Summer Dostoevsky
a free day of galavanting in LA
The first thing I did in my new neighborhood in LA is find out where the cork oaks are.
Everywhere, if you know where to look: on Sunset Ave, Penmar, Grand. I rode around on my bike composing photos.
Cork oaks in LA are not magnificent in the way that the banyan figs here are magnificent, like Jupiter in posters of the solar system. Cork oaks are scraggly and I love them. They are where cork comes from. Peel off the spongey bark to keep wine sublime and studios soundproofed. The bark grows back. Useful, resilient, self-sustaining: cork oak.
Grown to benefit the world in Portugal and Spain, cork oaks in LA are street trees, adding texture. I knew where to look thanks to a good-old-fashioned website, TreeKeeper. It tells you the name and location of any street tree in LA and is a miracle of urban planning. Our new LA neighborhood is in Venice, near the Santa Monica border. This is our second downsizing, for when we’re here, part-time, for family. My wife is doing a great job making the new place cozy and she told me to go right ahead when I told her I planned to spend the day galavanting.
After cork oak tourism, I got a good falafel on cushy pita on Ocean Park Blvd. The surfer dude behind the counter saw my paperback and said, “Is that book really called The Idiot? It should be about me.”
Doestoevsky is so great at describing faces. Listen to this: “Her grey eyes might have been at times very merry and caressing, if they had not as a rule looked grave and thoughtful; too much so, especially of late.” Some authors look into the human heart; Doestoevsky looks you right in the face. I wish I could describe surfer dude at the counter like Doestoevsky — “his cheeks were sunburnt and sea-washed as one with not a care, but his eyes sparkled with the glint of self-determination” —ha-ha, sure, now do it for 700 pages!
Point being… after lunch, I meandered on my bike over to the driving range at Rancho Park. I’m taking up golf! Yup, golf, something I’ve been saving ‘til I got old and someone’s turning 65 in two weeks. The top deck at the Rancho Park driving range, that’s like swatting balls from the mezzanine at Shea Stadium. To me, as a non-golfer turned newbie golfer, the game is about the ability to fly. When a swatted ball soars aloft, straight and true: I’m like a bird.
Squibs and shanks don’t matter at a driving range. You just tee up the next ball. The only consquence is learning, and that’s optional.
My companions on this day were lots of people taking lessons. I never want to take a golf lesson, ever. I just want to make it up as I go along. There was also a guy with a Pirates hat — not the classic gold P but a cartoonishly marauding buccaneer — and very shiny shoes.
This guy had a round face and a gap-toothed, trusting, eager smile. He gave the impression of being a well-trained gentleman in his thirties, gaining on his forties. His cap was not a regulation Pirates hat of any kind. It was like fan fiction, a dreamed-up thing. I recognized it at a glance. Before I could process the shoes, he openly admired my knee-high orange socks, which I was wearing for good bicyclist visibility.
“I like your Major League socks. Are you a Mets fan?” he avidly inquired.
I betrayed my innermost self by grumbling, “Not this year.”
“I’m a year away from becoming a licensed baseball historian,” he divulged, skipping right over my apostasy. “My speciality is the 1800’s. The umpires had it bad back then.”
I had questions. How bad did the umps have it in the 1800’s? I’m sure I’ve read about this, but my brainpower was being diverted back to his shoes. Too fancy for golf shoes; or, if they were regulation, then pushing the bounds of snazziness.
We should have aired it all out, me and my new Pirates fan friend. Is there really such a thing as a licensed baseball historian, or did someone make that up to give this guy a goal in life?
I just said, “Baseball in the 1800’s was savage” and skulked away, or attempted to skulk away, but didn’t really know where I was going, and wound up encountering the Bucs fan again, where he greeted me anew: “I like your Major League socks.”
After the driving range, I rode my bike 12 miles to the Central Library to examine different translations of The Idiot. I’ve been reading the Constance Garnett translation. What nuances might I be missing? A librarian with a gaunt mystic’s face half-covered with a black N95 mask retrieved an armful of tomes from the stacks and gave me the run-down on each.
“This is the most recent,” he noted. “This one was published in the U.S.S.R. This one is the Garnett, as revised by Yarmolinsky.”
I thanked him as much as I could without appearing obsequious. Then I sat down and copied out variations of “he was accustomed to appear as a somewhat brilliant young man” — “rather brilliant,” “some brilliance,” “a certain brilliance.” с некоторым блеском (“s nekotorym bleskom”). I got that last bit from Google AI. Credit where credit is due. It was fun to pretend I was writing a thesis on comparative translations but what I really need to do is finish reading The Idiot. Then, I will have accomplished something.
Coming soon, like, next week — the print edition!
Describing the “surfer dude” like Dostoevsky killed me. Great read.
Love the 📰