Carver’s Dog

– SHARPEN YOUR GAZE: Over at Blogging L.A. yesterday, I gave Faboomama a Nathanael West-inspired lecture (second comment in) on why she should not openly laugh and guffaw at L.A.’s faux architectural styles; as is par for the course at BLA, any attempt at intellectual discourse has thus far been non-engaged. I guess stories about asinine “rebel” bicyclists taking to the L.A. freeways in some sort of “daring demonstration showing exactly how inefficient driving a car in Los Angeles can be sometimes” is their idea of an engaging dialogue. (Well, actually, it is).

– WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU, MA’AM: Over at Be Not Inhospitable To Strangers, Scot Young has crafted a nice haiku sonnet, 17 Syllable Sex, inspired, he says, by the online journal of my brief return visit to L.A.

– SEARING! Our own John Shannon has received a nice notice from Publishers Weekly for his new Jack Liffey novel, The Devils of Bakersfield:

In Shannon’s searing 10th novel to feature Jack Liffey (after 2007’s The Dark Streets), Jack and his pregnant teenage daughter, Maeve, run into trouble in Bakersfield, Calif., after stopping there for the night on their way home to Los Angeles. When a sleepless Maeve leaves their motel for a walk, she’s falsely arrested for dope possession and jailed for a short time with Toxie, a rebellious teen with whom she discovers she shares a passion for Jane Eyre. Worried about Toxie, Maeve later returns from L.A. to Bakersfield, where Dennis Kohlmeyer, the paranoid pastor of the 10,000-member Olive Grove Evangelical Church, has incited his flock to hysteria against devil worshippers. Scenes of book burning, exorcism, wholesale jailings and worse may strike some as exaggerated, but Shannon cites actual examples of Bakersfield’s long history of racial and social prejudice throughout. The plot-driven action builds to an either/or ending on which readers are invited to vote on the author’s Web site.

– AND FINALLY … I ALWAYS HATED MAMET: Ah, sweet justice. It is being reported that a massive audience walkout ensued at a recent solo reading by David Mamet of his adaptation of Dr. Faustus in NYC:

At first one or two left, dignified and quiet, as if they had to get home to relieve the babysitter.

Then coats started rustling, whispers became impolitely perceptible, and the audience grew ever more restless. The Kaufmann Auditorium in the 92nd Street Y was turning into an unhappy, however cultured, hubbub.

But David Mamet droned on, inexorably reading what I remember as the manuscript version of his Dr. Faustus. And he seemed amused that the audience wasn’t amused.

The evening had taken an odd turn indeed. After being lushly entertaining in his cultured Robin Williams way, he had squandered our good will and anticipation with a vigorous reading of the kind of play-in-verse that could give plays-in-verse a deadly dull reputation.

 

Previously: Lit Blogging 5.0
 

UPDATED

– Things might be a little stop and go around here for the next week and a half or so. Miss L and I are headed down to L.A. on a business trip. We’re renting a car so I can poke around my storage locker in Atwater Village while we’re there and retrieve most of my books and DVDs.

– According to this article in the S.F. Chronicle, the weakening dollar is causing all sorts of new frugality and belt-tightening in households across the land. In an IN/OUT chart accompanying the article, book stores are “out” and libraries are “in” for cash-strapped Americans. Except maybe for some folks in L.A.

From LAist:

The Los Angeles Public Library is under pressure from Mayor Villaraigosa and the City Council to cut spending and raise fees to help decrease LA’s $400 million budget deficit. If the budget goes through unchanged on May 1, drastic cuts would force eight regional branch libraries to close their doors on Sundays, the book buying budget would be slashed by $2 million and library staff may be subject to “mandatory furlough days or reduced work weeks.”

The libraries targeted for close on Sundays are North Hollywood, Mid-Valley Regional, Arroyo Seco, West Los Angeles, Hollywood (Goldwyn Branch), Exposition Park, San Pedro and West Valley. The move would eliminate 36.5 staff positions. Book buying funds have already been reduced by 22% from last year and as a result these monies were tapped out four months early in 2008.

You can read the entire article here.

– “RoboCop” and “Basic Instinct” director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that suggests that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary. Oh, those wacky Dutch filmmakers .

– Had some fun over at Joseph Mailander’s Mainbrace a couple of days ago. J.M. posted an erudite list of “favorites” (including citing Carver’s Dog as a favorite blog — thank you, Joseph) and I responded in kind in the comments section.

UPDATE

Even though I’ve been shirking my editorial duties due to looming work deadlines, we’re still publishing some good stuff at Hemingway’s Shotgun: an excellent haiku by Christopher Dean; Ghost Writing Distance in Vowels by Mr. Zach; the haunting Grave of William Wordsworth by Eric D. Lehman; and A Writing Life by your humble editor.

And if you’re fan of Nathanel West’s 1933 novella Miss Lonelyhearts, you just might enjoy our Carver’s Dog Book Club dialogue on the book. 33 terrific and insightful ponderings to date. For our next club selection I am recommending one of the many titles I am enjoying right now, Gun, With Occasional Music (1994) by Jonathan Lethem, a delightful blend of hardboiled noir and sci-fi. It has been properly hailed as a marriage between Raymond Chandler’s style and Philip K. Dick’s vision.  

I’m also pleased to report that plans are moving ahead for a 50-page chapbook of the Mr. Bukowski’s Wild Ride adventures. I’ve fortuitously located an investor who is willing to finance the initial run of approximately 64 trade paperback editions that will soon be available online and through City Lights Books in San Francisco. We’ll keep ya posted on that.

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT JOURNALISM I LEARNED FROM HUNTER S. THOMPSON

It’s true. In 1979, I devoured Thompson’s classic Hell’s Angels and the intense journalism collection, The Great Shark Hunt. Of Shark Hunt, the Washington Post praised:

In addition to being a testament to the undeniably beatifying properties of American excess–literary, political, chemical, you name it–Hunter Thompson is the high priest of the ad hominem attack. Anyone unlucky enough to get in the way of his satirical sledgehammer will end up with soup for brains. Still, even Thompson needs a good villain to get properly lathered up; that’s why he peaked simultaneously with America’s 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon. Tricky Dick was Thompson’s dark-jowled, pale-calved Muse, and with his departure Thompson seemed to lose his place a bit. Swatting flies with a baseball bat.

Of course, aping Thompson’s journalistic style set me up for a journalistic career with a limited path for publication. Journalism with a first-person voice is not always an easy sell unless the narrator is considered an expert on the subject at hand. Eventually I relied on my J school knowledge and broadened my market to the drone-like world of trade journalism but I’m pretty much through with that. I just started writing book reviews for Pop Matters and there’s a lot of room for Thompson-esque writing in that market.

Anyway, I’m straying from the point because it’s Sunday evening, there’s Phillip Glass on the radio, and I’m stupid from pain pills as I write this. Or was it that something I smoked in that pipe? Probably a combination of both. Okay, so there’s a terrific article by Ruthe Stein in the April 20 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle about a new documentary on Dr. Gonzo:

It somehow seems appropriate to end a 15-day marathon of 105 movies and special programs with a tribute to this occasional San Franciscan and master of gonzo journalism. He came up with “gonzo” to describe his freestyle, drugs- and booze-fueled writing found in books such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72.” Chunks of both were composed in the Bay Area. While Thompson’s home was in Woody Creek, Colo., his heart and soul were in San Francisco.

This was his kind of town, and he was witness to events that became part of the city and all of Northern California’s tapestry. Thompson was the caretaker of the Big Sur Hot Springs in 1961, right before it became Esalen. He moved to the Haight-Ashbury in the mid-1960s, arriving just as hippies were settling in. He became a familiar, boisterous figure at local watering holes for years while churning out lengthy pieces for Rolling Stone and other publications.

AND SPEAKING OF JOURNALISM …
Joseph Mailander writes about judging a high school journalism contest and wistfully recalls the heady days of the Los Angeles Times:

 When I was in college, my father even used to include the newspapers of the past week in my care packages. And I’m glad he did, because I got to follow most memorably writings on local architecture, and it was a key time in LA for developments such as the Pacific Design Center and also megastructure downtown. And Sunday without the New York Times was unthinkable.

AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE “CITIZEN JOURNALISTS”?

Okay, before anyone starts hurling rocks at me, I genuinely like the folks at Metroblogging L.A.; in fact, BLA hosts two of my favorite local bloggers, Will Campbell and David Markland. But I have a real problem with the Metroblogging slogan TAKE BACK YOUR LOCAL MEDIA. Let’s start with a quote from this posting by Jason Burns (who does a fantastic Archiving Angeles series) from April 18:

There has been much criticism of late regarding one of the world’s most venerable news institutions. A sale, a few firings, a revolving door of editors. Ever since the term new media was coined, “professional” journalists and corporate new outlets have chuckled at the competition known as the blog. Bloggers are not journalists. They are not media. They are not people. Newspapers are the news. They are the ones who deliver the cold hard facts of the day - unless it’s a story on Tupac. Whoops.

Fine. But if BLA is the standard by which we are defining citizen journalists — I despise that phrase — and the concept of “taking back the local media” then we’ve got a long way to go. Just look at a sampling of some of the stories that BLA is breaking for you:

A guy flashing his tattoo (April 18); a petition against a new city law requiring taco trucks to move on after one hour (April 18); A Grilled Cheese Invitational Cook-Off (April 17); Ruth writes about the sewers being cleaned out (what an apt unintentional metaphor) in her Silverlake neighborhood (April 17); and Travis pokes fun at functionally illiterate restaurant workers. I could go on and on but I think the point speaks for itself.

AND LASTLY …

The secret words of the week are spooky flute. If you hear anyone say “spooky flute” this week you have to give them one hundred dollars. Or buy them lunch. Whichever is most convenient.

Previously: Book Club, Anyone?

 On the heels of David N. Scott’s recent comment that he “should read more books of real quality”, I’m  throwing out a title for David’s intellectual appetite and perhaps for group discussion.

The title in question, one of my favorite novels of all time, is Nathanel West’s comedy with tragic implications, Miss Lonelyhearts. A novella, actually, Lonelyhearts runs a sparse 128 pages but reads like an acerbic, caustic lightning bolt and can be devoured in one sitting — but the impact will stay with you for a lifetime.

Published in 1933, West’s protagnist is a nameless newspaper advice columnist who cracks under the strain of the heartbreak he reads in his daily mail, ultimately succumbing to a fall that all faithless people eventually make.

Aside from David Scott, anyone interested in opting in for the read can buy Miss Lonelyhearts in paperback here for a mere $10.36 . And then we can all meet up here, say, early May for discussion.

Over ten pages of notes on a yellow legal pad, handwritten, black ink on some evenings, blue ink from a fine point Pilot pen on others. The author of the novel, I observe on the yellow paper, is writing of a time in U.S. history (1905-1915) of great catastrophes and “the rapid gathering of wealth and the centering of management of industries into fewer and fewer hands.”

He writes a lot about language, this guy. He writes about “inventing new language for the unspeakable.” His protagonist believes — or is that the narrative voice speaking? — that “words create thought, not vice versa.”

The author’s use and abuse of alliterations is documented both on the legal pad and in marked passages of the book:

” … the piped peeps of the peepers.”

And the doozy, the one where the book reviewer just knows that the author had Roget’s Theasurus in his lap, the book of synonymous words propped open by the massive erection sustained from such careless — but perhaps, the author believes, deliberately chosen – flinging about of words:

“… certainly he never communicated the sense to his son, but then, he wasn’t the sort to share his counsel or strut it, commend consolation, ignite debate or stroke it, proffer congratulation, talk sex, politics, business, or religion, cajole or gladhand, trade barbs or bon mots, josh around, or call his one and only affectionate nicknames — horsefly, piss ant, buzz cut, bullethead, bucko, bucky, buckaroo, spike, spud, sluggo or stretch, slim or stubby, satchmo or socks or sprat or sprout …”

How many hours spent with this miserable, overwrought, near-500-page sodomizing of the English language? Who knows. Many. Many massive moonlit monkeyshine minutes spent reading and ruminating the rhapsodizing wrath of a writer who, in his last published novel – his book, his bane, bold, bawdy, bibliographic biography — the last one that the critics almost uniformly remarked was way too full of alliterations … well, sometimes, sir, the critics are right.

Damn. I wish this were my actual review instead of the one I have to write.