Some dreams of mine relate to what's going on in my life, and some are random, complete "Where the hell did that come from?" moments. They're the ones I treasure the most, save for one really awful dream, only because it presented to me a full outline for a novel that I could have started writing as soon as I woke up, if it had not insisted on fading from my memory so quickly. It was like the universe saying, "No, boy, you're doing this on your own. We're not giving you a freebie."
For the past few months, I've had dreams that took place on college campuses, some with a theme park adjacent to it (Think Six Flags Magic Mountain, with more rollercoasters than anything else), one with a full-service McDonald's and an arcade on campus, always with the choice of going to math class or not. In those dreams, I wonder if I really need to, if my world will be so affected if I didn't. Always, I end up not going, always I feel really good about it, not wasting my time on what I don't want to do.
A dream I had early this morning was far from what seemed to be that norm.
I was back at Silver Trail Middle, where my dad taught computers and business education when I attended in 7th and 8th grade, and beyond that. I was standing in the empty hallway where Dad's class was, remembering such personalities as the apparently-repressed science teacher who, when he spotted Monica Haynick and her boyfriend holding hands between class periods, called out "Daylight!", and they separated, probably reconnecting once they were out of view of him. I never understood it. Young love is hard enough to manage as it is. But it never affected Haynick, a strong spirit and mind who I imagine retains those qualities today.
Standing there, rooted to one spot, I was taking in the knowledge that my parents had bought the entire school property, the connecting buildings, the cafeteria, the gym, the music rooms. This was our new home. I don't know how they could manage the upkeep on such a place, but that wasn't part of the dream. I was thinking about the two years I had been at this school (Actually a year and a half because my 7th grade class was at a portables site in another location in Pembroke Pines while the campus was being built, and during winter break, my dad and the other faculty members and staff moved into the new campus before the start of the next semester), and now these halls were mine to roam, free of educational residue. I was thinking about what classroom to choose as my own room, based on where I might have had a good time each day in school. But that's all the dream offered. I woke up, it was 10:26 a.m., and it was time to start the day.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Tidbits from the First Issue of The Henderson Press
If I'm not doing research for books or plays, my evening schedule after the freelance writing job newsletter is complete is comprised of, for now, reading back issues of The Henderson Press via downloaded .pdf files, and toward the late-night hours, listening to audio of arguments before the Supreme Court.
So far, just from this first issue of The Henderson Press, dated Sept. 23, 2010, I've learned:
- That Henderson has the ironically-named Ocean Avenue.
- That not only is there a library within the Henderson Libraries network that's located inside the Galleria at Sunset mall (though it's a cubbyhole since it obviously can't maintain the space of, say, a Sears), but there's also one in a Target shopping center, Lake Mead Crossing, on West Lake Mead Parkway.
- Henderson Libraries was established in 1943 with one library in downtown Henderson.
- Colin Hay of "Men at Work" performed at the Henderson Events Plaza on October 8.
- The Henderson Farmer's Market has food vendors and one, at least at that time, is called Tacizza, the slogan of which is, "Tastes like a pizza, looks like a taco."
- There's Coo Coo's Cafe on West Pacific Avenue, and the ad in this issue states, "Home of the Funky Monkey Frappe." If they're still around when I get there, I want to know what's in that.
- One of the nice things about this paper is that it's got a retail/service directory with listings for mail services, auto glass, handyman service, reception services, and more. And there's also job listings, and car and real estate ads. I know that's in every newspaper, or at least used to be for some, but it's impressive to me because it's where I want to be.
So far, just from this first issue of The Henderson Press, dated Sept. 23, 2010, I've learned:
- That Henderson has the ironically-named Ocean Avenue.
- That not only is there a library within the Henderson Libraries network that's located inside the Galleria at Sunset mall (though it's a cubbyhole since it obviously can't maintain the space of, say, a Sears), but there's also one in a Target shopping center, Lake Mead Crossing, on West Lake Mead Parkway.
- Henderson Libraries was established in 1943 with one library in downtown Henderson.
- Colin Hay of "Men at Work" performed at the Henderson Events Plaza on October 8.
- The Henderson Farmer's Market has food vendors and one, at least at that time, is called Tacizza, the slogan of which is, "Tastes like a pizza, looks like a taco."
- There's Coo Coo's Cafe on West Pacific Avenue, and the ad in this issue states, "Home of the Funky Monkey Frappe." If they're still around when I get there, I want to know what's in that.
- One of the nice things about this paper is that it's got a retail/service directory with listings for mail services, auto glass, handyman service, reception services, and more. And there's also job listings, and car and real estate ads. I know that's in every newspaper, or at least used to be for some, but it's impressive to me because it's where I want to be.
My Old High School Isn't Enough. I'm Going to Disney World!
During one of the best days of my life the Tuesday before last (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2011/10/rosh-hashanah-and-furlough-days-off-day_04.html), I listened to the entire soundtrack of Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress on my mp3 player while my family and I were at Fry's in Woodland Hills, the one with the Alice in Wonderland theming.
As a Disney fanatic who went to Walt Disney World every weekend and sometimes during the week just for dinner when he was a tyke, who owned a great number of Disney movies on VHS back then and now the same great number on DVD, whose favorite childhood movie was Flight of the Navigator and whose favorite movie is Mary Poppins, whose parents have Mickey and Minnie-shaped mirrors and a Mickey telephone, and a Mickey lamp that sits on a shelf in our house, this is normal for me. I could never let go of what I loved back then, and in the same vein, I also have the proper soundtrack for the Tomorrowland Transit Authority in Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom (not the stupid "Let's explain every single attraction in Tomorrowland that you've already seen as you were walking around before you got on this ride for a 10-minute break" soundtrack that's currently being used) on my mp3 player, as well as the narration for the Walt Disney World Express Monorail. I am happily incurable.
On Monday night, done with the freelance writing job newsletter I compile, and not feeling like doing much of anything to advance the writing projects I'm working on, I wandered through my memories on YouTube. I found video of the Carousel of Progress from 2010, exactly how I remember it, and video of the Tomorrowland Transit Authority. After we moved to South Florida, we only visited the Magic Kingdom occasionally, never going to EPCOT or then-Disney-MGM Studios (Now it's just Disney Studios), and we had only been to Animal Kingdom once and that seemed to be enough. We had a deeper connection to the Magic Kingdom being that since we went so often when I was little, the monorail drivers recognized us, and performers in the parades stopped by on their routes to say hello. What more could my growing imagination want?
Even though Andy Rooney was the one who pushed me headlong into writing, I think Walt Disney World helped create the sparks in my imagination that started the process. In 2000, when Dad wanted to go to the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) at the Orange County Convention Center, Mom, Meridith and I went to the Magic Kingdom in the morning on the second day of his conference (He met us in the park later, or, likely, Mom and Meridith), and because we were allowed in along with the other hotel guests (Even though we weren't staying at a hotel on the property) for Early Entry, I rushed right to Tomorrowland and rode Space Mountain, my favorite attraction there, three times before it began to get crowded. But I didn't leave Tomorrowland after that. I had no reason to, because Tomorrowland contained everything I loved, in Space Mountain, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, the Carousel of Progress, and the arcade seen after you exit Space Mountain, which had a CD jukebox. Put money in, choose your favorite songs, and they're heard all throughout the arcade. I also loved that through one window in the arcade, you could see the train pass by. Incongruous, but terrific fodder for my imagination.
The Tomorrowland Transit Authority was never crowded, always seen as a way to take a break from the bustle of the park, and I rode it many times. Vehicles used to pass by one another and I always waved at those who were on the other track, even though I didn't know them. I've always toyed with a story or a play involving that.
It was also fun to sometimes see Space Mountain with the lights on, since you rode adjacent to the hulking structure, which always looked like a jumble of metal when it wasn't working. And the soundtrack, oh that blessed soundtrack, always with proclamations such as, "Now approaching: the Tomorrowland Interplanetary Convention Center," (It was first home to ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter, and now houses Stitch's Great Escape, which is a waste, even though Alien Encounter really scared me when I went on it during Silver Trail Middle's 8th grade end-of-the-year trip. Now, listening to the soundtrack for Alien Encounter, I appreciate the detail that went into such an atmosphere) and the model of Walt Disney's city of the future, called EPCOT after the first tight turn of the ride where you could see Cinderella Castle from there.
Now the Tomorrowland Transit Authority has "PeopleMover" added to the name, though it will always be as it was for me. For me, spending the entire day at the Magic Kingdom inside Tomorrowland and among Space Mountain, the Carousel of Progress, and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, there was such a wealth of imagination. And I also remembered my toddler self in a stroller with that sky blue top watching Mickey and Minnie in shiny gray space costumes at the Tomorrowland Theatre Stage when my TTA car passed by circular windows that offered a brief glimpse of the shuttered stage, which I think has now been demolished.
Watching videos of the Tomorrowland Transit Authority on YouTube that night, I decided that in writing my future books, in needing to be somewhere in my mind that's peaceful, that offers up a lot of thinking space, I'll keep not only Flanagan High School in 9th grade at the portables site in Pembroke Pines, near our condo, but also add the TTA via YouTube, to have those moments of remembering sitting in one of those vehicles, parts of Tomorrowland passing by, my mind fully active and energetic because of all that was around me.
As a Disney fanatic who went to Walt Disney World every weekend and sometimes during the week just for dinner when he was a tyke, who owned a great number of Disney movies on VHS back then and now the same great number on DVD, whose favorite childhood movie was Flight of the Navigator and whose favorite movie is Mary Poppins, whose parents have Mickey and Minnie-shaped mirrors and a Mickey telephone, and a Mickey lamp that sits on a shelf in our house, this is normal for me. I could never let go of what I loved back then, and in the same vein, I also have the proper soundtrack for the Tomorrowland Transit Authority in Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom (not the stupid "Let's explain every single attraction in Tomorrowland that you've already seen as you were walking around before you got on this ride for a 10-minute break" soundtrack that's currently being used) on my mp3 player, as well as the narration for the Walt Disney World Express Monorail. I am happily incurable.
On Monday night, done with the freelance writing job newsletter I compile, and not feeling like doing much of anything to advance the writing projects I'm working on, I wandered through my memories on YouTube. I found video of the Carousel of Progress from 2010, exactly how I remember it, and video of the Tomorrowland Transit Authority. After we moved to South Florida, we only visited the Magic Kingdom occasionally, never going to EPCOT or then-Disney-MGM Studios (Now it's just Disney Studios), and we had only been to Animal Kingdom once and that seemed to be enough. We had a deeper connection to the Magic Kingdom being that since we went so often when I was little, the monorail drivers recognized us, and performers in the parades stopped by on their routes to say hello. What more could my growing imagination want?
Even though Andy Rooney was the one who pushed me headlong into writing, I think Walt Disney World helped create the sparks in my imagination that started the process. In 2000, when Dad wanted to go to the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) at the Orange County Convention Center, Mom, Meridith and I went to the Magic Kingdom in the morning on the second day of his conference (He met us in the park later, or, likely, Mom and Meridith), and because we were allowed in along with the other hotel guests (Even though we weren't staying at a hotel on the property) for Early Entry, I rushed right to Tomorrowland and rode Space Mountain, my favorite attraction there, three times before it began to get crowded. But I didn't leave Tomorrowland after that. I had no reason to, because Tomorrowland contained everything I loved, in Space Mountain, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, the Carousel of Progress, and the arcade seen after you exit Space Mountain, which had a CD jukebox. Put money in, choose your favorite songs, and they're heard all throughout the arcade. I also loved that through one window in the arcade, you could see the train pass by. Incongruous, but terrific fodder for my imagination.
The Tomorrowland Transit Authority was never crowded, always seen as a way to take a break from the bustle of the park, and I rode it many times. Vehicles used to pass by one another and I always waved at those who were on the other track, even though I didn't know them. I've always toyed with a story or a play involving that.
It was also fun to sometimes see Space Mountain with the lights on, since you rode adjacent to the hulking structure, which always looked like a jumble of metal when it wasn't working. And the soundtrack, oh that blessed soundtrack, always with proclamations such as, "Now approaching: the Tomorrowland Interplanetary Convention Center," (It was first home to ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter, and now houses Stitch's Great Escape, which is a waste, even though Alien Encounter really scared me when I went on it during Silver Trail Middle's 8th grade end-of-the-year trip. Now, listening to the soundtrack for Alien Encounter, I appreciate the detail that went into such an atmosphere) and the model of Walt Disney's city of the future, called EPCOT after the first tight turn of the ride where you could see Cinderella Castle from there.
Now the Tomorrowland Transit Authority has "PeopleMover" added to the name, though it will always be as it was for me. For me, spending the entire day at the Magic Kingdom inside Tomorrowland and among Space Mountain, the Carousel of Progress, and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, there was such a wealth of imagination. And I also remembered my toddler self in a stroller with that sky blue top watching Mickey and Minnie in shiny gray space costumes at the Tomorrowland Theatre Stage when my TTA car passed by circular windows that offered a brief glimpse of the shuttered stage, which I think has now been demolished.
Watching videos of the Tomorrowland Transit Authority on YouTube that night, I decided that in writing my future books, in needing to be somewhere in my mind that's peaceful, that offers up a lot of thinking space, I'll keep not only Flanagan High School in 9th grade at the portables site in Pembroke Pines, near our condo, but also add the TTA via YouTube, to have those moments of remembering sitting in one of those vehicles, parts of Tomorrowland passing by, my mind fully active and energetic because of all that was around me.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Random Afternoon Notes
Earlier today, I wasn't sure where to start once I logged on. Do I write separate entries about the truly laugh-out-loud books of Celia Rivenbark, the high priestess of Southern humor? Would a "First Lines from Books I Love" entry be valid for Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits, even though I laughed the hardest at a passage toward the end of the book? And what about all the book and DVD mail I got today, stopped up by there being no mail yesterday, hence the deluge? So it seems it would be better to handle all of this like this.
I've read Celia Rivenbark's previous three books, laughed at many, many wicked thoughts of hers, but this, in Belle Weather, about the effects of Ambien usage on others, had me doubled over laughing so hard that I was getting very close to gravity pushing me off the couch:
"I read an interview with a woman who had gained more than 100 pounds by cooking while asleep. Every morning, girlfriend was mystified by the dirty dishes and empty refrigerator.
In the South, we usually just figure that the waterbugs got especially industrious overnight. Those suckers are big. It's not a huge stretch for me to assume that, one night, they'll just walk upstairs and ask me, in waterbug-speak, "Yo, girl, where's the FryDaddy? Me and the kids is hawn-gry!"
This led to starting Rivenbark's You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning, and this story, which speaks to me because of my preference for used books, not only because they're cheaper:
"Perhaps the saddest note that I have received over the years came from Julie Ann, who married a Yankee man a few years ago.
"On Mother's Day, I got to sleep late, which means about ten 'til eight," she wrote. "While I was sleeping, just my Mother's Day luck, my husband, who never does any domestic chores whatsoever, decided to get all aim-high and decided to clean the cast-iron skillet I'd left on top of the stove."
Hons, when I read those words, I had to sit down. Because I knew what was coming.
"This was the cast-iron skillet that I got from my great-aunt Connie Jo for my wedding shower ten years ago. It has been lovingly seasoned over the past ten years, having fried enough bacon to clog the arteries of the entire state of Texas. It has made hundreds of servings of fried okra, cornbread for countless holiday meals, gravies too numerous to mention, and our daughter and I made her very first blackberry cobbler together in this pan. It was seasoned to perfection, a gleaming black bottom that I could see my reflection in."
I poured myself a glass of wine to steady my nerves as I continued reading.
"Do you know what my boneheaded Yankee husband did? He came to me, all proud, saying he 'got my old skillet clean, you know, the one with all the crap on it.'"
Julie Ann said she got a little dizzy at this point.
"You mean my cast-iron skillet? The one I got for our shower? That one?"
Her duh-hubby just grinned, stupid and proud. "That's the one! It took more than an hour, but I got it clean!"
He had assaulted her skillet with a Chore Boy scrubbing pad, stripping off nearly ten years of perfect seasoning.
Julie Ann began to cry, the great heaving sobs of a Southern woman who has married an ignoramus. He brightened and offered to buy her a new skillet.
And that sums up how Southerners view life and love, y'all. New is not better. Shiny is overrated. These are truths we hold dear in the South, where we embrace imperfection for the gift that it is. Y'all can say "amen" now."
The bold emphasis is mine. And though there have been times when I've questioned exactly how Southern I am, having been born in Plantation, Florida, in South Florida, compared to a North Carolinian like Rivenbark and others in Georgia and those states, I believe I am still Southern, just as valid, with my love of grits, growing up saying "Yes'm" and "No'm," and all-you-can eat country-fried steak nights at Po Folks that were around when I was a baby and that I took part in when I was older.
That is also how I view life. When I was 11 and found that three-book Andy Rooney compilation in that thrift store, it wasn't new. It was used. And I didn't mind at all. I just wanted Rooney's words at the time, to learn how he did his life's work, and becoming inspired myself to be a writer. Now, I love used books not only because they're cheaper, but also because they've got history, like dollar bills that pass through many states, though more meaningful with the scrawls on certain pages, notes from loved ones expressing their hope that they enjoy the book. As Anne Brancroft once said, playing Helene Hanff, one of my heroes, in the movie 84 Charing Cross Road: "I love inscriptions on flyleafs and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned and reading passages someone long-gone has called my attention to."
I've seen inscriptions and notes in the used books that have passed through here, that I haven't kept because I didn't feel that they could be part of my permanent collection. But I've never felt that desire to do it. I believe people can do anything they want with books, and certainly the same can be said of mine, but I know what my favorite parts are and where they are in a novel such as This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes. I don't mark up my books because I want those parts to remain part of the entire book. I look forward to them, but they are only one or a few parts of the book. They contribute to something whole. To point them out by pen mark is to lessen the spotlight on everything else in a favorite book.
I would be tempted to do such a thing with Buried in Books: A Reader's Anthology by Julie Rugg, which I received in the mail today. Rugg quotes from various and varied authors on such subjects as "Degrees of bibliomania," "Books' lives," and "'An early taste for reading'." Quotes from books, excerpts, all about the love for reading and the eccentricities that grow from it. To me, happy ones at that.
I will undoubtedly find other books I want to read through these quotes and excerpts, perhaps even quotes to use for the "Quote a Day" part at the top of the freelance writing job newsletter I compile every Sunday through Thursday evening for the following day. But last year, before What If They Lived? was published and I was thinking about what my second book should be, I bought from Staples a pack of legal notepads. I decided to use legal paper because it's what my maternal grandfather used in his practice as a lawyer. Plus, he used a legal pad to write a letter to me when I was a baby and it's one of my most prized posessions (Included in that list is a manual for a United Airlines Boeing 747-100 that one of my campmates gave to me during a weeklong aviation summer camp in 1998 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach). My grandfather, who I never knew a great deal (I was very young), was an admirable man and I want to follow many of his traits. This is one of them.
So when I read Buried in Books, I'll use a legal notepad to jot down titles to look up on Amazon, and page numbers for quotes to reference, to put into a file I keep of quotes to use for that newsletter. I think it's easier that way.
Today's mail was also a combination of books I really want to read, books that are part of the preliminary research I'm doing for my 1930s movie history book, and DVDs I've been anticipating, one well above the others that came.
There was From This Moment On, Shania Twain's autobiography (She's beginning a Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace in December 2012, and Meridith and I want to see her, being that she was a big part of '90s music for us), and The Supreme Court by William H. Rehnquist. Rehnquist explains the history of the Court and its proceedings, which probably haven't changed since 2001, save for Chief Justice John G. Roberts wearing a plain black robe like his colleagues (First among equals, but one vote like the rest of them), whereas Rehnquist wore a robe with four gold bars on each arm.
I also received Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman for the purpose of seeing how MGM is covered here, what details there are. I plan to use The Hollywood Studio System by Douglas Gomery as a reference book for my project since he covers all the studios in the time of the Hollywood Studio System, 1930-1949, and writes about the business side of them as well, though I'm obviously not sure yet how much detail Gomery gives about the inner workings of the studios, the day-to-day business, the activity on the lots. This one stays with me, though.
In DVDs, Travels with My Aunt came!!! And now that leaves Barfly and The Glass Menagerie, directed by Paul Newman, as the only other two movies I want on DVD so badly. In the case of Barfly, a Criterion Collection release, since Warner Bros. released it on DVD in 2002 with a commentary by director Barbet Schroeder, but a few years later it went out of print and prices for available copies were jacked up to $50 and then $100, and I'm hoping this total silence means that there will be a Criterion release one of these days.
As soon as I pulled Travels with My Aunt out of its packaging, I rewound the VHS tape I had bought of it and then put it in its case and into the Goodwill box. I'm thinking of buying the VHS tape of The Glass Menagerie off Amazon so that maybe it'll come to DVD soon. Then I'll have the convenience of not having to rewind a great deal to watch my favorite parts over and over, as it will be when I watch Travels with My Aunt again. And what made me the happiest fan of the movie is that Warner Archive remastered it. I saw a clip on the website and it looked pristine, and I know that will hold true for the entire thing.
Despite being a former film critic, I still have some pull with some DVD labels due to my affiliation with Film Threat, which I don't use that often, only when I really, really want a certain DVD, and ever since I got back to books, that hasn't hit as much anymore. Recently it did, when I found that the Microcinema label was releasing a film of a one-man show starring John Maxwell called "Oh, Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?" Maxwell plays William Faulkner, and I just had to see this, just like with Give 'Em Hell, Harry starring James Whitmore, which I bought from the Goodwill center in Stevenson Ranch for $3 on VHS. For that one, it was also because of my passion for the American presidency, but I'm always fascinated by one-man shows, that one actor stands up on that stage and plays one personality for 90 minutes or so. Laurence Fishburne has done it with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Christopher Plummer has a one-man movie coming out called Barrymore, in which he plays John Barrymore, and the thinking is that since Whitmore got an Oscar nomination for that filmed stage performance as Harry Truman, there might be an attempt to try that with this one. It works for me since I want to write plays, and have thought about the one-man show a few times, and have seen two of them, one with Frank Ferrante as Groucho Marx, and the other with Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, both at the College of the Canyons Performing Arts Center over these years, two of the only worthwhile experiences I've had in Santa Clarita.
And late last week, I found out that Acorn Media was releasing all of their On the Road with Charles Kuralt sets in a package called the Americana Collection, and it was delivered to my front door today. Kuralt is one of my heroes because I have the same curiosity toward life that he has, finding what looks interesting and talking about it. As is said in the copy on the back cover of Set 1 about Kuralt's program: "No topic was too small, no person too insignificant." And I can't wait to watch all of these because in the copy on the back cover of Set 2, it mentions "...the 87-year-old college professor turned janitor who proclaimed, "No honest work is undignified." It ties right into the way I live life, that no one is above me and no one is below me.
I've taken on an unusual small hobby. I Google hotels that my parents and I, or just my parents, have stayed at, such as America's Best Value Inn on Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas, next to Hooters Casino Hotel, and Fiesta Henderson, where my parents stayed for two nights on their latest business trip to Vegas (The business being a job interview for my dad which didn't pan out because they weren't factoring in the decades of experience he had when offering a salary), which they hated because the toilet never stopped (And only on their last night there before moving over to Hampton Inn & Suites also in Henderson did someone come to fix it), and they had a bad digestive experience at the Denny's there. I also look up the Hacienda Hotel and Casino near Boulder City (home to a rock ledge that you can walk on, and in front of you is the most stunning view of the vast desert, an ocean of sand that seems to ripple in almost the same way) and I read the reviews of all these places. I'm not necessarily looking for insight into how good or bad they are, but I like looking for the stories, ascertaining the personalities of the people who wrote the reviews, based on their words.
From that sprung another desire. I get no use out of The Signal in Santa Clarita. I worked for them once, I did my five weeks as interim editor of their weekend Escape section, and I liked putting together a section of a newspaper on my own, but not the stress of it. Since I don't connect to this valley at all, there's no reason for me to read it. So, in anticipation of moving one of these days to Henderson, why not connect to The Henderson Press? When Mom and Dad came home from the most recent trip, they brought me a copy of The Henderson Press, the latest issue then, since they publish every week (at the start, they published every two weeks).
I went to the website last night and found that they have every issue on the website in .pdf files. I've decided that I want to read all 37 issues, even the one that was brought home to me since I remember a few things from it, but not all. I want to learn as much as I can about my future hometown through its newspaper, which is written far better than The Signal. Even some clumsy wording found at the start of an interview in the first issue was no big deal to me because it was genuine. There was no posing as there is here. These writers clearly love their city and that's all that matters to me. I want to feel like I belong somewhere already, and this is a good start. And once we get there, I'll know everything there is to know about Henderson and there won't be a need for any adjustment beyond a physical one. Plus, it'll make the inevitable exploration a lot more fun.
I've read Celia Rivenbark's previous three books, laughed at many, many wicked thoughts of hers, but this, in Belle Weather, about the effects of Ambien usage on others, had me doubled over laughing so hard that I was getting very close to gravity pushing me off the couch:
"I read an interview with a woman who had gained more than 100 pounds by cooking while asleep. Every morning, girlfriend was mystified by the dirty dishes and empty refrigerator.
In the South, we usually just figure that the waterbugs got especially industrious overnight. Those suckers are big. It's not a huge stretch for me to assume that, one night, they'll just walk upstairs and ask me, in waterbug-speak, "Yo, girl, where's the FryDaddy? Me and the kids is hawn-gry!"
This led to starting Rivenbark's You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start in the Morning, and this story, which speaks to me because of my preference for used books, not only because they're cheaper:
"Perhaps the saddest note that I have received over the years came from Julie Ann, who married a Yankee man a few years ago.
"On Mother's Day, I got to sleep late, which means about ten 'til eight," she wrote. "While I was sleeping, just my Mother's Day luck, my husband, who never does any domestic chores whatsoever, decided to get all aim-high and decided to clean the cast-iron skillet I'd left on top of the stove."
Hons, when I read those words, I had to sit down. Because I knew what was coming.
"This was the cast-iron skillet that I got from my great-aunt Connie Jo for my wedding shower ten years ago. It has been lovingly seasoned over the past ten years, having fried enough bacon to clog the arteries of the entire state of Texas. It has made hundreds of servings of fried okra, cornbread for countless holiday meals, gravies too numerous to mention, and our daughter and I made her very first blackberry cobbler together in this pan. It was seasoned to perfection, a gleaming black bottom that I could see my reflection in."
I poured myself a glass of wine to steady my nerves as I continued reading.
"Do you know what my boneheaded Yankee husband did? He came to me, all proud, saying he 'got my old skillet clean, you know, the one with all the crap on it.'"
Julie Ann said she got a little dizzy at this point.
"You mean my cast-iron skillet? The one I got for our shower? That one?"
Her duh-hubby just grinned, stupid and proud. "That's the one! It took more than an hour, but I got it clean!"
He had assaulted her skillet with a Chore Boy scrubbing pad, stripping off nearly ten years of perfect seasoning.
Julie Ann began to cry, the great heaving sobs of a Southern woman who has married an ignoramus. He brightened and offered to buy her a new skillet.
And that sums up how Southerners view life and love, y'all. New is not better. Shiny is overrated. These are truths we hold dear in the South, where we embrace imperfection for the gift that it is. Y'all can say "amen" now."
The bold emphasis is mine. And though there have been times when I've questioned exactly how Southern I am, having been born in Plantation, Florida, in South Florida, compared to a North Carolinian like Rivenbark and others in Georgia and those states, I believe I am still Southern, just as valid, with my love of grits, growing up saying "Yes'm" and "No'm," and all-you-can eat country-fried steak nights at Po Folks that were around when I was a baby and that I took part in when I was older.
That is also how I view life. When I was 11 and found that three-book Andy Rooney compilation in that thrift store, it wasn't new. It was used. And I didn't mind at all. I just wanted Rooney's words at the time, to learn how he did his life's work, and becoming inspired myself to be a writer. Now, I love used books not only because they're cheaper, but also because they've got history, like dollar bills that pass through many states, though more meaningful with the scrawls on certain pages, notes from loved ones expressing their hope that they enjoy the book. As Anne Brancroft once said, playing Helene Hanff, one of my heroes, in the movie 84 Charing Cross Road: "I love inscriptions on flyleafs and notes in margins. I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned and reading passages someone long-gone has called my attention to."
I've seen inscriptions and notes in the used books that have passed through here, that I haven't kept because I didn't feel that they could be part of my permanent collection. But I've never felt that desire to do it. I believe people can do anything they want with books, and certainly the same can be said of mine, but I know what my favorite parts are and where they are in a novel such as This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes. I don't mark up my books because I want those parts to remain part of the entire book. I look forward to them, but they are only one or a few parts of the book. They contribute to something whole. To point them out by pen mark is to lessen the spotlight on everything else in a favorite book.
I would be tempted to do such a thing with Buried in Books: A Reader's Anthology by Julie Rugg, which I received in the mail today. Rugg quotes from various and varied authors on such subjects as "Degrees of bibliomania," "Books' lives," and "'An early taste for reading'." Quotes from books, excerpts, all about the love for reading and the eccentricities that grow from it. To me, happy ones at that.
I will undoubtedly find other books I want to read through these quotes and excerpts, perhaps even quotes to use for the "Quote a Day" part at the top of the freelance writing job newsletter I compile every Sunday through Thursday evening for the following day. But last year, before What If They Lived? was published and I was thinking about what my second book should be, I bought from Staples a pack of legal notepads. I decided to use legal paper because it's what my maternal grandfather used in his practice as a lawyer. Plus, he used a legal pad to write a letter to me when I was a baby and it's one of my most prized posessions (Included in that list is a manual for a United Airlines Boeing 747-100 that one of my campmates gave to me during a weeklong aviation summer camp in 1998 at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach). My grandfather, who I never knew a great deal (I was very young), was an admirable man and I want to follow many of his traits. This is one of them.
So when I read Buried in Books, I'll use a legal notepad to jot down titles to look up on Amazon, and page numbers for quotes to reference, to put into a file I keep of quotes to use for that newsletter. I think it's easier that way.
Today's mail was also a combination of books I really want to read, books that are part of the preliminary research I'm doing for my 1930s movie history book, and DVDs I've been anticipating, one well above the others that came.
There was From This Moment On, Shania Twain's autobiography (She's beginning a Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace in December 2012, and Meridith and I want to see her, being that she was a big part of '90s music for us), and The Supreme Court by William H. Rehnquist. Rehnquist explains the history of the Court and its proceedings, which probably haven't changed since 2001, save for Chief Justice John G. Roberts wearing a plain black robe like his colleagues (First among equals, but one vote like the rest of them), whereas Rehnquist wore a robe with four gold bars on each arm.
I also received Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman for the purpose of seeing how MGM is covered here, what details there are. I plan to use The Hollywood Studio System by Douglas Gomery as a reference book for my project since he covers all the studios in the time of the Hollywood Studio System, 1930-1949, and writes about the business side of them as well, though I'm obviously not sure yet how much detail Gomery gives about the inner workings of the studios, the day-to-day business, the activity on the lots. This one stays with me, though.
In DVDs, Travels with My Aunt came!!! And now that leaves Barfly and The Glass Menagerie, directed by Paul Newman, as the only other two movies I want on DVD so badly. In the case of Barfly, a Criterion Collection release, since Warner Bros. released it on DVD in 2002 with a commentary by director Barbet Schroeder, but a few years later it went out of print and prices for available copies were jacked up to $50 and then $100, and I'm hoping this total silence means that there will be a Criterion release one of these days.
As soon as I pulled Travels with My Aunt out of its packaging, I rewound the VHS tape I had bought of it and then put it in its case and into the Goodwill box. I'm thinking of buying the VHS tape of The Glass Menagerie off Amazon so that maybe it'll come to DVD soon. Then I'll have the convenience of not having to rewind a great deal to watch my favorite parts over and over, as it will be when I watch Travels with My Aunt again. And what made me the happiest fan of the movie is that Warner Archive remastered it. I saw a clip on the website and it looked pristine, and I know that will hold true for the entire thing.
Despite being a former film critic, I still have some pull with some DVD labels due to my affiliation with Film Threat, which I don't use that often, only when I really, really want a certain DVD, and ever since I got back to books, that hasn't hit as much anymore. Recently it did, when I found that the Microcinema label was releasing a film of a one-man show starring John Maxwell called "Oh, Mr. Faulkner, Do You Write?" Maxwell plays William Faulkner, and I just had to see this, just like with Give 'Em Hell, Harry starring James Whitmore, which I bought from the Goodwill center in Stevenson Ranch for $3 on VHS. For that one, it was also because of my passion for the American presidency, but I'm always fascinated by one-man shows, that one actor stands up on that stage and plays one personality for 90 minutes or so. Laurence Fishburne has done it with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Christopher Plummer has a one-man movie coming out called Barrymore, in which he plays John Barrymore, and the thinking is that since Whitmore got an Oscar nomination for that filmed stage performance as Harry Truman, there might be an attempt to try that with this one. It works for me since I want to write plays, and have thought about the one-man show a few times, and have seen two of them, one with Frank Ferrante as Groucho Marx, and the other with Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, both at the College of the Canyons Performing Arts Center over these years, two of the only worthwhile experiences I've had in Santa Clarita.
And late last week, I found out that Acorn Media was releasing all of their On the Road with Charles Kuralt sets in a package called the Americana Collection, and it was delivered to my front door today. Kuralt is one of my heroes because I have the same curiosity toward life that he has, finding what looks interesting and talking about it. As is said in the copy on the back cover of Set 1 about Kuralt's program: "No topic was too small, no person too insignificant." And I can't wait to watch all of these because in the copy on the back cover of Set 2, it mentions "...the 87-year-old college professor turned janitor who proclaimed, "No honest work is undignified." It ties right into the way I live life, that no one is above me and no one is below me.
I've taken on an unusual small hobby. I Google hotels that my parents and I, or just my parents, have stayed at, such as America's Best Value Inn on Tropicana Avenue in Las Vegas, next to Hooters Casino Hotel, and Fiesta Henderson, where my parents stayed for two nights on their latest business trip to Vegas (The business being a job interview for my dad which didn't pan out because they weren't factoring in the decades of experience he had when offering a salary), which they hated because the toilet never stopped (And only on their last night there before moving over to Hampton Inn & Suites also in Henderson did someone come to fix it), and they had a bad digestive experience at the Denny's there. I also look up the Hacienda Hotel and Casino near Boulder City (home to a rock ledge that you can walk on, and in front of you is the most stunning view of the vast desert, an ocean of sand that seems to ripple in almost the same way) and I read the reviews of all these places. I'm not necessarily looking for insight into how good or bad they are, but I like looking for the stories, ascertaining the personalities of the people who wrote the reviews, based on their words.
From that sprung another desire. I get no use out of The Signal in Santa Clarita. I worked for them once, I did my five weeks as interim editor of their weekend Escape section, and I liked putting together a section of a newspaper on my own, but not the stress of it. Since I don't connect to this valley at all, there's no reason for me to read it. So, in anticipation of moving one of these days to Henderson, why not connect to The Henderson Press? When Mom and Dad came home from the most recent trip, they brought me a copy of The Henderson Press, the latest issue then, since they publish every week (at the start, they published every two weeks).
I went to the website last night and found that they have every issue on the website in .pdf files. I've decided that I want to read all 37 issues, even the one that was brought home to me since I remember a few things from it, but not all. I want to learn as much as I can about my future hometown through its newspaper, which is written far better than The Signal. Even some clumsy wording found at the start of an interview in the first issue was no big deal to me because it was genuine. There was no posing as there is here. These writers clearly love their city and that's all that matters to me. I want to feel like I belong somewhere already, and this is a good start. And once we get there, I'll know everything there is to know about Henderson and there won't be a need for any adjustment beyond a physical one. Plus, it'll make the inevitable exploration a lot more fun.
Monday, October 10, 2011
My All-Time Favorite Books, Part 2
(This entry is dedicated to Lola at "WOMEN: WE SHALL OVERCOME" (http://dumpedfirstwife.blogspot.com/). Eventually, I continue.)
Upon Andy Rooney's retirement from 60 Minutes the Sunday evening before last, I went to my room in search of On the Road with Charles Kuralt by Charles Kuralt, which I had bought from a $1-only used bookstore in Burbank on a chilly January night (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2011/01/lost-my-dream-girl-i-hope-theres.html). During Rooney's final essay, I was reminded of Kuralt, a great American journalistic explorer who brought us closer to our fellow citizens while showing us how vast our country truly is and the treasures it contains in its people.
To the right of my bed, there are 10 stacks of books, and back issues of McSweeney's The Believer along with 8 books in a long Cheez-It box lid I took from a Costco because I had never seen it before. There is a somewhat order to nearly all the stacks, naturally books I want to read, though not always stacked according to what order I want to read them in, but rather what I happen to notice at the time that I put on top of the stacks so I don't forget. The only fully-organized stack is made up of books about or involving Las Vegas and Florida, in front of a box bookshelf (bookshelves made from moving boxes since we thought we wouldn't be here in Saugus too much longer after we moved here, but here we are) containing my permanent collection of books.
So I had at least 10 minutes of searching to do, as I pulled out one precariously-perched stack after another, looking inside box bookshelves behind some stacks, seeing if perhaps the book was in one of those dark spaces. And then I found The Runaway Jury by John Grisham and wondered how it had gone so long unnoticed in this space. It's my favorite Grisham novel since it involves a courtoom and a jury and is reminiscent in a way of 12 Angry Men, one of my favorite movies, albeit on a much wider scale.
I moved that to my permanent collection, atop two volumes of a memoir by Neil Simon, books of plays by Sam Shepard and Herb Gardner, and a few plays I had bought from Dramatists Play Service, Inc. (http://www.dramatists.com/) that involve only two characters in a certain time frame. I'm interested in plays featuring only two or three characters, since those are the kind I want to write one day. Hence also the book Duo! Best Scenes for the 90's, featuring two characters in each excerpt, which was under those plays.
Yesterday, while at Ralphs, I started reading Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits by Southern humorist Celia Rivenbark, and today I wanted to read the rest. Yet I had a set of chores in washing containers Mom wanted washed, sweeping dead pine needles from the patio, putting it all into a white garbage bag and taking it out to the garbage bin before I rolled that and the recycling bin to the curb for pickup tomorrow. I still have to do that later.
I seemed to move slower, though. Before I started washing those containers, I read two chapters in Belle Weather and was reluctant to move on to the rest of the day. I wanted more, also because I've got Rivenbark's two subsequent books (I've read her previous three) to read, including her latest, called You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl.
As I washed the containers, I thought about the books that are my all-time favorites that I still needed to write about, versus the ones that are just my favorites. What are the differences? What propels Post Office by Charles Bukowski far above The Runaway Jury?
I think it's a matter of where I am when I read certain books. Before we moved to Southern California, I naively believed that I could take the Metrolink from the Santa Clarita station to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and there would be a public library right there. And I could do that every weekend. That was the impression I got from what Mom and Dad described about Santa Clarita after they had gotten back from a second 10 days there in late July of 2003, which led to us having only a week to move since Dad had to be there to report in with the rest of the teachers.
Upon arriving as a new resident, I saw that there was no chance of that. Santa Clarita was 30 minutes north of Los Angeles, but it was so isolated from the vast metropolis. When you are here, you are truly cut off from there. And there I was, trying to make sense of this entirely new world, which in the late '90s I thought was on the other side of the universe. After becoming a student at College of the Canyons and discovering the library there, I immediately sought books and novels about Los Angeles, searching for some path that made all this accessible, more palatable. I got the sense as a new resident that if you weren't from the area, if you didn't know anything about it, you were on your own. There's no help. Now I realize that there was no one answer. Los Angeles doesn't have an overall explanation. There are many, and you pick the one that you can live with and take it with you.
But as that newbie, I wanted to find different types of authors that could explain something to me, anything. What was all this? Who could live here? Why did they live here? What did they find in such isolation (Even with the massive population of Los Angeles and nearly 200,000 people in Santa Clarita, it still feels like you're removed from everyone you encounter, and connections are shallow)? Most importantly, where was I?
At the time of arrival, I was a new writer at Film Threat (http://www.filmthreat.com/), having been accepted because the editor, Eric Campos, had liked the reviews I had written for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Teentime section when I was in high school.
At the end of May 2004, Campos posted a review of the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This on the site (http://www.filmthreat.com/reviews/3799/), and I wondered who in the hell would call a novel Post Office or even write about it? What about a post office could possibly inspire a novel? I had to know.
My then-new Valencia library had a copy available and I checked it out. And I was knocked to the floor over and over again. Bukowski had worked in the U.S. Postal Service for 12 years. And what he described in this novel, through his alter ego Henry Chinaski, was a hard shit job, but there was such life in his writing, such funny rawness about it. And Bukowski revealed to me the Los Angeles that I knew had to be there under all that reputation. This wasn't the Los Angeles of television nor of Hollywood. This was the Los Angeles of the regular citizens, the ones just trying to make their days work in any way they can, before heading home or doing whatever suits them, what keeps them sane. It is an odd city many times over and one that I can never love because I don't fit into what it stands for, in being so spread out as to be totally separate from everyone else. But it is a city that makes me shake my head in wonder and think, "Geez. Only here. Nowhere else."
I wanted more Bukowski. And I found more with Notes of a Dirty Old Man, a collection of his columns from the underground newspaper Open City. I remember we were living in the apartment in Valencia in our first year (we moved to Saugus the next year), and it was a Saturday afternoon, and I was in my room, laying on my bed, my head under my window through which there was sunlight filtered through dusty blinds. And I spent the entire afternoon reading it, and I knew that I had found an incredible writer who had lived life according to his own beliefs, no one else's. If anyone objected, too damn bad.
More Bukowski followed. I discovered his books of poems, such as The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps, which is my favorite collection. It's said that those who don't like poetry read Bukowski's because it's the poetry of the working man. It is, and it's what I always like in my reading, the author shouting, "YOU'RE GONNA LISTEN RIGHT NOW!" And I do because the writing matches that demand.
His War All The Time: Poems 1981-1984 is another of my all-time favorite books because there's a 28-page section titled "Horsemeat," in which he writes about spending time at the racetrack. He went for years and you can tell that he knows what you can't possibly glean in a first visit and certainly not if you go only, say, twice a year.
I first read Harlan Ellison's Watching by Harlan Ellison as a film critic for Film Threat, realizing that I would never be as famous as Ebert is. That was not only sheer luck (Ebert had been in the right place at the right time in 1967 when his predecessor at the Chicago Sun-Times left), but Ebert truly loved movies and made himself unique in that respect. He wasn't trying to play King of the Hill, to be the best (though for himself I'm sure he wanted to be the best in what he was doing), but just remained fascinated by movies, excited by them, and it always showed in his writing.
I loved movies then, though in retrospect, I probably had just liked them when I was writing reviews. I did love the opportunity to review truly independent films (those that didn't have a distribution deal and were pretty much unknown), but later on, it felt like a hamster wheel when I was a member of the Online Film Critics Society and awards season came around along with the screeners to match of those movies being pushed for Oscar consideration, movies that we'd see as well to determine collectively what the best of the year had been. And every year in the years I was a member, it was always the same.
Ellison loves movies, but was smart in not only letting that be the only thing he was known for. His list of works is longer than mine will ever be, including the famous Star Trek episode "The City of the Edge of Forever," graphic novels, many short story collections, retrospectives, essays, and I think the only time Ellison will ever stop writing is probably at least 5 years after he dies. Maybe even 10, because he'll only just notice where he is.
Most importantly, Ellison is honest in his appraisals. Brutally. If his time has been wasted, get the hell out of the way, crouch down, and shield yourself. Ellison is no mealy-mouthed critic who hasn't realized that writing also contains personality. Ellison has a lot of it, and I remember reading this book a few times when I was writing reviews, amazed that it could be done like this. I thought you summarize the plot, give your opinion, and that's it. That's suitable for Supreme Court opinions, I realize now, but not movie reviews. What the hell are you doing writing movie reviews if you're not passionate about movies? I was for a time. But based on the reviews I read of other critics, I thought there was a set format and only gradually did I begin to break out of that. The first time I applied to be a member of the Online Film Critics Society, I was rejected because my reviews had too much plot summary and not enough opinion. I adjusted as necessary and was accepted the next year. But Ellison, man. Ellison does not care about being in an organization, doesn't care about being lauded, doesn't worry about if he's well-liked. He knows how he feels and he lets it be known. That's all.
Here's the start of his review of Les Carabiniers (1963), directed by Jean-Luc Godard: "Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film is an exercise in audacity. It is also, like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an exercise in directorial self-indulgence. It is, in many ways, an exercise in idiocy. Life is too short. To be bored for even seventy-nine minutes is too long."
I know of many movie reviewers who are looking to become as famous as Ebert and they keep trying through their blogs and the websites they write for. But it's one opinion. What makes your opinion so special that you'll be permitted to assume the mantle of Ebert after he dies? Eventually, I found that movies weren't my life, that I couldn't live only on writing movie reviews. I'm much happier because of that discovery, but I never forget what Ellison teaches through these writings, that you need to live for you. You need to be yourself.
And at this point, I think there needs to be a third and final part. Whether that will happen sooner than this entry appeared, I can't be sure, but I can be sure that Steinbeck, Robinson Crusoe, Alan Bennett, Sarah Stewart, and Helene Hanff will be featured.
Upon Andy Rooney's retirement from 60 Minutes the Sunday evening before last, I went to my room in search of On the Road with Charles Kuralt by Charles Kuralt, which I had bought from a $1-only used bookstore in Burbank on a chilly January night (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2011/01/lost-my-dream-girl-i-hope-theres.html). During Rooney's final essay, I was reminded of Kuralt, a great American journalistic explorer who brought us closer to our fellow citizens while showing us how vast our country truly is and the treasures it contains in its people.
To the right of my bed, there are 10 stacks of books, and back issues of McSweeney's The Believer along with 8 books in a long Cheez-It box lid I took from a Costco because I had never seen it before. There is a somewhat order to nearly all the stacks, naturally books I want to read, though not always stacked according to what order I want to read them in, but rather what I happen to notice at the time that I put on top of the stacks so I don't forget. The only fully-organized stack is made up of books about or involving Las Vegas and Florida, in front of a box bookshelf (bookshelves made from moving boxes since we thought we wouldn't be here in Saugus too much longer after we moved here, but here we are) containing my permanent collection of books.
So I had at least 10 minutes of searching to do, as I pulled out one precariously-perched stack after another, looking inside box bookshelves behind some stacks, seeing if perhaps the book was in one of those dark spaces. And then I found The Runaway Jury by John Grisham and wondered how it had gone so long unnoticed in this space. It's my favorite Grisham novel since it involves a courtoom and a jury and is reminiscent in a way of 12 Angry Men, one of my favorite movies, albeit on a much wider scale.
I moved that to my permanent collection, atop two volumes of a memoir by Neil Simon, books of plays by Sam Shepard and Herb Gardner, and a few plays I had bought from Dramatists Play Service, Inc. (http://www.dramatists.com/) that involve only two characters in a certain time frame. I'm interested in plays featuring only two or three characters, since those are the kind I want to write one day. Hence also the book Duo! Best Scenes for the 90's, featuring two characters in each excerpt, which was under those plays.
Yesterday, while at Ralphs, I started reading Belle Weather: Mostly Sunny with a Chance of Scattered Hissy Fits by Southern humorist Celia Rivenbark, and today I wanted to read the rest. Yet I had a set of chores in washing containers Mom wanted washed, sweeping dead pine needles from the patio, putting it all into a white garbage bag and taking it out to the garbage bin before I rolled that and the recycling bin to the curb for pickup tomorrow. I still have to do that later.
I seemed to move slower, though. Before I started washing those containers, I read two chapters in Belle Weather and was reluctant to move on to the rest of the day. I wanted more, also because I've got Rivenbark's two subsequent books (I've read her previous three) to read, including her latest, called You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl.
As I washed the containers, I thought about the books that are my all-time favorites that I still needed to write about, versus the ones that are just my favorites. What are the differences? What propels Post Office by Charles Bukowski far above The Runaway Jury?
I think it's a matter of where I am when I read certain books. Before we moved to Southern California, I naively believed that I could take the Metrolink from the Santa Clarita station to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and there would be a public library right there. And I could do that every weekend. That was the impression I got from what Mom and Dad described about Santa Clarita after they had gotten back from a second 10 days there in late July of 2003, which led to us having only a week to move since Dad had to be there to report in with the rest of the teachers.
Upon arriving as a new resident, I saw that there was no chance of that. Santa Clarita was 30 minutes north of Los Angeles, but it was so isolated from the vast metropolis. When you are here, you are truly cut off from there. And there I was, trying to make sense of this entirely new world, which in the late '90s I thought was on the other side of the universe. After becoming a student at College of the Canyons and discovering the library there, I immediately sought books and novels about Los Angeles, searching for some path that made all this accessible, more palatable. I got the sense as a new resident that if you weren't from the area, if you didn't know anything about it, you were on your own. There's no help. Now I realize that there was no one answer. Los Angeles doesn't have an overall explanation. There are many, and you pick the one that you can live with and take it with you.
But as that newbie, I wanted to find different types of authors that could explain something to me, anything. What was all this? Who could live here? Why did they live here? What did they find in such isolation (Even with the massive population of Los Angeles and nearly 200,000 people in Santa Clarita, it still feels like you're removed from everyone you encounter, and connections are shallow)? Most importantly, where was I?
At the time of arrival, I was a new writer at Film Threat (http://www.filmthreat.com/), having been accepted because the editor, Eric Campos, had liked the reviews I had written for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's Teentime section when I was in high school.
At the end of May 2004, Campos posted a review of the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This on the site (http://www.filmthreat.com/reviews/3799/), and I wondered who in the hell would call a novel Post Office or even write about it? What about a post office could possibly inspire a novel? I had to know.
My then-new Valencia library had a copy available and I checked it out. And I was knocked to the floor over and over again. Bukowski had worked in the U.S. Postal Service for 12 years. And what he described in this novel, through his alter ego Henry Chinaski, was a hard shit job, but there was such life in his writing, such funny rawness about it. And Bukowski revealed to me the Los Angeles that I knew had to be there under all that reputation. This wasn't the Los Angeles of television nor of Hollywood. This was the Los Angeles of the regular citizens, the ones just trying to make their days work in any way they can, before heading home or doing whatever suits them, what keeps them sane. It is an odd city many times over and one that I can never love because I don't fit into what it stands for, in being so spread out as to be totally separate from everyone else. But it is a city that makes me shake my head in wonder and think, "Geez. Only here. Nowhere else."
I wanted more Bukowski. And I found more with Notes of a Dirty Old Man, a collection of his columns from the underground newspaper Open City. I remember we were living in the apartment in Valencia in our first year (we moved to Saugus the next year), and it was a Saturday afternoon, and I was in my room, laying on my bed, my head under my window through which there was sunlight filtered through dusty blinds. And I spent the entire afternoon reading it, and I knew that I had found an incredible writer who had lived life according to his own beliefs, no one else's. If anyone objected, too damn bad.
More Bukowski followed. I discovered his books of poems, such as The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps, which is my favorite collection. It's said that those who don't like poetry read Bukowski's because it's the poetry of the working man. It is, and it's what I always like in my reading, the author shouting, "YOU'RE GONNA LISTEN RIGHT NOW!" And I do because the writing matches that demand.
His War All The Time: Poems 1981-1984 is another of my all-time favorite books because there's a 28-page section titled "Horsemeat," in which he writes about spending time at the racetrack. He went for years and you can tell that he knows what you can't possibly glean in a first visit and certainly not if you go only, say, twice a year.
I first read Harlan Ellison's Watching by Harlan Ellison as a film critic for Film Threat, realizing that I would never be as famous as Ebert is. That was not only sheer luck (Ebert had been in the right place at the right time in 1967 when his predecessor at the Chicago Sun-Times left), but Ebert truly loved movies and made himself unique in that respect. He wasn't trying to play King of the Hill, to be the best (though for himself I'm sure he wanted to be the best in what he was doing), but just remained fascinated by movies, excited by them, and it always showed in his writing.
I loved movies then, though in retrospect, I probably had just liked them when I was writing reviews. I did love the opportunity to review truly independent films (those that didn't have a distribution deal and were pretty much unknown), but later on, it felt like a hamster wheel when I was a member of the Online Film Critics Society and awards season came around along with the screeners to match of those movies being pushed for Oscar consideration, movies that we'd see as well to determine collectively what the best of the year had been. And every year in the years I was a member, it was always the same.
Ellison loves movies, but was smart in not only letting that be the only thing he was known for. His list of works is longer than mine will ever be, including the famous Star Trek episode "The City of the Edge of Forever," graphic novels, many short story collections, retrospectives, essays, and I think the only time Ellison will ever stop writing is probably at least 5 years after he dies. Maybe even 10, because he'll only just notice where he is.
Most importantly, Ellison is honest in his appraisals. Brutally. If his time has been wasted, get the hell out of the way, crouch down, and shield yourself. Ellison is no mealy-mouthed critic who hasn't realized that writing also contains personality. Ellison has a lot of it, and I remember reading this book a few times when I was writing reviews, amazed that it could be done like this. I thought you summarize the plot, give your opinion, and that's it. That's suitable for Supreme Court opinions, I realize now, but not movie reviews. What the hell are you doing writing movie reviews if you're not passionate about movies? I was for a time. But based on the reviews I read of other critics, I thought there was a set format and only gradually did I begin to break out of that. The first time I applied to be a member of the Online Film Critics Society, I was rejected because my reviews had too much plot summary and not enough opinion. I adjusted as necessary and was accepted the next year. But Ellison, man. Ellison does not care about being in an organization, doesn't care about being lauded, doesn't worry about if he's well-liked. He knows how he feels and he lets it be known. That's all.
Here's the start of his review of Les Carabiniers (1963), directed by Jean-Luc Godard: "Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film is an exercise in audacity. It is also, like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an exercise in directorial self-indulgence. It is, in many ways, an exercise in idiocy. Life is too short. To be bored for even seventy-nine minutes is too long."
I know of many movie reviewers who are looking to become as famous as Ebert and they keep trying through their blogs and the websites they write for. But it's one opinion. What makes your opinion so special that you'll be permitted to assume the mantle of Ebert after he dies? Eventually, I found that movies weren't my life, that I couldn't live only on writing movie reviews. I'm much happier because of that discovery, but I never forget what Ellison teaches through these writings, that you need to live for you. You need to be yourself.
And at this point, I think there needs to be a third and final part. Whether that will happen sooner than this entry appeared, I can't be sure, but I can be sure that Steinbeck, Robinson Crusoe, Alan Bennett, Sarah Stewart, and Helene Hanff will be featured.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Book TV Breeds Memories
I love Book TV on C-SPAN 2. Every weekend, I get insight into authors I've heard of, the reasons why they pursued their chosen subjects, and I also learn about authors I've never known before. Yesterday alone, I listened to a talk by author Kristie Miller at the 2011 National Book Festival (headed by the Library of Congress) about her book, Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson's First Ladies which spurred me on to take notes and wonder if I can eventually find a workable angle for one of my presidential history books.
Then there was Candice Millard, author of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, about President Garfield's assassination and the horrid circumstances surrounding it. She was speaking from the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio, where she had undertaken a few research trips for her book. It's a book I can't afford just yet, and am hoping it'll be reduced in price in due time, because I really want to read it, not only to see if I'd need any part of it for my research, but also because she has a low-key, easygoing speaking style that spotlights her vast knowledge on her subjects, which is the same in her writing (I read the sample provided at Amazon).
She had been reading about Alexander Graham Bell, came upon the story about Bell desperately wanting to help the mortally wounded Garfield (also mortally wounded by his doctor who thought he knew everything, but knew nothing about what was necessary to help his patient, and dismissed advice from others that was the correct advice), and was fascinated by it, and decided to research it, and then came the book. In answer to a question about what she was going to write next, she said she couldn't reveal too much since it was in the early stages, but that it was going to be about Winston Churchill.
That's smart, because I also prefer to be vague about my subjects of choice. I've become excited by a potential new project which involves 1930s movie history, but with a different focus. I have also noticed that I have more ideas for non-fiction books than novels. There, I have two dusty ideas, one of which may be viable one day, but even though I read novels, I don't feel the pull to write them as I do with what I want to pursue in non-fiction.
After Millard's talk came a program of Ken Jennings speaking in Seattle at the Elliot Bay Book Company on September 20 about his book Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. Lucky Jennings with his astonishing run on Jeopardy! because it's given him great opportunity to become an author. And it's a lot of fun to watch him talk about his book because he split it into three parts: One was a discussion about his own background as a lover of maps, the people he met while writing the book, second was a geography quiz in which the prizes for the eventual winner was a copy of Maphead and a Ken Jennings bobblehead doll which had been made for promotion of a CD quiz game, and third was a Q&A. I'm not sure, but I don't think the C-SPAN program covered the Q&A portion.
During the talk about his book, Jennings described the map rooms in the Library of Congress, which stretched over two or three football fields, over 900 cabinets full of maps in drawers. He described pulling out one map at random, and it was a map of a plantation....George Washington's plantation.
I'm not a maphead. I don't feel what Jennings and others in his book feel about maps, but I have had that feeling about one map that I saw at a rest stop/convenience store in Primm, Nevada, right at the Nevada/California border. Inside, there is a small space of slot machines right as you walk in, to the left is that convenience store (I first had Vegas Chips there, really good potato chips that had been produced in Vegas, and unfortunately, the company that made them was bought out long ago and the product line disappeared) with many products, including coffee, baked goods, and some sandwiches, and to the right is a long hallway leading right to the restrooms.
As you walk that long hallway, on the left are payphones and on the right is a long wall-length map of the United States. I am always awed and fascinated by that map. I first look at Florida, having been born and raised there, to spot where I had lived and to pick out memories, such as DeLand, where, in 1998, me and my Embry-Riddle summer camp roomate, and a flight instructor, had flown in a Cessna to the small airport there, and had lunch in the tiny diner on the property. I also look for St. Augustine, because of the history there that I love, that I've seen, and I search for towns I'd never heard of, and there are always a few.
Then I look at California to first look for Santa Clarita, and then see what I've never heard of in California and there are many towns for that. The rest of the time I spend looking at all the other states, looking for unique names. This map doesn't spur me on to wish to travel extensively one day (though I will hopefully end up doing so as my only goal in life is to visit all the presidential libraries in the nation), but it makes me wonder about all the people who live in these towns, who they are, what they love about their towns, why they might be moving somewhere else, and I regret that there's no one like Charles Kuralt today. He traveled and reported on such people, and we learned so much about the United States because of his efforts and those of the team that accompanied him on these trips. Maybe it's because of the Internet that there isn't anyone like him anymore, because of YouTube, because of people shooting their own videos, but I think we could use a measured voice like that again, someone who explores those lesser-known places with quiet interest. It takes a great, willing mind for that and Kuralt had it.
What I feel about that map at the rest stop is exactly what will transfer over to my new home. I want to explore every square inch of Henderson and Las Vegas and Summerlin and Boulder City and the Hoover Dam. I know parts of all of these, but not enough. When that happens, it's going to be a consistently great time.
Then there was Candice Millard, author of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, about President Garfield's assassination and the horrid circumstances surrounding it. She was speaking from the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio, where she had undertaken a few research trips for her book. It's a book I can't afford just yet, and am hoping it'll be reduced in price in due time, because I really want to read it, not only to see if I'd need any part of it for my research, but also because she has a low-key, easygoing speaking style that spotlights her vast knowledge on her subjects, which is the same in her writing (I read the sample provided at Amazon).
She had been reading about Alexander Graham Bell, came upon the story about Bell desperately wanting to help the mortally wounded Garfield (also mortally wounded by his doctor who thought he knew everything, but knew nothing about what was necessary to help his patient, and dismissed advice from others that was the correct advice), and was fascinated by it, and decided to research it, and then came the book. In answer to a question about what she was going to write next, she said she couldn't reveal too much since it was in the early stages, but that it was going to be about Winston Churchill.
That's smart, because I also prefer to be vague about my subjects of choice. I've become excited by a potential new project which involves 1930s movie history, but with a different focus. I have also noticed that I have more ideas for non-fiction books than novels. There, I have two dusty ideas, one of which may be viable one day, but even though I read novels, I don't feel the pull to write them as I do with what I want to pursue in non-fiction.
After Millard's talk came a program of Ken Jennings speaking in Seattle at the Elliot Bay Book Company on September 20 about his book Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. Lucky Jennings with his astonishing run on Jeopardy! because it's given him great opportunity to become an author. And it's a lot of fun to watch him talk about his book because he split it into three parts: One was a discussion about his own background as a lover of maps, the people he met while writing the book, second was a geography quiz in which the prizes for the eventual winner was a copy of Maphead and a Ken Jennings bobblehead doll which had been made for promotion of a CD quiz game, and third was a Q&A. I'm not sure, but I don't think the C-SPAN program covered the Q&A portion.
During the talk about his book, Jennings described the map rooms in the Library of Congress, which stretched over two or three football fields, over 900 cabinets full of maps in drawers. He described pulling out one map at random, and it was a map of a plantation....George Washington's plantation.
I'm not a maphead. I don't feel what Jennings and others in his book feel about maps, but I have had that feeling about one map that I saw at a rest stop/convenience store in Primm, Nevada, right at the Nevada/California border. Inside, there is a small space of slot machines right as you walk in, to the left is that convenience store (I first had Vegas Chips there, really good potato chips that had been produced in Vegas, and unfortunately, the company that made them was bought out long ago and the product line disappeared) with many products, including coffee, baked goods, and some sandwiches, and to the right is a long hallway leading right to the restrooms.
As you walk that long hallway, on the left are payphones and on the right is a long wall-length map of the United States. I am always awed and fascinated by that map. I first look at Florida, having been born and raised there, to spot where I had lived and to pick out memories, such as DeLand, where, in 1998, me and my Embry-Riddle summer camp roomate, and a flight instructor, had flown in a Cessna to the small airport there, and had lunch in the tiny diner on the property. I also look for St. Augustine, because of the history there that I love, that I've seen, and I search for towns I'd never heard of, and there are always a few.
Then I look at California to first look for Santa Clarita, and then see what I've never heard of in California and there are many towns for that. The rest of the time I spend looking at all the other states, looking for unique names. This map doesn't spur me on to wish to travel extensively one day (though I will hopefully end up doing so as my only goal in life is to visit all the presidential libraries in the nation), but it makes me wonder about all the people who live in these towns, who they are, what they love about their towns, why they might be moving somewhere else, and I regret that there's no one like Charles Kuralt today. He traveled and reported on such people, and we learned so much about the United States because of his efforts and those of the team that accompanied him on these trips. Maybe it's because of the Internet that there isn't anyone like him anymore, because of YouTube, because of people shooting their own videos, but I think we could use a measured voice like that again, someone who explores those lesser-known places with quiet interest. It takes a great, willing mind for that and Kuralt had it.
What I feel about that map at the rest stop is exactly what will transfer over to my new home. I want to explore every square inch of Henderson and Las Vegas and Summerlin and Boulder City and the Hoover Dam. I know parts of all of these, but not enough. When that happens, it's going to be a consistently great time.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
My Favorite Joke
"A car hits a Jewish man. The paramedic rushes over and says, "Are you comfortable?" The guy says, "I make a good living." - Henny Youngman
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