Santa’s visiting The Last Bookstore

I went to “The Last Bookstore” in downtown L.A. and came out happy after seeing thousands of books in this quirky place!

michele roohani last bookstore christmas tree

Last time I was in Los Angeles I bought a bunch of used books about wine and took them back to Paris; the books were great and I like the bookstore’s sense of humor:

crazy books michele rouhani

Even funnier are their section of “books by color”!

red books last bookstore michele harper

They have taken this idiocy to the max:

books by color michele roohani harper

Only people who love books can laugh at them like this by arranging them by color!

book labyrinth michele roohani

Some people play chess,

old men playing chess M+V michele roohani

some chat,

book talk michele harper

but they mainly read…

t bookstore michele roohani

They have a little art gallery :

lst bookstore micheleroohnai

There is a Borg section,

borg lenses michele roohani

that I liked a lot:

borg shop last bookstrore los angeles rouhani

I was even able to find one of my favorite issues of National Geographic magazine about Suleiman the Magnificent from 1987!

national geographic michele roohani

Just some snow outside and it would have been a perfect christmas scene…

derniere librairie michele roohnai harper

No snow but they have this amazing labyrinth made out of books that starts with a funny tunnel:

labyrinth michele roohani

with a soldier standing guard outside…

bookstore soldier michele harper

If you don’t like what you read, you know what to do:

last bookstore michele harper

But when you get over your anger, you can sit down quietly and read again,

globe bookstore micheleharper

A nice book about Christmas,

neimann markus xmas book

before these ladies get angry at you…

women books last michele rouhani

And throw you out of…

last bookstore michele dordaneh roohani

Merry Christmas everybody!

books xmas lamp michele roohani

See my 2007 Christmas in Beverly hills here.

See my 2009 Christmas in Strasbourg here.

 

Rainy day in Paris with Richard Holbrooke

It’s a rainy afternoon in Paris, just the way I like it, but I am in bed 3 weeks after a foot surgery and lots of time to read.

Some time ago I was nudged by my friend, Ajay, (happy birthday Ajay) to read Paris: a love story. I thought maybe it’s about the one among millions of little/big romances in the city of lights so I didn’t rush to it. I was surprised to find a very interesting book by Kati Marton:

She was the wife of Peter Jennings and Richard Holbrooke and she has been in love with Paris all her life. I liked both these gentlemen and her story starting in Hungary and continuing all over Europe and United States kept me reading through the night (pain is also responsible for keeping you awake).

I knew Holbrooke from his days in Bosnia and Afghanistan and Jennings was coming to all our homes for years via ABC News. After that book and no brighter future in pain reduction, I started reading The unquiet American, a very interesting book published by Holbrooke’s friends after his death in 2011.

It is an amazing book if you like history and/or are interested in high diplomacy; Richard Holbrooke shines with his whole package of qualities and imperfections. I am considering to read (finally) a book by John le Carré, being nudged this time by Holebrooke himself!

I rarely read fiction so it would be hard to choose which of these two to read and which just watch as a film. The free first chapters from Kindle will help me make up my mind. I am as they say a “promiscuous” but loyal reader – I read many books at the same time but I do finish them all!

“History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.”  John le Carré

 

Adieu Christopher Hitchens, my favorite Mister Opinion

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends” wrote Hitchens last June and I am heartbroken to know he passed away yesterday…

I didn’t agree with everything he said (but who would? who could?) yet I learned a lot of very interesting things from him especially his relentless atheism that provoked the wrath of the faithful!

He sold his soul to the devil of alcohol and booze who helped him write but killed him prematurely. Keeping his great wit until the end he said: “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist”.

Here are some quotes from him that I like:

“There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.”

“People are being too easily pleased. I’m amazed they settle for so little.”

“A gentleman is someone who is never rude by accident.”

“A lot of friendships absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language.”

“I hate stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.”

His friend Richard Dawkins said: “I think he was one of the greatest orators of all time. He was a polymath, a wit, immensely knowledgeable, and a valiant fighter against all tyrants including imaginary supernatural ones.”  

I got to know his work via his excellent articles and book reviews and then I read his great book, “God is not great, how religion poisons everything”. I laughed all the way through the book! I liked his succinct biography of Thomas Jefferson  and his latest book, Arguably, is patiently waiting in my Kindle.

Graydon Carter says: “There will never be another like Christopher. A man of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar.”

I read in Time that When Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, believers of all faiths prayed for his health — and his salvation. The staunch atheist responded that he was grateful for the good wishes and hoped that praying for him made the faithful feel better. “Hitchens was never far below boiling point. He was an evangelical secularist, an atheist warlord.”

His friend, the novelist Ian McEwan, once said of Hitchens: “It all seems instantly neurologically available: everything he’s ever read, everyone he’s ever met, every story he’s ever heard. I’ve seldom met anyone who speaks in such fluid, elegant, nuanced sentences, dizzying in their breadth of reference.”

I loved the fact that he didn’t like Kissinger, Lady Diana, Jerry Falwell or Jacqueline Kennedy (he called her widow of opportunity!)

I strongly disagreed with him on his stand on the Iraq war or his view on abortion but he bought me back when I read what he had said of George Bush, when he was governor of Texas: ‘He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things’.

Another quote: “Marx says criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism. Philosophy starts where religion ends, just as chemistry starts where alchemy breaks off or astronomy starts where astrology runs out. It is the necessary argument. Not believing in the supernatural is the critical thing.”

These past few months, It was heart wrenching to read his articles about the cancer killing him but he never lost his grace. His memoir, Hitch-22, was a good (if not great) read because I was curious about what made this man who he is. I would like to see his friends, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, write about his death, his life…

Read about his last days here.

Read Hitchens’ article about his own imminent death here.

A good article about him is on today’s NYTimes here. 

Kindle and I, a love affair…

I have been wanting to write about my Kindle ever since I got it two years ago; the following is how the Kindle and I feel about each other.

I absolutely love my Kindle! I thought that as a bibliophile, I will hate any e-reader but I can’t find any fault with this quiet, light, patient, non-demanding, treasure chest of a library that goes from my purse to my bed table and travels everywhere with me from a crowded café in Paris to my quiet bed table.

It lets me highlight any passage in the book which I can print later; I don’t even have to open a dictionary to see the meaning of a word – my kindle whispers it in my eyes…My sneaky Kindle lets me read a sampler of the books I am interested in and only then gently pushes me into making money for Amazon…

Now it’s my Kindle’s turn to talk about me:

Hello, my name is Kindle Bezos and I am to tell you how my  mommy, Michele loves me. I am a spoiled, pampered, well loved little gadget; Michele lost my brother but she bought me one day later. She loves me and my dad, Jeff!

*She hugs me and kisses me to make the world jealous…

*She loves it that I am not a battery vampire like her iPad .

*She learned my instructions quickly (I am easy) and she types on me with patience and she talks to me often in 3 languages!

*She loves it that I can communicate easily with the mothership and get her almost any book her little heart desires; she likes the good deals I broker for her and I am working on showing her my French side (no luck on any Persian titles showing up on my screen soon!)

*She takes care of me – I even have a great polka dotted cover! She downloads almost everything I suggest to her (Papa Jeff will be happy with me if I succeed to make her read the New York Times on me!)

I don’t like it when:

a) She highlights long passages (sometimes I want to shout so she stops before underlining the whole damned book).

b) She stops often for a word’s definition (I am expecting that from my foreign owners; they always exhaust me with the dictionary…)

All this said, nothing comes close to a real library which I had in a previous life:

Those old friends are sitting in a storage room in Los Angeles and waiting for me to go and rescue them!

I love my Kindle but in defense of books, watch this very funny clip here.

The best commercial for Kindle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hg7bYEZ6e8&NR=1

 

Nicolas Bouvier, the Master Traveler

This is my blog’s fourth Anniversary issue and what better subject than the amazing Nicolas Bouvier! He traveled from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan in 1953-1954 with his painter friend, Thierry Vernet.

I read his great book, The way of the world, last year; it started a bit slow but once that he got to Iran, I was hooked. This map traces their journey from Europe to Asia where Bouvier starts in Geneva and ends in Afghanistan:

His friend, Vernet,  has kept a visual jounal by drawing what they see together and what Bouvier writes:

These images are my interpretation of their work and an homage to this delightful journal. “Ten years in the writing, The Way of the World is a masterpiece which elevates the mundane to the memorable and captures the thrill of two passionate and curious young men discovering both the world and themselves.”

They traveled with a small Fiat Topolino (above and below) that took them through hell and paradise!

What was striking about this little book was the fact that I didn’t have to lower my expectation of excellence: Bouvier writes with the ease of the poet that he is and the attention of an enthusiastic humanist…

He talks about “women buried in their floret tchador”: femmes ensevelies dans leur tchador à fleurettes.

He talks about how “Iran, the old aristocrat, who has experienced everything in life … and forgotten a lot, is allergic to ordinary remedies and needs special treatment. The gifts are not always easy to give when children are five thousand years older than Santa Claus.”

After finishing the book, I got curious about the writer and started the “research”! I compiled many images about this master Iconographer, I watched many of his interviews—from his youth until the last years of his life— and he sounds as fresh at the end as he did in the beginning.

The Swiss television has a great archive on the subject.

I have to admit that the year they spent in Iran was the most interesting to me— even though Serbia, Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan had their own exhilarating charm. He even talks about my old school, Jeanne D’Arc of Tehran, in the years before my birth. The next couple of pictures of Bouvier are from their time in Tehran; this one from a modest hotel’s balcony:

He’s typing in the nude in the heat of the Iranian summer:

Most of all I loved the winter they spend in North west of Iran, in Tabriz:

The way he describes the long quiet winter in that city transports the reader to the depth of our common humanity; I laughed when he talks about the smell of hot Persian breads, Sangak and Lavaash in the snow or when he describes the frozen mustaches and beards of men in the freezing cold, the boiling water of samovars and the fact that everybody thinks only about three words: tea, coal and vodka!

Speaking of Persian breads, Bouvier suggests that only a very old country can make luxuries out of most banal routines;  this bread has been thirty generations and a few dynasties in the making…

I was overwhelmed with nostalgia reading his beautiful poem about the onset of winter (Zemestan in Persian) in Tabriz:

I couldn’t find it in English so I translated it myself; first the original in French:

Novembre
Les grenades ouvertes qui saignent
sous une mince et pure couche de neige
le bleu des mosquées sous la neige
les camions rouillés sous la neige
les pintades blanches plus blanches encore
les longs murs roux les voix perdues
qui cheminent sous la neige
et toute la ville jusqu’à l’énorme citadelle
s’envole dans le ciel moucheté
C’est Zemestan, l’hiver
Tabriz, 1953

November
Bleeding open pomegranates
under a thin layer of pure snow
the blue of the mosques in the snow
rusty trucks in the snow
white guinea fowl whiter still
long red walls lost voices
who walk in the snow
and the whole town to the huge citadel
flies in the mottled sky
It’s Zemestan, winter
Tabriz, 1953

These images are based on the following books:

Bleu Immortel and The way of the world.

I read the “The way of the world” in french (L’Usage du Monde) but it has been lovingly translated by Robyn Marsack; I recommend it to all of you.

Que votre ombre grandisse or May your shadow grow!

 

My three Italian boy friends

I was late for my rendez-vous with Italo Calvino but he didn’t get mad; time is after all an elastic commodity for Italians…

italo calvino umberto eco primo levi michele roohani

Seamus Heany talked to me at length about him and encouraged me not to despair but how could I? Calvino suddenly died before I got to know him.

italo calvino michele roohani read books

Of the Italian Princes so far I only knew Umberto Eco and Primo Levi; I got to like Eco a lot after he took me to see the movie The name of the Rose about twenty years ago. Umberto and Primo each deserve their own blog post but let’s continue with Calvino.

italo calvino michele roohani pink orchids

I liked so much what Calvino’s said about reading that I need to share it with you; read it and judge for yourself:

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you…And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. ”

italo calvino michele roohani read books wordle

The above image is that passage in wordle.

Gore Vidal wrote in 1985: “Europe regarded Calvino’s death as a calamity for culture.” and I agree. Italy is not just an operatic country with clowns like Berlusconi at its head…

A couple more quotes from Calvino:

“Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.”

“Only a certain prosaic solidity can give birth to creativity: fantasy is like jam; you have to spread it on a solid slice of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing, like jam, out of which you can’t make anything.”

Read about Calvino here

Vidal talking about him here

The lost and found Art of Bookbinding, a second anniversary issue

It’s been two years since I started this blog and I just have to make this post fabulous…I’ve been wanting to write about the new Kindle for a while but I have felt guilty towards books!

duby feodalite figurine michele roohani

As many of you know I am a shameless bibliophile but  even though I am a rather “early adapter” of new technologies, buying a Kindle has not been a priority (you can carry a big chunk of your library—1500 books— and the neighborhood’s news stand in one Kindle).

lionheart coeur de lion book michele roohani

I am tactile and love touching books and feeling the pages, the type, smelling the paper, the ink, etc…this little soldier guards my books valiantly!

knight books chevalier michele roohani

This one—Herman Hess’ Narcissus and Goldmund— was one of my favorites and I have read it in three languages during the past 30 years (talking about obsession!) and I can’t imagine getting the same pleasure from reading it on Kindle…

herman hesse Narcissus and Goldmund michele roohani

Could I have appreciated Jean Michel Maulpoix‘s poetry without his signature blue covers? No paper?

jean michel maulpoix michele roohani l’instinct du ciel

Would he have wanted to be read on a gadget? Knowing him, I would say non!

“Blue makes no noise. It is a timid color, without ulterior motives, forewarning or plan; it does not leap out at the eye like yellow or red do, but rather draws it in, taming it little by little, letting it come unhurriedly, so that it sinks in and drowns in it, unaware.”

maulpoix books livre une histoire de bleu michele roohani

I can read Lukacs or Gopnick on a Kindle but not the Shahnameh (even writing about it is sacrilegious). One of my favorite blog posts is the one I wrote about this passion of mine.

napoleon john lukacs borges michele roohani

I audited a bookbinding course on my last trip to europe and was pleasantly surprised to see that this beautiful art is not dead.

bookbinding press leliure michele roohani

people in the atelier were restoring old books—resewing the pages, making new covers, etc—with a lot of love, attention and reverence. These fonts were for leather book jackets:

font bookbinding police reliure michele roohani

Is Amazon.com cannibalizing its own industry? They are the makers of Kindle.

bookbinding jargons michele roohani

I have to admit that  even I would love to have all the newspapers I read daily, on one gadget. The gadget that carries most of my books to choose from on a trip; I guess all I am saying is that it’s very hard to read poetry on a machine—wouldn’t these beautiful poems feel/sound better on paper?

i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

e.e. cummings


fernando pessoa book of disquiet livre de l’intranquillité michele roohani

“Parfois je me fais presque honte
De croire autant ce que je ne crois pas.
C’est une variété de rêve
Avec le réel au milieu.” Fernando Pessoa

 

Thank you all for the kind comments and support through these past two years.

michele roohani narcissus thank you card

Revisit my post on books here.

A book is a present we keep opening—again and again…

A night with George Steiner and Gaelle Boissonnard

A night with George Steiner and Gaelle Boissonnard—now that’s a curious ménage! Late caffeine kept me up until 6:30 this morning and I spent the night with these two.

 

gaelle boissonnard passerelles poissons fish michele roohani

Steiner took me from an old Transfuge to wikiquotes and Cornel West; there goes  3 hours pf precious sleep and when my mind was too tired to absorb anything more, Boissonnard’s images were there to help with their delicate originality.

 

gaelle boissonnard passerelles poissons fish michele roohani hat

“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.” Steiner

 

gaelle boissonnard passerelles blue michele roohani

Boissonnard is everything our “noisy” culture isn’t—serene, quiet, tranquil…

She has started working with a new company; I hope this move makes her work more available to international markets. Just found out that my friends in Paris, La Banque de l’Image, mention her in their company’s blog!

 

Gaelle Boissonaard michele roohani in the wind

I love this quote of Steiner: “the most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.” This is what I have learned by heart long ago:

“Le tout est de tout dire, et je manque de mots
Et je manque de temps, et je manque d’audace
Je rêve et je dévide au hasard mes images
J’ai mal vécu, et mal appris à parler clair.” Eluard

gaelle boissonnard passerelles bird michele roohani

دلم گرفته است

دلم گرفته است

به ايوان مي روم و انگشتانم را

بر پوست كشيده شب مي كشم

چراغهاي رابطه تاريكند

چراغهاي رابطه تاريكند

كسي مرا به آفتاب

معرفي نخواهد كرد

كسي مرا به ميهماني گنجشكها نخواهد برد

پرواز را به خاطر بسپار

پرنده مردني است


I feel sad,

I feel blue.

I go outside and rub my fingers

on the sleek shell of the night.

“I see  that lights of contact are blocked,

All lights of contact are blocked.”

“Nobody will introduce me to the sun,

Nobody will take me to the gathering of doves.”

Keep the flight in mind,

The bird may die.

Forugh Farrokhzad

This post is in the loving memory of the 3 sisters my friend, Marie, has lost in the past few years (the last one two days ago)—all young, all from heart problems…

To see Boissonnard’s blog  go here.

V.S. Naipaul, a monster I love?

I’ve been reading this extremely entertaining book about V.S. Naipaul—The world is what it is—and realizing more and more how his anger towards banality, mediocrity and simple pettiness of people makes sense (of course he is obviously not a nice man). I have written about him before and my interest in him was sharpened after I read in the BBC about this biography of his being published without him changing a word of it. Now, that’s courage…

naipaul nybooks michele roohani divided

A  good article about the book and the five years it took Patrick French  to write it was published in The Nation ; a fascinating glimpse of the mind of the “supreme egotist”.

naipaul young and old michele roohani

I find Naipaul’s banter with Derek Walcott amusing; read about it in The Telegraph.

naipaul walcott

Two Nobel Laureates from the West Indies fighting like children—cute!

Ian Buruma describes him well: “Naipaul’s voice, which some younger writers are tempted to mimic, cannot be defined by citing his opinions on race, the colonial experience, India, literature, or anything else. His views are frequently designed to shock and outrage.”

Cynicism (at its best) jumps at you from every page of French’s book and Sir Vidia’s lucid prose has kept me awake all last week. I empathize when he says: “my life is too short, I can’t listen to banality”.

naipaul telegraph

Like Naipaul, I have refused to engage in wishful thinking all my life and if this makes me a cynic, be it! “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

added on 12/23/08—I keep looking for him—just read James Wood’s article, Wonder and Wounded: He is socially successful but deliberately friendless, an empire of one: “At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.”

added on 12/27/08—”Artists cannot claim immunity from decency.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

I agree to a certain point with her but I don’t believe that artists should be judged by their personality (ies)—Picasso must have been an impossible man with his lovers but I can’t deny his art…

Is Naipaul “mad, bad and dangerous to know” like Lord Byron was? Read this very good article in Times by Magnus Linklater.

Kertész and me: “on reading”

I am a bibliophile and not ashamed to admit it! I love good books, and as much as I read online, paper and ink remain sacred to me. My love for books is thanks to my father’s great library of classics.

burnt old books los angeles library michele roohani

I went to the Los Angeles Central Library looking for some books and I couldn’t resist taking these pictures and sharing them with you. This library burnt in 1986—something about burning books fills me up with utter sadness and an enormous sense of loss (remember Fahrenheit 451?)

To see the most beautiful libraries of the world visit this site. We need these in a world where “print” increasingly resembles an endangered species.

burnt old books los angeles library michele roohani ribboned box

The books that were somewhat burnt yet still salvageable are so fragile that they have to be kept in special boxes. You can still see the black soot on them:

burnt old books los angeles library michele roohani black soot triolet

You can’t check out the more damaged ones because of their fragility like this one:

burnt old books los angeles library michele roohani ziska

The good news is that there are thousands of wonderful and “healthy” books in this library and the reading rooms are very pleasant.

reading room books los angeles library michele roohani

This is one book I have promised myself to read one day:

gibbon roman empire los angeles library michele roohani

But who has the courage to even contemplate these ones:

zola los angeles library michele roohani

André Kertész‘s newly reissued photo essay On Reading,  features 66 images, taken between 1915 and 1970, of people enraptured by print.

kertesz michele roohani man reading with a cat

“Kertész’s images celebrate the power and pleasure of this solitary activity and capture the deeply personal, yet universal moment of reading. This poetic book that has long been out of print is even more compelling today in a world where “print” increasingly resembles an endangered species.”

kertesz michele roohani woman reading

Even if Jeff Gomez argues that we are at a Gutenbergian moment, in which writers, publishers and readers must make the jump from paper to the more fluid territory of the screen, I can’t imagine being without the smell and the feel of paper.

kertesz michele roohani child reading

I still print everything serious that I want to read because staring at my screen bothers my eyes.

kertesz michele roohani woman reading in subway

“Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.” Alfred Whitney

Kertész and me: “on reading”

Speaking of great photographers, I went to Melvin Sokolsky’s opening night last thursday at Fahey/Klein Gallery. I’ve had the privilege of  taking a “Master Class” at UCLA with him some years ago. His pictures have remained as fresh as the day he took them and unbruised by time.

melvin sokolsky michele roohani