Tag: Los Angeles

Book Blogs, Writing

My Favorite Books of 2012 — Five to One

Yesterday I posted my favorite books of 2012 — ten to five.  It wasn’t a list that attempted to define the best books of 2012 or the hippest or the best buys.  It was basically a list of my favorite books.  So to recap: 10. A Scanner Darkly 9. Concussion and Our Kids 8. Hey Fudge 7. Empty the Sun. 6. True Confessions.  It’s interesting to look back on the books I’ve read, because sometimes after I finish a book, I seem move on without taking the time to reflect on what I learned or what I enjoyed.  So it’s nice to look back.

And what I have noticed is that the books say a lot about where I am at in my life, personally, and as a writer.  For example, many of the books on my list are L.A. books.  Well, I live in L.A. County — soon to be moving — and a lot of them are noir mixed in with a book from my home state, Massachusetts.  Also, I have some science fiction novels on the list.  It’s funny, almost three years ago, I would never have even talked about science fiction — chalking it up to nerd fiction.  But I can’t get enough of it now. Next book I’m going to read, after I finish a Daniel Smith book and Kohler’s Gestalt Psychology, is Ender Games.  So now, enough preamble, finally, my top five favorite books of 2012.


runningwithscissors

5. Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

It’s pretty shameful that I hadn’t read Burroughs’ classic memoir before this year, but I’m glad that I finally came to the book.  I believe that books come to us or appeal to us at certain times in our life for certain reasons.  Maybe I’m talking about fate.  Maybe I’m talking about coincidence.  Why not both?  But this year, as I began to revise my book, reading Burroughs has proved to be of tremendous importance.  It’s about a young kid struggling with a mentally ill mother in Massachusetts.  And seeing how a writer handled this narrative, the characters, even the setting, proved to be extremely important.

The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.  A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.

I understand that above line very well.  What I loved most about this book is the way Burroughs handles structure.  Of course, it’s in chronological order, but there is something about the way it holds together that I’m still trying to figure out.  How the hell does this book come together and still provide a satisfying ending?

Ham on Rye

4. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski 

So far, Ham on Rye isn’t my favorite piece of writing by Charles Bukowski.  I love Post Office, Hot Water Music, and Love is a Dog From Hell (Ecco selected poems), but Ham on Rye is a good book.  I think of it more as a memoir, now, than I do as a novel.  That’s what it basically is, and I think maybe the book would have been more respected as a memoir, because it’s basically a chronological structure with very little plot.  Memoirs can get away with loose structure and plot — in my humble opinion — because the emphasis is more on the writer and the character.  I love Ham on Rye, because of the origin story of the great Henry Chinaski, but also because I get to see a pre WWII L.A.  There is one scene where Bukowski — I’m sorry Chinaski — is riding his bike to the beach that is unforgettable.

I could see the road ahead of me.  I was poor and I was going to stay poor.  But I particularly didn’t want money.  I didn’t know what I wanted.  Yes, I did.  I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn’t have to do anything.

Stolen Air

3. Stolen Air by Osip Mandelstam translated by Christian Wiman

Stolen Air is by far my favorite poetry book of  2012.  Not just because it’s published by Ecco Press and has an incredible introduction by Ilya Kaminsky, but because it’s stunningly beautiful and so far different from the poetry I usually read.  Most of my favorite poetry is narrative — Philip Levine, Denis Johnson, Frank O’Hara — and I often find lyrical poetry esoteric and purposefully pretentious.  There is just something about Mandelstam — the persecution in Russia, the passion for freedom, the incredibly tight images — that just blew me away.  Take a poem like Godnausea, which was written on April 4, 1931:

By torchlight bewildered with purpose/ Into the cellar of the six-toed untruth:/ Well, my pretty, she says,/ Lifting the hairy turnip of her head:/ Are you hungry, or are you dead?

There is something hardboiled, rugged, grungy about Mandelstam that I love.  And the collection that spans Mandelstam’s poetry comes together in stunning harmony.

Thrilling Tales

2. McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales Edited by Michael Chabon

For my money, there is no better collection of stories that blends a literary bent with thrilling and amazing adventures that this one.  And that’s what I love about reading books in the first place — adventure.  I love the feeling I get when I read Twain, Hemingway, London — as if the whole world was able to be discovered and conquered.  And each one of these stories has that certain feel — even though a lot of it ends bad.  The book features Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Aimee Bender, and Jim Shepard.  But the list is endless of how many great writers are included in the anthology.  But my favorite, the absolute most thrilling story in the collection, is The Albertine Notes by Rick Moody.   Honestly, this novella-length story is by far the best story I have read in years.  It blew me away in terms of the way he manipulated time and how it linked into the overall premise of the story: the main character was investigating a new drug that injected pleasant memories to the user who lived in a present-day dystopia.  The writing was just incredible, and it’s a book I suggest you go out and buy — right now!  After reading this story, Rick Moody became one of my favorite writers.

LA_Confidential_CVS5885

1. L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy

This year, it’s hard to find a novel that captured me as much as L.A. Confidential.  I have learned so much from reading this book — about my city, about writing, about plot and timing — that I’m almost tempted to recommend this book just on what you will practically take away as a reader and writer.  Well, I don’t think I need to recommend this book, actually, because it’s a classic.  And it’s worth that label.  It’s a dramatic triumph that builds to Oedipus like proportions.  I’ve already written a lot about this book in the last couple weeks.  But let me leave you with one of the last lines from the book (Sort of a spoiler alert):

Some mean get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.  You’re in the former, but my God I don’t envy you the blood on your conscience. 

Until next year… 

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.

scanner-book-cover

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.

Cantu-Cover-200x300

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?

hey-fudge

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.

EPSON scanner image

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.

true confessions

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, Writing

What Writing Creatively Really Needs: Hope

The last week was great, because I was able to take some time away from pitching and writing and step back a bit.  I’ve been freelancing, now, for four months, and it’s time to take stock of where I am at.  It’s a difficult journey, but I have great support.  Over the last two weeks, I have had work appear at the LA Weekly, OC Weekly, and Salon.com, but when I look back on the last four months, my creative work has suffered a bit.  I’ve been so focused on trying to write for projects that will help me survive that I’ve forgotten, to some extent, about poetry, about short stories, about my memoir.

Maybe that was a part of the plan.  Maybe I needed some distance.  And when Thanksgiving “break” came, I found myself writing a new story, and it was my first true science fiction story.  It’s set in a Los Angeles in the future, and while I feel somewhat nerdy writing the story, it’s been a pleasure to allow my imagination to wander — to envision a new world.  And this has helped rev up the creative process.

This would have never happened four years ago.  I would never have even given science fiction a chance.

When I was in graduate school, I started out only interested in literary pieces.  I was (and still am) a huge fan of Tobias Wolff, Denis Johnson, Stuart Dybek, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and Junot Diaz, and I only cared about one story — the lyrical, literary story.  I actually had a teacher in undergrad, after much pleading to tell me where I needed to grow as a writer, tell me that I only valued the realistic story.

But when I got to FIU, I met a teacher who started to introduce me to genre — especially Noir and horror.  I was resistant at first.  I thought genre was for hacks who wanted to make money.  Then I started to read Raymond Chandler, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.  One of the best anthologies this teacher suggested was the American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny From Poe to the Pulps.  I suddenly became aware of the tremendous possibilities of genre and the infinite combinations — even surrealism, abstraction, the philosophically stirring existed within the forms.  Yes, I was ignorant and stubborn, but I was learning.  So I read everything from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Island of Dr. Moreau to Borges, and I saw similarities and possibilities.

Now, this isn’t any new revelation.  Just look at Michael Chabon and many other writers experimenting with genre.  But I was suddenly freed from the reality that all writing had to be real and true.  Truth is a word, anyway, that has nothing to do with facts or even reality.

So I wrote my first horror story at FIU, and at first, it was torn apart, somewhat, in the workshops.  I had a tendency, then, and a tendency, now, to go over the top.  So I revised and worked on it.  And about two weeks ago, it was accepted into a future anthology by Sirens Call Publications.  The story is called: “The Castle on the Hill.”  The anthology is a haunted mental-ward theme.

My point is this: sometimes in order to feel free again, to be reminded of the infinite  possibilities of this world, of art, of writing, it’s important to live within a form, a genre, a guiding principle.  Sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes it’s better to be free and without direction.  Right now, I feel somewhat stuck in between both ideas.

I’ll wake up tomorrow, and I won’t truly know what the day will bring. I’ll sit down to write a pitch, and I might find a better idea.  I’ll sit down to finish a story, and I might end up writing a poem.  And maybe it’s only in this searching, in this lost wandering do we come to direction, to guidance, to form.  Well, the most important commodity, when it comes to writing, has to be hope.  Hope that you will find a thread.  Hope that your character will come alive.  Hope that you will finish.  Hope that you will be appreciated.  Hope that you will find the words to say what is pulling at your heart-strings.  Hope is what gets us through the feeling of being lost.

And so now, I must come to a stopping point.  I didn’t really know where this blog was going to take me.  I didn’t know really what was even on my mind.

Writing

The Rattling Wall Issue 3 Release

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On Saturday at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, The Rattling Wall had a celebration to  release Issue 3.  David L. Ulin, James Meetze, Jillian Lauren, Angel Nafis, and others read at the Masonic Temple to a packed crowd.  Michelle Meyering hosted the event from a desk on the stage.

Ulin and Nafis were my favorite readers.  Nafis has such a great reading style, and her poem (the one that ended each line with the word black) was a knock out.  She concluded the night.  Here’s a video of Nafis:

Plus, there was this great video beforehand about the making of The Rattling Wall.  Michelle talked a lot about the softball tournament I helped organized back in the summer. She also wrote about the game in the introduction to the book.  Michelle writes that during that softball tournament, she realized that she had created a home in Los Angeles by creating The Rattling Wall.  It’s a pretty powerful intro and sets up the whole theme of home for the issue.

I was lucky enough to have my poem, “Chinatown,” published in the book.  And it’s right next to Ulin’s piece, which is pretty bad ass.  Joyce Carol Oates is in the book, too.  Plus, there are these awesome illustrations by Ben Tegel in the book.  They were displayed during the event, and when people were reading, I found myself laughing out loud…lol.

Well, at one point during the night, Michelle asked the contributors to stand up.  That’s when I stood up out of the crowd with all the other writers, and I felt incredibly proud and humbled at the same time.  This is really one of my most significant publications to date for my poetry, and it’s an incredible start.  And I felt a part of Los Angeles, too — even being some kid from Clinton, Mass.

So, it’s going to be a big week.  Finishing up a piece at Pacific Standard.  Just got the edits back.  And then I’m working on a draft for a piece on Kerouac.  I had a pitch accepted at an amazing publication.  Just don’t want to jinx myself yet.  Talk is cheap.  Writing is real.  But can still be cheap.  Goodnight everyone!