“When we think about the people who have given us hope and have increased the strength of our soul, we might discover that they were not advice givers, warners, or moralists, but the few who were able to articulate in words and actions the human condition in which we participate and who encouraged us to […]
OUR COMMON HOME
ECHO PARK’S LOTUS POND
Echo Park, the LA neighborhood hard by downtown, boasts the largest lotus stand in the western United States. The lake where the lotuses live began as a man-made reservoir back in 1868. A surrounding park and boathouse were completed by 1895. By 1907, more green space had been added by extending the park south to […]
THAT QUAIL, ROBERT
Following my column about Clare Kipps’ Sold for a Farthing (the story of a domesticated sparrow), I learned of another memoir of a “house bird.” The protagonist of That Quail, Robert lived in Orleans, Massachusetts during the 1960s with a couple named Tom and Mildred Kienzle. The author was a neighbor. Displacement of very small objects […]
SOUTH COAST BOTANIC GARDEN
The South Coast Botanic Garden comprises 87 acres sitting pretty in the Palos Verdes Hills. It’s always fun if you live in, say, Koreatown, to realize that Crenshaw Boulevard—on which the garden is located—runs 25 miles south through the city basically into the sea. Their mission “is to serve the community by providing a unique […]
A WOMAN IN THE POLAR NIGHT
Another reading tip: Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night. Here’s the Kirkus Review: The isolation of Arctic Spitsbergen which Mrs. Ritter faced with her husband for a long season brought unique trials and joys. In pensive prose she unfolds the fierce glory of the Arctic as she watched the waning of the light, […]
SOLD FOR A FARTHING: THE STORY OF A SPARROW
Nothing brings me more joy than sharing a little-known book. Here is one such hidden treasure: Sold for a Farthing, by Clare Kipps (1953). Kipps was an Air Raid Warden in London. Her husband died in 1940. Two weeks later she found an injured sparrow on her front stoop. “Feeling that if a new-born infant […]
RICHARD, WE HARDLY KNEW YE
One of our favorite relatives, known to me as Cousin Dickie, died last Friday. Here’s the obit I worked up: Richard G. King, 80, of 1459 Ocean Boulevard died on March 15 after a long illness. Born on July 11, 1938, in Danvers, MA, Richard came as a child to live in Rye Beach [NH] […]
CHESTERTON AND VON BALTHASAR
“The Church is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his time.”— G.K. Chesterton “Love alone is credible.”― Hans Urs von Balthasar
RUNNING FOR THE HILLS: AUTHOR HORATIO CLARE
I just finished an extraordinary memoir, Running for the Hills: Growing Up on my Mother’s Sheep Farm in Wales by Horatio Clare. Like many people I know, Clare grew up with a gloriously eccentric (sometimes bordering on scary) parent (the father left soon after the mother, Horatio, and his younger brother moved to a very […]
ROBINSON JEFFERS’ TOR HOUSE
In his day, Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was one of the nation’s best-loved poets. He was known mainly for his epic Greek-style poems, modern-day tragedies based on the California’s central coast. He toiled in obscurity, then hit it big around the age of 37, when “Tamar and Other Poems” became a best-seller. Six years later, he […]
#ALLOFUS
“Unhindered by the guards, we stood by the barbed-wire fence which separated our compound from the men’s, and gazed spellbound at the long line of men who passed before us–silent, with bowed heads, plodding wearily in prison boots similar to ours. Their uniforms were also similar, but their trousers with the brown stripes were even […]
HOMELESS
Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov–Fyodor Dostoevsky – “Young man, young woman, do not forget to pray. Each time you pray, if you do so sincerely, there will be a flash of a new feeling in it, and a new thought as well, one you did not know before, which […]
DEAR LOS ANGELES
David Kipen is a native Angeleno, former literature director for the National Endowment of the Arts, professor, critic, radio personality and founder of the nonprofit Boyle Heights lending library Libros Schmibros. But his greatest achievement may the splendid new book he compiled and edited: Dear Los Angeles: The City In Diaries and Letters, 1542 To […]
MISSION TO THE CALIFORNIA MISSIONS
In an attempt, to partial avail, to escape the construction noise at my apartment, I took off last week for the Central Coast. In Santa Maria I visited with my dear friends Tensie and Dennis and made an abortive attempt to purchase a cemetery plot in the adjacent hamlet of Guadalupe (that it was MLK […]