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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Jacket Copy: Who are some of Tallahassee's best-known writers?
Jeff VanderMeer: This is a city teeming with writers, so it's a somewhat difficult question. At Florida State University, you have Robert Olen Butler, poet David Kirby and Mark Winegardner (best known for literary fiction until he did the "Godfather" spinoffs), Bob Shacochis and Julianna Baggott, for example. Daniel Maier-Katkin, another professor, just sold his account of the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger to a major publisher, so he'll be high-profile soon. Outside of the university, there's Mark Mustian, also a city commissioner, who just hit it big with a sale of a novel to Putnam (a writer to watch next year). I'm probably the resident "fantasist mascot," so to speak, and then there are host of others at the university and elsewhere working in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
JC: Do authors in Tallahassee have a favorite hangout?
JVM: The Warehouse is FSU's hangout, since the university's literary readings are held there. I like Black Dog Cafe by Lake Ella, and you'll find other writers there on a pretty regular basis because it's got a nice view and the place is laid-back but with good service and coffee. All Saints Cafe is another favorite for writers around here.
When in Lexington, Kentucky, stop by Stella's Deli at the corner of Jefferson and Ballard and you've got a good chance of catching sight of Gurney Norman, James Baker Hall or Bobbie Ann Mason noshing on the fare, all made from local ingredients. If my timing had been different -- if I hadn't arrived after they'd closed on Saturday -- I could tell you how delicious the food is, or show you a photo of the senior Kentucky literary figures.
Hall and Norman studied at the University of Kentucky (UK) before becoming Stegner fellows at Stanford University in 1960. In fact, four Kentucky students won the prestigious Stanford creative writing fellowships in just three years, and Hall attributes their success to the passion and ambition of one writing teacher, Robert Hazel.
"He knew Phil Roth -- he called [him] Phil. And Bill Styron, he called Bill. And he claimed to know a lot of people that he did or didn’t know by first name. And it was dazzling, it was dazzling. We had never, ever imagined living in that world. We didn’t know what it was."
It's interesting that so many writers from this state university in Kentucky all imagined they could enter the world of the literary elite, just on the power of one emissary -- that they imagined it, and then they did it.
"He made us think that we lived in that world, that we were ... that we were compatriots, that we were brothers, were William Styron and Phillip Roth. And they weren’t ... They weren’t in textbooks; they were in our conversation. Does this make any sense? They were in our conversations. And John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, and all of the Southern writers, and Frank O’Connor—they were our kin. They were our preceding generation or preceding two generations. They were where we came from. And it was not academic; it was nothing academic at all. It was one big family that he was the patriarch of."
The fact that I ended up in Lexington at all is due to the big, wide generous litblogging family, in the persons of Gwenda Bond (Shaken and Stirred) and her husband, writer Christopher Rowe. From their house, it's just a short walk, past beautiful architecture and friendly neighbors, to the center of downtown. We lunched outside (photo 6 in this slideshow from the local newspaper, the Herald-Leader) and watched bikers race. The sun shone. Dogs romped. It was lovely.
We went out for dinner then stayed out later than we should have at a bar with live bluegrass music, where I availed myself of -- what else? -- Kentucky bourbon.
While I was driving through Ohio, every sign for Zanesville (hometown of writer Zane Gray) made me think of "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson wasn't from Zanesville -- he was from Camden, on the west side of the state, and too far for me to visit. Besides, he later wound up in Marion, Va., where his legacy is celebrated.
For all the fame he had in his day -- he was a bestseller, a literary bon vivant and mentor to Faulkner and Hemingway -- Anderson doesn't get read much now. The beginning of one of his stories — "Hands" the opening to "Winesburg, Ohio" — after the jump.
Above: Friends helping me make my departure from Pittsburgh possible are, from left, Jamie Bono, Robert Yune, Emily Stone and Paul Ruggiero.
There is a grand road trip tradition in American letters that I find irresistible. Today I embark on another cross-country drive, and what I discovered, while packing, was that I have a lot of books (including a vintage paperback copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" with a man in a striped shirt and jaunty neck scarf). Perhaps an insane amount of books. Even after purging and triaging, books and books and books. Unlike Kerouac, I do not travel light.
My trip will take me south from Pittsburgh to Florida, then west, clear across the country, to Los Angeles. Along the way I will do as much reading as I can: A select few (dozen) books will ride up front with me.
But to make it a truly literary road trip, I plan to visit some literary landmarks along the way. The Washington Post wrote up several in Georgia, and it looks like the "On the Road" scroll is on display through May 31 in Austin, Tex. Obviously, that's not a complete literary tour. What are your suggestions?
If you can judge by the people sitting around me on my flights yesterday, that is. Last night, as others dozed in the darkened cabin, my row kept our lights on and read.
At the window: a tall gray-haired man reading a hardback on personal finance. Middle seat: a middle-aged woman with a hefty romance novel. Me, I was working on my laptop; I'd finished the novel and two short story collections in my bag.
The woman across the aisle from me was reading a magazine. She got to the end and then, apparently with nothing else to read, paged back through it slowly, scrutinizing every advertisement. She seemed to want words to fill the airplane ride. I felt bad for her -- I had a surplus of words with me. Should I offer her one of my books -- a short story collection, maybe? What if she was content re-reading her magazine? Eventually I left her to the pharmaceutical disclaimers, deciding that her reading material was none of my business.
On my earlier flight, the guy next to me pulled a worn, spine-cracked John Grisham thriller from his pocket. Its bookmark was a faded boarding pass from another airline; the last time he'd read it, it seemed, was when he was on a plane.
Maybe all we need to do to boost American reading rates is to give everyone free plane tickets.
SoCal lit blogger John Fox and the good people of Red Fence hit the L.A. Times Festival of Books with a camera crew and tracked down some fabulous fictioneers (T.C. Boyle, Shelley Jackson, Lydia Millet among them) to ask them about art and literary pilgrimages.
Where have they gone? Which one ate a page of Shakespeare? Watch to find out.
By his own count, the late Ryszard Kapuściński covered 27 incidents of revolution, war and upheaval around the world -- and recorded much of it in such books as "The Soccer War," "The Shadow of the Sun" and "Imperium"before he died on Jan. 23, 2007. Many of his fans may be surprised to learn that the Polish journalist also wrote poetry -- although one might wonder when he possibly found the time.
Although there was much fanfare around the appearance of Kapuściński's final book, "Travels With Herodotus," which was published not long after his death, it's disappointing that "I Wrote Stone," now published in English for the first time by Biblioasis, has come out with not so much as a single trumpet sounding.
Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba, this slim volume gathers poetry Kapuściński wrote over 40 years. Slim, yes, but hardly insubstantial.
Big events -- such as the murder of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba -- may have been treated lyrically in his prose, but Kapuściński's translators note that he believed poetry could "illuminate dimensions of human experience that otherwise would remain unknowable." These poems capture the moments between crises, impressions that carry a book-length argument in a few lines. "Magellan Reaches Tierra Del Fuego," for example, ends on this note of despair:
They stand gazing — they hope for paradise and the caravel reaches the shore and they see sand, stone and cliffs
Yup, amid a steady drumbeat of news about Southland bookstores closing their doors due to rising rents and declining sales comes word that a Los Feliz landmark will nearly double in size.
Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery.
"It's all so exciting," Slattery writes in a March newsletter to Skylight's faithful. "It will be at least a few months before all is ready, but we plan to move our art, film, music, theater and a few other sections to the new space, which will allow us to also expand a few sections."
Why now, as Dutton's Brentwood Books prepares to close its doors at the end of the month and Book Soup shutters its Costa Mesa satellite store?
Two reasons, Slattery tells Jacket Copy:
Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "He could have rented this space for a lot more money to some chain operation. He thinks that the bookstore is an important thing."
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