The litblog The Millions recalls the 1998 book "Underground: Travels on the Global Metro" by photographer Marco Pesaresi, who visited Berlin, Calcutta, London, Madrid, Milan, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, Paris and Tokyo: His camera sometimes conspires with the passenger," they write -- causing a pose, an attitude (Mexico City). Sometimes, it is seemingly invisible (Milan) capturing but not appearing to intrude on a pre-existing mood (Tokyo).
Who knew Calcutta had a subway system? Well, that's what people say about Los Angeles, and we do -- it's pictured in the photo above. Anyway ... the occasion for the subway appreciation was a travel piece in Canada's Globe and Mail on the world's subways. Author Mark Kingwell -- a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and author of 12 books -- knows, and loves, all subway systems. And he knows L.A. has a subway: Los Angeles, a place where people are ashamed to admit that they use the subway, actually has a nice one, with carpeted trains, Frank Gehry architecture and handsome bums who look like — maybe are — out-of-work actors. ...
You can fall in love in the subway. You can read a book ostentatiously, telling people you are a Jane Austen kind of guy or a Jonathan Lethem kind of girl. You can hang from the bars and pretend you are a monkey. You can smell people's feet, hear their dumb ideas, see them eat and sometimes vomit. This is democratic social space, my friends, with all the anxieties and possibilities that such space implies.
He cites notable literary treatments of subways, including "V." by Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Lethem's essay on the Hoyt Schermerhorn station in "The Disappointment Artist" and "Girls Fall Down" by Maggie Helwig, which he describes as being "about bioterrorist plots in Toronto's subway." He even quotes birthday boy T.S. Eliot: [W]hen an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.
If I were making a pile of subway books, I'd add Jennifer Toth's memorable (if contested) nonfiction tale "The Mole People," about people living in abandoned subway tunnels under New York City. What's your favorite tale from the underground?
--Carolyn Kellogg
Photo credit: Carolyn Kellogg
The Left Bank of Paris is legendary for its artistic and intellectual history. In the 1920s, it was where French artists and expatriates from America and elsewhere rubbed shoulders over Pernod and escargot. OK, I'm making that up -- I have no idea what Fitzgerald or Matisse might have ordered. But Picasso -- I'm pretty sure he liked bread.
I admit, the details of this period and place elude me; my knowledge extends only as far as Henry Miller's freeloading exploits in the French countryside. So I welcome this primer from Gridskipper, with a quick and succinct list of the literary cafes of the Left Bank.
Tourists have overrun many of them, such as Les Deux Magots, pictured above. Everyone wants to order a caffé latte where Albert Camus did. Which is why they also go to Café de Flore, one of many haunts of Camus and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Hemingway frequented the Café Dauphin, which has been transformed into the Café Jade with a "retro-modern décor" -- not sure what that means, but apparently it's keeping the tourists at bay. But Brasserie Lipp, opened in 1890, is protected by the French Ministry of Culture, so it looks much as it did when Marcel Proust ate (madeleines?) there. Nowadays, it's frequented by the likes of Woody Allen.
A couple of notable colleges and libraries make their list. What curious intellectual doesn't want to say they set foot in the Sorbonne? But the best tip is that Foucault worked on "The History of Sexuality" at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir. Gridskipper notes, "The staff is not exceptionally friendly, so it helps to speak French." Bonne chance!
--Carolyn Kellogg
Photo credit: Zemzina via Flickr
I don't need to tell you the downside to traffic — heck, we've got a whole blog for that. But the upsides are harder to come by. Today, we have the Good Magazine commuting culture consumption chart.
Good compares the length of some hefty works of art — CDs of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the three "Lord of the Rings" films, and the audiobook of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" — to the annual time spent driving to work in major American cities.
The good news is that the only American city with a long enough annual commute to hear the complete unabridged audiobook of "War and Peace" is Los Angeles. The bad news is that, with a total of 72 hours spent in traffic going to work each year, you could even start on "War and Peace" a second time. Or any number of other classics.
If you aren't behind the wheel, of course, you can read books instead of listening to them. Patrick, who blogs for Vroman's Bookstore, says that he's tripled the number of books he read when commuting by car now that he takes the subway to work.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo: Richard Hartog / Los Angeles Times
Wind turbines near Palm Springs, Calif. Photo by Carolyn Kellogg
Driving east from Arizona on the 10, I thought about Tod Goldberg, writing books and blogging in the neighborhood of Palm Springs. I thought about Marisa Silver's new novel, "The God of War," set at the nearby Salton Sea. I thought about all the literary features of the California desert I might learn about, yet I kept driving. Los Angeles was too close; I couldn't resist its pull.
I arrived just in time for Book Expo, a cornucopia of literariness overflowing the boundaries of the convention walls (all the way to Prince's house). It was impossible for one person to see everything, which is why I'm glad that John Fox was out there with the Red Fence video crew, interviewing Kelly Link, Eli Horowitz and someone dressed up in an old-timey dress to promote a book. And that Boris Kacha was hobnobbing with porn star turned bestselling author Ron Jeremy for New York magazine, that some people actually went to the panels, that John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton were spotted together (Galleycat got a photo), that Sherman Alexie and Neil Gaiman can be heard together in this podcast and that Laura Miller brought her perspective on the current state of the publishing industry.
Now it's time to get my books unpacked and introduce them to my BEA-acquired advance copies.
Carolyn Kellogg
Old West meets New West: a bobcat passes by a suburban Arizona garage. Photo by Kim Perina.
Poet Sally Ball and her husband, novelist T.M. McNally, live in Scottsdale, near Phoenix. When I was traveling across Arizona, Sally showed me around Tempe, which is also near Phoenix. It may be more accurate to say that both towns are now virtually in Phoenix; the capital of Arizona, at 1.5 million people, has swelled past its outlying towns.
The writing community of Phoenix/Scottsdale/Tempe is spread thin by the city's sprawl, Ball told me. Yet she was enthusiastic about the outreach efforts of Arizona State University (where she and her husband teach), particularly Alberto Rios' work and the projects of the Piper Center for Creative Writing.
Ball shared her thoughts of the relationship between people and place in her part of Arizona. I sometimes think very hard about the unnaturalness of how we live here -- in the desert, with our pools. And I live in Scottsdale, which is sort of the peak of the weirdness of it: golf everywhere and lavishly decorated freeways, and "water features" in our irrigated yards (i.e.: cascading into the pool, a rocky waterfall, or scuppers shaped like lions or dragons (a lot of these have a kind of "ancient flavor" -- Rome, or the Qing Dynasty). And I think the Lifestyle (this word is in heavy use) sort of mimics the landscape and the falseness of living in the desert, the willfulness of it: so many shallow roots, a shallow sense of belonging. Which then increases shallowness or falseness in everyday life: plastic grass for the Xeriscape, plastic boobs for Mom. This place with no menacing weather (okay, monsoons for two weeks in July...) but Hummers and Escalades by the thousands. There's a baseline sense that we can beat nature: bring in water for our lawns, thrive even in 110 degree summers, and why not also have fuller lips, skinny thighs, no more wrinkles....
More thoughts from Ball on Arizona, the Old West and the New West, below.
Carolyn Kellogg
Read on »
L.A.-based writer Ben Ehrenreich is a novelist and journalist. "The Suitors," his first novel, is loosely based on "The Odyssey," so we thought he might know something about journeys. With books.
Jacket Copy: Assuming you bring books with you when you travel, go on vacation, how do you determine how many? Is it a careful calculation or something less scientific?
Ben Ehrenreich: Mainly I cram books into every available space in my bags, take half of them out, then sneak half of those back in. I live under the hopeful illusion that I will have far more time to read than I ever end up having.
JC: Have you ever been stranded with nothing to read?
BE: Yes. Most memorably, I had been reporting in Afghanistan, had a stopover in Dubai on the way home. I realized as I stepped onto the plane back to Los Angeles that I had not only packed my sleeping pills in my checked bags, but all my books. I spent the next 20-some hours awake, staring at the seatback in front of me.
Read Ben's reading list after the jump.
Carolyn Kellogg
Read on »
One of the most exciting things about taking a trip is leaving responsibilities behind: To me, this opens up wide expanses of unspoken-for time. No grad school presentation prep, no comp class planning. And I can read, read, READ! — with the all the enthusiasm of a mad, gleeful Frankenstein.
Too much enthusiasm. That's a photo of some of the reading material I brought with me on my literary road trip. You might notice that it begins with James Joyce's "Ulysses" (it's about time I stopped avoiding this iconic work of modernist literature). We all know "Ulysses" is quite enough to tackle, but I brought along a huge bagful of other books and magazines I was itching to read — just in case I whipped through "Ulysses" in no time.
The first night, I read all of the first line ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.") before falling asleep.
The thing I fail to remember when packing is that time away isn't the block of empty space that it appears to be in my calendar. There are people to meet, meals to be eaten, places to visit, drinks to be imbibed, discussions to be had. Even sleep to be slept. All which makes travel worthwhile.
So maybe it would take reaching my destination before I made significant "Ulysses" progress. I probably wouldn't get to all the other books I packed, but you can read on for what I might have read, had I not been distracted by that margarita:
Carolyn Kellogg
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New Orleans today: a restored house next to one that remains vacant. Photo by Carolyn Kellogg.
Pia Z. Ehrhardt is the author of the book Famous Fathers and Other Stories; she has won many awards, including the 2005 Narrative Prize. She makes her home in New Orleans and, although she didn't know me from any other intrusive blogger, she graciously agreed to show me around. Before she'd finished, I was ready to move there.
Erhardt sat down with Jacket Copy to talk about her hometown and her work:
Jacket Copy: How long have you lived in New Orleans and what do you like about the city?
Pia Z. Ehrhardt:
I've lived in New Orleans since 1980, after leaving Mississippi to elope with my first husband. The marriage only lasted five shaky years, but I stayed put. I feel like I've been in a 30-year, up-and-down love affair with a city.
A lane of Live Oaks, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. Photo by Pia Z. Erhardt.
JC: How did the transformations caused by Hurricane Katrina in affect your relationship to and perception of New Orleans?
PZE: When I first returned to New Orleans in October (for the day, because my son and I were living in Houston for the fall semester), I saw a knocked apart, deeply wounded city and it broke my heart, because I didn't know how to help, what to do, how to grieve. It was like watching someone you love suffer and the prognosis is iffy at best. But this a fiercely resilient place. Everything was the color of ash, but within a few months, green started poking through, grass, new leaves, and bushes that had stayed under polluted water for three weeks flowered. People dragged their belongings out to the street, and they were moving ahead, trying to reclaim their homes and businesses and lives. So you keep going on bits of hope and progress. This is a patient and proud and steadfast town, as are its people, and, come to find out, so am I.
More after the jump.
Read on »
I never know what I'll find on the road — for example, I was driving through Georgia and whizzed past this enormous peach on a pole.
In a more literary vein, later on I heard Mississippi public radio promote its upcoming special on Eudora Welty (to broadcast Sunday, May 25, or online here). Recorded at Symphony Space in New York earlier this month as part of the Selected Shorts series, the special includes readings of three Welty stories, biographer Suzanne Marrs and, as emcee, writer Ann Patchett. Guided tours of Welty's home in Jackson, Miss., are available Wednesdays-Fridays with advance reservations.
Still further down the road — Interstate 10, to be exact — after crossing from Mississippi into Louisiana, I suddenly found myself on the Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Parkway. Ambrose, who died of cancer five years ago, wrote the well-known WWII books "Band of Brothers" and "D-Day." To honor his work with the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, a segment of the I-10 was renamed for the famed historian in 2004. Which makes sense, but it certainly was a surprise.
Carolyn Kellogg
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Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Deputy Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Lead blogger, Jacket Copy
email: jacketcopyla [at] gmail.com
Assistant Book Editor
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times