Literate in L.A.

Waxing Nostalgic

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:02:00 +0000

I have always been a nostalgic person. Even when I was a little kid, I was nostalgic. For my grandpa’s days as a sailor in the Orient in the 1930s. For my parents’ sock-hop-letterman-jacket-1950s-youth in rural, small-town America. My friend Connie says that when she was a teen, all she could do was look forward into the future. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I listened to Simon & Garfunkel and wrote poems about wearing flowers in my hair, or about my own childhood, which was, in my own words, about lilacs, kittens, and love.

Simply put, I have a thing for lost worlds, for what was, and this year the nostalgia is worse than ever. (I am not even counting how St. Elmo’s Fire, which I own, makes me cry, or my latest obsession with Thirtysomething.) This dangerous nostalgia started innocently enough, with picking up yet another Richard Yates’ novel. Then I discovered Mad Men and rented three discs at a time from Netflix so I could watch the episodes back to back. Finally, used book hunting in Tucson with my dad, I found Mary Cantwell, whose memoir, Manhattan, When I Was Young, is the true life version of “the good old days.” Cantwell was Mad Men’s Betty and Peggy all rolled into one.

In her job as an assistant at Mademoiselle in the late 1950s (a magazine, keep in mind, that once published the greatest literary writers in America), Cantwell wrote that all she ever did for her boss was “order theater tickets, make restaurant reservations, and type the occasional letter. The letters were personal, not professional.” And of her coworkers at lunchtime: “The copywriters and other literary types were eating saucisson at the French Shack, unless they were at Barney’s knocking back martinis.” The things that we think of now as clichés—martini lunches, cigarette smoking in offices and airplanes—were nothing remarkable. They were just part of daily life.

When I emailed my best book friend Janet to tell her I was reading Cantwell (and how much I was loving her), she replied, “When you are in NYC, do you feel the Manhattan of Mary Cantwell? I don't anymore but I did so strongly up until the mid-70's. Now I feel a huge surge of loss when I am there—but whether that's for the city or my younger self that loved it so, I won't know until I go back for more than a couple of days—whenever that might be.”

This reminded me of something I read in the memoir Leap Days, in which the author describes moving to New York in 2004, when she was in her forties: “Change is such a constant here that people have to become accustomed to it, if not inured. Novelist Colson Whitehead was thinking of the transitory nature of the storefronts and corners when he wrote that you become a New Yorker ‘when what was there before is more solid and real than what is here now.’ That fine newspaperman of the old school, Pete Hamill, calls New York the Capital of Nostalgia. In his book Downtown: My Manhattan, he tells us that the New York version of nostaligia isn’t just about buildings and the people who live in them: ‘It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An is has become a was.’”

Something valuable, behind you forever. Our younger selves. The crux of it. Because my nostalgia is about more than just some romantic vision of a long ago New York that I never knew. That just happened to be the trigger, setting the stage for the very real losses that have overtaken me this year. When I heard that Gourmet magazine is shutting down next month, I sat alone in my apartment and sobbed. Then I received the news that my precious Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, where I worked—and lived, and grew up—during most of my twenties, is the latest casualty of the economic downturn, diabolic predatory tactics of superstores, and people who will waste their money on so much crap but not pay full price for a book (and therefore keep quality alive). Chances are in January the bookstore will be leaving the city’s historic Pioneer Square, where it has reigned, serving as a landmark, defining Seattle as a literary city, and reminding the world that words and personal service do matter, for more than thirty years.

Naturally, I’m feeling very selfish. Not only do these two losses gouge out great pieces of my past, they also intrude on the beauty of my future. My Vietnam food book, Communion, will be published in February 2010, and it will never know the pages of Gourmet, a magazine whose thoughtful commentary and literary tone put it in a class of its own. My novel, In Yellow Babylon, which I have faith will be published soon, may never be purchased from Elliott Bay—and I may never read from it there, an event I have dreamed of for years.

Am I a Luddite? No. Do I hate newfangled things? Nope. Do I wish we could return to a time when a female engineer or advertising executive was more than just a anomaly? She was dreaded and even loathed. Absolutely not. And in any case, I am not talking about the social changes the last few decades have given us. Those are another essay altogether. My kind of nostalgia may be rose-tinted, but I am a realist at the same time. What I miss, and see going away, and feel is the most tragic loss in all of this (beyond my own personal sense of loss), is a respect for tradition and quality. In an article about the end of Gourmet in The New York Times, Christopher Kimball (publisher of Cook’s Illustrated magazine) wrote:

“The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.”

I miss the thoughtful. I miss the considered. I want more than one sentence at a time. I want ideas that are thought through (thank God for The New York Review of Books.) I want a world in which patience still is a virtue, rather than some outdated fuddy-duddy quality like manners or personal responsibility (AIG et al still blow my mind). Yes, the clerk at Whole Foods really did snap at me, “What, don’t you know how to read?”, when I forgot to push the “yes” button on the debit card machine. Clearly, patience and manners were not part of her makeup, as seems to be the case with so many these days.

Another great loss in my life this year was Cook’s Library, a decades old cookbook store here in LA. In this store, I sampled the most amazing pine nut tart and bought the least pretty of all the tapas cookbooks because Tim who worked there assured me it was the best—he was right. I met famous chefs, and also one of my dearest friends, Ann Le, when we were both scanning the shelves doing research. Without this intimate, neighborhood shop, we never would have encountered one another, and our lives would be less rich for it. That is another thing I feel nostalgic for. Human interaction. The real deal, not just Facebook quips, as much as I enjoy reading them.

It’s not that I want the new to go away. I just don’t want the old to disappear—how sad I was in recent years when my neighborhood lost Irna’s Corsetorium to a trendy shop selling $400 boots, and the eighty-year-old Hungarian baker at the Farmer’s Market, whose kalachi recipe came from his own family, shut down his shop, which was replaced by a chain that doesn’t bake a single loaf of bread on the premises. I’m glad people no longer smoke in restaurants, but it still makes me smile when a man opens a door for me, or my friend Pete walks on the outside when we’re on a busy street.

And so, just a few years past forty, I am becoming one of those people who clings to the “old ways.” To my fountain pen, and to the shortwave radio my dad gave me that pulls in the blues station from San Diego (even though I could just as easily listen to that station online). To those funny ads in the back columns of the New Yorker, for books by the foot and the $14 beret from John Helmer, est. 1921. I cling to hope (thank you, President Obama, for bringing that back) that integrity and independent bookstores and the ability (and desire) to discriminate are not one day twittered away. And as far as Twitter is concerned, I wonder if there will come a day when today's twenty year olds turn forty and find themselves longing for a simpler time of texting and tweeting and the iPod Touch. Remember all those crazy things we used to post on our Facebook walls! Man, those were the days ... So life goes on.

My Life as a Fake

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:01:00 +0000

It has been one of those months. The purple petals are fading on the jacaranda trees, which means summer is officially here, and I can’t read without growing restless. I have a rigid schedule these days: up at five to work on my novel, an hour break around eleven, and then to work editing until six. When I’m done, I eat dinner, and then reach for something to read. But nothing is working. Half a dozen books are sitting half-read (or less, or more) on my nightstand. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The Elegance of the Hedgehog. An Illuminated Life. Main Street. The Easter Parade. The Golden Notebook (just two chapters to go, and somehow I can’t do it). I open each book, read a paragraph or two, and then flip on my computer to watch an episode of Barney Miller on Hulu before going to bed, just so I can get up and start all over again.

I missed being devoured whole by a book, and so on Saturday I decided to walk to the new Goodwill on Beverly and buy a book that would consume me. I put my trust in serendipity. I walked in, got distracted by the racks of jeans, and wasted time searching for old Levi’s for a while before making my way to the bookshelf. I scanned the volumes. Lovely Bones came as no surprise. When does it not show up in a thrift shop? Imagining Argentina did. What a powerful story. But I had already read it. I was distracted for a moment by the realization that Goodwill’s are where Reader’s Digest condensed books go to die.

Then I found, side by side, two editions of Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake. A British version and an American version. I know of his books. I have always been meaning to read him, though I assumed it would be something more obvious, like Oscar and Lucinda or True History of the Kelly Gang. But these paired paperbacks seemed like a sign, especially since the book was about literary folly and Asia, two of my favorite subjects. I liked the cover of the British version better, but I didn’t like its paper and typeface. The American version had a slight tear in its back cover, but the paper felt nicer, and the type was bigger. I chose the American version.

Back outside, I walked to the post office, and to the library to return three of the partially read books. From there I headed up First toward Starbucks to get an iced green tea. I opened My Life as a Fake and read the first paragraph. I read the second. I read the third. Reading and walking in the dead heat of midday, passing in and out of the shade of the magnolia trees. It was one of those bluest of blue days when shadows feel like pools of cool water. I was beyond the noise of the main streets. I could hear the breeze in the palms high above as words like “territorial enthusiasm” drifted from the page.

It was the kind of book that leapt right in. Just what I needed. I read on until I hit Starbucks, and held my place with my thumb as I ordered my iced tea. The barista asked me what I was up to that day.

“Walking and reading,” I told him.

He considered this and seemed confused. He said, “Good thing you’re doing it in this neighborhood. You couldn’t do that in just any neighborhood in L.A.”

This was true, for more than one reason. I most likely wouldn’t get mugged here (although I have been mugged in a better neighborhood than this one), and the sidewalks were relatively smooth. Very little tripping as I read and walked. Past the New Beverly Cinema. Past the medieval crenellations of Lloyd Klein Couture, with its turtle pond out front. I marked my place again to take a moment to watch the turtles, necks arched, little pointed faces arched toward the sun. As I read about a prank involving a poet called Bruno Hat, I overheard two homeless men in a bus shelter discussing whether or not Michael Jackson had been abused as a child. I walked home, book in hand, took out the dog, book in hand, and then perched on the arm of my sofa, book in hand, still reading.

As I blow dried my hair, I wandered through Kampong Baru market. As I ate dinner, I listened to a man named Christopher Chubb try to convince the editor of a literary journal of the authenticity of a particular poem. I like hiding away from the world and reading for hours. I also like living while a book is living. Not just to be absorbed by it, but to live with it, as it lives, as I did as a child, cleaning my room with Little Women propped open, dirty socks and Jo’s dreams of being a great writer and chaotic school papers and Beth’s dying all one. As evening came, I was only a third of the way through My Life as a Fake, but I had plenty more to do before bedtime. I would water my plants, I would dust, and I would take the dog for another walk. Reading all the while.

City of Ghosts

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Mon, 25 May 2009 03:04:00 +0000

I just got back from a month in Asia, a week of which I spent in Cambodia. My friend Janet and I traveled to the northeast, to Kratie, where I took off by myself around seven each morning for days spent bicycling along the Mekong River, past simple timber houses built on stilts, around an island filled with cows and haystacks, and up and down Kratie’s riverfront promenade at sunset. It was peaceful. It was beautiful. I could have stayed longer, until the ennui of small town life set in and I felt the urge to move on.

From Kratie we took an eight-hour bus ride to Phnom Penh, which I had been looking forward to visiting for ages. Not only because of a novel I was researching, but because I had been there in 1997, right after the Hun Sen coup that ousted the prime minister. During that first trip there was a tension simmering just beneath the surface. The coup was so fresh that some of the windows were still shot out at the airport when I arrived. But there was also a warmth that swam among the quiet, dusty city streets like sunlight in the current of a dark river. Phnom Penh felt in a state of limbo back then, the past not forgotten—nothing that terrible can be forgotten—but in the process of being let go, and the future still to come. Any future. That was the beauty of it. Coming back, I was excited to see the direction it had taken, envisioning a place in which ancient Khmer artistic traditions were revived and evident in daily life, the French architecture restored, and the mood one of conciliation among a resurrected population.

My heart broke. The city was dingy and aggressive, its streets clogged with cars and filthy exhaust fumes. Its energy was cheerless. I was only back for a few days, so I realize my experience was limited, but in that short time I saw three street fights and not a single person laughing. Not in a shop, not in a restaurant, not at a sidewalk street stall. I saw none of the modest promise that I remembered. The once beautiful waterfront had become just another backpackers’ free-for-all of happy hours, beggars and desperate motorcycle drivers. Protecting children from pedophiles is a national campaign. So many of the old French buildings looked as if they should be condemned. The only thing that felt cared for was the National Museum, full of Khmer art, and that was where I spent most of my days.

When I did wander the streets of Phnom Penh, I searched for a glimpse of people enjoying themselves but instead saw lethargic street vendors and a man in a suit get out of a Lexus SUV and pee on the wall across from the Royal Palace. Often, the movie City of Ghosts crossed my mind. I saw it when it came out in 2003. On the surface it is a basic thriller. Matt Dillon plays a front-man involved in a kind of Ponzi insurance scheme. When claims following a hurricane reveal the scam, the Feds come down on him, so he heads to Cambodia to find his boss, played by James Caan, who is trying to invest in a casino while hiding out from some angry Russians.

What I liked about the movie the first time I saw it was what a fine job Dillon, who also directed, did with the atmosphere. I had lived just across the border in Vietnam for four years, and I felt that he really got that part of the world, from the color of daylight at certain times of day to the flicker of fluorescent lights in a room at night to the faded elegance of the floor tiles to the people—he portrayed without parodying young Vietnamese women forced into prostitution, dazed pill-popping travelers, a beautiful do-gooder, a good-hearted but practical cyclo driver, and the French innkeeper played brilliantly by Gerard Depardieu, who wrests a knife from a man’s hand while balancing his half-Cambodian toddler on his hip. I also felt that Dillon captured a moment in time. The last days of the Wild West. But watching the movie after my recent trip, I saw it as a chronicle of why Cambodia has the odds stacked against it.

I’m not saying that Matt Dillon is a sage, but he certainly illustrated the players in a tragic path of least resistance. The corrupt but realistic Cambodian general who will always put himself and money before his country. The foreigner (Caan) who does not see himself as opportunistic or greedy, but rather practical in his own way as he shreds a country’s culture and belittles its dignity in pursuit of the big buck—most dangerously when it is disguised as "the name of progress." Mostly, though, Dillon caught the thoughtless violence that is bred by a legacy of thoughtless violence.

During my recent trip, my friend and I had dinner with a Cambodian man in his early twenties, charismatic, fluent in English, with every foreigner who has ever met him rooting for him to succeed. As the evening progressed and the small talk gave way to real conversation, we talked about whether the city is dangerous or not, and he said he didn’t think so before telling us how that when he and his friends caught a guy who had been robbing travelers, they bashed his head in with a rock. It was unclear whether or not the robber survived.

A country’s youth is its hope. Is this Cambodia’s hope? A child of Khmer Rouge survivors who spent his boyhood on the streets, begging and then selling newspapers. A young man who waits for his brother the tuk-tuk driver to get off work every night so that they can go home together—safety in numbers. He seemed to have little understanding of the brutality his parents must have suffered, but a very real—and nonchalant—street knowledge of the endowment that brutality had bequeathed. It is the nonchalance that concerns me.

Sitting there in a country in which an entire generation of thinking people had been eradicated, in a city that has its own killing fields, at a table with a polite young man who thought nothing of the vigilante punishment of another human being, I wondered what there was left to hope for. I hope that the young man finds the promise that lies within him. I hope that City of Ghosts becomes a time capsule. But mostly I hope that I am wrong and that the future—a generous, life-affirming future—is still to come to the sad faded streets of Phnom Penh.

For the times, they are a-changin'

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:06:00 +0000

For the past nine years---the longest I've lived anywhere---I have been writing at a desk in the back of my apartment that overlooks my neighborhood's old Spanish-style buildings and the Hollywood sign. It also overlooked two palm trees and an old power pole that captivated me the first time I saw it. I could never get enough of the view ... bright blue days, windy days, rainy days, the smoky, hazy, unreal days of the Griffith Park and San Diego fires. I've watched squirrels hang precariously off the pole, and birds cluster on it. When I wasn't able to find the right words, I stared at it for hours. And then, last week, the worst thing imaginable happened. I noticed a couple guys working on the pole. The next thing I knew, the decades' old power box and beautiful blue glass thingies (sorry, I don't know the technical terms) were gone, and in their place a new, ugly cylinder that I'm sure is safer and more efficient, but that breaks my heart every time I look at it. I'm not sure that I want to live here anymore. In pictures, an ode to my writing life since 2000 ...

How the Library is Saving Me During the Economic Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:15:00 +0000

I love books. Not just reading, but books. I know a lot of people say that. I overhear it at parties: “Oh, I just adore books.” But I really do, sometimes to the point of unhealthy obsession.

It’s not just that I lived with my nose in a book as a kid (Judy Blume and Nancy Drew, and Gone With the Wind, Jane Eyre, and Harlequin romances as a teen); or that I worked for six years at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle after college; or that I still read at least ten different book reviews a week. I’ll read a dozen reviews of the same book, even if it’s one I’m not interested in, just because I can’t stand not being in the loop. I don’t waste money on shoes or booze or gadgets, but I have been known to go out and buy a book, just to have it in my possession. And then, never read it.

That said, I do read a lot. So between buying books I read and buying books I don’t, books consume a serious chunk of my income. This is especially hard on my wallet when I’m on a binge; when I pick up an author and can’t stop until I’ve read everything by that person. Over the years, I’ve done this with Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble, Mary Wesley, Honore de Balzac, Thomas Hardy, Nora Ephron, and so many others. Last year, though, when I suddenly got it into my head that I wanted to read Eve Babitz, I went to my local bookstores and couldn’t find anything in print. I mentioned this to my friend Janet, a fellow reading fiend, and she mentioned, to my surprise, the library.

I was forty-one, and it had been at least a decade since I’d checked a book out of the library. But the second she said that magic little word, “library,” a flood of happy images washed over me: all the libraries I had known in all the towns I had grown up in around Washington State, culminating with the library at Gaiser Junior High School in Vancouver, Washington. It was where I had volunteered to work during my free periods, and where I stole. Not books. I would never steal a book. But the pockets and cards put inside the front covers of library books. I took them home and glued them in the novels I had written, and made my sister check my masterpieces out from my library/bedroom.

The Gaiser Junior High library was unusual, a pit in the center of one of those 1970s experimental schools, where the classrooms circled the pit but had no walls, other than bookshelves for dividers. It was difficult to steal from there, but I did it, hands sweaty, heart pounding. Along with stealing, I spent hours scouring the shelves, reading every single one of those girls’ historical docu-novels with the reddish orange covers, and all of Betty Cavanagh, the first writer to ever respond to one of my letters.

With those fond memories in mind, I walked to the newly reopened Fairfax branch of the Los Angeles Public Library a few blocks away from my apartment. It is a gorgeous, Spanish mission-style building, with hardwood floors and plenty of wide desks for people to read or work on their computers. I got myself a library card and ordered Eve’s Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; and Sex & Rage. Within a week, they arrived. I had them all read before the following week was out.

But my renewed love isn’t just about the library itself. It’s also about the physical books. When I buy a book at a bookstore, it is usually new. At the library, I always request the old first edition. The edition I would have read if I had bought the book right when it came out. The edition of Fear of Flying that I never could have bought because it was published in 1973, when I was eight. Even if I had been a precocious eight year old, which I was not, I think Isadora Wing’s views of life would have overwhelmed me. I take these books—smelling delicious as only old paper and ink can—back to my apartment, where I sit in the bright California sunlight. As I read the original edition, I try to put myself in the context of its era, imagining the shock, challenge, humor, sadness, outrage, or whatever other emotion the book evoked at the time of publication.

As this New Year came round, with all of America focused on the financial crisis, I decided that I should not purchase any books this year. The crisis hasn’t hit me hard. It’s more of a psychological challenge that has to do with the obsession this country has with acquisition. The second I made the decision to do this, I had a panic attack. So, I got onto my library’s website, and I ordered Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde and eight other books, some classic, some new.

I will bring them home. I will stack them up. I will look at them with satisfaction whenever I pass them by. I will read some. I will merely read the jackets of others. And I will be secure in knowing that although the world may shift this way and that, books are constant. Cutting back doesn’t have to mean giving up what I love best. Even if I don’t have a cent to my name, the library will always be there to keep my obsession fed.

Upton Sinclair’s Oil!

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:35:00 +0000

Whenever I travel out of town, I like to check out the local independent bookstores. A month or so ago in San Francisco, I happened upon Browser Books, on a trendy stretch of Fillmore Street. This tiny, crammed, and superbly stocked shop was filled with backlist gems that would make any independent bookseller weep with joy.

I was with my friend Janet, who found her treasure in a copy of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Wanting to contribute to the independent cause, I scanned the front table and saw a stack of Oil!, with its sinister-black movie cover linking it to There Will Be Blood. Having guiltily put off reading The Jungle for years, I suddenly felt that the time had come for Upton Sinclair. That night, while Janet slept in the twin bed across from me, in our $50-a-night, seventh-floor room in The Astoria overlooking the Chinatown Gate, I devoured the first fifty pages.

Usually, the terms “social commentary” and “page turner” don’t go hand in hand, but as Sinclair unfolds the story of Southern California oil discovery, oilmen, wildcatting, Wobblies, communists, and the Teapot Dome Scandal during the first quarter of the 1900s, he throws in a great story, which also includes movie stars, jazz, the subconscious mind, and even a nod to Aimee Semple McPherson, in the guise of a young preacher man. This is a first-rate potboiler, and at the same time a lesson in how in the heck we got into Iraq. Oil, greed, greed, and oil, with a little more oil and greed and lots of corruption thrown in for good measure.

Anchoring the book, Bunny grows from a teenager to a young man, struggling between his loyalty to his oilman dad, who has an intriguing, but ultimately dangerous, code of ethics, and the unfairly treated oil workers. He loves his father, and his father loves him, as is clear when he doesn’t chastise Bunny for getting involved with the enemy. It is this mutual love that creates much of the book’s tension, not between the two men, but between one man, Bunny, and his conscious. Every angle is worked, including the always fascinating trait of neutrality, which is—no big plot spoiler—never neutral in the end.

One of the great things about Oil!, as I mentioned about An American Tragedy, is how timely it feels (despite all the terrific period details). There is something very current about it, in the characters and the issues. Or perhaps that’s the bummer about it. Haven’t we learned any lessons yet? Apparently not, given the question posed in the last pages: Could a civilization endure on the basis of such purchase of government? Certainly the current US regime is answering that.

With a setting in Southern California, Oil! also returns relevance to the oil wells that pierce the land in this part of the country. Not those towers we’re used to seeing in movies about Texas, but the bobbing contraptions that look, ironically, like the skeletons of dinosaurs. They are atmospheric background, like palm trees, for anyone who lives here, taking the back road to LAX or driving around the South Bay. Having passed them for so many years, you are used to them, and even feel a fondness for them. If you are attached to that sentimentality, then I don’t suggest reading Oil! But if you’re aching for change, it’s a terrific substantiation of why this country so badly needs it.

If you’re up in San Francisco, make sure to support this shop:

Brower Books
2195 Fillmore St.
San Francisco, CA 94115
415-567-8027

Where have you been all my life, Richard Yates?

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:19:00 +0000

Do you ever stumble across a writer and wonder, “Where have you been all my life?”

Having finished reading the short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, I pose this question to the ghost of Richard Yates. Funny thing is, I’d already stumbled across him a few years ago, when a friend suggested that I read Revolutionary Road. I did, and it was good, but I didn’t give Yates further thought until I read a post last December in The New York Times’ book review blog, “Paper Cuts.” In it the writer suggested giving short story collections for Christmas gifts, offered a few of his favorites, and asked for recommendations. There followed 119 comments from readers.

I perused these comments and saw this from a man named Lawrence Tate: “And jeez, how the hell can there be nearly 60 posts on this subject without anyone mentioning Richard Yates?! If one is choosing collections apart from his Complete Stories, I’d go with the first, Eleven Kinds Of Loneliness. If any short story book of the last century holds up, that one sure does.”

When I was younger, I had a love/hate relationship with short stories. I wanted so badly to like them, but I always found them dissatisfying because they were so … short. I like getting to know characters over time; I like plot development. Short stories are unable to offer that. But lately, I had been thinking about them, wanting to figure them out, these small, self-contained creatures. And when I read that title, containing loneliness, not to mention eleven kinds of it, I felt inspired to give short stories a shot again. I made my request at the local library, and within a few days I had an early-1960s, cloth-bound copy of the book in hand.

I read the first story, “Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern,” one early morning over a cup of tea. I was struck by its miserable beauty. I wanted to skip work and finish reading the whole book that day. But I knew I’d be sorry when I was done, for precisely the reason that I would be done, so I rationed myself, a story a morning before I started work. I’ve always been an early riser, but suddenly, I was awake before six, and well into a story as the sun came up each day. Before I’d even finished the collection, I knew I had to own it, and ordered a copy of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.

In the introduction to this collection, Richard Russo writes: "Yates understood that while we risk disappointment when we set for ourselves an ambitious goal and fail to achieve it, the challenge, in a sense, insulates us from the worst humiliation. Dream big and we’re expected to fail. About the worse that can happen … is that we’ll be applauded for our pluck. Dream small, Yates seems to suggest, and we’re expected to succeed. As a result, failure ensures not just disappointment, but humiliation, anguish, and, most dangerous of all, the impulse to dream smaller next time, thereby risking even greater failure."

Oh, those small, small dreams. In the story “A Glutton for Punishment,” the main character, Walter Henderson, dreams not of success. Instead:

There was certainly no denying that the role of a good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him. All through adolescence he had specialized in it, gamely losing fights with stronger boys, playing football badly in the secret hope of being injured and carried dramatically off the field … College had offered a wider scope to his talent—there were exams to be flunked and elections to be lost—and later the Air Force had made it possible for him to wash out, honorably, as a flight cadet …

Yes, a story about a man who dreams of failing, and because it’s a Yates’ story, chances are, he’s going to fail at that. They’re all going to fail, but knowing this doesn’t mean you know how each story will end. At first, once you’ve read a couple, you think you do, but each time a story draws to a close, Yates, with his exquisitely discreet talent, surprises you. By the time you read the last stories, you are bracing yourself.

I have never before read someone who so ably transferred his characters’ discomfort onto me, so I felt that I was the patient in the tuberculosis sanitarium trying not to let it show that he wanted to read Sports Illustrated rather than talk to his visiting wife, or the journalist overhearing his pathetic co-worker being berated by their boss. I can’t give any more details than that, because firstly, I could never do them justice, and secondly, I don’t want to give anything away. Even though these are not the kinds of stories with things in them to be given away, they are meant to be read without preface. They are meant to be experienced as the experience in the story is taking place.

While I thought I’d made the discovery of the century in Richard Yates, a Google search reveals that he has a loyal following, from Average Joes like me, to writers like Kurt Vonnegut, who declared, “The best short-story collection ever written by an American.” And then, of course, there is Raymond Carver, whose writing apparently owes quite a debt to Yates.

Yates’ moving stories are of a white-collar culture in a post-WWII time period dominated by Cheever and early Updike. Wives put on lipstick and pour from cocktail pitchers before dinner (adult dinner, which is served after the children have eaten and gone to bed), and TB patients smoke in the sanitarium. While I admire Cheever, and accept that Updike is a skilled and even insightful writer (though he’s never really grabbed me), they are, I realize, fakes. By that I mean simply that they are not Richard Yates.

Yates’ writing does not console. By addressing loneliness, by naming it and exposing it, he does not make us feel less lonely, as most other writers do. Rather, he makes us understand that the fundamental nature of loneliness means it is something that can never be bridged and must always, ultimately, be suffered alone.

Philip Roth's Zuckerman Novels

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:33:00 +0000

Among my many 2008 New Year's resolutions was to finish reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Praise of Slowness. To that goal I added reading all nine of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman novels. I can’t say what prompted me to do this. Probably all the fuss over the recent publication of Exit Ghost(the ninth novel); and I wanted to see what a novelist could do with a character and storyline over the course of many years. Also, I enjoyed the first Zuckerman novel: The Ghost Writer. It is a writer's novel, with its highlights being those moments that turn the spyglass on the process of writing. I read the following passage half a dozen times, simply because at its fundamental level, it touches on something true in most writers.

In it, the famous, reclusive novelist Lonoff says to Zuckerman:

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste ... I sit back down at my little Olivetti and start looking at sentences and turning them around. And I ask myself, Why is there no other way but this for me to fill my hours?

In The Ghost Writer, aspiring novelist-to-be Nathan Zuckerman has the chance to visit his idol, the critically acclaimed novelist E. I. Lonoff, at Lonoff’s home in rural New England. Over the course of twenty-four hours, there is plenty of talk about what it means (and entails) to be a writer, a few intense interactions between Lonoff and his wife Hope, and a more than intense reverie on young Nathan’s part.

In an elaborate daydream (in the middle of the night), Nathan imagines that Amy—a college student who is helping Lonoff organize his writings for donation to a university library—is Anne Frank; Anne did not die in the camps, but is alive and hiding in America. Is this romantic notion a sentimentalist’s wish for Anne not to have suffered such a tragic fate? Of course not. This is a Philip Roth novel. If Anne is alive, it would be so that Nathan could marry her, bring her out of hiding, and therefore redeem himself with his Jewish family, whom he has offended with a story based on a great aunt and her fatherless grandsons, a story that Nathan’s father believes tarnishes not only the family name, but Jews as a race.

The writerly side note to this fantasy comes when Nathan learns what Amy really is—a lovestruck young woman who wants Lonoff to run away with her to Italy. For complex reasons you need to discover for yourself, Lonoff won’t. Upon learning this, Nathan thinks:

Soundlessly as I could, I slipped down from the desk and made my way on my toes to the daybed, where, from the sheer physical effort that had gone into my acrobatic eavesdropping, I collapsed. My astonishment at what I’d overheard, my shame at the unpardonable breach of his trust, my relief at having escaped undiscovered---all that turned out to be nothing, really, beside the frustration I soon began to feel over the thinness of my imagination and what that promised for the future ... Oh, if only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what actually goes on!

Nathan truly embodies the saying: “Enough about you, let’s talk about me.”

By the second novel, Zuckerman Unbound, the main character has evolved into an excruciatingly famous novelist in his thirties, dealing with a fling with a starlet who leaves him for Castro, a dying father whom he has not reconciled with, and the notoriety (and creepy fans and detractors) that have come with the recent publication of Carnovsky, which I am told is based on Portnoy's Complaint. I really wanted to like this novel. I really wanted to be drawn deeper into the character introduced in The Ghost Writer. Instead, I was bored. And I was constantly distracted. While reading about Campbell’s Funeral Home, across the street from Zuckerman’s apartment, my mind began to drift … Isn’t that the same place that Heath Ledger’s body was taken … what a tragedy … so young, and with a daughter … Novels are supposed to help you forget about reality, not fling you haphazardly out into it.

I didn’t know where to focus. I got confused by Pepler, a sort of stalker. I found myself reading solely for the occasional gems, such as this observation Zuckerman makes about his starlet: He was thinking of Caesara starting at nineteen as the enchanting Anne Frank, and of the photographs of film stars like the enchanting Caesara which Anne Frank pinned up beside that attic bed. That Anne Frank should come to him in this guise. Here we go, I thought, now I’m going to see how that young man who fantasized Anne Frank back to life has become a middle-aged man sleeping with starlets. But no.

At another point, Zuckerman is reading a book that belongs to Caesara, and he comes across a passage she has underlined. He asks her what else she has underlined, and she replies, What everybody underlines … everything that says ‘me.’

While this is true, I love it when novels speak to me, when they touch on the core of my experiences, when they give voice to my thoughts, I also love novels that tell interesting stories about interesting characters. This one didn’t. So, am I going to read the third, The Anatomy Lesson? I’m still intrigued, but I can’t make any promises. And if I don’t? I doubt I’ll be the first person to break her New Year’s resolutions this year.

An American Tragedy

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:45:00 +0000

I have a thing for big novels. Not physically. Physically, I like slim little Muriel Spark-sized novels. Physically, big novels are too heavy to read in bed late at night. But emotionally … well, that’s another matter entirely. For me, emotionally, big novels are commitments, big novels pay off, and that’s why I keep going back to them. That’s why I read Gone with the Wind over and over and over when I was in junior high. That’s why I stuck with the unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo (more than 1,400 pages), even when I realized that every other member of my classics book club was reading the abridged version---not their faults, as the version they bought didn’t mention anything about abridgement. And that’s why I’m nearly through The Golden Notebook.

Big novels often have one thing going against them, though. Setup. They can take so long to get into. At the beginning of last year, I started Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I can’t remember why I decided that I had to read this book, but I did have to, so I started it, and then put it down, and then read some more, and then put it down … by September I was only 300 pages into it. I had put it down and picked it up countless times, and read many other books in between, but the crazy thing was that whenever I started to read it again, I remembered every single detail of what I had already read.

The reason it took me so long to get into it is that Dreiser loves his sentences so much that he repeats them, often, sometimes in new ways, sometimes in the same way. When you’re just getting to know characters and nothing much has happened in the story, this can be a bit burdensome. But then something happens—perhaps intentional, but probably not—and the rhythm he has created with his repetition serves as a kind of hypnotism, along with a brilliant use of incomplete sentences, such as this one, which I think about often: “Bitter cold and bright stars.” The rhythm rocks you (though doesn’t lull you) into the story, to a place where you couldn’t back out even if you wanted to … and I didn’t want to.

Halfway into the book, I couldn’t put it down. Based on the true story of a murder in the early 1900s, An American Tragedy is just what its title suggests: a very American story about a man who wants more than he has, what he will try to do to have it. It is about that sad side of the American Dream, that willingness to do anything to in order to have. It was a perfect reflection of its time, when there was suddenly so much to want and have in America, and it’s a perfect reflection of these modern times---or maybe it’s just that America hasn’t really changed much over the past 100 years. As I read it I thought often about the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, with their explorations of morality and fatality. And I often found myself humming Kris Kristofferson’ssong, “In the News,” which begins:

Read about the sorry way he done somebody's daughter
Chained her to a heavy thing and threw her in the water
And she sank into the darkness with their baby son inside her
A little piece of truth and beauty died

While this opening stanza is about Laci Peterson, the song is overall about the abuse of power on all levels; it is about horrific acts committed purely for selfish reasons, from one man’s murder of his wife to one country’s invasion of another, consequences be damned. Of course, this song is also relevant because Lacy Peterson was drowned by her husband and in An American Tragedy (I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, and in any case, I found the book more compelling because I knew what was going to happen), a young man does the same to his pregnant ex-girlfriend, simply because he wants out, and wants something else. And what is more American than getting what we want? And what is more tragically American than doing so at the expense of another?

An interesting thing happened while I was reading this book. Just as I got to the part about the trial, I was called in for jury duty, so there was a weird continuum between my days and nights, as I sat on jury listening to a trial and then went home and read about a trial. Granted, my trial was for a DUI, not murder, and no one in the book was distracted by the prosecutor’s panty lines or the ‘80s rock song of a cell phone that someone occasionally forgot to turn off or the dilemma of whether or not to date the jury foreman, but still, there was a courtroom and lawyers and judge and all the legalities that are still the same … it lent a surreal aspect to my reading, which had reached the page turner stage by then. Because if you make it through the beginning of An American Tragedy, by the time you reach the trial, you will not be able to put it down.

The one thing I found interesting about my own eventual obsession with the book was how scandalous I found it: illegitimate pregnancy, attempts at abortion, murder. The latter of course is always shocking, but the first two are hardly the stuff to raise eyebrows in the 21st century. Naturally, there was a part of me that was imagining what it would have been like to read this book when it came out in the 1920s---with its mention of Freudians and psychic sex scars and the heroin that the victim’s mother was given to calm her after her daughter’s death. But what really affected me was that even though this kind of thing happens too often (just read the CNN home page), it is still shocking to think about one person harming another, deliberately, for purely self-serving reasons. For purely self-serving reasons. To plot it out. To cover it up. To look into another person’s eyes and still be able to conceive of the act, which to me is just short, morally speaking, of carrying it out.

The night after my last day of jury duty was also the night I finished reading. After closing the novel, I grabbed my Netflix and watched 12 Angry Men. Now I’m watching A Place in the Sun, which was based on the book. Leave it to Hollywood to make Montgomery Clift sympathetic and the victim (played by Shelley Winters) nearly seem deserving of her fate … an American tragedy, indeed.

All About Eve (Babitz)

noreply@blogger.com (Kim) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 03:54:00 +0000

Culturally, LA has always been a humid jungle alive with seething LA projects that I guess people from other places can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like LA, anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in LA, to choose it and be happy here.

- Eve’s Hollywood, by Eve Babitz

I’m a binge reader. Though this habit had been dormant for so long that I’d been unintentionally on the wagon until my friend Janet mentioned the library. For the past year, I’ve been in a read-everything-about-LA mood, and she recommended Eve Babitz. I hopped on Amazon, only to discover that all her terrific early stuff is out of print. I started scouting my favorite used book sites when Janet asked me why I didn’t just go to the library. Why, indeed? I loved the library when I was a kid, but I confess, I hadn’t been to one in years, inexcusable for a bookaholic, and even more so since my Fairfax branch reopened recently in a gorgeous new Spanish mission-style building just a few blocks from my house. I drove over and got myself a card (my old one had expired), and ordered up Eve’s Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; and Sex & Rage. I had them all within a week. I had them read before the following week was out.

I ADORE binge reading. In my early twenties, during my first years working at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, I overdosed regularly: Anita Brookner, Margaret Drabble, Laurie Colwin, MFK Fisher, etc. etc. etc. But I hadn’t done this in ages, and my bender with Eve brought back all that old intoxication---the red wine I drank while I read her helped. Eve Babitz is brilliant, and the fact that she’s gone out of print somehow solidifies for me her brilliance all the more in these days of soap suds women’s memoirs; just because something bad happened to you, doesn't mean you have an interesting story to tell; you need to be an interesting writer, as well. Sure, she can be all over the board with style, but when it comes to insight, she is the premier LA writer. I have nothing but the greatest respect for Joan Didion, and I think Nathaniel West and John Fante are tops, but Eve gets LA more than anyone else I’ve ever read.

I don’t care that she slept with Jim Morrison. I don’t care about her nude photo playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. I care that this girl can write like nobody’s business. She’s courageous. She’s not coy. She’s a chick, but you’d never put her in a pink dust jacket (I hate it that chicks and pink are now forever associated with one another), not even a pink straightjacket. She’s grammatically correct, even when writing about things that have nothing correct about them. And, yes I know I already mentioned this, she genuinely gets LA, mainly, I think, because she doesn’t see LA as someplace/something “to get,” like most other writers who tackle the subject.

Recently, I read a book called I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen. Talk about a coy title. It says it all, about the author’s imagined view of the city. In fact, she came to LA predisposed, and though she continued to look down on everything about it, she sure seemed to be fascinated with Warren Beatty---somehow, he was at nearly every party she attended, (and she attended many, despite her obvious disdain for them), serving as some kind of symbol, perhaps, though a symbol of what I don’t know.

In any case, said author has nothing good to say about LA, falling back on the whole derisive gambit that most writers like to employ when trying to capture this city that just isn’t capturable---this is why they do it, perhaps. To deflect from their inability to capture. In one section, she drives out to the Salton Sea, and I felt that the only reason she did this was to be able to flex her ability to "get" the desolation of the place. Yep, desolate it is, especially if that’s all you want to see.

Alternately, in Eve’s Sex & Rage, the main character Jacaranda observes: “She remembered that there was a petrified ocean, an ocean that was caught inland while the rest of the ocean departed. You could see down to the bottom, so far, absolutely clear turquoise, all the sea life that belonged in the ocean---starfish, sea anemone---things that didn’t belong in an inland body of water, a lake, which usually had trout or salmon. But the Salton Sea was absolutely clear and absolutely pure and absolutely patient … The Salton Sea didn’t move unless you touched it; it was unbidden by the moons, it had no tides, it lay there in perfect beauty, perfect stillness, out in the middle of the desert.” It takes bravery and brains to write like this.

There is such a satisfying intensity beyond the clichés of LA. Everyone talks about the earthquake weather, for example. It’s de rigueur if you live here to know what earthquake weather is, and it’s a badge of honor when sometimes you’re even right about it … even though the odds are with you on taking that bet. But Eve, ah Eve, she sees it clearly for what it is: “She could feel the rancid tension in the air beneath the lopsided yellow moon’s malevolent regard. She could feel some kind of hazy snap, some uproar, about to happen. In Los Angeles it's called 'earthquake weather,' but Jacaranda knew earthquakes were just a metaphor for any out-of-control slant suddenly tilting beneath your feet."

Eve gets it because she’s not afraid to like this indescribable pocket. And she’s not afraid because it doesn’t occur to her that there’s anything to be afraid of in liking it. And she likes liking it, unlike most people I know here who reluctantly like it, or like it but don’t want to and so pretend not to, or just simply hate it. She’s decadent. She’s real. She's unfazed. She’s fresh more than thirty years after publication. Get yourself to the library and start with Slow Days, Fast Company. Then hop online and check out her Smithsonian Oral History Interview. Then mope until you find a new author to take you on another bender.