1. fiction
Recently I was gifted by my mom a copy of Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. For having taught an evergreen section of it (“Shitty First Drafts”) for over 15 years, I had never actually read Lamott’s book. And, truthfully, I still haven’t. But I have now read enough to feel inspired to give fiction writing a whirl again. Specifically, Lamott advocates for an instinct that is often my creative cri de cœur: start with rich characters. For Lamott it’s the genesis of all important storytelling, claiming, “Get to know your characters as well as you can, let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.” Unfortunately for me, I don’t often allow myself the time—weeks, months, according to Lamott—necessary to let these characters develop the problems, circumstances, or issues required to motivate most fiction. As such, my interesting characters become fully rendered humans who, through their complexities and uncanny ability to mimic actual speech, are dull and inert. They are remarkably lifelike avatars with nowhere to go, nothing to do.
Still, a recent reading of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row has reenergized me. Here’s a book with a wide array of (mostly not-racist) characters whose vignettes are illustrative of who they are individually and, over the course of the novel, collectively. Cannery Row culminates with a party that serves as a logical, perfect ending because of the attention to character. And then there’s my favorite novel, The Day of the Locust (1939), which accomplishes much the same—albeit with an even spikier, more abstract denouement. Couple this with Lamott’s reminder that character is key and I feel a curious tickle of inspiration. If you manage it well, the rest of your work will spool off of your characters like a snakeskin molting. Even the most quotidian of circumstances will be made unique if you take the time to enrich the figures experiencing them. (Does this sound like self-help yet?)
Whatever.
You can also just take Lamott’s advice and see if you can break and remake it through the guise of experimental fiction. Two of my favorite novels these past decades are works drawn exclusively around singular characters and their worldviews. These are Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (1983) and Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. (1964). I appreciate just rattling around in these character’s heads because anything that passes between their ears becomes, by proxy, indelible—whether Palomar sees infinity in a lawn or tries to avoid leering at a breast on the beach, or when G.H. is forced to consider the void because she squished and ingested a cockroach’s guts. My secret goal with the fiction I write moving forward will be to merge an experimental sensibility with the rich, lived-in place-setting of something like West’s opus. Easy peasy.
2. libraries, burnt and otherwise
A strange symmetry this week has been, finally, diving into Susan Orlean’s The Library Book (2018) just as we had the occasion to spent time in three(!) libraries at USC. Orlean’s book was gifted to me by our family friend up in Carmel and I have been immensely enjoying it; Orlean is a great detailer and it serves her creative non-fiction. The 1986 burning of the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles is something I had heard about not long after moving to Los Angeles, probably after first visiting the library (I also worked for LAPL for a brief spell). I certainly read more about the Central Library burning when Orlean’s book was published—I was quite familiar with her work already, having taught The Orchid Thief (1998) and Adaptation (2002) in a class on (what else) adaptation. Nevertheless, the severity and the remarkable nature of the fire was still novel to me. One haunting detail from Orlean’s book is firefighters describing the flames as so hot they were transparent, closer to a plane of glass than the usual red, yellow, orange, and black.
Admittedly, I was barely deep into The Library Book when, unprompted, I visited three libraries at USC. A trawl through the Doheny Memorial Library, Library for International & Public Affairs, and Architecture & Fire Arts Library at USC was a nice occasion, alongside Orlean’s book (a regular paean to libraries), to recognize why libraries are so wonderful. You do feel like you’re walking through a storehouse of all the world’s contained knowledge: social sciences, hard sciences, maps, Shakespearian folios and vintage postcards, almost any novel you can desire, vinyl and DVDs, and on and on. And it feels inspiring and tangible in ways that having access to much (but not all!) of this stuff, hidden away on the internet—behind paywalls; on spam-y, suspect webpages; in algorithm-busted search engines—never will. In fact, that bumping up against the unexpected as you seek out the expected is my favorite part of libraries. I love stepping up to a shelf for a specific volume and invariably pulling off two or three adjacent items that I may have not otherwise discovered. Bliss.
Here I am, courtesy of S., doing the aforementioned.
3. embarrassment of riches (l.a. repertory division)
I have a long, complex relationship with the Los Angeles repertory film scene. The first rep screening I attended, back in 2007, was at the New Beverly Cinema. So I will always hold a special place for that particular establishment (my nearest, dearest, and most consistent rep cinema). That first screening? A grindhouse double run by Eric Caidin (RIP) and Brian Quinn of Man from Deep River (1972) and Toxic Zombies (1980). Back then the grindhouse screenings had raffles. In a beautiful bit of serendipity, I won the grand prize on my first night—a signed George Romero BTS photo from Night of the Living Dead (1968). Everyone booed when I walked up to collect my prize. It was an intoxicating evening.
Now I’m older and a lot grumpier. I want to enjoy the young generation that comes through the New Bev, but it can be tiresome at times. When I started visiting the New Bev, you had characters like Freddy, who had been Orson Welles personal driver, and who wore mutton-chop sideburns and cycled through sweatshirts for every movie studio in town. I appreciate that the current crowds seem to love just about every sort of film—I see people at Hong Kong nights that I also see at Hitchcock nights (which wasn’t always true)—but they also treat the moviegoing experience a bit too much like concerts for my taste, smoking as much weed as they can manage before 150 minutes of Fassbinder or a screening of Vice Squad (1987). Unsurprisingly, these weed-a-palooza screenings have unequivocally lead to some of the stinkiest screenings I have ever attended. (This is saying something as, at the New Bev, I used to sit next to actual hobos sipping from gut-rot bottles, with their sunbaked bindles stashed in the aisle; thinking here of a specific Taxi Driver/Hardcore double). Also, I have been masked-up lo these past five months, which is a testament to the odoriferous nature of this mutant medical-grade weed we now have to live with.
This rant-y windup leads to this: this past week helped reinvigorate my love of Los Angeles repertory cinema. (For now!) In particular, a double of two Roger Corman-produced horror features, Brain Dead (1990) and The Unborn (1991), at the New Bev, and a special screening of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) at the Egyptian Theater. Both screenings also featured Q+As, which, admittedly, I appreciate more in theory than in practice—I've seen a few too many that were rambling, incoherent, poorly moderated, or downright idiotic to harbor much love for them. Instead, I’ll just happily list all the greats I’ve seen in person due to these Q+As: Bert I. Gordon, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Mazursky (to name a few of the dearly departed), Bradley Cooper, Eugene Levy and Christopher Guest, Joe Dante, Quentin Tarantino, Gena Rowlands (to name those among the living).
Anyway, these screenings. For once the Q+As worked in conjunction with (and, in the case of the New Bev, more than) the films themselves to bring back some of my zeal for rep cinema in Los Angeles. Whether it was directors Adam Simon and Rodman Fletcher being feted by an audience filled with family and friends (including crew and cast members), or writer/director Tsai Ming-liang and co-star Lee Kang-sheng (who, by the way, only answered one question) having their responses slowly, humorously translated from Mandarin, I found both screenings indicative of the wonder L.A. rep cinema can provide. Living in the second biggest city in the US, and a global destination, should have its benefits. That’s something I’ll have to remind myself of the next time I'm perfumed by too-much-weed.
4. au fait accompli vandalism
There is a powerful monument to vandalism and wasteful private capital sitting in downtown Los Angeles and this week S. and I got to catch a glimpse—quite accidentally—as we moseyed from a delicious lunch at Pine + Crane to a nearby coffee shop. The notoriously graffitied Oceanwide Plaza is an arresting thing to see, and it belies a timely tale of Chinese development gone sideways (something I got hipped to in my time in Hong Kong).
I am just checking in here to acknowledge the awesome power of seeing three massive skyscrapers in a city center like Los Angeles bedecked with graffiti from bottom to top. Quite a sight.
5. big cooking
Sometimes, with cooking, I get a wild hair to make something decadent. As an Italian-American, my default for that impulse tends to be a big, heaping stockpot of red gravy. I have a long-abandoned recipe for one made with five pounds of meat. (The stockpot I typically use for my red sauce was purchased specifically to make that monstrosity.) This time I improvised with my own concoction—the meat may have actually come out to more than five pounds (spicy Italian chicken sausage, pork spare ribs, beef short ribs, and meatballs)—because I wanted something with even simpler prep. Therefore, in approximately 20 minutes, the meat had been browned, onions and garlic cooked down, and everything was back in the pot for a swim in pounds (6 lbs and 9 ozs, to be exact) of tomato puree.
There are two issues with my big cooking red gravy that I have come to identify with this latest batch. One is that I keep impulsively purchasing and adding in sorta crappy dried porcini mushrooms that my local Burbank Italian deli keeps near the register. I may be the only one, months apart, who even purchases these bastards. They seem like the perfect ingredient to kick the sauce up a notch, but, instead, they end up sinking to the bottom of my stockpot and turning into burnt shards of black charcoal that have to get dredged out of the sauce and discarded. My second issue, if it’s indeed not the porcini and something more crucial (like the onions) that’s blackening, is that the stockpot just isn’t the finest quality—at the time I bought it, thrift was the name of the game with kitchen gadgetry. I now recognize I probably need to replace much of my home cookware, while also acknowledging I would prefer to wing it with what I have.
These complaints aside, the umami richness of my sauce was worth the hiccups. We ate off it a couple times and now pounds of the gravy sit in the freezer waiting to accompany future chicken parms, lasagnas, and even sautéed white bean piles. The big cook, bumps aside, does its job.