James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 14
September 15, 2015
Venice-Boothville
Everything has to end somewhere, and the Mississippi River, The Great River Road, and the peninsula at the very tip of the State of Louisiana all peter out near this magnificent Black Cormorant bayou in the famous Mississippi delta. The mighty river and its road arrive here after flowing and running through ten States and 3,765 km, all the way from the Canadian border.
Speaking of endings, these cormorant trees get their looks from the bird droppings, which are slowly killing the roots. The cormorants will nest and pollute here until the last tree collapses, then fly off to lay waste to another forest somewhere. But they are an ancient species, vaguely related to the pelican, and have been doing this since the time of the dinosaurs. Human policies have ranged from extermination to protection to taming of these expert competitors for the fish population.
We don’t recommend traveling here during hurricane season. Georges, Katrina, and Irene all flattened the area.
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Louisiana, Travel
Tejon Pass
For the uninitiated, The Big One refers to a magnathrust earthquake predicted by some geologists for the San Andreas Fault in Southern California, to occur sometime in the next century.
What makes the event particularly threatening is the string of finger faults that feed off the main fault all of the way from Los Angeles into Orange County. The LA Basin contains more than eleven million souls and a sizeable percentage of American productive capacity. Within minutes, the story goes, a rupture in the San Andreas could trigger these finger faults, kill all kinds of people, and destroy the work of centuries.
The Northridge Quake of 1994–a minor tremor by comparison–lasted just 20 seconds (in the main rupture), killed 57, and caused $20 billion worth of damage. It burst Lockhart, wife, and children out of bed at 4:31AM more than fifty miles away, an experience no one is in a hurry to repeat. Friends nearer the epicenter were thrown five feet into the air and watched refrigerators careen across kitchens and through walls.
The photo shows the San Andreas Fault where it crosses Interstate 5 in the Tejon Pass north of Los Angeles. Beautiful for something so deadly, isn’t it?
Filed under: Travels Tagged: California, Travel
English
In Eastern Europe all of the way to the Bosphorus, everyone speaks English–except for the tourists. Whether it’s a French girl talking to her Romanian uncle, an Austrian passenger ordering coffee from a Turkish conductor, or an Italian with a defective passport remonstrating with a Bulgarian border guard, the foreign language–if not of choice, then of necessity–is English.
Virtually all of the natives speak a kind of Resort English. The waiter knows the words for cabbage, polenta, and dried fish. The spice seller knows every strange-scented grain and powder and the pleas it takes to talk you into buying more than you need. Everyone knows the way to the next major sight you plan on seeing. Even the ticket-window clerk knows how to say, “Stupid! You miss train! Come back tomorrow!” But virtually never will you hear a complete English sentence or phrasebook term without a heavy overlay of accent. It’s probably the season–deep winter–but the English and American travelers seem to have ventured elsewhere.
Not that we mind, but sometimes it feels like a million former high school students are just waiting for us to come along to practice their skills. The good news, of course, is that we have run into nothing but endless patience with our own klutzy and even hilarious attempts to bridge the gap with French, German, Italian, and even our own brand of Latin. As far as we can tell anyway, although we’re still wondering about a few of the meats on our plate in upper Romania.
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Travel, Turkey
Budapest
After the Hungarian Revolution of 1989, when citizens were ripping down Soviet memorials all over the country, one bright official had the idea of creating a tongue-in-cheek memorial in the countryside outside of town to hold the deposed statuary. The open-air Memento Park opened its doors on the second anniversary of the liberation and now houses one of the more bizarre (and less subtle) collections of political art ever assembled.
Unfortunately, the biggest statue of them all–of Comrade Stalin–had already been broken up into tiny pieces, leaving just his boots for the exhibition. Still, it seems appropriate that the boots that trod roughshod all over Eastern Europe should commemorate the dead dictator. He will not be missed around these parts.
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Hungary, Travel
București
Pity the poor Nicolae Ceaușescu. His life was the ultimate expression of the homily that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
On the one hand, we have the hardscrabble, but immensely attractive and handsome idealist who clawed his way to the pinnacle of Romanian socialism. Along the way, he found true love in his wife Elena, with whom he held hands right up to their joint murder in a sad, little cellar in Tragoviste. He famously let Elena win at backgammon, even though he constantly caught her cheating.
On the other hand, a ruthless leader who killed thousands who he imagined–correctly or not–were plotting against him. A man who could sign a death warrant with no more regret than a meter maid ridding her street of unwanted cars.
On the other hand, an iconoclast who defied the Soviets in condemning the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and a brilliant foreign policy artist who managed to ally his Romania with both Israel and the Arab nations at a time when no one else could.
On the other hand…
Leaders really do live to serve the people, and when they forget this, history takes its pitiless revenge. So on 21 December, 1989, when Nicolae started to speak from this rather drab Central Committee balcony in downtown Bucharest, it turned out that history had passed him by. The crowd booed and jeered, and Nicolae fled with Elena, until the helicopter and then the truck ran of fuel. When history caught up with them in a pathetic courtyard outside a dismal, rural Romanian town, it was their own people who rigged a quick trial and shot them down, no doubt to save their own skins.
Did Nicolae and Elena deserve their fates? Of course they did–we all deserve the fates we conjure for ourselves. But it does seem odd that Nicolae Ceaușescu should have been the only leader who paid with his life for the political monstrosity that was the Soviet sphere of influence. Erich Honecker, Władysław Gomułka, Antonín Novotný, János Kádár, wherefore art thou?
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Romania, Travel
Saint-Loup de Varennes
A massive concrete sign outside this village just north of Chalon-sur-Saone in Bourgogne announces that Nicéphore Niépce invented photography here in 1822. For once, one of these weird historical claims appears to be accurate–as long as you define photography as the permanent imprinting of images on light-sensitive materials using chemicals.
The Niépce family was famously ill-tempered and eccentric–the oldest brother Claude went mad and died in London while marketing another family invention, the fuel-injected internal combustion engine (seriously–they named it the Pyréolophore). In the process, he managed to squander the family fortune so thoroughly that the father of photography himself nearly ended up an unmarked municipal grave. Judging by the current state of the village in this photo, no one got rich off all the experimentation, other than a Niépce partner, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who stole most of the credit with his Daguerreotype.
As long as we’re cluttering up your mind with useless information, Nicéphore was actually baptized Joseph, but changed his name to honor Saint Nicephorus. The latter led the 9th-century Iconodules in their successful fight to prevent the Byzantine Iconoclasts from outlawing the veneration of religious images.
Imagine a world without religious art or photography–except, thanks to these gents, you don’t have to.
Filed under: Travels Tagged: France, Travel
The Secret Lives of Eddy Casanovitch
Our favorite erotica peddler, the nearly real Eddy Casanovitch, is forced to drastically pull in his horns when a young rocket scientist Mallory and the runaway Texan teenagers Sarah and Cozette fall on him from out of the beachy California sky.
“You call that a plot?” Alex’s New York publisher Grace bellows. Maybe not, but then the ancient love of Eddy’s life, the gorgeous Keisha, shows up as a world-class madam with her own fascinating flock. And then the other love of his life, Sarah’s Mom Roxie, roars in from Texas to collect her due. All this while Eddy’s doing his best to talk Mallory’s irritated CEO Daddy out of killing her.
The fundamental problem: Eddy’s just a regular guy with a vivid, if degenerate imagination. But the more he tries to explain it to neighbors, lovers, vengeful CEOs, and publishers, the less they understand. After all, he wrote all that trash, didn’t he? But, as the exhausted man keeps repeating, there’s a reason they call it fiction.
Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.The Secret Lives of Eddy Casanovitch
A Sad, Little Comedy of Less-than-Erotic Errors, Not for Lack of Trying
Dedication
To the memory of Veronica Franco, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, and Xaviera Hollander, three extraordinary women who created their own fates without losing their extraordinary senses of humor.
Author’s Note
The following is a work of pure fiction—unfortunately. The names have been changed to protect no one. As a matter of fact—now the author has a chance to think about it—the names haven’t even been changed.
Chapter 1
It’s not every Fourth of July a girl falls into your lap from out of the clear blue sky. Literally collapses on top of you from an excess of drugs and alcohol, as you sit out on your beachfront brick steps, minding your own business, with the half-baked, half-naked holiday madness flooding by.
It’s not every Fourth of July a girl misplaces the next four hours of her thrilling drunkard’s life, then wakes up, miraculously still clothed—if you can call it that in her itsy-bitsy bikini—on your living room floor. Yet that is exactly how I met the young woman named Mallory.
Not to be confused with the duck. “That’s a Mallard,” she observed with astonishing coherence for a hung-over beach bum with headache wedged in hands. “My name is M-A-L-L-O-R-Y.”
I’d taken refuge behind the pretend-desk as far across the living room as I could manage, with a sofa, a pair of filing cabinets, and a dead plastic fern for protection. “Glad you’re suddenly so precise. I take it you can float anyway? Although I was planning on waiting until dark to dump you in the ocean.”
“You want me to just leave?”
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Although I was serious about letting the neighborhood toddle safely off to bed before ejecting her.
This Mallory could do defensive when it suited her. “You don’t have to be so hostile, you know. I’ll pay for the damn computer.”
An interesting offer, considering that it wasn’t every Fourth of July your New York publisher forewent a day in the Hamptons to threaten you with bloody murder if you didn’t immediately turn in the manuscript you’d promised her. The manuscript in the laptop that, surprisingly enough, was sitting in your lap out on the steps, when the wingless duck took off in defiance of the laws of gravity and lost control of knees and elbows.
Just then an impatient publisher and a wrecked laptop were the least of my worries. The girl helped neither matters nor my mood by turning her head to focus past the empty salad bowl I’d left next to her once comatose, now airsick, brow for emergencies. Her eyes lit on the bookshelf beyond and brought on an attack of curious. “You really read all that trash?”
Trash? Did she say trash? “What are you talking about?”
She took a minute to recover either her sight or her ABCs. “The Casanovitch books. Aren’t they porn?”
Porn? Did she say porn? “I don’t know what you’re—”
“Holy shit. You’ve got a dozen copies of each. What are you, some sort of…?” But then a lightbulb must have shattered in her buoyant brain. “You’re him, aren’t you?”
“Who?”
“Eddy Casanovitch! You’re the porn guy. I heard he lived around here somewhere.”
I don’t know what I expected from the revelation. Not my ex-wife’s pseudo-shocked reaction when the word had leaked out that all that time wasted scribbling—whatever the hell I was doing—had turned into one of the larger viral sales outbreaks at the more colorful end of the internet publishing alley. Nor the neighborhood’s outrage as they raced to lock their doors and windows against the tidal wave of smut they suddenly imagined flooding out of my camouflaged literary brain.
Nancy hadn’t needed the scandal to justify her flight, but then my ex-wife was always a thorough soul. By the time she and her long-term boss-and-lover parted ways with me, her gossipy, pseudo-Methodist lips had over-publicized my tacky-cheesy nom de plume and left me a pariah from one end of our sand spit to the other. No more anonymous, smutty scribbles out of this molester and pervert. Only, as of the current afternoon, I was a pariah with a young, nearly naked waterfowl passed out on the floor of my living room.
Thank God for webcams and duck-proof desktop computers.
This Mallory girl must have read my mind. Her eyes quickly flitted over the ties and folds of her bikini for signs of unauthorized ingress. It was all I needed to see.
“Time to go,” I told her and crossed the room with a less-than-gentle lift of the nearest sun-fried wing. “No, I didn’t date-rape you, and yes, I can prove it beyond a shadow of your unwashed fingernails.”
“Hey! Lemme go! What’s the matter with you?”
I couldn’t very well tell her that I’d acquired an army of overwrought citizens watching for the slightest kink in my infamously fake and degenerate façade. No question, I needed to move and change my pseudonym. More immediately, I needed to stop admitting ducks in bikinis.
“Why’d you bring me in here in the first place?” Mallory protested, as I helped, or maybe herded, her to the front door.
“It wasn’t my idea. And get yourself better friends. After you passed out on top of me, they talked me into bringing you inside, then left to supposedly get your things.”
The panicky girl glanced past me back into the apartment. “What things? Where are my things? Who brought me—?”
I had no idea what she was babbling on about and cared less. As far as I could tell, the door opened on a clear coast. “Like I said, get yourself better friends.”
“Wait a minute!” She shook off my hand and shoved me away. “I don’t have any money. How do you expect me to get home?”
I wasn’t about to start handing out cash to departing bikinis in my front doorway. The crowds might have thinned from the exhausting day-long beach orgy, but there were always satellites, helicopters, and neighborly binoculars to consider. Not that I was paranoid.
I geared up for a foul-tempered retort, but mysteriously never let it escape my lips. The truth was, this Mallory had somehow struck me as a pretty harmless, maybe even pleasant, girl when she wasn’t airborne or critiquing my literary standards. Not to mention a figure-eight body with an impressive cleavage, muscular thighs, runner’s legs, and skin so smooth and unblemished that it was hard to picture her as a habitual drunk or drug user.
In spite of my earlier snarky comment about her fingernails, she at least looked and smelled like she might have suffered through more than one shower in her short life. But considering my situation, the operative word was short.
I shook my head at the utter stupidity of letting her get a word in edgewise. “Let me see your driver’s license.”
“How do you—”
“It’s stuck halfway up your overdressed butt, young lady. I noticed it when your pretend-amigos were flopping you in here.”
She reached back quickly enough that I was convinced when she insisted, “I’m twenty-six, if that’s what you’re worried about. And I’m not going to accuse you of anything, so get over it.”
“You’re a student?”
“Hardly. I’m a rocket scientist.”
“Very funny.” Yet when I turned over the thin, plastic sleeve she handed me, it included an employee ID card from a high-tech space and defense contractor, no less.
Maybe this genius Mallory would know which satellites and neighborly listening devices to jam if I ever dared to negotiate the beach walk with an unsuspecting, true-to-life date in tow. It wasn’t hard to forgive her twenty-six-year-old smirk, considering, but then she stormed the enemy position anyway with, “I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. In case you’re interested, I was mugged.”
Interested? I suppose it depended on the definition.
Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.Filed under: Novels Tagged: California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas
Oklahoma!
We’ve never visited the State, nor even seen the musical (this picture is from Wyoming and probably looks nothing like the place), but wonder if we should think about replacing the national anthem with this show-stopper. Every time the movie production company breaks out into the song, we break out in song and goosebumps. No idea why…
There’s never been a better time to start in life.
It ain’t too early and it ain’t too late!
Starting as a farmer with a brand new wife,
Soon be living in a brand new state!
Brand new state–gonna treat you great!
Gonna bring you barley, carrots and potatoes,
Pasture for the cattle, spinach and tomatoes,
Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom,
Plenty of air and plenty of room,
Plenty of room to swing a rope!
Plenty of heart and plenty of hope.
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain,
And the waving wheat can sure smell sweet,
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
Oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and I,
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk
making lazy circles in the sky.
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeeow! Ayeyipayeyay!
We’re only saying
You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma O.K.!
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain
And the waving wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
Oklahoma, every night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk
Makin’ lazy circles in the sky.
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeow! Ayeyipayeyay!
We’re only saying
You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma O.K.
Okla-homa-Okla-homa-Okla-homa
Okla-homa-Okla-homa-Okla-homa…
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeow! Ayeyipayeyay!
We’re only saying
You’re doing fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma
O. K. L. A. H. O. M. A.
Oklahoma!
Yeow!
–Lyrics courtesy of Oscar Hammerstein.
–Music courtesy of Richard Rodgers and your imagination.
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Oklahoma, Travel, Wyoming
Paris
We regret to report that you can no longer recklessly lather up your lips with lipstick and kiss Oscar Wilde‘s tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery. In an unusual gesture for Paris, the authorities have chosen public sanitation over romance in erecting a plate glass barrier around the grave too high for even the tallest of Wilde lovers.
The cemetery authorities actually made the change in 2011, but we weren’t blogging then. If we were, we gladly would have warned any nearby smoochers to (literally) get in their last licks before it was too late. Sorry about that. The monument looks pretty drab these days without the fan decoration, but maybe public health statistics have improved???
Filed under: Travels Tagged: France, Travel
Milano
In one of the stranger juxtapositions we’ve ever seen, Native American musicians in full costume play New Age music with flutes, drums, and eerie recorded backup sounds on the Piazza del Duomo outside Milan Cathedral. The square is home to an enormous array of street entertainers and musicians, but this act is by far the most popular.
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Italy, Travel
