Honey Talks About Anais Nin
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
A year after my mother’s funeral, I spent Christmas Eve some years ago with my younger step-brother and stepfather at the home of an elderly Ukrainian man – John – in Cathedral City, which is near Palm Springs.
The funeral had been relatively horrible. My stepfather was a Jew but he got a priest to deliver the eulogy because, as he said, “You never know.” My brother wore movie star sunglasses indoors and took over for the priest and spoke for hours, all of it a lot of crap. Afterwards, my brother solemnly sat us down and said that the mourner who arrived dressed like Elvis Presley had put Voodoo beads in our mother’s casket to replace her rosary and for just a moment my father had wanted to go out and dig her up.
John had a heavy hand when he filled our glasses with a transparent alcohol. Read more
Honey Ponders Karl Marx And Charles Dickens
[This essay introduces Boryanabooks contributing writer Honey van Blossom. Honey is a former Marxist Belgian striptease artiste who writes from a tower on one of the Silver Lake hills, which she shares with her husband the Baron von Munchausen.]
Over the winter break, I took my eleven-year old grandson Ethan Allen to the movies and we saw Jim Carrey’s voice and eyes assemble an animated Ebeneezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
I hadn’t read the novella since I was Ethan’s age, when I thought the story was a fable about a hard-hearted stingy man transformed by hallucinations into a kindly gentleman who becomes a second father to Tiny Tim.
In this winter’s film of A Christmas Carol, images of the city’s impoverished people, social injustice, coldness, death and the miserable ghost Marley chained to his boxes of money contrast with memories of an innocent English countryside from a kinder past, when Scrooge was a young man, and with the beaming and fat wealthy man who is an incarnation of charity and philanthropy and with the accepting humility of the underpaid Bob Cratchit and his family. 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.
