Conversation starter

One of my favorite things about living here is that there are so many outdoor cafes and coffee shops. I like to treat myself to breakfast, sitting outside at a rickety metal table, watching the traffic go by and maybe reading a book while sipping coffee.

Yesterday I grabbed up a novel I'm reading and headed to my regular cafe. When I got there, I was surprised and delighted to see a friend sitting there. "May I join you?" I said.

"Sure."

I put down my book and went inside to order my coffee. When I came out, he was looking quizzically at my book.

"Sex and Rage?" he asked.

Later, a friend of his walked by. They greeted one another, and he introduced me to her. Her eye fell upon the closed book on the table and she did a double take. "Sex and Rage?" she asked.

Today, I met another friend for coffee at another cafe. While I was waiting, I chatted with the waitress. She glanced at my book. "Sex and Rage?" she asked.

Eve Babitz is an author born in Los Angeles who became somewhat notorious during the '60s for her semi-autobiographical writings about LA's rock and roll and arts scene, and the culture of Southern California itself. She played the role of groupie/muse for several artists, including Jim Morrison of the Doors, Ed Ruscha, Steve Martin, and others. Her work is now being reissued, and I'm fascinated by her crazy, kaleidoscopic take on Los Angeles in the '60s. "Sex and Rage" is the third book of hers I've read. The book - so far, anyway - is not really about sex, and not really full of rage.

Yet - the title on the cover is so bold it really stands out! For a single woman sitting in a public place, I seem to have found myself an unintended conversation starter.  What an interesting experiment!

Work ahead

My classes begin a week from today. I've ordered the required books for my classes, and they've started to arrive. I'm renting some of the books - it's cheaper than buying, and you just have to return them at the end of the term. Others, I'm buying because I think I will want to own them. Others, I'm buying digital versions of them.

So far, I've received about eight books. There are a couple more I'm waiting on.

For my "Non-Fiction as genre" class, these are actual books, not textbooks, and when I signed up for the class, I started reading the suggested list, taking them out from the Los Angeles County Library.

My other book-intense class is on British Romantic poetry, and I've got a couple of poetry anthologies. I've dipped into them randomly, but it's hard to know what poems the class will be focusing on.

In any case - it's all about reading. Books, books, books!

Santa Monica Noir

Palisades Park looking over the bluffs in good weather

It was good standing there on the promontory overlooking the evening sea, the fog lifting itself like gauzy veils to touch his face. There was something in it akin to flying; the sense of being lifted high above crawling earth, of being a part of the wildness of air. Something too of being closed within an unknown and strange world of mist and cloud and wind...

The unseasonably foggy weather we're experiencing now in August makes me think of Dorothy B. Hughes' 1942 noir thriller "In a Lonely Place," which is set in Santa Monica. The novel opens with the protagonist, former fighter pilot Dix Steele, standing on the bluffs of Santa Monica's Palisades Park, looking out over the fog-shrouded beach.

Bloomsday

June 16 is Bloomsday - a commemoration and celebration of the life of author James Joyce. The novel Ulysses is set entirely on the day of June 16, 1904. In Dublin and in US cities, Bloomsday is observed by readings of the novel, visiting the settings of its scene, and even dressing up like Joyce's characters.

Like most people, I've tried to read Ulysses and failed. It's dense going. But if you want to try, you can read it online at the Gutenberg Project. Here's a Wikipedia page that gives a synopsis.

And for a mid-day Sunday, here's Leopold Bloom in a pub, having his lunch and daydreaming:

—Have you a cheese sandwich?
—Yes, sir.
Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of burgundy take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber, Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.
—Wife well?
—Quite well, thanks... A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?
—Yes, sir.
 ...
Wine.
He smellsipped the cordial juice and, bidding his throat strongly to speed it, set his wineglass delicately down...

Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off....

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all.O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

My! What a powerful spur to memory, just gorgonzola cheese and burgundy wine!

Here in Los Angeles, you can celebrate Bloomsday at the UCLA Hammer Museum. Enjoy your Bloomsday!

Bibliophilia

"Diagnosis" - installation by Jena Priebe and David Lovejoy

Book lovers, rejoice. Here is your Mecca.

We just happened to stumble upon The Last Bookstore when we were taking a post-brunch walk through the historic financial district in downtown Los Angeles.

Tacos and tunes

Yesterday was the Second Annual Los Angeles Taco Festival in Boyle Heights.

Modest as festivals go, it isn't complicated. It's all about eating tacos, hanging out, and listening to music in Mariachi Plaza.

Music in the library

Imagine - a high brick wall covered with creeping fig entirely surrounds the property, which takes up an entire block in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.

This neighborhood is one of Los Angeles' oldest, with many of the buildings dating from between 1880 and 1925, It was once the home of LA's wealthiest founding fathers, and after the Supreme Court struck down segregationist covenants, it became the home of LA's wealthy and prominent African American community.

Construction of the 10 freeway cut through the neighborhood, destroying many fine homes, and the neighborhood declined in the '60s and '70s. But today it's coming back as preservationists, USC academics, and others discover neglected beauties among the mix of shabby Craftsman bungalows, pillared mansions, and stucco'd apartment houses. 

But in this block on the north side of West Adams Boulevard, between Gramercy and Cimarron, there's another Los Angeles treasure to discover.

Books, Schmooks

Libros Schimbros at the UCLA Hammer Museum

In 2010, David Kipen, native Angeleno and former director of the National Endowment for the Arts' Reading Initiatives opened a used bookstore and lending library in Boyle Heights, east of downtown in Los Angeles. He called the store Libros Schmibros - an inside joke about the early 20th century Yiddish heritage of Boyle Heights. In the store, Kipen sells used books and allows folks in the community to borrow books if they can't afford to buy. He encourages donations and welcomes volunteers to help shelve, stock and staff the store.

Many of his customers are neighborhood students who commute to universities across town, like UCLA - so it was a no-brainer for the UCLA Hammer Museum's Public Engagement program to bring an outpost of Libros Schmibros to Westwood for a residency.  Set up in the museum's lobby gallery, the extra space allows even more of the collection to be made available to the public, and to host a series of book discussions and readings by authors.



Some of the stock of used books in Kipen's collection came to him as independent bookstores in Los Angeles County closed and sold their stock - victims to competition from big chain stores, internet sales, and rising retail rents.

The run of the residency, originally scheduled to end on October 9, was extended until November 5th. We popped in to visit.

When you enter Libros Schmibros at the Hammer, you are welcomed with colorful garlands of papel picados, the Mexican cut-paper folk art used to celebrate holidays like Dias de los Muertos. There are also paper Chinese and Japanese lanterns that glow. The space is lined with bookcases and fitted out with a comfortable curved green couch that invites the visitor to get comfortable and read. Along the back wall of the space, above the cases, is a 23 foot long mural drawn by artist J. Michael Walker.

Titled "City in Mind: A Lyrical Map of the Concept of Los Angeles," it's a literary map of  Los Angeles. From the coastline where Joan Didion stands on the beach to Boyle Heights, where Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston writes about internment in Manzanar, throughout the landscape of greater Los Angeles, writers are depicted where they lived and wrote, and Walker shares quotes of their works. Early Iconic Los Angeles authors like Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler and John Fante are all here. So are current authors like Pulitzer Price winning food critic Jonathan Gold and wordsmith musicians like Randy Newman and the late Tupac Shakur. The map is multi-layered - it evokes simultaneously the earliest Tongva people, the Spanish missions, the Depression, the Summer of Love.

Detail - "Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I love you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town" - John Fante

 When we visited, both David Kipen and Michael Walker were there, and we spoke with them. Michael kindly allowed me to take photos of his map, and signed a copy of his book "All the Saint of the City of the Angels." David, while sharing my disappointment that so many independent bookstores are closing, told us of new stores bucking the trend. In Malibu, Diesel reopens. In Redondo Beach, Mysterious Galaxy Books offers some consolation to those who mourn the loss of Mystery Bookstore in Westwood. Though e-books and Amazon are threatening mainstream bookstores, he said the salvation of independent bookstores lies in neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, where many residents lack internet access.

There are efforts to find a permanent home for the literary map, whether at a museum, library, or university. The original Libros Schmibros is planning a move from its first store to another in Mariachi Plaza. The little room in the Hammer Museum was filled with well-wishers and an excited anticipation to turn the page on the next chapter.

Pink Saturday - Pretty pink poison

Pink Saturday - Beverly at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

I'm a little under the weather this week - cramps are roiling my gut, gurgling embarrassingly, with occasional spasms of pain. I don't know whether it's food poisoning, hormonal mischief, or just the large amount of jelly beans and Peeps I ate last weekend.

But I'm staying home with a hot pad on my tummy, lying in bed sipping tea and reading escapist novels.

Oleander is a common shrub here in Southern California, and you see it everywhere. There are white varieties, a pale peachy variety, and bright cherry-red like this shrub in my neighbor's yard.

I first learned about oleanders as a young teen, from a novel by Anya Seton. Back then, I read everything Ms. Seton wrote - thick romances set in Britain and America, with real historic figures interacting with her heroes and heroines.

I'm not sure it was good for me at twelve or thirteen to read these racy tales, with their torid sex scenes; but my teenaged self thrilled to read of the naked white limbs of the adulterous queen glimpsed fleetingly in darkness, the trembling lips of the lusty Puritan maiden, the passionate seduction of Katharine Swynford by the debonair John of Lancaster.

Seton's romances weren't as sexually explicit as modern romance novels, but what they lacked in specifics they made up for in drama, sweep, and sensational intrigue.


One of her early novels was set in the Hudson River valley, and the plot is, to us today, predictable. A young innocent girl leaves home to join the household of a rich family as a companion to their daughter. But all is not well at Dragonwyck. The Patroon despises his greedy and selfish wife, and lusts for Our Heroine. The wife gorges herself on desserts, sprinkling the sweet whipped cream with bay leaf ground in a little spice mill. One night, the unfortunate woman becomes violently ill and dies, freeing the Patroon to marry Our Heroine.

As their marriage founders, Our Heroine begins to suspect her predecessor's death was more than an accident. It is revealed that the Patroon replaced the bay leaves in his wife's spice mill with the deadly leaves of oleander.

Oleander is one of the most toxic plants in cultivation. Almost every part of the shrub is toxic. The bark, the leaves and even the flowers' nectar cause extreme gastrointestinal distress, abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting and excess salivation. It can also damage the heart and the central nervous system.

Living in northern cities like New York and Seattle, I'd never seen an oleander until we moved to Southern California. Some 25 years after reading "Dragonwyck" with its description of the violent symptoms of oleander poisoning, I was surprised and a bit uneasy to recognize the shrubs in my yard as oleanders.

Oleanders are widely grown here, because they're pretty, drought tolerant, and resistant to brush fires.

Still, it's curious that authorities recommend growing it in high-fire-risk areas. In Florida, on the Courtney Campbell Causeway, the state has posted signs among the oleander shrubs growing there, warning fishermen not to use the limbs for campfires to grill fish - so toxic is even the smoke.

In the novel "White Oleander" by Janet Fitch, a woman's conviction for poisoning her lover with oleander lands her daughter in the horrors of the state's foster-child programs. The white oleander appears again and again evoking the unease of Southern California's brush fires, It also appears as a sinister symbol of the mother's sociopathy.

Oleanders growing in Dijon, France

Oleanders grow in many tropical climates, including Sri Lanka and India. There, the Yellow Oleander plant is linked with up to 2000 poisonings a year - mostly deliberate, intended suicide.

As with most chemically complex plants, the oleander's ability to make the human gut purge its contents has beneficial uses, too. It has been used in traditional folk medicine in the Mediterranean region, and recent researchers have used extracts of the plant in anti-cancer drugs.


Still, when I walk the dog on our street we pass dozens of large, lush oleanders, in full bloom for the spring. Their pretty pink and white blossoms are sweetly fragrant, and unless you know what they are, they don't appear the least bit sinister.

Well, now!! Not very cheerful for Pink Saturday, is it? But it got my mind off my gurgling tummy!

What books are your guilty pleasures when you're under the weather?

UPDATE: Well, my tummy-ache has turned into a bigger adventure than I thought. Stay tuned.

Fashion encounter

The other day in a small Seattle boutique, I stood with another customer at the full-length mirror. I was considering a tunic dress I had tried on. She was looking at a cardigan sweater.

She paid me a compliment on my choice, and I returned the favor. She DID look wonderful - she had a great orange tweedy jacket that looked wonderful against her dark skin, and a bright scarf at her throat. As I looked through the Sale rack, I overheard her conversation with the saleswoman.

No, she didn't have much time, she had a car waiting outside. She was on a book tour, had done a reading here and was on her way to the airport. I asked her the name of her book.

Here it is:


Now go get it. Because any woman who can dress as cool and be as nice as Terry McMillan is worth a read.

A vivid sense of place

I don't know about you, but I'm the kind of reader who is a re-reader. I always like to go back and re-read a book that really grabbed me. And when I do find such a book, I like to keep reading in the same vein.

If I read a book by an author I like, I like to read all the author's works. Once I exhaust that, I like to read the author's biography. Or maybe the works of a contemporary or friend of the author. Or maybe books about the same region an author hails from or writes about.

A few weeks ago I pulled Richard Russo's book of short stories, "The Whore's Child," off my bookshelf. The collection is a nice introduction to Russo's work, from his earlier stories about life in a depressed upstate New York mill town to his wryly comic take on academia to his portraits of successful yet unsatisfied Hollywood types.

These roles seem to be mismatched, yet they reflect Russo's own life. Born in the small town of Gloversville, NY, Russo went on to become a professor of English. His novels were made into movies, and Russo went on to write screenplays and adaptations of his and other works.

He won the Pulitzer Prize a couple years ago for his novel "Empire Falls" which was made into a TV drama. Paul Newman starred in a film version of his novel "Nobody's Fool."

One of my favorite Russo books is his second novel, "The Risk Pool." It tells a story of a boy growing up in a small town, a broken marriage, a ne'er do-well father and a damaged and unhappy mother. But it's richer than that - Russo re-creates the emotions and embarrassments of adolescence; he evokes the flavor of his setting, and he lovingly - and comically - portrays the companionship between men. His characters ring true - even the minor ones are multilayered and complex, and his dialogue springs to life on the page. The sour-tempered bar owner, defeated and fearful postal worker, defeated ingenue doomed to a life under her mother's thumb are real enough to make a reader mourn for them. And the defiantly disorganized Sam Hall - the narrator's father - is an anti-hero as engaging and yet as hilarious as any character summoned from Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, or John Kennedy Toole.

A few days after I finished reading "The Risk Pool," I went to see an exhibition at the UCLA Hammer Museum, of the works of the American painter Charles Ephraim Burchfield.

The exhibition shows work throughout his career, starting with a period in 1917 when he lived in Ohio. He was very prolific as a young man, painting landscapes and scenes from nature that are almost hallucinogenic in their quivering energy, in the words of the Hammer site:

"Childhood's Garden" - Charles Burchfield, 1917

"vibrate with color and sound like visual symphonies where the humming of insects, rustling leaves, bells, moonbeams, and vibrating telephone lines are woven together to reveal the beauty and power of the American landscape."

Burchfield moved to Buffalo, in upstate New York, and worked for a wallpaper company, designing patterns. He married, raised a family, and continued to paint. During this period, he depicted small-town scenes, industrial scenes, and regional landscapes. He was a friend and contemporary of Edward Hopper, whose work his has often been compared to. In fact, one critic likened Burchfield's work to "Edward Hopper on a rainy day."

"Civic Improvements" - Charles Burchfield, 1928

While touring with theatre companies in the 1980s, I spent a little time in upstate New York. We played Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, Binghamton, and Utica. When I saw the paintings of Burchfield's middle period in the exhibition, I was struck by how vividly they evoked that part of the country. The wintery sky, the staid brick buildings, the bare trees in the cold. The theatres I played were often in older downtown areas, with vacant retail zones, or modest businesses like diners and quiet bar-rooms.

"Winter, East Liverpool" - Charles Burchfield, 1927

The sights in the paintings remind me of the way those towns looked, and the descriptions in Russo's novels evoke memories of my own life in them - the drear Holiday Inns, the meals taken in red-sauce Italian restaurants or diners. The dialogue rings so familiar, too - the stagehands I worked with in each town, good-naturedly insulting one another and bumming money or drinks, like Sam Hall and his friends in "The Risk Pool."

"Early December Snow" - Charles Burchfield, 1945

I can just see Sully from "Nobody's Fool", shoveling Miss Beryl's sidewalk when I look at this painting.

A little more than twenty years ago, [The Man I Love] and I lived for a year in a small upstate New York town. It was a college town, and we were there on an academic fellowship. The town was at the base of a long glacial lake, and the land rose up from the banks of the lake, and the highways and railroad tracks rose up the hills from the center of town and continued on through rolling countryside and farms.

"Road and Sky" - Charles Burchfield, 1917

Russo's comic novel about academia, "Straight Man" is set in the fictional Eastern Pennsylvania town of Railton, and the college where his hero Hank Devereaux is a professor is a bit less well-known than the one in the town we lived in, but Russo describes the same sense of town vs. gown that we sensed during our year there. I got a job on campus myself, and worked with college staff workers who were at the bottom of the pecking order from the professors. Oddly, it was the least talented professors who made a point of stressing staff's lowly status, as if they knew inside that little else than a title separated them from the carpenter shop foreman.

Russo captures this so vividly in "Straight Man" with his characters - a bright but unschooled secretary, a middle aged handy-man admiring the well-spoken divorcee professor from afar, the disgruntled waitresses and unemployed railroad workers condescended to by young post-modernists - it immediately resonated with me.

As do the paintings. The happy convergence of memory, literature, and art heightens my experience of all three things, and makes me think I know the places better than I actually do.

Bottle tree

We were driving through the small town of Hillsborough, North Carolina this August when we saw this blue-glass bottle tree in the front yard of a small bungalow.

Bottle trees are an African-American folk tradition in the South, that evolved from West and Central African belief that malevolant spirits can be trapped inside empty bottles. People put empty bottles on the branches of trees or even dead branches propped up to resemble trees. The bottle tree is kept in the yard near the house, to draw the spirits away from the dwelling place.

The spirits enter the bottles at night, the belief goes, and then, trappped, they are burned up by the heat of the morning sun.

It's so much the better if the bottles are pretty colored glass, to be more attractive to those wicked and mischievous spirits. Milk of magnesia bottles in deep cobalt blue were prized for bottle trees. Sometimes other pretty, shiny objects like pie tins, ribbons and bits of glass also decorate the bottle tree.

Mississippian Eudora Welty worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration between 1933 and 1936. In her travels around the state, she took photos of rural life. Those images led to her storytelling, and her career as one of Mississippi's best known fiction writers. She wrote "Livvie," a short story published in 1943 in the collection "The Wide Net," where a young black woman marries an older man who keeps her isolated from the rest of the world, for fear she will be drawn away from him. He keeps a bottle tree in the yard, which Livvie recognizes because she

"...knew that there could be a spell put in trees, and she was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house - by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again."

Welty wrote about the real bottle tree that inspired the story, in her book "One Writer's Beginnings":

"Along Mississippi roads you'd now and then see bottle trees; you'd see them alone or in crowds in the front yards of remote farmhouses. I photographed one - a bare crape myrtle with every branch of it ending in the mouth of a colored glass bottle - a blue Milk of Magnesia or and orange or green pop bottle; reflecting the light, flashing its colors in the sun, it stood as the centerpiece in a little thicket of peach trees in bloom."

Art historian/anthropologist Robert Farris Thompson says the tradition comes from Central African Bakongo people, who attached broken pots and containers called nkisi to the trees around their homes, to drive away evil spirits and thieves. "Bottle trees are an important element of African-American visual culture," Thompson wrote in his 1983 book "Flash of the Spirit - African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy" - "They will always be with us, like okra, hominy and black-eyed peas."

While I was looking for information about bottle trees, I found Felder Rushing's website, with a page devoted to bottle trees. Go visit and view his wonderful photos of all the creative variations of this folk tradition.

Visiting Dijon with an old friend

In the fall of 1929, an American graduate student named Al Fisher enrolled at the University of Dijon in France to pursue an advanced degree. Accompanying him was his wife, a California girl named Mary Frances.

Mary Frances wrote her brother David a letter about the city that was to be their home for almost three years:

"I do wish you could see this town. I never did believe those illustrations in books like Grimm's fairy tales and so on, but I do now....All the houses are built right up to the edge of the sidewalks and are from two to five stories tall, and thin - perhaps only 2 rooms wide and a room thick. They are of stone and plaster, and in this town, date from 1400 A.D."

At the center of the town is a large palace, the home of the powerful Dukes of Burgundy, who ruled the region independently from 937 A.D. until annexed by France in 1477. Today the great, open, semi-circular Place de la Liberation faces the Palace. Modern cafes and fountains grace the renovated place.

Beyond the great open plaza are the narrow streets of the oldest quarter of the city

where the Palace of Justice, the library, and older university buildings are located. Late medieval townhouses present "a continuous blank face of high facades pierced by the big closed arches of the doorways," wrote Mary Frances.

Rue du Petit-Potet

One of these narrow streets was the tiny Rue du Petit-Potet. The Fishers found rooms to rent in this street. They boarded with the Ollangier family, and ate their meals at the family table.

When Mary Frances first saw the house where they would live for two years, she described it this way:

"It was a real Burgundian town house, in two parts, one on the street and the other at the back of a deep narrow courtyard. The entrance to the whole place was, of course, the little door cut in the great double door that once had let carriages into the courtyard."

When we visited Dijon this summer, we stayed in the Rue du Petit Potet at the home of a friend.. This is the entrance to her house - a large double-door opening onto an inner courtyard, with rooms in the surrounding structure. A smaller door within one of the large doors opens for pedestrians.

In our friend's courtyard, tiny wild strawberries grow between the cobbles.


and an apricot tree thrives in the sheltered, cobblestone paved courtyard. The wall of the old medieval house are golden, with lion-carvings around the windows. The room where we stayed is at the back, swathed in vines, with a terrace planted with oleander, roses, and calendula.

Sunday morning, the church bells of Dijon awoke us, tolling as Mary Frances describes in her book:

"All the streets of this old quarter off the place d'Armes were narrow and crooked and teeming with life behind their shuttered windows, and from our rooms on the Rue du Petit Potet we could hear fourteen or more bells ringing from the many small churches and convents."

The Ollangier's house was across the street from our friend's house, but it's unclear to a traveler today exactly which house it was. The Fishers boarded first with the Ollangier family, then with the Ribadout family, who bought the house during their stay. Mary Frances credits her talented landladies' contributions to her gastronomical education. While Al went to the University, Mary Frances took classes at the nearby Ecole des Beaux Artes.

Entryway of the Church of St. Michael

The couple went to cafes in the place de l'Opera, just down from the Church of St. Michael, near the theatre where their landlady, Mme. Ollangier played in the orchestra pit for traveling productions to make a little money. Al wrote while sipping coffee at cafe tables. The couple visited restaurants nearby, most notably Au Trois Faisans, or The Three Pheasants.

Mary Frances went walking in the town with her sister Norah who came to visit from the United States,

"Behind the Ducal Palace [where ] ran the oldest marketing street in town. It was very narrow and crowded and dirty, and it was the most picturesque part of the town, with gabled buildings showing the famous tiled roofs of Burgundy...green and yellow and black and red. And there was the beautiful small place Francois Rude and finally the place where people gathered to see the famous gargoyles and the great clock Jacquemart with its mechanized figures on the facade of the eglise Notre-Dame.

Looking at the facade of Notre Dame church on market day in Dijon

After two years living as boarders, the Fishers rented a flat in a different part of town, a neighborhood where workers and artisans lived, on the Rue Monge, by the Place Emile Zola, upstairs from a pastry shop.

The Rue Monge, near the Place Emile Zola

She wrote of waking in the morning to the sounds in the little place below the windows -

"noise, such energetic, lusty, bustling and stirring noise....First we heard the workers in their hard shoes, then the luckier ones with bicycles, and all the bells ringing; the shop shutters being unhooked and folded back by sleeping apprentices; a great beating of pillows and mattresses, so that now and then brown feathers floated past our windows; and always the clanging of the little trams going up into the center of things..."

In the Rue Monge, Mary Frances would have her own kitchen for the first time in her married life. She soon learned that to cook France, you must go to the market. The great, beautiful steel and glass market, les Halles, designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel himself before the turn of the century, was many blocks away, over by Notre-Dame. Wednesdays and Saturdays were market days, and she soon learned to shop like the other women.

"I learned that les Halles were literally the only place to get fresh vegetables and that two heads of cauliflower and a kilo of potatoes and some endives weighed about forty pounds after I'd spent half an hour walking to market....I learned, with the tiredest feet of my life, that feeding people in a town like Dijon meant walking endless cobbled miles from one little shop to another...butter here, sausage there, bananas someplace again, and rice and sugar and coffee in still other places."

Mary Frances and Al started entertaining friends in their small flat, cooking simple but hearty meals in a tiny kitchen, learning to enjoy food made from fresh, delicious ingredients yet un-hampered by the rigid customs of bourgeouis French domestic cuisine. She describes a dish made from baking cauliflower with cream and grated cheese in a casserole, with salad and bread and fruit to accompany it.

In the narrow Rue de Verrieres, the timbers of one house is decorated with carvings of grapes and snails.

Dijon has been a destination for gourmets seeking fine wine and fine cuisine since the 19th century, and in 1921 Mayor Gaston Gerard launched the Annual Foire Gastronomique - a November event promoting Burgundian foods and wines. By the time the Fishers arrived in Dijon, the fair was a huge success. As poor Americans, they didn't attend the fancy balls and dinners, but they enjoyed the displays, the crowds and the food and wine. On a later visit to the Fair, Mary Frances described the scene as:

"The town was jumping, quasi-hysterical, injected with a mysterious supercharge of medieval pomp and Madison-Avenue-via-Paris commercialism."

We stopped at the Place Francois Rude, where children still ride on a small carousel beside the fountain.

We marveled at the House of the Caryatids, a 16th century house with elaborate carvings.

These buildings, with the color tile roofs characteristic of Burgundian architecture, are in the Place des Cordeliers, a small square at the end of the Rue du Petit Potet.

You can see more of these tiles on the Church of St. Benigne, its soaring spires and steeples rising up from the low houses of the street.

As we walked around town, looking at the old half-timbered houses and sitting at sidewalk cafes, I felt as if Mary Frances were walking right along side me, showing me the sights. If you'd like to read more about M.F.K. Fisher's life in Dijon, read her book, "Long Ago in France."

Closing the book

The other day at my lunch break I decided I wanted to buy a book, so I went up to Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade - it was a short walk, and it was a beautiful day.

There's only one bookstore on the Promenade today. It's the big national chain starting with "B."

As I walked from Broadway to Wilshire Boulevard, I saw something I had never noticed before, though I've been coming down here for over ten years.

The buildings on the Promenade are an eclectic mixture. Some are new and architecturally edgy. Some are old, dating from the early 20th century, and nicely restored. Others are brand new buildings with brand new applied decor that pretends to be old.

This building appears to be old, faced with the tan bricks common to local retail buildings of the 1920s. I just happened to look up at the facade

and saw this. A band of carved stone decoration, running across the front of the building. But instead of being classical motifs or a floral garland, it was a shelf of books.

And then I remembered. This building used to be the home of Midnight Special Bookstore, which moved to the Promenade in the 1970's. An independent bookstore, vocally left-wing, politically active, but also fully stocked with all kinds of literature, fiction, and childrens' books. It was always busy, full of browsers. It was open late at night, too. They'd often host readings by authors. In 2003 Midnight Special closed. The landlord had raised the rent. High-demand locations like the Promenade were demanding rents that major corporate chain stores were happy to pay, but small independent businesses couldn't.

The owners tried to find another location nearby, but it was the end. They never reopened.

I remember when you could choose to buy a book from at least five booksellers on the 3rd Street Promenade. In addition to the big national chain starting with a "B," there was Midnight Special; also Rizzoli Books, where you could browse beautiful and expensive art books; also an architectural bookstore.

Oh, yes, and there was that other big national chain starting with a "B," too - it just closed this winter.

On the Third Street Promenade you can find anything you can find in any other shopping mall anywhere else in the country. There's Victoria's Secret, Pottery Barn, Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, J.Crew, Old Navy, Urban Outfitters, Guess, Restoration Hardware, Esprit.

But if you want to browse for a good novel or a mystery, you have only one choice.


Here's what moved into the site of the old Midnight Special Bookstore. I can't believe I never noticed the frieze of books before. I wonder how many other people notice it now, and wonder why it's there.

PROMPTuesday

Our PROMPTuesday today - What was the best book you’ve ever read and why?

I 've always been a reader. My Mom says she once found me, at age two or three, sitting in my little chair with a book on my lap, gabble-gabbling the words. She was shocked - was I reading?

As it turned out, no, I had memorized the poem and was merely reciting it - but that was the beginning of my long relationship with books.

As a grade-schooler I loved being taken to the library. In my town, the library was a big two-story house made of yellow limestone, at the top of a hill rising up from the east banks of the Fox River. A modern, low-roofed wing tacked on the back of the house held the Children's Section. I would choose my books and stack them in my arms, and only go to the check out desk when the stack was too tall to carry any longer.

I loved mysteries. I loved the fantasies of Edward Eager. I loved Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Rumer Godden. If a book wasn't very good - no matter. I read it anyway, and then went on to the next. My mother says that I never did housework or chores willingly - If I wasn't outside in the woods and the grassy Illinois fields that surrounded our house, I was always in my room with my nose in a book.

The library was it for me. In those days we seldom bought books - or at least real, hardbound books. I was, however, allowed to buy mass-market childrens' series books. I saved my allowance and Christmas money to buy Nancy Drew books, and could read one from front to back in a single day.

I do remember one time a real book was bought for me. When I was about 9 I was hospitalized briefly for a minor procedure. My mother brought me a book to read while I recovered in the open children's ward I shared with three other children, purchased from the bookstore across the street from the small hospital. "Oh," I said when she presented me with it. "I've already read that." She went right back to the bookstore to choose something else.

Years later in the seventh grade I made friends with a girl who, coincidentally, had been in that children's ward that day. She remembered the spoiled little girl who had sent her mother back to the bookstore for another book.

A few years ago, I talked with a tall, slender, glamorous singer backstage, in her book-and-magazine-cluttered dressing room. We were good friends, even though the only thing we really had in common was a voracious appetite for reading. "Honey," she said, " You know you're a reader when you put off going to the toilet until you find something you can read!"

So when you ask me what's the best book I've ever read? My answer is - the one I'm reading RIGHT NOW.

Mahoney

The other day, I was with a friend and, as things sometimes happen, something was knocked over and there was a tumble of litter on the floor. My friend bent to pick up the small pieces, and I said, "Hang, on, don't do that with your hands, let me get the Mahoney."

The what?

My friend had never heard this term. Propmen backstage, who spend a lot of time sweeping the floor, call a long-handled dustpan and small broom a "Mahoney." But I had never bothered to wonder why it was called this. So I googled it.

The official description of a Mahoney is "a dustpan with a waist high handle, allowing the user to collect floor sweepings without bending over." In 1933 United States Patent #1893426 was awarded to John Mahoney for what was called a "lobby dust pan," fashioned so that the pan, when folded and hung on the wall, could serve as a holder for the broom.

A very useful tool in compact, high-traffic spaces like backstage in a theatre.

The Patent office shows several patents issued for devices to collect floor sweepings, including #587607 issued in 1897 to an African-American inventor named Lloyd P. Ray for what he called an "Improved Dustpan."

Mr. Ray and his wife Emma wrote a joint autobiography, titled "Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed." They were born the children of slaves, but by the turn of the last century, they were prominent Methodist church leaders and missionaries to the poor, destitute and downtrodden. Their book can be found online at Documenting the American South, hosted by the University of North Carolina.

The Rays describe their lives with vivid candour. They were married in 1887 in Fredonia, Kansas. He was a stonecutter and mason, and she was a servant for a lady who ran a millinery shop. Emma describes herself as a headstrong young woman who liked to wear the latest in fashion, go to theatres and have a good time. "As I grew older I became more vain," she confesses. Lloyd and Emma were young and lived a fast life. Emma admits:

I knew that he drank when we were married, but I didn 't think much of it at that time. I thought so long as he could take a drink or let it alone when he liked, it was all right. I thought it looked manly for him to smoke a cigar.

After a while, Lloyd's drinking increased, and he started to have job trouble. He began lying to Emma about money. After each bender, he apologized, and promised to clean up his act. But he always seemed to backslide.

It would not be very long before it would be the same old drink, the same old devil, the same old sin. I had a temper equal to a tigress. And a drinking man and a woman with a high temper make a home a hell. Many a night have I wept all night and wet my pillow with tears. He would always be sorry afterwards and say, "I will never do it again." But of course the habit was on him, and his associations were bad, and he had not the power within himself to resist the temptation.

In 1889 the couple thought a fresh start would revitalize their marriage and change their lives, and they moved to Seattle, Washington.


The Seattle fire has just destroyed the downtown business section, and stone masons were in demand. People lived in tent cities, and as Lloyd describes it,

saloons were at every door. The temptation was terrific and drinking everywhere. Beer by the water buckets was on the job from morning until night. Thus it got me farther down . . . I was in the habit of going to the saloon every morning when I was working, to get my "morning's morning" as I called it.

While Lloyd hung out at the notorious "Billy the Mug's Saloon" on the corner, Emma made friends in the neighborhood and began to attend the African Methodist Episcopalian Church. The church was located in the part of town where the African-American community was centered, called the Central District, around 23rd Avenue between Madison Street and Jackson Street. Some of her friends also had husbands with drinking problems, and the ladies counseled one another.

Emma tried to convince Lloyd to join her at church, but he refused. She prayed for his conversion. Eventually, it worked.

I thought I would go down and take a drink this morning, but my sins lay heavy upon me . . . I went to the bar and called for a whiskey, but something came up in my throat, and my heart was so heavy I could not drink. I shoved it to one side and said, "Give me a beer." They gave me the beer, and the same lump came in my throat, and I could not drink it. I shoved that to one side and said, "Give me a cigar," and paid my bill and walked out, never to go in again. As I started up the hill towards home I said, "What's the matter with me?"

Lloyd joined his wife at the next revival meeting, and their lives turned around after that. The couple became active in their church and community, and in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. They ministered to the sick, the poor, and those in jail. They even went to the saloons and taverns, where Lloyd's old drinking buddies were shocked to see him.
They worked with Mrs. O.S. Ryther, the founder of a children's home that still exists in Seattle today, trying to save young women from a life on the streets.

Their autobiography is a vivid account of how poor people lived in America at the turn of the century, populated by crazy characters and filled with fantastic stories. Their tales of ministering to street kids and drug addicts in the slums of Seattle are surprisingly similar to modern accounts. Emma Ray's voice dominates the book, as we see her develop into an impassioned preacher herself, while Lloyd is more modest, content with a supporting role.
Mr. and Mrs. Ray do not give an account of Lloyd's invention of the folding dustpan. But it was a hardscrabble life, and Lloyd was a man who worked with his hands, so it makes sense that he would try to devise a method of easing his work.

Emma tells of holding prayer meetings in the street near a vaudeville theatre, down on Railroad Avenue, which ran along the waterfront and the piers. Between shows, the theatre's orchestra would assemble in the street and play music to accompany their preaching.


I wonder, perhaps, as they made friends with the folks from the theatre, did Lloyd Ray share his handy invention with the house Propman?

"Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed," is great story of a fascinating African-American couple. Go to the link and read it - you'll love how Emma's voice brings turn of the century Seattle alive. This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

Line drawings from the U.S. Patent Office. Seattle photos from the University of Washington digital collections. Photo of the Rays from the book.