Far From Brooklyn

This tumblog was supposed to be a record of a year in California.  As an Easterner only in his fourth year in LA, I’m still blown away by the silly, awful, wonderful strangeness of SoCal, and the light, and the mountains, and the motels, and the taco stands, and the graffiti, and the plants that look like something out of a textbook of the paleozoic era. When I’m out skating along Santa Monica Bay, sometimes I see the mountains along the edge of the ocean and my arms rise in the air in a reflexive gesture of awe.

Really.  I’m not kidding.

So I meant to get in the habit of carrying a camera and just trying to document one California thing each day, or almost each day…

And instead I started logging the books I was reading.  It’s as if I was spending the winter back East, snowed in, working my way through a pile of books in front of the fire.  Oh well.  Though the blog may not show it, I really have taken advantage of Cali living… just haven’t blogged it.

So I will note that I re-read, for the umpteenth time, both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece, Maus, while working my way through the Gombrich.  I consider these books to be basically perfect.  The portrait of Vladek and his fight to survive, and the parallel tale of his imperfect ability to survive in post-war America, is simply without flaw.

Maus by Art Spiegelman