Spain, Again…
The Spanish countryside today
Dan Bessie (left) with Oriol Porta, director of "Hollywood Contra Franco" in the Ebro River Valley
Dan and others walk through the Ebro Valley, the scene of some of the great struggles of the Spanish Civil War
An Abraham Lincoln Brigade landmark, from 1938, is still there
The same Lincoln Brigade headquarters in 1938
The dead sleep cold in Spain tonight. Snow blows through
the olive groves, sifting against the tree roots. Snow drifts
over the mounds with small headboards. For our dead are a
part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can
never die. Each winter it will seem to die and each spring it
will come alive again. Our dead will live with it forever.
–Ernest Hemingway
By DAN BESSIE
Don Quixote, had he ventured out of La Mancha today and into the Ebro River valley from whence we’ve just returned, might well be terrified by the 150 or more gigantic white windmills dotting the landscape. Installed to generate electricity for Spain, the workers constructing these behemoths also uncovered the unmarked graves of hundreds of Catalan and Spanish, as well as American, British, Canadian and other international dead of whom Hemingway speaks—some of the 35,000 or more volunteer soldiers who came to the aid of the Spanish Republic during the late 1930s, in its heroic but failed effort to prevent the country’s takeover by the Falangist general Franco—aided by his fascist pals, Hitler and Mussolini. Read more
God Damn The L.A. Dodgers
BY LIONEL ROLFE
Magic Johnson doesn’t come across as a Frank McCourt, so maybe he will be successful in his effort to rebuild the Dodgers, but I don’t necessarily wish him luck.
In the relatively short time Frank McCourt owned the Dodgers and that valuable real estate in Elysian Park near downtown, he managed to trash the franchise. He was such an obvious repulsive billionaire slimeball, people stayed away from his enterprise in droves. From my standpoint, that wasn’t necessarily bad. Because people stopped going to the ballgame, I was able to commute from downtown Los Angeles home to Atwater late at night without getting stuck in all the traffic leaving the stadium.
McCourt was good for the traffic patterns on the freeways around his property. Now I fear the old days will return, and I’ll be sitting there in traffic in that series of endless tunnels just before you go north on the Golden State. Read more
Shaggy Man’s Ramblings – New from Boryanabooks
We are please to announce the publication of a new paper book from Boryanabooks: Shaggy Man’s Ramblings: Essays by Leslie Evans.
The book is 342 pages and lists for $12.95 at Amazon.
Click here for the Amazon sales page.
Below is the full Preface
The majority of these essays first appeared on my website, The Shaggy Man’s Place (www.shaggyman.com). All but one were written between 2006 and early 2012. Just over half are biographical sketches of people who interest me: Sayyid Qutb, the central theorist of jihadi Islam, polemicist Christopher Hitchens, George Bernard Shaw, and a group of figures prominent in Los Angeles history who lived or are buried in my turn-of-the-twentieth century West Adams neighborhood. Read more
International Reaction To The Raymond Avenue Murders
Editor:
Sorry to read about the murder of 2 students in your city. Thanks for informing me. Actually, I only passed through LA twice. LA geography and crime is pretty distant.
I sure join in hoping that USA political economy and culture turn around and there’ll be less crime, drugs, guns, unemployment, vacant houses and homeless people…
Dont use new expensive cars or sit in any car or outside especially not after dark… Scary stuff. Read more
On the Raymond Avenue Tragedy
2700 block of Raymond Avenue, where the killings took place.
Leslie Evans
USC and the nearby West Adams neighborhood where the double murder took place April 11 are still in shock. Police are hunting the cold-blooded killer in a widening manhunt, and a new wave of fear is settling into the neighborhood after two decades of reductions in local crime. As president of the Van Buren Place Community Restoration Association, the block club for the area where the murders happened, I want to express the most profound sympathy from all of our neighbors to the parents of Ying Wu, who lived among us, and of her male friend Ming Qu.
I met Ying Wu only once, in the home where she rented a room, four doors away from mine, and remember her as lovely and laughing. She had come from distant Hunan in China’s interior to study electrical engineering at USC. She was living with a nurturing couple and their daughter who are among my closest friends and in whose home I have spent many happy hours. On the day we met I had visited to watch Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western, Once Upon a Time in the West, with the homeowner, my friend David. As it was ending Ying Wu and her roommate came home. We were introduced and shared momentary pleasantries, they sampled the snacks I had brought and went up to their room. Yesterday the wanton violence of our celluloid afternoon became real and she was struck down at the age of twenty-three while talking in the rain in her boyfriend’s car. She was shot in the chest; he in the face. Trying to save her, Ming Qu, mortally wounded, made his way from the car, up the walk to the house. He banged on the door to summon help, breaking two small glass panes before falling unconscious. He died on the way to the hospital, also twenty-three. Under China’s one-child policy they were both only children. Read more
Why I Like My Old Friend Gerald Nicosia So Much
Lionel Rolfe (left) with Gerald Nicosia, at Beyond Baroque. Photo by Susan McRae
LIONEL ROLFE
I met up with my old friend Gerald Nicosia the other day at Beyond Baroque in Venice where they were holding forth about Jack Kerouac on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
Nicosia, whose book Memory Babe has remained the major biography of the man, was joined by Harry E. Northrup and Aram Saroyan and lots of other beat poets in a moving celebration. There was talk of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kenneth Patchen and Kenneth Rexroth. There was a religious fervor to the moment, even if Gerald was obviously tired. He’d been traveling to promote his new book One And Only: The Untold Story Of On The Road. But when a special moment from Kerouac was mentioned, his face lit up and the tiredness vanished and he burned with an intensity that belied his aches and pains.
People who tend to write off Bohemians as politically left miss the fact that Kerouac’s friendship with William F. Buckley was based on two pillars they shared: Catholicism and conservative politics. Kerouac even had real anti-Semitic animosity to Ginsberg. Read more
The Magic of Lord Dunsany
Leslie Evans
Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
When the world is too much with you, the inanities of politics have you down, and the fount of insoluble crises discourages, it is a good time to read something by Lord Dunsany. An Edwardian Irish aristocrat, much of his voluminous work is long out of print, but what is available is mostly his early wonder tales, probably his best. Dunsany is usually described as a fantasy or science fiction writer, but such terms mislead. He is often compared to the more widely read H. P. Lovecraft, who readily acknowledged Dunsany’s influence, yet their work shows more differences than similarities. Read more
“Edendale” Now Available as an Amazon Kindle Book
Long serialized here on Boryanabooks, Phyl van Ammers generations-spanning tribute to the people of the near mythical Edendale in Los Angeles’s northern hills, better known today as Echo Park and Silverlake, is now available as an Amazon Kindle book.
The characters in the made-up Edendale come from the Black Sea, from a shtetl in Ukraine, from slavery in the Southern States, from Japan, from the Polish enclave in Hopewell, Virginia, from Bulgaria, from the island of Curacao, and from Mexico. They fall in love, read Ina Coolbrith’s poetry, sing in a scratchy old voice, dry clean, press and sew clothes, sell rags, drink malted milk, swim in the Pacific Ocean, live homeless along the river, practice law, play the piano and the violin, teach school children, research in a library, take the train to Union Station, soldier in World War II, fly into the ocean, go mad, take acid and hallucinate, and are struck by a hit-and-run driver. Some of the characters die, and their survivors attend the funerals and say bad things about the departed.
Click here for the Amazon Kindle edition of Edendale. Only $8.00
FREE TRADE DOESN’T WORK
By LIONEL ROLFE
There’s been something wrong in this land for several decades now–most people have been sensing that but haven’t been able to put a name to it. Finally, economist Ian Fletcher wrote a book called, “Free Trade Doesn’t Work” which pretty effectively says it all.
He also, never modestly, offers up some beguiling simple solutions to the problem.
I would have never expected an economist to come up with any answers. I rarely ever turned to proponents of the “dismal science” because I always figured that was too generous a description of whatever it is they do. For me, economists have always had more in common with the clergy who dominated most of human history up until the last century or so than real scientists. Psychology and economics and other pseudo-sciences have moved into the fray in the last century or two, with new explanations of things. Not necessarily better ones. Read more
A French Philosopher Challenges Europe’s Sympathy for Third World Despotisms
Pascal Bruckner
The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism – Pascal Bruckner. Translated from the French by Steven Rendall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010 (original French version, 2006).
Leslie Evans
Pascal Bruckner is one of that inimitable French breed of public intellectuals: philosopher, academic, novelist, and polemicist. Born at the end of 1948, he is a veteran of the sixties, when he had a certain sympathy for Maoism. Today he is a firm liberal, in American terms perhaps a very moderate leftist. He is a leading figure among the New Philosophers who broke with Marxism in the early 1970s, others including Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, Alain Badiou, and Bernard-Henri Levy, though even those grouped under this sobriquet share no common platform.
Bruckner presents an unapologetic defense of liberal democracy in its confrontations with religious and third world authoritarians. He endorsed the NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in defense of Muslims under attack by Serbian forces in the former Yugoslavia. He supported the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq, though he was later critical of the U.S. conduct of the war. And, like Paul Berman in his Flight of the Intellectuals, Bruckner came to the defense of Somali exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali when she was contemptuously labeled an “Enlightenment fundamentalist” by leftist authors Ian Baruma and Timothy Garton Ash for her campaign against Islamic female genital mutilation, the two authors contrasting her unfavorably to the supposed Islamic moderate Tariq Ramadan. Bruckner dismissed Ash and Baruma as epitomizing the “racism of the anti-racists.” Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
