The Reading Life: J.G. Ballard's stormy weather

This is part of the occasional series "The Reading Life" by book critic David L. Ulin.

"Los Angeles weather," Joan Didion wrote in her 1967 essay "Los Angeles Notebook," "is the weather of ... apocalypse," but late last week, as rain descended on the normally arid summer landscape of Southern California, it was not Didion about whom I found myself thinking, but J.G. Ballard.

Ballard, who died in 2009, is perhaps best known for investigating the erotic possibilities of violence in a world anesthetized by consumerism and conformity. Early in his career, though, he wrote a series of novels ("The Drought," "The Drowned World," "The Wind From Nowhere," "The Crystal World") that address environmental themes.

From the perspective of the present, it's tempting to call Ballard prescient — these novels all appeared in the early-to-mid-1960s — yet as Martin Amis notes in an introduction to the new 50th anniversary edition of "The Drowned World," that's something of a fixed game. "[F]ictional divination," Amis writes, "will always be hopelessly haphazard. The unfolding of world historical events is itself haphazard (and therefore unaesthetic), and 'the future' is in a sense defined by its messy inscrutability."

Pomona Public Library: From endangered to uncertain

If Pomona's City Council had approved a proposed budget at its Monday meeting, the city's only public library would have been closed. Instead, it has recieved something of a reprieve.

The Pomona City Council passed a budget that will keep the library's doors open beyond August. That's when it was slated to be closed for a year to help meet a budget gap.

More than 40 speakers appeared at the meeting to show their support for the library, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin reports. The names of 150 people opposed to the library's closure were read into the public record.

The meeting, which included consideration of cuts in fire services, did not end until 1:30 a.m.

The future of the library is not exactly clear. The Daily Bulletin reports that on the one hand, Pomona's City Manager Linda Lowry told council members that representatives of Rancho Cucamonga contacted Pomona and expressed an interest in operating Pomona's library. But on the other hand, "Rancho Cucamonga City Manager John Gillison said Tuesday morning that his city has no interest in running Pomona's library."

The Daily Bulletin's David Allen, who has been writing in support of keeping the Pomona Public Library open, spoke to other Rancho Cucamonga officials Tuesday.

I phoned Robert Karatsu, the city's library director, and Diane Williams, a member of the council's library subcommittee. Neither one seemed to know what Lowry was talking about.

"She's gone way farther down the road than we have," Williams said.

She and Karatsu said Rancho Cucamonga has offered to look at the Pomona library budget to suggest cost savings. Operating Pomona's library costs $1.6 million a year, the same as each of Rancho Cucamonga's two branches, which are open far more hours.

Still, Karatsu saw no way to operate Pomona's library for $400,000, one-fourth of the current cost, and said he couldn't see operating Pomona's library as a branch of Rancho Cucamonga's.

They're not even in the same county as us," Karatsu said.

Allen explains that the budget the Pomona City Council passed includes just $400,000 to keep the library open, while another $600,000 has been set aside to bring about its still-possible closure.

Representatives from Rancho Cucamonga and Pomona will meet to discuss the library's future. For now, at least, the Pomona Public Library is still open, on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

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Photo: Pomona Library. Credit: Friends of the Pomona Library

 

Will the Pomona Public Library be closed?

The Pomona Public Library dodged a bullet Monday when a City Council budget vote was postponed. Facing an unexpected funding gap, the city was poised to close the doors of its only public library.

The reprieve may not last long. The vote was postponed only until June 25.

Library supporters are urging Pomona residents to attend that council meeting. Using the Facebook page Don't Close the Pomona Library!! for organizing, they've posted fliers and suggested distributing them to neighbors and friends who may not have Internet access. In part, the fliers read, "Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries!"

Inland Valley Daily Bulletin columnist Dave Allen has been spreading the news of his support. "For years I've used the Pomona library for research purposes, and it may be my favorite of all the Inland Valley's libraries," he wrote. This week, he finally signed up for a library card there.

Two weeks ago, library employees learned that the budget gap might mean closing the facility's doors. The council is to vote on a budget plan that would impose cuts that include closing the library and reducing the city's fire contract. Of the city's expected 29 layoff notices, 15 are expected to go to the library's staff. The council meeting on the cuts is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m.

The city of Pomona, which is home to about 160,000 residents, has just the one public library. If the library's closure is approved, it will shut its doors in August and keep them closed for at least a year. Only if its funding is restored in a future budget vote would the library return.

"Closing down a library is the destruction of a community," Mickey Gallivan, president of the Historical Society of Pomona Valley, told the Daily Bulletin. "If you want to destroy a civilization, you burn their books and you close the library."

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-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Pomona Library. Credit: Friends of the Pomona Library

Fug Girls get 'Messy' with young-adult follow-up [Updated]

Just in time for summer beach reading season, professional celebrity skewerers the Fug Girls are back with another young-adult sendup of Hollywood celebu-spawn. We caught up with Go Fug Yourself bloggers Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan to talk about their "Messy" new book.

Jacket Copy: In your young-adult debut, "Spoiled," a vacuous blond ladder climber goes Manolo a Manolo with her surprise half sister. In "Messy," she continues to spar but with a different female character. What is it about rivalry that appeals?

Heather Cocks: It isn't so much about rivalry as outsiderness. In "Spoiled," Molly was a geographic outsider. In "Messy," we get someone who’s emotionally an outsider. Those are the kinds of feelings that anyone can relate to. A lot of teen rivalry is feeling you’re different from someone else and being judged for being different. I don’t know any teenage girls who look back on that time and say, 'What a wonderful, magnificent time of personal growth.' Usually you're thinking of the girl who made you feel like an idiot.

JC: Like "Spoiled," your new book is a takedown of celebrity culture. But, like your blog, it's a takedown that unfolds in the blogosphere. Why did you want the rivalry to center on a Hollywood insider blog?

Heather Cocks: There's definitely the idea that the Fug Girls are writing a book, so there’s a fun wink to how we met and got started. The reason these books even exist is because we have this blog. People often assume that we ourselves are anonymous because we don’t put our pictures on the website and we have facetious bios we put up. My picture is from Joan Collins when she was on "Dynasty" and Jessica’s is Shannon Doherty from "90210," so people see that and assume we’re trying to stay anonymous and sometimes disbelieve we’re women or that our names are really Heather and Jessica because they’re cheerleader names you would cherry-pick to write a blog like ours. That brings up the whole idea of whether you can believe what you see on the web. It was a fun way for us to deal with identity issues. [Updated June 6, 2012, 8:51 a.m.: The original version of this post said the Fug Girls don't put their fiction on their blog. They don't put their pictures.]

Jacket Copy: How is writing young-adult fiction different from your blog, especially writing as a team?

Jessica: Heather and I are very comfortable writing together because we’ve been doing it for eight years. Our posts on Go Fug Yourself we write ourselves, but our work for New York magazine and other freelance we do together, so it feels like a natural extension. Logistically, we had a very detailed outline and then we traded.

JC: Why did you even want to write fiction for teens?

Heather: It’s such a different muscle from what we do on the blog because it’s creating something new as opposed to riffing on material. To have a picture that’s your base is different from creating the world yourself. We both watch a lot of CW and ABC Family. We're very soapy people. We read a lot of young-adult because there’s so much really well-written fiction for young adults. God knows the number of times we mention "Sweet Valley High" on our website. It felt like a really natural arena to step into.

JC: What's so great about your books is that the humor from your blog completely translates. What makes fashion and celebrity culture so fun to make fun of?

Jessica: We sort of see Go Fug Yourself as the online version of sitting around with your friends watching the Oscars. It's a virtual coffee klatsch to sit around and say, "What is she wearing? What is he thinking?" We intend it to be good-hearted, but I also think if I had all these resources -- all the money and the stylist and the trainer and the time -- I would look fantastic all the time. There’s something confounding when someone who has all the resources to look amazing all the time sometimes looks totally insane.

JC: Brick was such a narcissistic, movie-star dad in the first book. Without spoiling "Messy," does he step up in book two?

Heather: One of my favorite scenes is when Brooke achieves a measure of professional success early in the book and she tells Brick and they have a little moment together. Anyone who read "Spoiled" knows she’s very much driven by wanting his attention. Brick in this book becomes a little more involved in her life, so I think people will be happy to see him spending some time. But he just finished work on "Avalanche," his epic snow movie shot in Key West.

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Photos: Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan; book covers for "Messy" and "Spoiled." Credit: Kim Fox; Little, Brown and Company.

 

On Goodreads, '50 Shades of Grey' is a regional hit

Mothers in Utah who might have found news of the popularity of the underground erotic hit "Fifty Shades of Grey" baffling can be forgiven, according to the data at Goodreads. Among the social reading website's 8.6 million users, Utah and Wyoming readers were the least likely to be reading E.L. James' novel.

The graphic above shows which states have most embraced the book, which the New York Times dubbed "mommy porn." The novel tells the story of a love affair between naive college student Anastasia and Christian, a billionaire with a taste for sexual dominance.

In the first six weeks the book has been available through new American publisher Vintage, "Fifty Shades of Grey" has sold 10 million copies. To put that in perspective, the president of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group explained that the book had captured 25% of the adult fiction market -- quite a lot. And there are even more books in circulation -- "Fifty Shades of Grey" was a word-of-mouth hit via a small Australian publisher before Vintage picked it up.

More than 11,000 Goodreads members have written capsule reviews of the book on the site. Though the three most popular only have one star, that hasn't stopped legions from being tempted by the book. A popular five-star review reads, "Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I still feel somewhat under the spell of this book. I'm so ... beguiled by it ;-) (book allusion). It was honestly an amazing read -- and one which I meant to just skim a few sample pages of, but ended up buying and then staying up the entire night to finish."

Among Goodreads members, "Fifty Shades of Grey" is most popular in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and New York. Except "most popular" isn't exactly it -- those are the states where the book is most likely to have been read. Yet those readers are not as enthusiastic about the book as their counterparts to the south and west -- readers in Mississippi, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Nebraska gave the book its highest ratings.

That enthusiasm has carried over: Goodreads has a list of other erotica titles that are starting to take the site by storm.

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Image credit: Goodreads

Festival of Books: On the Los Angeles riots, 20 years later

In a lot of ways, Sunday's Festival of Books panel "Los Angeles, 20 Years After the Verdict," was a sequel to Saturday's interview by Patt Morrison with Rodney King, whose beating by L.A. police officers 21 years ago was the first in a series of steps that culminated in the 1992 riots.

And in another sense, the panel was a reunion for some of the players in that tragic moment in Los Angeles history.

Moderator Warren Olney, now a KCRW radio host, was a Los Angeles TV reporter at the time. He was joined by Jim Newton, L.A. Times columnist and editor at large, who was covering the Los Angeles Police Department for the L.A. Times when the riots began. 

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Connie Rice was a civil rights activist and lawyer, and later a co-founder of The Advancement Project, and the recent author of "Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman's Quest for Social Justice in America, From the Kill Zones to the Courts." The fourth panelist was Gil Garcetti, who at the time was mounting a campaign for Los Angeles County district attorney.

Juan Felipe Herrera appointed California poet laureate

Juan Felipe Herrera was appointed California poet laureate by Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday. After  the required confirmation by the California Senate, Herrera will be the first Hispanic writer to serve in the post.

Herrera currently holds the Tomas Rivera Endowed Chair in the department of creative writing at UC Riverside. In addition to works of poetry, his 23 books include prose, short fiction, young adult novels and books for children. His accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, National Endowment for the Arts writers' fellowships, California Arts Council grants, the UC Berkeley Regent's Fellowship, the Breadloaf Fellowship in Poetry, and the Stanford Chicano Fellows Fellowship.

His 2008 collection "Half of the World in Light" was a winner of that year's National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. "Herrera’s work is informed by his participation in the cultural and historical Chicano Movement of the 1960s, by a strong influence from Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, and by an awareness of Mexico’s intimate and conflicted relationship with the U.S.," wrote book critics circle board member Rigoberto Gonzales. "Indeed, Herrera inhabits, critiques and re-imagines the borderlands between Spanish and English, barrio-speak and academic philology, Mesoamerican myth and popular culture, to give readers a unique and original lens through which to view contemporary society in the Americas."

Herrera, 63, is the son of migrant workers from Mexico. He attended UCLA as an undergrad, earned a master's degree in social anthropology from Stanford and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa's creative writing program. He was elected to the board of chancellors for the Academy of American Poets in 2011.

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Photo: Juan Felipe Herrera. Credit: Office of the Governor of California

 

Francesca Lia Block takes her mortgage woes public

She called me back after talking to the public radio show "Marketplace." That's the kind of person children's book author Francesca Lia Block is: She writes kids books about fairies. She doesn't like to cause conflicts. And she calls people back.

But Bank of America has not, according to Block, always shown her the same courtesy.

For close to a year, Block, author of the Weetzie Bat books for kids, has been calling and talking to various representatives at Bank of America. Some call her back, some disappear, some give one answer, some another. She says she's underwater on the mortgage but has never missed a payment -- all she wants to do is renegotiate terms and save her house. On Friday afternoon, she posted a record of her travails on Facebook and a new blog, Save Francesca's Faerie Cottage.

"The bank did call me today," she said Monday, "and said we saw your stuff online and we want to follow up." Whether anything will come from that is still uncertain -- she was speaking to the media relations department, which told her something different from she'd heard from the president's office on Friday.

Block could have predicted none of this in 2007, when she and her mother bought a Culver City home together. At that time, the Los Angeles housing market had been going up, up, up; buyers were wild to get in before being priced out. Block, who has two children, was eager to buy a home that was convenient to schools; she realizes now that the mortgage she'd gotten was ill-advised.

"I trusted them," she says of her broker, who was with a large firm that she declines to name. She got an interest-only mortgage; its payments will balloon a year from now. There has been a precipitous drop in home prices -- her home's value has dropped by $150,000. Together, that would be enough reason to seek new terms with the bank. Yet Block has had two personal calamities that make the issue more critical -- and more complex.

The first is her own health. The author of the Weetzie Bat series, Block is a successful author by any measure. "I've done quite well over time," she admits, "but it was a bad year." That was the year her eye "just split" -- technically, it was a spontaneous perforated retina. She has a cataract in her other eye. Working -- looking at a computer screen -- was difficult.

In addition, her mother fell ill. Diagnosed with cancer in 2008, her mother died a year later. Not only was Block negotiating that loss emotionally -- her mother's name was on the loan.

"We talked to an attorney about what to do, and it was clear that the house would be in my name, so we didn’t think it was a problem," she says. "She and I were very open about what was going on; she, more than anything, wanted me and the kids to stay here. But it didn't help."

Block was unable to switch the loan to her name, the bank told her, because the house was underwater. Her mother left her the house, but Block -- who was the one making the payments all along -- needs a loan to be in her name. At one point, the bank told her that she'd need $150,000 cash to secure it. She began trying to figure out how to come up with that enormous sum, and waited, and waited. The bank never called her back.

2011 was a better year -- better, perhaps, save for the ongoing efforts to keep her house. She applied for the Making Home Affordable program in April 2011. And called, and faxed, and called again. And she wrote.

"I worked every day last year, seven days a week, to make the payments," she says. "I physically can’t do it anymore. If this doesn’t work, I think I’ll have to give up."

Last week, she reached the president's office and was told her case was under consideration -- and that they would call her back.

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Photo: Francesca Lia Block and her children. Credit: Nicolas Sage

$100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award goes to Timothy Donnelly

Claremont Graduate University's $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award will be given to Timothy Donnelly for his book "The Cloud Corporation," originally published by independent poetry press Wave Books. The prize is one the poetry world's most substantial, and most prestigious. It is designed to a support a poet in mid-career.

Donnelly, who is teaching at Princeton this spring, is on the writing faculty at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. It took him seven years to complete "The Cloud Corporation."

"I’m among the many people in this country who have had to go into significant debt just to get by," Donnelly said after the award was announced. "All the anxiety in the book about the economy and the struggle to make ends meet isn’t just for effect -- it’s all very personal. This prize will give my family and me a measure of financial stability that would otherwise have taken a decade or more to achieve. But as true as all that is, it’s the honor of having had "The Cloud Corporation" chosen for this distinction that I really can’t wrap my head around."

In addition to the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Claremont Graduate University has announced the winner of its Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which is presented to a poet for his or her debut collection. That will go to Katherine Larson for "Radical Symmetry," published by Yale University Press. Larson, who lives in Arizona with her family, has worked for a decade as a molecular biologist and field ecologist.

Previous winners of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award include Yusef Komunyakaa, Chase Twichell, Tom Sleigh, Matthea Harvey and Robert Wrigley.

The winners will be feted at an award ceremony in Claremont on April 19; author Maxine Hong Kingston will give special remarks.

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Photo: Timothy Donnelly. Credit: The Poetry Foundation

100 years of UCLA on your coffee table

Of the many photographs in a new history of UCLA, one is especially arresting. The photo, from April 1929, shows the school’s first four buildings on its soon-to-open Westwood campus with little else around for miles but rolling hills and a few  houses. “The campus is so far out in the country that it’s obvious only farmers will ever be the students’ neighbors,” the caption reads, quoting a not-particularly-far-sighted journalist at the time.

Clearly, the growth of UCLA and surrounding Westside neighborhoods was never a given. The school’s unusual journey to academic prominence -- with political intrigue and student unrest along the way -- is the basic narrative of “UCLA: The First Century,” a lavish 360-page coffee table book by Marina Dundjerski. (Truth in advertising, the actual centennial doesn't really come around until 2019.)

Pushing against the Berkeley-centric education establishment, Southern Californians undertook much politicking for the state to finally authorize in 1919 “the Southern Branch” of UC on the site now occupied by Los Angeles City College in East Hollywood. The move 10 miles west a decade later was followed by the Depression’s austerities, the Red Scare’s challenge to academic freedom, the Baby Boom’s construction frenzy, the Vietnam War protests, affirmative action debates and the current budget crises. 

Dundjerski, a 1994 graduate of UCLA and a former campus correspondent for The Times, researched that history for eight years, conducting more than 200 interviews and searching through archives for documents and historical photographs. She came away impressed, she said, about “how much risk everybody took in building UCLA to become the institution it is today.”

The book was commissioned by alumni leaders in advance of the centennial and the research was funded with grants from two alumni organizations and the Ahmanson Foundation. It is being published by Third Millennium Publishing Limited of Britain in conjunction with UCLA History Project/UCLA Alumni Association, and officially hits shelves in March; the UCLA bookstore already has it in stock, and Amazon is taking pre-orders.