Mark Saha's Blog, page 2
May 31, 2020
The Protest in Santa Monica
5/31/20 – 5pm
Just got back to my apartment from a look at the situation along Main Street in Santa Monica. It is a little surreal; a strange quiet like before a storm is broken only by the sound of helicopters overhead.
Almost all businesses are closed, but there were a surprising number of people scattered about. They loitered mostly in in twos or threes but occasionally six or more. The ones in black with hoodies coming from Santa Monica Place seemed obviously part of the demonstration, especially a couple putting loot in the trunk of a parked car. Many others were younger people with skateboards or on bicycles scouting to see what was happening.
I saw several girls in their teens or twenties alone on the street. They seemed to feel perfectly safe despite a total absence of police, who are occupied elsewhere.
Items --
-- A store adjacent to the Edgemar complex was covering its windows with plywood as if preparing for a hurricane.
-- The Anchor restaurant, which has outdoor tables for customers, was open with all tables taken. They had a prominent sidewalk sign that proclaimed: “WE SUPPORT BLACK LIVES MATTER”.
-- Main Street Plaza (office & restaurant complex) was closed with four security guards out front.
-- Main Street Liquor was open so I picked up a bottle of Jack Daniels just in case. The owner looked surprised when I said there was a 4 pm curfew. He wanted to know if he was in violation of the law. A lady in line behind me told him that it was legal for him to stay open, but nobody was allowed on the street unless going to an essential business like his.
-- The strangest sight by far was an absolutely gorgeous model wearing a spectacular silvery grey gown on the corner of Ocean Park and Main. A cameraman and his assistant waited with her until a knot of six or so protesters approached on the sidewalk. She quickly joined them, and the cameraman began walking backwards for a tracking shot. She was proudly defiant accompanying these ominous hooded figures in black.
Just got back to my apartment from a look at the situation along Main Street in Santa Monica. It is a little surreal; a strange quiet like before a storm is broken only by the sound of helicopters overhead.
Almost all businesses are closed, but there were a surprising number of people scattered about. They loitered mostly in in twos or threes but occasionally six or more. The ones in black with hoodies coming from Santa Monica Place seemed obviously part of the demonstration, especially a couple putting loot in the trunk of a parked car. Many others were younger people with skateboards or on bicycles scouting to see what was happening.
I saw several girls in their teens or twenties alone on the street. They seemed to feel perfectly safe despite a total absence of police, who are occupied elsewhere.
Items --
-- A store adjacent to the Edgemar complex was covering its windows with plywood as if preparing for a hurricane.
-- The Anchor restaurant, which has outdoor tables for customers, was open with all tables taken. They had a prominent sidewalk sign that proclaimed: “WE SUPPORT BLACK LIVES MATTER”.
-- Main Street Plaza (office & restaurant complex) was closed with four security guards out front.
-- Main Street Liquor was open so I picked up a bottle of Jack Daniels just in case. The owner looked surprised when I said there was a 4 pm curfew. He wanted to know if he was in violation of the law. A lady in line behind me told him that it was legal for him to stay open, but nobody was allowed on the street unless going to an essential business like his.
-- The strangest sight by far was an absolutely gorgeous model wearing a spectacular silvery grey gown on the corner of Ocean Park and Main. A cameraman and his assistant waited with her until a knot of six or so protesters approached on the sidewalk. She quickly joined them, and the cameraman began walking backwards for a tracking shot. She was proudly defiant accompanying these ominous hooded figures in black.
May 11, 2020
Wide River Revisited
Here is a recent but not uncommon example of the mischief depicted in my Lost Horses story “Wide River”:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/alabama-ve...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/alabama-ve...
April 16, 2020
Two Scots in an Elevator
Ask any TV writer and he’ll tell you the hardest kind of writing to bring off is comedy. Yet it looks so wonderfully easy, and is such a pleasure to watch, when it clicks. Something like this …
Two Scots in an Elevator
https://youtu.be/J3lYLphzAnw
Two Scots in an Elevator
https://youtu.be/J3lYLphzAnw
April 14, 2020
Tobacco Road – A Review
My impression from some Goodreads reviewers is that Tobacco Road has drifted so far out of context over the passing years that contemporary readers scarcely know what to make of it. One called the book an argument for Eugenics, while another says Caldwell is racist, and others speculate whether tobacco roads even existed.
Starting with the last of these, Caldwell writes (Chapter VII):
“The road on which Jeeter lived was the original tobacco road his grandfather had made. It was about fifteen miles long, and … ended on the bluffs at the river. The road had been used for the rolling of tobacco casks, large hogsheads in which the leaf had been packed […] Sometimes the casks had been pushed by gangs of negroes to the river steamboats, other times they were pulled by teams of mules … thousands of hogsheads had been rolled along the crest of the ridge and they had made a smooth firm road. There were scores of tobacco roads on western side of the Savannah Valley … Any one walking cross-county would find as many as six or eight in a day’s hike.”
Crop rotation was not understood back then, and the soil soon became depleted of nutrients needed to grow tobacco. Cotton was substituted, but after a few years the yield was again so poor that farmers struggled to survive. Caldwell was the son of a rural Presbyterian minister, and as a boy had traveled with his father, riding a cotton wagon loaded with food which they distributed to the unfortunates who lived along tobacco roads in the early part of the 20th century. The bitter poverty and human destitution he saw left an indelible impression.
His break as a writer came when short stories published in small literary journals caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott recommended him to famed Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins who worked with major authors like Hemingway and Thomas Wolf; (Scott’s letter to Perkins is in Fitzgerald’s collected letters). Perkins invited Caldwell to submit to Scribner’s Magazine. After publishing a few stories, and issuing a hardcopy story collection, he asked for a novel – and got Tobacco Road.
Perkins believed the book had merit but warned he would have to fight for its publication. Scribners had a profitable textbook division, and feared the novel would trigger a boycott of their textbooks in Southern schools. Tobacco Road had an initial sale of only about two thousand copies, and the reader response postcards inserted in each copy by Scribners were not encouraging. Then a Broadway play based on it began to set records, and readers returning to the source novel found, as Perkins had, literary merit.
The suggestion by one reviewer here that Caldwell advocated Eugenics is not credible; it’s apparently in reference to a 2007 paper by academic Ashley Craig Lancaster (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218198). Eugenics advocates believed not just the physically defective but also the morally degenerate could be eliminated by selective breeding. Ms. Lancaster seems to imagine, based only on her reading of the text, that Caldwell’s intention was to dramatize the need for such selective breeding. But there is no obvious genetic defect in the Lester family tree. Jeeter’s grandfather owned a great tobacco plantation, and his father inherited half of it. The depletion of the sandy soil made it useless for growing tobacco and increasingly unprofitable for cotton. Debts had forced Jeeter to surrender ownership of the land on which he now struggles to survive as a tenant farmer.
But Jeeter is not lacking in moral ambition:
“The passing of winter and the slow growth of early spring had the usual effect on Jeeter. The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground … he burned a field here and a field there on the farm each spring, getting the growth of broom-sedge off the land so it would be ready to plow in case someone did lend him a mule and give him a little seed-cotton and guano.”
Caldwell always said the theme of his books was “the effects of poverty on the human spirit.” He was sympathetic to the socialists and communists of his day and states bluntly in these pages (Chapter VII): “Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.”
Instead we see Jeeter exploited by the capitalist system:
“Once he had secured a two-hundred-dollar loan […] on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal, and charged him interest on that too […] When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars, and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year’s labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and the mule, too.”
Even less credible than Eugenics is another reviewer’s claim that Caldwell was racist. His novel “Trouble in July” (1940) is a study of the economic and social forces behind racial violence in the rural South, while “Place Called Estherville” (1949) looks at the same forces in an urban environment. Ray McIver, a Black playwright, actor, teacher, and personal friend to Caldwell, in 1982 edited a collection of Caldwell race themed stories as “The Black & White Stories of Erskine Caldwell.”
Caldwell believed in his youth that education was the cure for racism. He gave up on that hope in later years, and became convinced that intermarriage was the only cure, and said he was always encouraged when he saw an interracial couple.
Caldwell traveled the United States by automobile in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, and published his observations as “Some American People” (1935). He toured the Deep South with photographer Margaret-Bourke White in 1936 and they produced the picture-and-text collaboration “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937). Bourke-White’s autobiography “Portrait of Myself” (1963) has an insightful chapter on her marriage to Caldwell along with some fascinating photographs.
George Snell, in his literary history “The Shapers of American Fiction – 1798-1947” writes:
“Emerging as a salient figure with extraordinary rapidity in the early ‘30s, Erskine Caldwell no doubt owed his popularity partly to fortuitous circumstances. Here was a writer concerned with the problems that engrossed all minds in those days of economic depression, and able to deal with such problems artistically; that is, in terms of human reactions. He could not only treat social issues artistically but extract what there could be of humor from them, a prodigious feat, it had seemed, since most of the fiction then current was solemn or hortatory or militant; a belly laugh was a prized rarity. He loomed on the scene quickly, portentously, and in the five years, 1931 through 1935, published seven books that established his reputation.
“Seemingly out of nowhere, with scarcely any observable apprenticeship, here was a major American writer pouring out in book after book a skillful, original kind of art and interpreting a phase of life that only Faulkner had previously investigated. If some readers saw a resemblance between the macabre humor in “As I Lay Dying” and that of some stories in “We Are The Living” (1933), it was only incidental, and the purport of the stories was positive, a call to an aroused social awareness, in a way and toward an end that no Faulkner story ever had.”
Starting with the last of these, Caldwell writes (Chapter VII):
“The road on which Jeeter lived was the original tobacco road his grandfather had made. It was about fifteen miles long, and … ended on the bluffs at the river. The road had been used for the rolling of tobacco casks, large hogsheads in which the leaf had been packed […] Sometimes the casks had been pushed by gangs of negroes to the river steamboats, other times they were pulled by teams of mules … thousands of hogsheads had been rolled along the crest of the ridge and they had made a smooth firm road. There were scores of tobacco roads on western side of the Savannah Valley … Any one walking cross-county would find as many as six or eight in a day’s hike.”
Crop rotation was not understood back then, and the soil soon became depleted of nutrients needed to grow tobacco. Cotton was substituted, but after a few years the yield was again so poor that farmers struggled to survive. Caldwell was the son of a rural Presbyterian minister, and as a boy had traveled with his father, riding a cotton wagon loaded with food which they distributed to the unfortunates who lived along tobacco roads in the early part of the 20th century. The bitter poverty and human destitution he saw left an indelible impression.
His break as a writer came when short stories published in small literary journals caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scott recommended him to famed Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins who worked with major authors like Hemingway and Thomas Wolf; (Scott’s letter to Perkins is in Fitzgerald’s collected letters). Perkins invited Caldwell to submit to Scribner’s Magazine. After publishing a few stories, and issuing a hardcopy story collection, he asked for a novel – and got Tobacco Road.
Perkins believed the book had merit but warned he would have to fight for its publication. Scribners had a profitable textbook division, and feared the novel would trigger a boycott of their textbooks in Southern schools. Tobacco Road had an initial sale of only about two thousand copies, and the reader response postcards inserted in each copy by Scribners were not encouraging. Then a Broadway play based on it began to set records, and readers returning to the source novel found, as Perkins had, literary merit.
The suggestion by one reviewer here that Caldwell advocated Eugenics is not credible; it’s apparently in reference to a 2007 paper by academic Ashley Craig Lancaster (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218198). Eugenics advocates believed not just the physically defective but also the morally degenerate could be eliminated by selective breeding. Ms. Lancaster seems to imagine, based only on her reading of the text, that Caldwell’s intention was to dramatize the need for such selective breeding. But there is no obvious genetic defect in the Lester family tree. Jeeter’s grandfather owned a great tobacco plantation, and his father inherited half of it. The depletion of the sandy soil made it useless for growing tobacco and increasingly unprofitable for cotton. Debts had forced Jeeter to surrender ownership of the land on which he now struggles to survive as a tenant farmer.
But Jeeter is not lacking in moral ambition:
“The passing of winter and the slow growth of early spring had the usual effect on Jeeter. The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground … he burned a field here and a field there on the farm each spring, getting the growth of broom-sedge off the land so it would be ready to plow in case someone did lend him a mule and give him a little seed-cotton and guano.”
Caldwell always said the theme of his books was “the effects of poverty on the human spirit.” He was sympathetic to the socialists and communists of his day and states bluntly in these pages (Chapter VII): “Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.”
Instead we see Jeeter exploited by the capitalist system:
“Once he had secured a two-hundred-dollar loan […] on the first day of every month they came back to collect interest on the loan. He could never pay it, and they added the interest to the principal, and charged him interest on that too […] When the final settlement was made, Jeeter found that he had paid out more than three hundred dollars, and was receiving seven dollars for his share. Seven dollars for a year’s labor did not seem to him a fair portion of the proceeds from the cotton, especially as he had done all the work, and had furnished the land and the mule, too.”
Even less credible than Eugenics is another reviewer’s claim that Caldwell was racist. His novel “Trouble in July” (1940) is a study of the economic and social forces behind racial violence in the rural South, while “Place Called Estherville” (1949) looks at the same forces in an urban environment. Ray McIver, a Black playwright, actor, teacher, and personal friend to Caldwell, in 1982 edited a collection of Caldwell race themed stories as “The Black & White Stories of Erskine Caldwell.”
Caldwell believed in his youth that education was the cure for racism. He gave up on that hope in later years, and became convinced that intermarriage was the only cure, and said he was always encouraged when he saw an interracial couple.
Caldwell traveled the United States by automobile in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, and published his observations as “Some American People” (1935). He toured the Deep South with photographer Margaret-Bourke White in 1936 and they produced the picture-and-text collaboration “You Have Seen Their Faces” (1937). Bourke-White’s autobiography “Portrait of Myself” (1963) has an insightful chapter on her marriage to Caldwell along with some fascinating photographs.
George Snell, in his literary history “The Shapers of American Fiction – 1798-1947” writes:
“Emerging as a salient figure with extraordinary rapidity in the early ‘30s, Erskine Caldwell no doubt owed his popularity partly to fortuitous circumstances. Here was a writer concerned with the problems that engrossed all minds in those days of economic depression, and able to deal with such problems artistically; that is, in terms of human reactions. He could not only treat social issues artistically but extract what there could be of humor from them, a prodigious feat, it had seemed, since most of the fiction then current was solemn or hortatory or militant; a belly laugh was a prized rarity. He loomed on the scene quickly, portentously, and in the five years, 1931 through 1935, published seven books that established his reputation.
“Seemingly out of nowhere, with scarcely any observable apprenticeship, here was a major American writer pouring out in book after book a skillful, original kind of art and interpreting a phase of life that only Faulkner had previously investigated. If some readers saw a resemblance between the macabre humor in “As I Lay Dying” and that of some stories in “We Are The Living” (1933), it was only incidental, and the purport of the stories was positive, a call to an aroused social awareness, in a way and toward an end that no Faulkner story ever had.”
March 28, 2020
Amanda Knox - 7 tips for surviving quarantine
Amanda Knox draws on her prison experience for these tips on how to survive quarantine:
“How do you think I got deez abs?”
https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status...
“How do you think I got deez abs?”
https://twitter.com/amandaknox/status...
February 9, 2020
A Holocaust Memoir Adapted to Graphic Novel for Young Readers
Freedom Means Living Without Fear
By Ha Metsajeret
When I heard about this book, I admit being a little skeptical that adapting a Holocaust memoir to graphic novel for young readers would work. I was given a copy by the author, a neighbor who lives down the block, and found it powerful and compelling.
From the Amazon page:
“This graphic memoir is an ode to high school sweethearts Sonja and Herman Rosenstein. In 1943, the Nazis ordered them to board a train in Holland bound for Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. They were 20-years old, newly married and madly in love. There were rumors, but they had each other and knew no fear. They were told that they were going to work for just a few months and so they decided to enjoy their adventure.”
The book is intended for young people in grades 5 - 12, but this adult was deeply moved. The work is a hybrid; the story is mostly told as graphic novel but switches to prose when we get to Auschwitz. Again, it's hard to believe such a boldly experimental presentation could work. For me it totally delivered, and seems to me a uniquely effective way to tell this true story. I highly recommend it to anyone with children or grandchildren.
The book is available from Amazon or Seasidepress.org. Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature offers a generous preview.
By Ha Metsajeret
When I heard about this book, I admit being a little skeptical that adapting a Holocaust memoir to graphic novel for young readers would work. I was given a copy by the author, a neighbor who lives down the block, and found it powerful and compelling.
From the Amazon page:
“This graphic memoir is an ode to high school sweethearts Sonja and Herman Rosenstein. In 1943, the Nazis ordered them to board a train in Holland bound for Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. They were 20-years old, newly married and madly in love. There were rumors, but they had each other and knew no fear. They were told that they were going to work for just a few months and so they decided to enjoy their adventure.”
The book is intended for young people in grades 5 - 12, but this adult was deeply moved. The work is a hybrid; the story is mostly told as graphic novel but switches to prose when we get to Auschwitz. Again, it's hard to believe such a boldly experimental presentation could work. For me it totally delivered, and seems to me a uniquely effective way to tell this true story. I highly recommend it to anyone with children or grandchildren.
The book is available from Amazon or Seasidepress.org. Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature offers a generous preview.
November 12, 2019
Lost Horses Giveaway
For anyone interested, I’m offering 10 signed copies of Lost Horses on a Goodreads Giveaway that runs Nov 10 – Dec 10 2019.
You can enter here --
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
You can enter here --
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...
August 31, 2019
Homeless in Los Angeles
Perhaps the tragedy of the homeless in Los Angeles is best grasped not in the reporting of sensational incidents, but in the mundane everyday ones that have now become so commonplace. For example this recent item from the Santa Monica Daily Press, about a young man of 34 who should be enjoying the best years life has to offer:
A male entered into the Rite Aid store located at 2412 Pico Blvd and began to drink a Gatorade from the shelf. When he was informed he needed to pay for the item, he told them he did not have any money. He sat down at the entrance area of the store and continued to drink the Gatorade. Police arrived on scene and the suspect was placed under private person’s arrest for shoplifting. Brandon Hurley Jones, 34, homeless, was arrested for shoplifting and a parole violation.
This story is at the same time unremarkable and a powerful comment on a society which has allowed such stories to become unremarkable.
A male entered into the Rite Aid store located at 2412 Pico Blvd and began to drink a Gatorade from the shelf. When he was informed he needed to pay for the item, he told them he did not have any money. He sat down at the entrance area of the store and continued to drink the Gatorade. Police arrived on scene and the suspect was placed under private person’s arrest for shoplifting. Brandon Hurley Jones, 34, homeless, was arrested for shoplifting and a parole violation.
This story is at the same time unremarkable and a powerful comment on a society which has allowed such stories to become unremarkable.
August 30, 2019
Santa Monica Daily Press reviews Lost Horses
A neighbor passed along a copy of my Lost Horses to columnist Jack Neworth of the Santa Monica Daily Press.
https://www.smdp.com/laughing-matters...
https://www.smdp.com/laughing-matters...
August 9, 2019
The Homeless at Santa Monica Library
It was inevitable, I suppose.
It’s pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t live under a rock that the Los Angeles area is in the midst of a growing and catastrophic homeless crisis. Because I go daily to the Santa Monica Main Library, where I write in a study room, I’ve witnessed an evolving change as a compassionate policy reaches limits.
The library opens at 10 a.m., but if you arrive a little before, you can’t get within fifteen yards of the door. The homeless, many with possessions in several plastic trash bags, lay on the sidewalk waiting to get inside. When the door opens, there is a rush as these homeless occupy pretty much all the available study desks and tables, stack their trash bags on tables and floor, plug in cell phones to recharge, and go to sleep. They are a mixed lot. Many are elderly lost looking women. Several are sinister looking men who wear sunglasses and heavy sweaters with hoods drawn in 80 degree humid weather, and lurk among the shelves. Often there is standing room only in the restrooms.
The Bookmark Café in the courtyard used to open at 8 am. One could buy breakfast there, and eat at an umbrella table alongside the reflection pool. But the homeless with their trash bags occupied all the tables, so patrons had no place to sit, and the café did no business. The Bookmark Café now opens at 10 am like the library.
Santa Monica is among the most compassionate of California cities for the homeless. I have noticed by comparison, in my daily walks, that the Los Angeles Public Library in Venice will not allow me to use their restroom. You have to have an LA library card, and present it at the desk, to get a restroom key.
But over the past several months Santa Monica’s policy has begun to crumble under the sheer staggering proportions of this human tragedy:
The periodicals wing, with its many study desks and tables, is now closed to the public “due to recent incidents of vandalism.” The Santa Monica Collection room and its study desks is also closed to the public for that reason.
Then came yesterday:
When I entered the front door, access to the library was blocked by a table. A little slip of a Japanese woman stood there, with two huge uniformed guards standing behind her for protection. She handed me a flier, and said I had to agree to the rules therein to be admitted.
Here is a sample from the new list of prohibited behaviors in Santa Monica Library:
> Engaging in or threatening physical assault or abuse
> Threatening or harassing other patrons or staff, including but not limited to verbal threats, stalking, offensive staring or touching.
> Displaying a weapon of any type, including firearms, knife, sword, or similar item.
> Brandishing any object (e.g. baseball bat or golf club) in a threatening manner
> Lewd conduct as defined by Penal Code 647a
> Blocking aisles or access to library facilities, furnishings, or equipment
> Sleeping in the library or on library grounds
> Using restrooms for bathing, shaving or washing of hair or clothing
> Placing feet on tables, chairs, or against walls.
> Sitting or lying on the floor
> Using the library while shirtless, barefoot or without shoes.
> Using the library while ones bodily hygiene is so noxious that it prevents others from library use.
> Misusing library property (e.g. using books as a footstool or pillow)
> Bringing any bicycle, shopping cart, or other wheeled devices to carry personal property into the library
> Bringing sleeping bags, tarps, bed rolls, mats, or blankets into the library.
> Using the library while under the influence of alcohol or drugs or other controlled substances.
Clearly, it seems to me, the tragedy of the homeless must not be even on the radar of the government, if things have reached the point that these unfortunates must seek refuge in libraries and public parks intended for other purposes. There are no winners here.
It’s pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t live under a rock that the Los Angeles area is in the midst of a growing and catastrophic homeless crisis. Because I go daily to the Santa Monica Main Library, where I write in a study room, I’ve witnessed an evolving change as a compassionate policy reaches limits.
The library opens at 10 a.m., but if you arrive a little before, you can’t get within fifteen yards of the door. The homeless, many with possessions in several plastic trash bags, lay on the sidewalk waiting to get inside. When the door opens, there is a rush as these homeless occupy pretty much all the available study desks and tables, stack their trash bags on tables and floor, plug in cell phones to recharge, and go to sleep. They are a mixed lot. Many are elderly lost looking women. Several are sinister looking men who wear sunglasses and heavy sweaters with hoods drawn in 80 degree humid weather, and lurk among the shelves. Often there is standing room only in the restrooms.
The Bookmark Café in the courtyard used to open at 8 am. One could buy breakfast there, and eat at an umbrella table alongside the reflection pool. But the homeless with their trash bags occupied all the tables, so patrons had no place to sit, and the café did no business. The Bookmark Café now opens at 10 am like the library.
Santa Monica is among the most compassionate of California cities for the homeless. I have noticed by comparison, in my daily walks, that the Los Angeles Public Library in Venice will not allow me to use their restroom. You have to have an LA library card, and present it at the desk, to get a restroom key.
But over the past several months Santa Monica’s policy has begun to crumble under the sheer staggering proportions of this human tragedy:
The periodicals wing, with its many study desks and tables, is now closed to the public “due to recent incidents of vandalism.” The Santa Monica Collection room and its study desks is also closed to the public for that reason.
Then came yesterday:
When I entered the front door, access to the library was blocked by a table. A little slip of a Japanese woman stood there, with two huge uniformed guards standing behind her for protection. She handed me a flier, and said I had to agree to the rules therein to be admitted.
Here is a sample from the new list of prohibited behaviors in Santa Monica Library:
> Engaging in or threatening physical assault or abuse
> Threatening or harassing other patrons or staff, including but not limited to verbal threats, stalking, offensive staring or touching.
> Displaying a weapon of any type, including firearms, knife, sword, or similar item.
> Brandishing any object (e.g. baseball bat or golf club) in a threatening manner
> Lewd conduct as defined by Penal Code 647a
> Blocking aisles or access to library facilities, furnishings, or equipment
> Sleeping in the library or on library grounds
> Using restrooms for bathing, shaving or washing of hair or clothing
> Placing feet on tables, chairs, or against walls.
> Sitting or lying on the floor
> Using the library while shirtless, barefoot or without shoes.
> Using the library while ones bodily hygiene is so noxious that it prevents others from library use.
> Misusing library property (e.g. using books as a footstool or pillow)
> Bringing any bicycle, shopping cart, or other wheeled devices to carry personal property into the library
> Bringing sleeping bags, tarps, bed rolls, mats, or blankets into the library.
> Using the library while under the influence of alcohol or drugs or other controlled substances.
Clearly, it seems to me, the tragedy of the homeless must not be even on the radar of the government, if things have reached the point that these unfortunates must seek refuge in libraries and public parks intended for other purposes. There are no winners here.
