Crunch Time for a Bibliophile

As of today, Saturday, April 23, 2011, I've got six more Saturdays, including today, in which I can check out books from the Valencia library. On June 4, books can no longer be checked out from there, Canyon Country or Newhall, and on June 10, all materials belonging to those three libraries will be due.

Now, I don't know when holds being placed for materials from the other County of Los Angeles libraries will be cut off. I've been lucky because despite declarations that any items put on hold from those libraries have to be picked up from the Castaic library (separate from the three Santa Clarita branches), all the books I've put on hold through the online library catalog have come to Valencia. If this was not meant to happen, I hope they don't correct it. Not yet. I still need these weeks so I can keep bringing in presidential books for research for my second book. I need those books. As I've said before, without the County of Los Angeles libraries, I never would have been able to write my share of What If They Lived?. I don't expect to get through all the books I'd need, but just to get the relatively major ones out of the way and those notes transcribed and saved, so I have it and can be comfortable with either checking out what those three branches have come July 1, or buying for cheap whatever I need off of abebooks.com.

But this also presents a new conundrum. Because though I'm dedicated to getting this research done, to figuring out exactly how I want to cover the material I'm bringing together, there's a play that keeps nagging me. Or maybe two plays. One takes place during Grad Nite at Disneyland (inspired by chaperoning my sister's Grad Nite in 2007), involving two sets of characters at different places in the park during the same hours, and the other takes place just off the lobby at the Grand Californian hotel, at two plush easy chairs, with a small circular table in between them, and a lamp a few inches behind the chair on the left, and a long, horizontal rose-patterned rug. I had my sister take pictures on her phone and e-mail them to me so I get the setting exactly right.

I've already spent time on the Dramatists Play Service website (http://www.dramatists.com/), and spent some money there, ordering those plays that hew fairly closely to what I want to write. I want to see how those playwrights did it, how they staged their plays, how they presented those situations. I want to learn as much as I can from them. At the same time, I've also become very much inspired by the works of Sam Shepard, or rather his prose. About two weeks ago, I checked out as many of his plays as I could find, intending to read them. This week, I've got more presidential books on hold to be picked up, and those are crucial in the face of these dwindling weeks.

But maybe there is a way to still have Shepard's plays, even though I'll likely return them today to pick up the books I need. I'll just put them on hold again after I've returned them and picked up my books on hold, and hope for the best. I should have the same luck next week that I've had this week. With so many people having abandoned the Valencia library in favor of Castaic and other County branches in anticipation of the transfer of control from the County to the City of Santa Clarita (It's a lot emptier on a Saturday than it used to be), there's more space for me.

Oh, one other thing to mention. I hit upon this book in an e-mail I subscribe to containing Washington Post book reviews. It's called Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf. A rather unwieldy title, but important to me because Wulf wrote about the first four presidents' passion for gardening. This is exactly what I'm seeking. It can be done, and so can the aspect of the presidents that I want to write about. I just have to figure out how to do it and I'm sure this book can help in some way. I don't intend to buy it now, since it's just a little too pricey for me after what I've already bought in recent weeks, but I will soon. I want to see how Wulf wrote about Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, and maybe there'll be inspiration in there for me.

Couldn't Do It

I did better than my record while at Broward Community College, in all the time I spent at Southwest Regional Library. Then, I didn't get past Moonraker. This time, I made it to Doctor No and this time, the run included Diamonds are Forever and From Russia with Love, both of which came after Moonraker.

Is it because I was reading them one after the other and perhaps got tired of their inner workings, the establishment of the missions, the woman beside Bond, the weapons, the descriptions of the food he ate, the details that Ian Fleming felt were important for us to know about the history of a place or of what Bond planned to do to defeat the villain?

I could never get tired of Fleming's food descriptions. I love descriptions of food in books, which is why, when I went on my latest shopping spree at daedalusbooks.com (It happens once in a while, not always once a month, but it always goes above $30), I bought Literary Feasts (http://www.daedalusbooks.com/Products/Detail.asp?ProductID=62969&Media=Book&SubCategoryID=&ReturnUrl=%2FProducts%2FSearch%2FHomeQuickSearchResult%2Easp%3FSearch%3Dliterary%2Bfeasts%26Media%3D), a compilation of food scenes in various novels.

Is it because I mostly knew how Fleming tended to operate within his novels, when the villain would be revealed, when Bond would be introduced to the allies that would help him on his mission? No. I think it's because it felt like Fleming didn't care as much when writing Doctor No as he did with From Russia with Love, which preceded it. In From Russia with Love, Fleming gives 71 pages over to the murderous Soviet organization SMERSH before even re-introducing Bond. He describes the operatives, the plan that they intend to carry out (to ruin and then murder Bond and completely upend the British Secret Service), and it's more than what the feature films gave with SPECTRE. President Kennedy had excellent taste when he mentioned this as one of his favorite books.

Doctor No is a huge letdown. It has everything one can expect from the Bond novels by that point, but it's written without the same attention or the same intensity to make you be completely absorbed in Bond's mission. I was disappointed when Donovan "Red" Grant (You may remember him when Robert Shaw played him in the film version of From Russia with Love), doesn't appear until nearly the end of From Russia with Love, because he's described so vividly in physical form and in personality that it feels like he should have more to do besides just basically lie in wait for the moment to kill Bond on the Orient Express.

The same disappointment is there in Doctor No, because Doctor Julius No comes into the novel fairly late, and isn't much of an interesting figure. This is who Bond will battle? It's not much of a battle towards the end anyway, and it's no wonder the script for Dr. No changed that drastically.

Now, it could be that I need a break, but I'm not ready to continue, or even certain that I'd want to continue. The James Bond movies are my Star Wars, and I had hoped that the same would stand for the books. Not to own them (since I haven't come upon any I'd want to have in my collection), but to know them as intimately as I do the films. If I got bored with the next set of titles, I could always close them and return them, but at this point, so close to when the County of Los Angeles is going to hand over control of the Santa Clarita libraries to the City of Santa Clarita and cut off access to their hundreds of thousands of titles (and leaving me stranded in so many ways in my research for the books I'm working on), I can't afford to waste slots like that.

So maybe not now. Maybe not later this year. Maybe next year, or the year after that. The feeling may come again. But I'm not going to force myself back into it. That's not the right way to read anything.

That's a Habit I Don't Need to Keep

After I woke up this morning and put my bedsheets in the washer (Kitty puked at the foot of my bed during the night, and I didn't feel like getting up at that hour to investigate, though I kept feeling a cold chunk of something whenever my foot wandered to the right side, and all I did when I saw it was sweep it up and put it in the garbage, but for the yellow stain there, washing the sheets was entirely necessary. Not sure what could have caused it, maybe a delayed reaction from the Passover plates we made for her and Tigger, but she seems ok now. Thankfully nothing beyond a stomach upset), Mom informed me that a nasty habit of mine had returned: Nastiness.

It's not random or calculated nastiness. I don't have the dark soul for either of those. But apparently, when I'm at work on a book, I tend to get short and snippy with those around me. Artistic temperament, maybe, but I thought that that's only earned after the third or fourth book. It's not so much devotion to the work at hand that I shut everything out, although Mom told me that when I'm working on one of my writing projects, I'm far removed from the rest of the world. I cannot be reached.

Now, I'm working on being more accessible. It's not fair to her, Dad and Meridith that I remain so aloof when I'm in the thick of that jungle of thoughts. But I can pinpoint where it comes from.

It happened when I was doing research for "What If They Lived?" One of the people I had chosen to write about was Carole Landis, a 1940s actress who led a tragic life. For each actor, I searched for the books that were available about them. For Landis, there was a book called Carole Landis: A Tragic Life in Hollywood by E.J. Fleming, published by McFarland & Company, which is notorious for very little editorial oversight.

I ordered the book from Amazon, since the County of Los Angeles library system had no copies, and I tried to read it. I couldn't. Fleming was so obsessed with setting up the time period, and not getting quickly enough to talking about Landis's life. Plenty of gossip abounded within the pages, too, and that became annoying as well. I couldn't find any part of this that I would have enjoyed enough to write about Landis's life and then speculate on what she might have done if she had lived.

I told Phil Hall that I wasn't getting anywhere with it, and e-mailed him my notes. I got rid of the book.

That's only one part of this habit. The other part is that I hate transcribing notes. I get so bored by the stupefying chunks of time spent typing handwritten notes into Word files. My vehement dislike for it began when I became an intern at The Signal and spent nine hours on my first day transcribing audiotapes for Stephen Peeples, one of the writers there. I became very good at quick transcription, but was very bored with the interviews and always having to strain to hear certain passages on those tapes.

When I transcribed the notes I wrote while reading 40+ books for "What If They Lived?", I couldn't stand sitting at the computer to do the same thing. I could read my handwriting, but after the 7th, 8th, and 9th pages, good lord, how much more did I have to go before I could tear up the notes triumphantly and then focus on the occasional frustration of making those essays read how I wanted them to read?

I don't mind writing. An idea comes into my head and I roll with it without complaint. But I enjoy editing a lot more. I love moving around words, playing with punctuation, figuring out how to make each sentence fit what I'm trying to do.

So it was with the same situation for "What the Presidents Read", my next book. Yesterday, I finally finished reading The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President by Taylor Branch. 668 pages. It took me a week to get through it. I didn't mind the policy discussions or the international matters covered, since I grew up during the Clinton Administration. I love history and I especially love learning about those who made it. Moreso, I'm nuts for presidential history. So Branch, a close friend of Clinton, recorded conversations with him as the events of his administration happened (more or less, because there were sometimes months-long gaps between when they would get together for these secret sessions, which were necessary so no one got wind of the intent of the project, which was to create an unassailable record of his time in office), and inside this book, you get insight into his troubled relationship with his FBI Director, Louis Freeh, as well as his distant relationship Janet Reno, and as much as the media wanted you to think back then that the Clintons' marriage was rocky during the Lewinsky scandal and could have fallen apart, that doesn't seem to be so.

Branch's writing tends to get somnambulistic at times, as he wonders about what he's supposed to be during the course of these recordings, whether he's supposed to sharply question Clinton, remain a sounding board, or gently suggest insights that could push the conversation into different directions. He does that many times, although I eventually understood that he was trying to grasp his place in this history, as it happened.

The most illuminating part of the book is the conversation that Clinton and Gore had after Gore conceded the election to Bush. I transcribed those pages verbatim (as I did for the book-related passages I need for my own book), because I want to use them for another idea I have. There's fascinating drama there.

So I finally finished the book late yesterday afternoon, and I spent the entire evening transcribing my remaining notes (As I finished transcribing each page from my pad, I tore it up and threw it out, as I have my notes saved on this computer and on my flash drive), which was tedious and frustrating, because when in the hell was this going to be over? Not the project, I mean, but just having to pull these words from the book into the Word file. And I got short with Mom and Meridith during the evening. I noticed a bit of that, but not completely enough to really think about my actions.

And I have thought about them. And it's ridiculous. They didn't write that book. Branch did. And I was short-sighted because this one book shouldn't cause all that trouble. I only thought about my immediate frustration, and didn't think about what this would lead to. Eventually, I'll have enough book-related information about Clinton and hopefully all the other presidents to write another book. And then I'll write it, and I'll write query letters to publishers and agents, pitching my book, and hopefully someone will find it interesting enough to publish it. And then I'll repeat the process with more books that I have in mind, both fiction and nonfiction. And I'll continue to do that, also with the plays I have in mind. This process widens my name. What problems could I possibly have with that?

Unlike the Carole Landis book, I can't close any of the books I'm reading for this project. I have to slog through them if necessary because I need lots of information. And not only that, but I'm doing concurrent research. While reading The Clinton Tapes, I came up with an idea for another book, centered on the history of a certain room in the White House. So while reading these books, I have to look out for two lines of information to cover both books.

I've got to watch myself now. Neither member of my favorite trio deserve to be sniped at. Despite my obsessed life with them, these are just books. Just varying chunky sizes of paper. I became a former film critic because I didn't find it fun anymore, with all the hype that never changes from year to year. Books are always fun to me, and that's how it should remain. And if any more books should frustrate me during this spate of research, I need to remind myself that there are more to come and there are equal possibilities of pleasure in those. I can't think of anything else I'd want to do. This is it.

Sometimes You Just Need a Box of Chicken

This past weekend, in The Wall Street Journal Weekend, in the Off Duty section, there was a page about Atlanta, under the "Adventure & Travel" heading. The bottom of the page is given over to people living in the featured area, and there was Cee Lo Green, Richard Blais from "Top Chef: All-Stars", designer Kay Douglass, and Kathryn Stockett, who wrote The Help. All gave their favorite places in Atlanta, and I loved Stockett's second-from-the-last pick in her column:

"Poultry Excuse: Kroger. I get my fried chicken--and much of my writing material--at the location in Brookwood Square. It will blow your mind--the chicken, the divorces. I once heard a pregnant woman tell her husband it wasn't his baby. He went right ahead and ordered an eight-piece box. 1745 Peachtree St. N.E., kroger.com"

Bettie Page's Banana Stand

Yesterday, after a long day that took us from one corner of this valley to another, including a stop at Moon Wok, the Bible of Chinese Food here, we went to Trader Joe's. Mom and Meridith went to PETCO next door first, but Dad and I went right to Trader Joe's.

No matter how much Trader Joe's disappoints me by what they take away (I still miss the microwave-in-bag spanish rice), I will never tire of this place. Not the free samples, not the pre-made salads that keep rising in price, not the frozen section with its always reliable supply of meatless corn dogs (which I like a lot better than regular corn dogs). And brother, if you want to get a look at more attractive female fare in this valley, go to Trader Joe's. A plumper behind is always appreciated.

That wasn't even the most interesting part of this long overdue shopping trip. At the banana stand, there were three employees there pulling the ripened bananas from the shelf below and putting them on top of the green bananas already stacked, because there were boxes on carts with new green bananas to be placed on that shelf below.

There was one employee working on this who was particularly fascinating. She had modest tattoos on her left and right upper arms, a tight dark shirt, and deep black hair. Maybe it was the eyeliner that did it, or her entire head, but she looked like a serious contender for a Bettie Page look-alike contest.

And no, I didn't stand there while choosing what bananas I wanted, imagining her in one of Bettie's outfits while she stacked bananas. Ok, I did.

And lest you think that was all that visit to Trader Joe's meant to me (It was 80%), I did quite well in gathering what I hadn't seen in so long, including my favorite chunky olive and edamame hummuses, a huge freakin' grapefruit, those meatless corn dogs, and more veggie burgers.

SAT Test Dream: Part None

Not one moment in a dream last night to continue what I hoped would be a recurring dream. Not an appearance by her, not any time, nothing. I did find myself in yet another theme park, which is helpful, since one of my (so far) two novels takes place during a day at a theme park, but I was disappointed.

SAT Test Dream

The last time I had what could maybe be considered a recurring dream was when I had a series of dreams involving the same theme: A girlfriend. This led to what I did not know would happen, that I began dating Irene in 7th grade, right on the day of the Valentine's Day Dance, yes, that February 14th. This was in 1997, so it shows that I'm beginning to age gracefully toward my 30s.

I wish that the dream I had through the night from late last night on would become a recurring dream. I loved it, because of the fun and the boisterous spirit in it.

I was in some kind of testing hall for the SATs. I don't know why. I was sitting at one of the desks, wondering why I was even there, because I was 27, and there is no way the SATs would benefit me in any way at my age. Not that they did anyway, because I took them in 12th grade, and that was that. I didn't use it on a college application, didn't have to apply it to anything else I pursued, and I sure as hell didn't need it to get a book published. I'm not sure if I will when I seek a publisher for my next book, but I hope not, because I don't remember what I scored, but I'll bet anything that I did a lot better on the English section than the Math section.

In this dream, I didn't decide to become an annoyance, but it just happened. I was playing with some blue goo on the desk, spreading it around, even while the papers were there. I don't know why the desks were so close, and there were no partitions between the desks to prevent cheating, which I did, though not because I needed answers. Apparently, I didn't care.

There was a girl sitting to my left. I didn't get her name. She didn't need a name. She needed an excited description, a celebratory exclamation, a shout, a yell, a fist pump coupled with "YES!!!!!!" She had such a vast, happy spirit that I find so attractive in any woman. I think she was a latina, and what was also most attractive is that she made extra weight look good. Yeah, she was heavy, but in a way that accentuates all the right places. And she was so much fun. She had the same opinion I did about the SATs, but she was a few years younger than me. Legal, of course, but I'm not sure what her reason was for being there. Maybe she hadn't taken the SATs in high school and thought to do it now as a lark. Maybe it was required for something she wanted to do, even being in her early 20s. I don't know. The one thing I was absolutely certain of is that I wanted her. I wanted to run around the world with her without needing any kind of transport, or waterskis, or anything that would make a speedy trip. I figured we could just float on the wind and let it remain underfoot as we ran.

The test began, and I didn't bother to take it seriously. I looked around, I fiddled with the goo some more, I played with a few small toys I had on the desk. And then I looked over at the answers of the girl to my left, and the person to my right. And I was caught, and told to leave the testing hall. But I wasn't leaving the building without her. So I waited the few hours that it took for the testing to be complete. And she came out, and I was overjoyed to see her again, and so was she, and she rushed me over to her house. She wanted to introduce me to her entire family.

I thought she had such a dominant, boisterous spirit. I could see where she got it from. Her father was such a good-natured guy, incredible at a stove, constantly creating culinary masterpieces. He joshed me a bit, looking stern at one point, asking what my intentions were with his daughter, then bursting out laughing. He said he knew as soon as I walked in that he could trust me. There was nothing sticky there.

Her siblings were great, too. I didn't get as much from them as I did the father, but they seemed like they were comfortable with me, too.

And she, well, at one point, she wrapped her arms around my neck from behind, and put her head on my left shoulder, watching her father cook. The feeling from that alone was enough to make me hope that this dream continues tonight or some day soon. I know that I would also like that feeling in real life. That is pure happiness. I believe it is the one time that gravity would allow me to ignore its laws and just shake and shimmy with joy in mid-air.