Book Blogs, Writing

My Favorite Books of 2012 — Ten to Six

I saw that a bunch of my favorite critics were writing a list of the best books of 2012.  David Ulin has a great one. You can read it here at the LA Times: Best of 2012. So I started to think about making a similar list.  But what’s different about my list is that I still read a lot of classics. Whereas a lot of critics need to be up to date on the newest and hippest books, I have never felt the need to be on top of what is hot.  I remember reading a quote, I think by Kafka, that said never read a book that isn’t at least six months old.

Now, I don’t think that’s true, necessarily, but in a lot of ways I still feel somewhat behind the eight ball in terms of the scope of literature.  So I’m catching up.  I mean, stop for a second and think about how many books there are in the world.  How in the world can anyone ever come close to reading all of them — or even yet, reading all the truly great books?  It’s staggering to think about the task.  I’m only on this Earth for a small amount of time, and I really hope I can find a way to expose myself to the best.  So, here are ten books that I read this year that I loved.  I’m starting with the first five.

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10. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The first book on my list  is the last book I finished.  I love Philip K. Dick’s writing, but the way I knew Dick’s work was through his short stories.  I actually had never read one of his novels until now.  And I love the stories, but A Scanner Darkly, which is set in a kind of L.A./Orange County hybrid, presented a futuristic and paranoid view of the city where I currently live that just blew me away.  What I truly admire about the book is the effect it has on the reader.  I kept reading on, fully aware that the sense of paranoia was deepening and the character was unreliable, but Dick had such a control over the story.  I trusted him and followed him into his drug infested world.  It reminded me of great L.A. Noir novels or even Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.  Or even a great Victorian book like H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man or Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  After reading this book, I plan on reading the rest of Dick’s novels.

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9. Concussions and Our Kids by Dr. Robert Cantu and Mark Hyman 

Sometimes, a great book has an impact so wide that it just becomes digested, almost unknowingly, into the cultural lexicon of a generation.  Dr. Cantu’s book, Concussions and Our Kids, is having a similar effect.  One day, I think Cantu’s book will be required reading in school — too much dismay from the students — similar in scope to A Silent Spring, because it sheds light on the concussion epidemic and serious problem in our community.  Cantu’s studies and his writing will change the way we play sports and think about our brains.  His research into CTE — the degenerative brain disease — has done so much to teach us about our minds.  It’s a fascinating read, and you’ll learn a ton about the current concussion dialogue.  For example, did you know that after football, women’s soccer is the next leading cause of concussions in youth sports?

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8. Hey Fudge by Travis Millard 

Hey Fudge is a book of illustrations/comics put out by a great L.A. press, Narrow Books.  I talked to the art designer of this book, and he wanted someone to flip through every page, because there is a story that unfolds, a narrative.  Millard’s work is hilarious, but also vibrant and alive.  Sometimes, whenever I need to clear my head from whatever analytical bullshit that is waging war on my mood, I open up Millard’s book and just kind of flip through.  The beginning of the book features a series of clips imagining that Michael Jackson was lost at sea.  The humor is definitely there — so is the craft.

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7. Empty the Sun by Joseph Mattson

Maybe this list is heavily influence by my current location — L.A. County — but I can’t help but devour L.A. writing.  And one of those great L.A. novels is Joseph Mattson’s Empty the Sun.  I wrote a piece about the book earlier this year at the LA Weekly, and it just seems to sum up a lot of the experience in the city — the fall out of the California Dream. That everywhere around the city, people come here and they become something, well, grimy, hardboiled, lost.  In a lot of ways, it seems right in that same vein as a lot of my other favorite class L.A. novels — Post Office and Ask the Dust.  Plus, this book even comes with a soundtrack.

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6. True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne 

Well, here’s another L.A. Noir.  I’m loving anything set in L.A.  There is just something almost paranoid, hallucinatory, distorted about these novels set in L.A.; something that’s just slightly off kilter.  In True Confessions, it might be the murder and the way the community responds.  A murder, in this world, is a headline, something to help the readers of the tragedy, the snooping citizens to forget about their meaningless lives.  The strange thing about reading True Confessions was that, sometimes, instead of feeling like I was in L.A., all the Catholic politics and the Irish descendants made me feel like I was back in Massachusetts or reading a book by Dennis Lehane.  I kind of liked that about this book.  It’s a classic.

Okay, tune in tomorrow for the next 5.  Saved my best for last.

Creative Inspiration, Personal Stories, Writing

Check Out My Reading at Book Soup And What Happens When You Lose Everything?

Last Thursday, I read at Book Soup as part of The Rattling Wall Issue 3 Book Tour.  I was lucky enough to read with some great writers: Brian Rooney, Amy Wallen, Panio Gianopoulus, Kate Reeves, and Suzanne Lummis.  It was a great reading, and I was honored to be a part of it — especially at such a cool and historic bookstore.  When I moved to L.A. almost two years ago, I interviewed Joseph Mattson and Tosh Berman at Book Soup.  Since then, my goal was to read there.  Big thanks to Michelle Meyering and The Rattling Wall for helping make that happen.  Check out the video above to see my reading.

So, as for what happens when you lose everything…Today was an utter disaster.  It was one of those days that you can never see coming — like an old man running through a red light — that shake the shit out of you and realize how one mistake can send you on a trajectory of unfortunate events.

This morning, I woke up and went over to Portfolio Coffeehouse on 4th Street to work on this piece I’m writing on port truckers.  I’ve been working on it since early September, and I have countless interviews that were extremely hard to come by.  So, I’m sitting in Portfolio, texting my buddy who just moved to L.A., and I’m going through some of the old audio.  I was going to delete some of the old ones in order to focus on typing up the important ones.  That’s when it happened.  I hit the erase button on my Olympus video recorder, and instead of only deleting one of the interviews, I deleted the entire folder.  All of my work…gone.

IMG_0438Suddenly, months of work, personal stories I was trusted with, money, opportunity, was gone.  I knew I was in a coffee shop, and I could hear the espresso machines spitting foam and the random people talking about their new businesses, but it all disappeared, and I wasn’t in the coffee shop anymore.  I was outside of it, in my head, playing out the infinite scenarios of apologizing for a stupid mistake and wondering how in the world I was going to make my deadline.

Now I actually walked outside, crouched down where people couldn’t see me, and screamed, “FUCK.”  I looked down at the voice recorder, holding it as if I was strangling the piece of electronic crap.  “How can this be so easy?  How can you be such a little shit?  What the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t want to erase all my work.  Couldn’t you have know that?  Couldn’t you tell?  How can you be such a terrible purchase?”

I stepped back for a second, realizing that I’m probably talking to myself, and I took a couple of breaths.  I went back inside and googled the Olympus product, found the contact information, and gave them a call.

So here’s where things get better, and if you’re going through this same scenario and you’re about to give up all hope, let me tell you — there’s a way to fix this.

What the woman on the phone told me is that there are these audio recovery programs you can download for free.  But she said they only work for about 75% of your lost work.  I figured, hey, 75% is better than losing everything.  What I needed, however, was to connect my voice recorder with a USB cable to my computer, so I rushed over to Best Buy, and I bought the cable.  One of the Geeks there told me about this program called Recuva.  She swore by the product and said it worked most of the time.

Oh, I thought, maybe I’m saved.  I prayed to God or Allah or Buddha — whoever the hell is up there listening to me and my problems — and I found the program for free.  Well, Recuva is a program only compatible with a PC.  I’m using a Mac.  But I found another program that worked for a Mac.  It is called Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery.  The download was for free, and it started scanning my computer.  The great thing about it was that you could scan iPods, hardrives, audio files, even flash drives, and it would find your material.  Lucky for me, the program found all my audio recordings.

And there they were — my mp3 files all stacked up in a folder like a miracle sent down straight from Vishnu.  I couldn’t believe it.  The program saved me — and for free.

I went to click on the files.  No so fast, the program said.  You need to buy the $100 software in order to recover the files.  I could see the audio, but I couldn’t own them yet.  I reluctantly paid the $100, knowing there was no other option, and now I have the files back, in my hands, in order to complete the story.

But it was terrifying.  I have never done something so stupid.  Well, at least as a freelancer, and I know now that I must start backing up everything.  What a wild day.

Writing

Two New Pieces: Concussions and Literary Battles

Yesterday I had two new pieces come out at the LA Weekly and Pacific Standard Magazine.  The piece for the LA Weekly was a part of the tournament for the greatest LA novel ever, and I read and officiated the fight between True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne and L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy.  Both are great books, but to me, L.A Confidential is a masterpiece.

When I was taking Lynne Barrett’s plot class at FIU — one of the best and most challenging classes I have ever taken — she made us read Aristotle’s Poetics.  While I disagreed with some of Aristotle’s statements, specifically that lower-class characters can’t make interesting main characters, it proved to be one of the most important books I have ever read.  The main lesson I took from that book was that great plots have a recognition and a reversal.  The reversal brings about the drama — that the status quo changes and characters fall and rise in “power.”  Well, L.A. Confidential, in my opinion, does what great Greek and English and American dramas accomplish — high drama, incredible reversals.  The change in the status quo from the beginning of the book to the end — the people who die, the sacrifices, the changes in character and their relationships to one another — is nothing short but stunning.  It has become one of my favorite books of all time.  Check out my piece: Best LA Novel Ever.

The other piece that I had come out was on brain injuries in football.  I started writing the piece back in September, and it finally came out in December.  I have a lot more information that I want to use on the piece, but it serves its purpose: examining the public relations of brain injury.  The focus seems to be on youth football and the NFL wants to control that image of safety at the grass roots level.  It’s complicated, because even though they are trying to protect their brand, the organization, USA Football, actually seems to be trying to change the game.  Check out this piece at Pacific Standard — Public Relations of Brain Injury — or at Salon — Will Concussions Kill Football.

Travel

Trip to San Francisco — Witnessing California (Pics)

DSCF0190Last weekend, I left Long Beach and drove up to San Francisco to hang out with Joe Clifford and read at Lip Service West.  On the way up, I drove on the 5, and I was blown away by the shifting almost fickle landscapes of California.  It didn’t take me too long to drive to the bay area, but once I was in San Francisco, the traffic was terrible.

Overall, this was an amazing trip, and I’m not going to share too much about it, because I’m going to write a piece about the trip for another publication.  But I had the chance to hang out with a great writer and fellow FIU alumni, Joe Clifford, and meet another great bay-area writer, Tom Pitts.  The cool thing about talking to these guys is that you realize they’re all about community, especially Clifford. He idolizes the community of the Beats and how they all helped each other out.  And he’s right; community is an incredibly important aspect in being a writer, and if our generation of writers learns anything from the past, we have strength in numbers.

Well, after consulting Facebook before I left, I decided to take the 1 home back to Long Beach.  I really didn’t know what I was in for. It turned out to be one of the most amazing drives of my life, and it felt like I had spent several hours driving through a dream.  Big Sur, well, I won’t say anymore…check out the pictures on the next page.  The drive took me 11 hours!

Oh, and if you’re in L.A. tonight, come see me read at Book Soup at 7 with a ton of other great Rattling wall writers!  Click “More” to see the pics.

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Personal Stories, Travel

Leaving San Francisco

So I’m about to leave San Francisco, after reading at Lip Service West.  What an incredible experience, and I will be blogging about it soon.  I spent a lot of time in Berkeley, and I even saw the University of California, Berkeley, for the first time.  Last night, I read in the Tenderloin, and I ate at a great taco shop in the Mission.  Right now, I’m trying to decide if I should drive down the one on the way home and stop in Big Sur.  It’s always been a dream of mine, and, you know, I think I’m going to do it.