp every winter to observe, advise and, well yes, be gawked at. (I'm sure this last caused Koufax some discomfort. He shuns the spotlight and doesn't like to talk about himself.)

But listening to yesterday's game on the radio, I learned that Koufax had been talked into coming back. Former Dodger owner Rupert Murdoch is long gone, and with him his media empire, which includes the New York Post. The Post published a piece in 2003 that so angered Koufax he disappeared again, and was gone for years.

But now he's back. The Dodgers and their fans may rejoice.

To commemorate this great occasion, I will now reproduce a poem  wrote a couple of years ago about my childhood experience of watching Koufax pitch, once and once only, on television:



Sandy Koufax posted an unbelieveable
.038 ERA in three games of the 1965 World Series
against the Minnesota Twins. I was ten, and
will never see the like again.
 

Seeing Sandy Koufax

 

I ran home from school one afternoon -- ran, got it?

Because baseball was still an afternoon game then,

and I wanted to get in front of the Sears

black-and-white portable as quickly as I could.

 

I couldn't have known it, but I was racing the clock

for keeps: at the end of that very season he retired.

The elbow caught up with the arm from hell.

 

But I got there. KTLA, Channel 5: I saw it,

him, the clockwork nightmare. (Willie Mays

Himself said the ball looked like an aspirin --

you barely sensed it whooshing past,

a dancing bullet in the afternoon light.)

 

Baffled hitters had two-tenths of a second

to watch it drop like Tennyson's eagle. Dancing.

 

Children, there was nothing like it. I pity you,

not having been there, never having seen.

His body became a slingshot like David's,

or like the spaceship in that dumb sequel to 2001,

 

where it sweeps around Jupiter, and using

the giant planet's gravity, slingshots itself violently

toward home. (This was about pitching, and going home.)

 

I got to see it in glorious black-and-white.

I was ten, and would never see its like again.

 

KD

 

A few years ago someone published a book entitled 101 Reasons To Love The Dodgers.

 

This is Reason #102.

 

Play ball!