Disputing Rasputin, Despair & Other Maters That Try My Soul
Lionel Rolfe
Author and journalist Lionel Rolfe says these essays may be his final summing up. At the moment he feels they are. But Rolfe has published eight books, and he similarly felt this way after each one of them was published, he admits.
Many of his books are focused on California, which he sees as a state of mind as much as the most significant state in the American union. He has worked as a staffer and a prolific freelancers for for some of the most prestigious newspapers in California–the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was for a decade the last editor of the B’nai Brith Messenger, the second oldest newspaper in Los Angeles until its death in the late ‘90s.
He also was an editor for Psychology Today when that magazine was edited from Del Mar, north of San Diego on the Pacific Ocean. He is the author of the classic Literary L.A., The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey, The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather and Fat Man on the Left.
But these essays do not stay in California nor are they concerned with only California things. In this book he writes about love and despair, death, religion, great music, London, and personal encounters with folks like Eugene McCarthy, Ed Asner, the real “Columbo” and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who was his uncle. He didn’t know Steve Jobs, but he felt some strong connections that put him close to the man.
As in the past, he writes about a large array of those he has known and befriended, the eccentric and the exceptional, the corrupt and the incorruptible, the charismatic and the naive, the utopian and dystopian, the visionaries and victimized, the radical and the reactionary, the (in) famous and the unjustly forgotten.
The son of concert pianist Yaltah Menuhin and Superior Court Judge Benjamin L. Rolfe, journalist and author Rolfe has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, among other nationwide periodicals across the country, and featured in PBS’s documentary America Utopia. A documentary about Rolfe and his book Literary L.A. is in production. He is the author of ten published nonfiction books and one novel. His prior work has been praised by Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Booklist, Variety, and as far-flung as the Guardian.
Rolfe speaks regularly at writers’ conferences, public forums, and in university courses on the subjects of literature, music, politics, and culture. He currently resides in Los Angeles.
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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.
