The Garner Files

I spent yesterday eating up the few details revealed during the press conference for Skyfall, the 23rd Bond movie (as well as the press release that provided the most intriguing plot for a Bond movie in a very long time), and reading the rest of The Garner Files by James Garner and Jon Winokur.

It was worth the wait since March, when I pre-ordered it from Amazon. At the end, in the "Films" section where all his movies are listed, Garner not only writes briefly about each, but rates them, and is not biased toward any of them, pointing out which were crap, which were done only because he was under contract. It makes me respect him even more than I already do.

Reading about My Fellow Americans, which I still hate, despite the presidential aspect, I always suspected this about director Peter Segal, because none of his movies are any good, save for parts of Tommy Boy: "I wish the director were so professional. He was a self-appointed genius who didn't know his ass from second base, and Jack and I both knew it. He had no idea where to put the camera, he didn't know what he wanted, and he was a whiner. The movie could have been a lot better."

The script by E. Jack Kaplan & Richard Chapman and Peter Tolan didn't help either.

Anthologies: The Sampler Platter of Books

I love anthologies. They're the sampler platter of books.

Take late this morning, after I had breakfast and decided that I didn't yet want to brush the dogs, preferring instead a few minutes in my room, looking at all the stacks of books around me. I found Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, an entirely e-mail-flavored novel, and put that in an accessible stack. Then I found Buried with Books: A Reader's Anthology by Julie Rugg which is U.K.-based, since that's where the author is, and so countless British writers get space here in such topics as "Degrees of Bibliomania," "'the good practice of buying a book a day'," "Books' lives," and "'An early taste for reading'."

Naturally, I had bought this one and then forgotten about it a few weeks later. Here it was again. There I was, waiting for the mail to come today, bearing The Garner Files, James Garner's memoir which was released yesterday and was shipped to me yesterday from Amazon (I pre-ordered it in March). Sure I was also reading One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, but it had been months since I had read an anthology that triggered me to copy titles onto a yellow legal notepad. I love anthologies for that reason, that you get samples from authors that you might want to read in full later on. You can pluck at will what you want to read and go from there.

It's why I also love the Best American series. Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Short Stories, Best American Travel Writing, always the promise that if not every single piece, there will be at least one piece that'll slam you to the wall and make you shout for more. Another series, Best Food Writing, is where I discovered Anthony Bourdain through an excerpt of Kitchen Confidential in the 2000 edition. And after being violently shaken up, down and upside down from it, I ordered Kitchen Confidential, which I still haven't read yet, but I ought to put it in the same accessible stack that Attachments is in.

The Garner Files arrived, as I expected, and in another package that also came, another anthology: Modern American Memoirs, edited by Annie Dillard and Cort Conley. Naturally, I was ordering another book when I found this one, and seldom do I read memoirs unless I'm interested in the person who wrote it, such as James Garner, Jane Fonda, or Shania Twain in the case of her From This Moment On. With this, I could explore the writings of such giant names as Wallace Stegner, Cynthia Ozick, Frank Conroy, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, and see if I'd want to read their memoirs as well.

The only problem I have with anthologies is that there are always titles I find that I want to read right away. After Mom got off the computer, I ordered from abebooks.com Hopscotch & Handbags, The Reluctant Bride, and My Family and Other Disasters, all by Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan (spurred on by excerpts from book-themed columns of hers featured in Buried in Books), as well as Book Book by Fiona Farrell, A Pound of Paper by John Baxter, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by Maureen Corrigan, A Reading Diary by Alberto Manguel, and Library Confidential by Don Borchert. Other titles I copied onto my notepad aren't as important as these and can wait either until interest piques by what else I find out about them, or until I have a library or two or three after we move to Henderson.

I still have to read the rest of Buried in Books, and I'm crossing my fingers that I don't come upon any more I-need-it-NOW titles. The Garner Files is waiting, but I don't want to rush right into it. I'll finish this anthology and then mosey on in. I'm sure Jim Rockford would do it the same way.

The Santa Ana Winds Blow In, and With Them, I Change

I like bringing the garbage and recycling bins back to the garage after dark because of the different feel of the atmosphere, far quieter than during the day, nothing else going on, nothing urgent to be taken care of, nothing else to think about. The day is done, the evening is here, and it's only time for reflection of what the day has done and looking to what the evening can do.

I hit the garage door button, waited as it went up, and saw that the tops of the trees were being blown to a flattop style. The Santa Ana winds have officially returned after small fits in the weeks before that didn't even register enough to say that they had arrived. A little late in the year for them, but here they are, and the feeling of the world around me has changed. In a few weeks, December will come, it'll get colder, I will reluctantly have to start wearing sweatshirts even though I swear I can get by with a white t-shirt under a short-sleeve t-shirt and a thick jacket over that, but I will feel empowered.

I always get this way in December. It's cold enough to the extent that no one really wants to do anything. There are jobs to go to and they will do only that and then rush right back home to the warmth of a fireplace (If they have one, and a few do, judging from that smoky smell in the neighborhood) or the heater spurting 80+ degrees throughout the house.

Me, I'm ready because the winter gives me what I want: I feel an impatient drive to get to work, to read a lot more, to research now, to see finally where this next book will take me. By this time last year, I was long finished with What If They Lived?, save for reading over the proofs before the new year and making sure my essays were exactly as I wanted them to read, and that whatever was rewritten conformed to my writing style.

I have not yet begun to read the books I have bought for this first round of research, and even so, those books will not be the only ones necessary for this project. For just these next few days, I'm getting back into the discipline of reading for long hours. You might think I do with how much I express my deep love for reading, but every day, there are chores, occasional shaves and showers, errands during the weekend. There's not a great deal of interruption (I bring whatever book I'm reading into whatever store we're at because I've seen these stores so many times over these past eight years. There's nothing new), but reading comes in fits. I need to get back to reading for hours, and including taking notes while reading. It won't be hard to get back into the groove of that, but I need it to run smoothly.

Of course, there's an ulterior motive to it, being that The Garner Files, James Garner's memoir, which I ordered in March, was released today and I got an e-mail from Amazon saying that it shipped. It'll be here tomorrow. I think I'll practice on that.

Fortunately, my research will start off well. I plan to read The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West first to get a feel for the book I want to write, and West captures the atmosphere I want. Not how he writes it, but that background.

Let winter come. I'm ready to be industrious again.

Here's the Inside of My Head

Remember the kids science show Beakman's World from the '90s? I grew up on that. I had a Saturday morning bowling league when my family and I lived in Coral Springs, Florida, and Don Carter Lanes was just over the city line into Tamarac. It was on at 12:30 on CBS, so I always made sure to tape it just in case I wasn't home by then.

Watch at least this first part of The Best of Beakman's World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7QvOKFm3wg

See those backgrounds, all that space filled up with all those props and those set designs? That's what the inside of my head looks like.

Where I Am Now and Where I'll Be for the Next Two Years

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to finally figure out what I want to research and write for the next two years. I have a cushion of a few months until my birthday in March and then it's real crunch time to try to be published again by the time I'm 30. I'd rather spend these next few months researching.

And I've decided: I'm going to research and write that 1930s Hollywood studio system book.

If I decided to work on the three presidential books I have in mind, I still have to figure out the angle for the principal one of the three which probably can only come from the books to read for it, whereas I know exactly what I want to do for that Hollywood book. I have to see if it's workable, if there are records kept for what I'm seeking, copious records at least. But I feel like I can do this. I'm not that far removed from What If They Lived?, since it was published in March. So it's best to tap into my experiences from working on that one, use them again, and then move on to entirely new territory.

By the count of November 1, I have two years, four months and 20 days left. Time to begin.

A Battle with Depth

Today I tried The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted by Bridget Asher. I left at page 24 because of its stubbornly impenetrable nature. I skimmed through the rest of a flashback and found that the featured wedding lasted for a decent-sized chunk of pages. Some details were beautifully written, such as the family property in Provence, France, but the entire book felt like it was written out of reach. You can observe the events, but you can't feel them. And if you try, the book moves further and further out of your grasp.

Frustrated by it, I moved on to The Kitchen Congregation by Nora Seton. Beautiful writing here too, tapping into deep wells of emotion of family, of cooking, of the descriptions of kitchens and Seton's mother's friends, which take up the first part of the book. She tries for poetic descriptions and accomplishes that sporadically, with some other passages feeling workmanlike, just a way to get to the next part of the thought.

I lasted until page 176. The book ends at page 246, and it's a better average than The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted, which ends at page 422. I just shuddered a bit while typing that, imagining trying to get through the rest of it, which I probably would have done if this book had been around in my teens (Although actually, I probably wouldn't have, because I checked out more movie history books than any other kind back then). But I don't have the time now. There's so many books in the world, so much to explore, that if a book doesn't work for me, even after page 20, away it goes for good. If a passage pops up that makes me want to give it a bit more of a go, then I read through the next few pages and decide. My reading list isn't finite, but my life is, and I want to make these decades most enjoyable in reading.

I considered giving up on The Kitchen Congregation during the chapter on Senta, who lived below Seton and her husband "on the first floor of a villa in Zurich." Seton's writing is heartfelt at times, but it feels so removed. You try to reach in and you can't get close enough, not because there's a secret password to declare, but because Seton is so deep into her memories, the emotions conjured up by those memories, that it feels like she forgets to look up and see those who are reading about her life. We are welcome, but please, don't get too close. These floors, these walls, are sacred. Look, but don't touch. Learn, but don't feel as much as she has. Sentimentality shouldn't be mawkish, but it shouldn't make you feel like you have to either learn the secret handshake or beg to know about someone's memories, especially with what they describe in food. Clearly Seton is a fine cook, and loves the life she lives in the kitchen, but everything else here doesn't have the same feeling.

I first skimmed past where I had stopped in the Senta chapter while considering whether to leave this book, finding the same writing style throughout. What's established at the beginning isn't going to change. But the next chapter, "Two in the Kitchen", starts with this:

"When I first saw my husband chopping green beans into uniform inches, I thought the marriage would never last. It was so precise, so painstaking. It was the way his mother did it. He liked his green beans cut small, but then he went and married a woman who manhandled green beans--no knife, no ruler."

"Ok, ok," I thought, "I'll stick with it to see the differences between her method of cooking and her husband's method. I want to know about that."

Seton is a careful writer, and she's thought about these various passages a great deal. She wants her words to be as well-cooked as the dishes she produces in her kitchen. But it feels like she holds onto them too tightly. She doesn't want any to slip out of place and upend the entire production. Most of the time, her writing feels too gentle. When she describes the actions of her children Hugh and baby Maddie while she and they visit Ida, an elderly lively friend, she hits upon the kind of writer she should have been throughout the entire book, including Maddie eating many things such as a pocketbook. It's a welcome shot of amusement that should have been suffused throughout the rest of the sentences here.

By page 176, I became disenchanted with it again and couldn't read any more pages. I appreciate the gentleness of Seton's words, but I wish she had looked up, beckoning the reader to get comfortable and settle in. I felt like I was standing up the entire time, smiling in parts, but mostly watching. Just watching. Never feeling.

After giving it up, I opened up Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life by Michael Lee West, which was the first in my "First Lines" series of entries (http://scrapsofliteracy.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-lines-from-books-i-love-1.html), even though I hadn't read any of it beyond that first paragraph. I like it already and I think it's going to bloom into love because West isn't self-conscious about her words. She writes well, but she wants the reader to come on in right away, to get to know how she became obsessed with food after her grandmother's funeral, because her grandmother's recipe for buttermilk biscuits would have disappeared had it not been for her, urged by her Aunt Tempe to write down the recipe since she remembered it. So far (and I suspect it'll last through the rest of the book), West's writing is warm and genial. And it is full of good-natured Southern life.

My plan for the weekend had been a double header of Kitchen Chinese by Ann Mah and Angelina's Bachelors by Brian O'Reilly, since The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted hadn't arrived by Friday. It came on Saturday, and by that time, I had given up on Kitchen Chinese because despite the delicious descriptions of Asian food, the story became very boring. There's no other way to describe it but just that and move on. I devoured Angelina's Bachelors afterward, and then came The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted and the beginning of the entry you just read. So three books came into view this weekend, and only one survived. I'm never perpetually impatient with books, just those I absolutely cannot continue.

First Lines from Books I Love #5: Angelina's Bachelors

Since becoming a writer at 11 years old, I've learned so much about writing, and surely still have much more to learn that will sustain me through the rest of my life.

I've learned not to be so prickly about language. People will end sentences with prepositions. It's not a heinous crime against humanity. (I'm not against this, but I have seen disturbing militancy from others about it.)

Contractions are ok; they help keep word counts low and prevent stuffiness.

And if you take away colloquialisms, you take away culture and how people live every day in language. I was born in South Florida, and grew up saying "Yes'm," and "No'm." I have not and will never say "Yes ma'am" and "No ma'am." That's not how I grew up, and I want to keep that part of my heritage.

But what I also learned is that I'm not the one to decide if my writing is impressive. I write because I want to, and however it turns out is because of the ideas I have of how it should be, along with assistance provided by editors. When I wrote my essays for What If They Lived?, I wasn't nervous about it being my first book, but my writing sure was. I overwrote the introduction to my James Dean essay, trying to tie in a visit to Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles, to a magnet store there with ones of Dean and Marilyn Monroe, to Dean's lasting appeal. Phil Hall, my co-author, thankfully looked over my essays and rewrote that introduction. I made sure it conformed to my writing style (Whatever that might be, but I make sure I'm comfortable with the words expressed), but was relieved, because in hindsight, it was an introduction more suited to a blog entry. In fact, I may post it here soon as a reminder of the time I spent writing that introduction, reading those paragraphs over and over, hoping that they clicked together without fighting it. I'm never embarassed by writing from years ago or writing I've scrapped. I always have to start somewhere, and that's where I did.

When I read The Men Who Would Be King by Nicole LaPorte, I was excited at the thought of writing with that level of detail, resulting from so much research that I hope to undertake as well for my own projects. I'm passionate about these subjects, so that will be easy.

Reading Angelina's Bachelors by Brian O'Reilly, I want to write with that much care, that much love. And it's huge. This is not just the product of O'Reilly's experiences being surrounded by cooking for decades, with his wife Virginia O'Reilly having cooked since she was little, not just him being the creator of Dinner: Impossible on Food Network, but him having a true love for words and for reading. At the beginning, Angelina's husband Frank dies (There's no reason for a spoiler alert here because it's mentioned in the copy on the back of the book and it's the impetus for everything else here), and even though Frank is given only five and a half pages before his death, O'Reilly knows him so well that we're affected by this, not only because Angelina is going to lose a beloved husband, but he seems like a very good man.

After the funeral, and after a cooking spree that produces dishes and soups that are delivered to neighbors, as well as a lasagna to Dottie, her across-the-street neighbor, Dottie's brother Basil returns the empty lasagna pan and proposes to Angelina an arrangement whereby she'll cook him breakfast and dinner six days a week and he'll pay her for it, a sum to help her keep on living and not have to worry so much about future finances, as she is already.

I wish I had brought Angelina's Bachelors into Sprouts yesterday. I hadn't had lunch before my family and I left on afternoon errands with the hope that we might eat out (I've been thinking again about a pastrami sandwich and Ultimate Chili Cheese Fries (which just means diced onions and sour cream included) at Weinerschnitzel). No luck, so by the time we reached Sprouts, I was famished, and grabbed a few samples from the bulk items, including chocolate-covered peanuts, and chocolate-covered cashews, and yes, not ideal, so I made sure that in the bananas we bought was a ripe banana to eat while driving a very short few hundred yards to Target nearby.

Had I read Angelina's Bachelors while walking around Sprouts, after grabbing a few containers of my favorite lemon yogurt from Casacade Fresh, my favorite yogurt actually, I would not have been inclined to scarf down chocolate. The descriptions of Italian food and Angelina cooking each dish is glorious, reverent, and it feels spiritual, a real connection not only with food but also with the bonds it creates between people. Wait until you read about Don Eddie's connection to marrowbones and toast, and the memories it brings to Big Phil, his nephew. Phil is my favorite character because he doesn't say a word, at least until it matters the most. It makes the impact of his later gesture huge.

Angelina's Bachelors is going into my permanent collection. I need it for reference not only in the gentleness of writing, but also how each word matters most. Every single word keeps you in the neighborly and caring world that Brian O'Reilly has created. Humanity has found another magnificent ally.

And now, the first lines:

"Perfect," whispered Angelina.

Standing alone in the moonlit warmth of her kitchen, she stroked them each softly in turn and applied the slightest, knowing pressure to each. They were cool to the touch now, all risen to exactly the same height, the same shape and consistency, laid side by side by side on the well-worn wooden table. The dusky scent of dark chocolate lingered in the air and on her fingers."

Angelina's Bachelors is also a vacation. Take a few hours for it, and you will return looking at the world anew.