LAWRENCE LIPTON (1959) First chapter of THE HOLY BARBARIANS - SLUM BY THE SEA

Lipton writes about Venice Beach.

LAWRENCE LIPTON (1959)  First chapter of THE HOLY BARBARIANS  - SLUM BY THE SEA

Page 421-422

Here, working couples with children find the run-down apartments and tumble - down shacks that the realtor has to offer,.  To them, too, it is Land's End.  After being turned away in other parts of town with "No children, no pets." they stagger finally into Ocean Park and Venice, foot-sore or with an empty gas tank, ready to rent anything with four walls and a roof, even if the walls are paper-thin and the roof leaks and the toilet is stuffed up.  "Wait till you see how I'll fix it up," says the wife with a tired little smile, and Dad has visions of puttering around Sunday morning with a paint brush turning this time-rotted ruin into the American Dream Home of the magazine color pages.

The young who come here have no such dreams.  The aged, living in the sealed-in loneliness of their television sets, will leave them alone. The working couples, fatigued after a night on the graveyard shift at nearby Douglas Aircraft, will nod over their beer and listen to the jukebox in the waterfront taverns.  If books, painting or music, or all-night gab fest are more important to the young than the mop and dishrag, nobody will read them any lectures on neatness in a neighborhood where it is no crime to leave the beds unmade and two days' dishes in the sink.  Nobody will turn to stare at beards and sandals or dirty Levi's on the beach where a stained sweat shirt or a leather jacket is practically formal dress.

Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

EXCERPT FROM THURSTON CLARK'S BOOK : JFK LAST HUNDRED DAYS

Commentary : This is fabulous writing, bringing the reader to the scene in the nation, in the world, with broad strokes and then the small details, painting a heart rendering picture of the JFK assassination and immediate aftermath!

CHAPTER "AFTER DALLAS"  (Last Chapter)
Pages 347 - 362

Jackie wept first, and from her and from Dallas a tidal wave of tears rolled across the nation and around the world.  In New York, there was a murmur and then a rising wail as the news jumped between tables at a midtown restaurant.  Advertising men in tailored suits hurried into St. Patrick's Cathedral and fell onto their knees.  Outside, drivers hunched over steering wheels, sobbing as dashboard radios broadcast the news.  A crowd gathered at the Magnavox showroom on Fifth Avenue, watching on television sets piled two stories high as Walter Cronkite chocked back tears before announcing that the President was dead.  Chorus girls rehearsing for an evening television show at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway kicked in unison, arms linked around waists and tears streamed down their cheeks.

In Washington, a rookie police officer wept as he lowered the flag on the Capitol dome to half mast and looked down to see that drivers had abandoned their cars and stood in the street, staring up at the flag and crying... At Harvard, a girl wept on the steps of the Widener Library and a boy hit a tree in time to a tolling church bell... President Truman cried so much when he called on Jackie before the funeral that he had to be put to bed in the White House.  A poem by the columnist Art Buchwald began each line, "We weep for, " and conclude, "We weep because there is nothing else we can do."  The cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting with his head in his hands... November 22 would be the first time many children saw an adult cry, and after hearing the news from sobbing teachers they went home to find their mothers in tears.  A girl remembered her mother doing the ironing as she watched television, her tears sizzling a they hit the hot iron...

Soviet interest in maintaining the atmosphere of détente created by the nuclear test ban treaty was demonstrated by the appointment of First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikolya, the most powerful Soviet official after Khrushchev, to represent the USSR at President Kennedy's funeral.  Khrushchev instructed his wife to write Jackie a personal note, an unprecedented gesture for a Soviet leader that his son believed was meant to stress "the sincerity and personal nature of his sympathy." ... (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko would tell the actor Kirk Douglas, "People cried in the street... They sensed that, in him (Kennedy). there might be a chance for our two countries to get together."

... Big Ben tolled every minute for an hour, lights dimmed in Piccadilly Circus, and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home reported that distraught British teenagers were "openly crying in the street." ...

Danes carried bouquet to the U.s Embassy and left behind a six foot high wall of flowers.  ...

Sixty thousand  West Berliners held an impromptu torchlight procession and gathered in the square where Kennedy had said "Ich bein ein Berliner." ...

President Charles de Gaulle told a friend, "I am stunned.  They are crying all over France.  It is as if he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family."

EXCERPTS FROM : JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE C 2013
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.
Penguin Press New York 2013 Publisher

THE STACKS

 

The original image I used when I first opened this blog!

JFK and JACKIE VORACIOUS READERS : FROM JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS

Page 72

He and Jackie were voracious readers.  For her, books had been an escape from her parent's troubled marriage; for him, an escape during his many illnesses and hospitalizations.  His reading had a determined and remorseless quality, and he read at meals, in the bathtub, and even propped a book up on his bureau as he dressed.  He told his friend Larry Newman, "I feel better when there are books around.  That's really where my education comes from."  Exchanging books had become a form of communication for them - a way of expressing feelings they had difficulty voicing.....

Page 73

Kennedy was a fast reader and could have finished the biography that weekend (of Marshall of France: The life and Times of Maurice de Saxe.

******

CT editor : Jackie may have given this book to her husband because Maurice de Saxe, the man it profiled, was much like him.  Witty, elegant, a philanderer. Even the Count's mother may have reminded her of Rose Kennedy, growing increasingly eccentric as she aged.  Also, the Count's father may have reminded her of JFK's father, Joe Kennedy, who was a "notorious satyr."  There were other similarities.  Jackie's first child Arabella, had been miscarried.  Maurice de Saxe's wife's first born lived only a few days, as had their son Patrick.  I wonder if Jackie believed in reincarnation.  I know from reading around her that she was a bit of a fatalist.



JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE C 2013
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.
Penguin Press New York 2013 Publisher

GARDEN VARIETY PARANOIA ? LAPL LIBRARY RECORD? ACCIDENTALLY RUNNING INTO PORN?

GARDEN VARIETY PARANOIA ?  LAPL LIBRARY RECORD NOT PRIVATE?
ACCIDENTALLY RUNNING INTO PORN?

 

By Christine Trzyna  C 2013

One of my more garden-variety-paranoid associates, who used to be a security guard at a world famous museum and owns a gun collection that was handed down in his family, is, among other things, afraid of how law enforcement (maybe the FBI?) can get your LIBRARY RECORD.  The way this goes is that you're suspected of doing something wrong and so they get your library account number and then a list of all the books you ever took out from say, LAPL.  From this they determine a psychological profile of you.

The truth is that I do suspect that LAPL and other libraries are collecting this information, but I don't know for sure.  I feel more sure that they know exactly what you're doing on the computer with your two free hours, but then I still believe you'd have to be doing something illegal for any law enforcement to actually ask for the record. 

Example, several years ago a person was arrested in the Studio City branch for using e-mail to send prostitutes to assignments.  It was in the paper that the police had been monitoring (reading) his e-mails for years, since he'd been doing so from the Sherman Oaks branch.

I tried to calm my garden-variety-paranoid associate. 

"I read all around subjects. I sometimes take out a book for the hell of it and I may or may not read the whole thing. There are books and films I've ordered, picked up, and then returned without reading or watching much of.  NO ONE CAN PROVE YOU READ A BOOK OR WATCHED A FILM SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU TOOK IT HOME.   NO ONE CAN PROVE YOU AGREE WITH AN AUTHOR'S POINT OF VIEW or that you were influenced by what you were exposed to!  ou can just as well get pissed off at an author as you can suck up information. Who can prove that what you read or watch says anything about you besides that you were curious or had a whim?

Actually, to me, it's circumstantial evidence that you actually looked at or read a web-site.  Unless you're Robert Blake and the FBI just looked at your hard drive and found out you were looking for murder supplies.

Through the years I have honestly and accidentaly hit into porn when I wasn't looking for it.  n my lifetime I have actually looked for it almost never.  I'm not for it. It goes against my spiritual beliefs and what I want for this world.

One such case was maybe a decade ago when I was looking for information on Sarasvati, the Goddess of the Arts in Hinduism.  (You might think of her as a patron saint of writers, musicians, dancers...) 

At the time I had an earthlink account and used their search engine.  One of the main links on the first page was called "Sarasvati's Temple." So I clicked and got onto an inter-racial dating site. I believe it was owned by a woman of some Asian background and her purpose was to give dating advice to men, mostly Asian men, and to assure them that there were inaccurate stereotypes that were effecting their self esteem.  So if you paged all the way down to say, page 20, you got to the International Penis Size Survey. This page had a 'how to measure' that had an actual penis on it.  I wasn't offended.  One of my platonic men friends thought it was so funny that he asked me to print the whole thing out for him to show his friends.

However, soon after that my earthlink account was plagued with porn spam, even communications that suggested I could get my hands on child pornography.  It was disgusting.  I was advised that pornographers were targeting me.  I got over 700 such offers in the 3 weeks that I was out of town on vacation.  One person suggested that the offer for child porn was actually an undercover operation.

Then there was the time I was checking on where hits were coming from to this Blog.  I happened to be at a Latter Day Saints genealogy library taking a quick break from research and believe me when I say that in the one second that it took to see a flash of the porn and shut it down, the Church people were notified that someone was looking at porn.  It was embarrassing as the manager came out and looked at what a row of young missionary men ("Elders") who had just come in were looking at on the computers.

More recently I discovered a graphic lesbian porn site linking to this blog.  It took me about half a second to get back to a civilized view of the world.  Sometimes people actually think that they are going to get at you in some way, say because you hate porn, by trying to infiltrate your work. 

Is this where I yawn?



C 2013 - 2022  Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved

THEY DIDN'T PAY ME TO SAY THIS! MY FAVORITE SALSA? HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES PEACH MANGO!

HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES : FATHER GREGORY BOYLE - SALSA ETC

Bought it at Ralphs - LOOOOVED it!  And there are many other products you can buy to support the effort which focuses on helping gang members get out of gangs and stay out of gangs!

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1933) GOLDEN LAND

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1933) GOLDEN LAND

"Hush now. Get into your trunks while I fix you a drink.  It's going to be swell at the beach."  In the bedroom his bathing trunks and robe were laid out on the bed.  He changed, hanging his suit in the closet where her clothes hung, where there hung already another suit of his and clothes for the evening.  When he returned to the sitting room she had fixed the drink for him; she held up the glass, watching him still with that serene impersonal smiling.  Now he watched her slip off the cape and kneel at the cellarette, filling a silver flask, in the bathing costume of the moment, such as ten thousand wax female dummies wore in ten thousand shop windows that summer, such as a hundred thousand young girls wore on California beaches; he looked at her, kneeling - back, buttocks and flanks trim enough, even firm enough (so firm in fact as to be a little on the muscular side, what with unremitting and perhaps even rigorous care) but still those of forty.  But I don't want a young girl, he thought. Would to God that all young girls, all young female flesh, were removed, blasted even, from the earth. He finished the drink before she had filled the flash....


Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

September 11 2023  My apologies to the fourteen readers who hit on this post. I suppose spell check did not work or save did not, as there were an embarrassing number of errors on this post. I do sometimes review posts after hitting the word publish but apparently did not catch these. I hope this is corrected now.  This is one of several quotes selected from Writing Los Angeles....  

JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE

CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

Any writing on a well known subject (The Sinking of the Titanic, Elvis Presley, the Presidency and Assassination of President John F. Kennedy) is challenged by all those who have tackled it before.  This year a number of JKF books are out to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of his death.  Are publishers just trying to Capitalize on this or is it more?  Could the American Reader be harkening back to a time when the typical citizen believed in his President?

Thurston Clarke was brilliant on focusing on JFK's last hundred days of life, as a President of the United States, because the reader senses in this a countdown to the inevitable.  Indeed, that focus makes us anxious because we already know what is going to happen, the death of a President by assassination, an event that is still controversial to this day.  Thurston managed to build suspense despite our already knowing what is going to happen. 

For a writer the challenge is how to tell the same old story it a different way, perhaps through his own writing style that simmers up from their own personality and character, and in this Thurston Clarke has exceeded all expectations. The focus here is on the humanity of the man and how he had changed as person within the historical context of the Presidency and his marriage to Jackie.   Readers around the subject as I am, will take in stride some of the reportage and note the difference in how certain issues are opened without defensiveness.

Haunting are the many times that JFK acknowledged, considered, and spoke about possibly being assassinated, as if he knew, and you know, sometimes people do know that they are going to die.  

The last chapter brought all that momentum to the sad climax of the immediate aftermath of the announcement that our American President was slain.  The event was impactful, the writing even more so in the delivery of a succession of scenes from around the country and around the world.  I cried, and I knew I wasn't just crying for JFK, or what once was, but for our United States of America, which seems to be in so very much trouble now.

Was it innocence that the American public had?  How could that be in this era of developing Civil Rights?  What made a Harvard educated man who never carried cash or credit cards with him because all bills got paid one way or another, who was shielded from poverty for much of his life, acknowledge the poor and understand that poverty is an issue tied to Civil Rights? 

Sometimes I think it was, first and foremost, because of his personal experience of bodily pain, disability, something that he (and his family) sought to dismiss.  Many people in as much pain, without advantage, suffer their whole lives in poverty, unable to find an employer who will have them.  He knew he would not be elected or considered a viable President if people knew what ailed him, and what ailed him was a lot.

As I continued to read this book, my promise to myself that I really would get up and do the dishes went unkept, as did my promise that I would take my dog for a really long walk.  I admit to be a slug of a woman who laid around in an unmade bed until I finished the book.  My dog sat with her head down on a pillow watching me, waiting with patience. But not a lot of you have that much luxury, so for you my excerpts.

Christine Trzyna

JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE C 2013
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.
Penguin Press New York 2013 Publisher