View: the Buck-A-Book Cart at the Cancer Society Thrift Store, Toluca Lake

VIRAL LIBRARY DEPT.

With the LAPL closed, and the rest of life closed, or deadly with disease, or burning, or under automatic weapons fire, the View gets bored at home with the cats. One of the only consolations in this awful time is that, with society going bust, the most astonishing serendipities of foreclosed wealth spontaneously appear at thrift stores. In this case, a bargain-book table presenting not the usual Tom Clancy and fat-free cookbooks and self-help garbage, but seemingly a carefully-curated library of biographies of the eminent Victorians and Edwardians and early Moderns, representing all the latest and most up-to-date scholarship, with some subjects (Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Oscar Wilde) represented with multiple ‘takes’ by various authors, all BRAND NEW.

Anais Nin, Disraeli and Gladstone, Vita Sackville-West, Ivy Compton Burnett, E.M. Forster. Their letters, their critics, their juvenilia, the letters their friends wrote about them, all annotated and in multiple volumes. They filled two carts out on the ash-drifty sidewalk, and many feet of space on the shelves inside.

There were two competing bios of Thomas Eakins; I love Eakins, but the blurbs on the backs of each essentially said, “the other bio is shit, this is the real story, buy this one;” thus I didn’t buy either! But — urban economics — some enthusiast might well buy both, and mankind might prosper thereby. I’m only now noticing, in these pictures, books I overlooked but covet; maybe I will go back to snatch them if possible. But mustn’t be greedy: here’s what my five bucks bought:

At-weill, He Should Have Read His Bible

The Guid Buik — Ex Libris VVV

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VIRAL LIBRARY DEPT.

When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England (1603), one of his famous projects was the Authorized English Bible. Any corresponding attempt to do a Scots version was scrapped. Duplicative at best, a “competing project” — at worst, a subversion of royal authority.

Un-authorized Scots translations existed, but were virtually outlawed (…blood, burnings, beheadings, mighty castles cast down.) For lang whiles, Scots itself was virtually outlawed (…mayhem, slaughter, massacres, cathedrals burnt.) Thus, Scots never had a language-unifying national Bible, the way English did. It set back Scots as a literary language by a couple hundred years.

This one came out in 1983; the year before I arrived in Edinburgh. (Milne’s Court is adjacent to New College, so I took meals with all the Kirk of Scotland divinity students. If anyone was excited about the first published translation of the Bible ever into Scots, I don’t remember it.) For readability, it beats the Sassenach Bible hollow. The print and binding are exemplary, the traditional gold leaf exquisite (with the Lorimer arms). Lorimer also did a Buik o Psaums, I’ll be hunting on Alibris for that one, too.

Imagine, all those dour Covenanters having witches’ tongues pulled out with red-hot iron pincers, had to lash them to damnation by reading out English Bible verses…it must have been exquisite torture to their own tongues. Well, now they have their own New Testament, so today’s exorcisms and shunnings must be more fun for everybody involved.

The translator, William Laughton Lorimer, (1885-1966) was a Professor of Greek at St. Andrews, seemingly an overlooked Mr. Chips sort, a shy genius. It’s appropriate that the city and University (and maybe even the miraculous bones) of St. Andrews should produce this masterpiece of literature. Add Lorimer (including his family and foundation) to the canon of St. Jerome, Wulfila, Cyril and Methodius, the King James council, Martin Luther, John Wycliffe, John Winthrop, and all the other brilliant Bible translators who have synthesized and preserved and extended human language and consciousness through their inspired hours of pedantry and word-sleuthing.

L.A.’s Burnt-Over District — The Poor Sepulveda Basin

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This wildlife refuge in the middle of the Valley has suffered several small fires since spring. Homeless jungles, bad management of that human problem, and bad land management practices in general, have prevailed for years, making fires infuriatingly inevitable. In all the past fires, big spots of the invasive Spanish pasture-mix grasslands had flash-burned; but the main wet cores of the refuge — Haskell Creek and the woodlands and wetlands around the pond, a major stop on the Pacific Flyway — was spared. Often it came at the cost of heroic, but dismayingly destructive, actions of the LAFD. What is at stake in these fires? The following pictures are taken over a bit more than year. Many rare species depend upon the spot. They are now displaced, in their high season. Better land management is desperately needed before it’s too late.

The vernal pool dries to a meadow, a prime milkweed-Monarch habitat in the Valley:

Down in there is the bed of Haskell Creek.

A few weeks ago I went out to check the season’s accumulated damage. The only creature I could find in the meadow was dressed in burnt weeds just to blend in, sackcloth and ashes, and praying hard:

I was shocked by the lack of progress (to put it mildly) in reducing the fire threat. I took a few photos for the View, and resolved to find out more about what the real reason was for this constant failure. This was early August, just before the 116-degree heat wave:

Over the holiday weekend, when it was 116 degreees, fires raged here, again started by the cookfires of a jungle. On the Tuesday after Labor Day, while it was still sour with reek, I found this: