We are pleased as punch to note that our dear friend Maud Newton has won second prize in Narrative Magazine's 2008 Love Story Contest for her story Conversations You Have At Twenty. You can see what she has to say about it here.
I'm sitting in an airport where someone just had Elliot Spitzer paged to Gate 32. No one seemed to notice. Though it would have been funnier to have him paged to Gate 9.
Please stop by and check out the newly redesigned marksarvas.com website. I hope you like Will Amato's terrific design as much as I do.
Today we take a slight (though not total) detour from literary matters, and I dust off my keyboard's "I" key to relate a personal tale from my past. (There is a book-related pay-off of sorts at the end, though, so stick around.)
Although I've gone to great lengths to cover up the traces of my geeky past, I own up - with a hint of pride (but just a hint) - to having been a Trekkie in my boyhood. The hardcore Star Trek phase lasted until I turned 14 and discovered The Beatles, launching a new and somewhat less geeky obsession.
But from 11 to 14, I was the kid who got beat up for carrying phasers around school. Yes, I went to Star Trek conventions. It's all very embarrassing to me now. (I should point out that I was only ever - and remain to this day - an original series devotee. No Next Gen or DS9 for me.)
Should you doubt it was as bad as I say, that's me on the right at the age of about 12, in Manhattan with my friend Andy for our first Star Trek convention. Yes, I am wearing a United Federation of Planets t-shirt.
So, I'm a rabid Trek fan, and William Shatner comes to town on his now infamous university lecture tour, the one in which he "sang" Rocket Man. I've arrived early and snagged a good seat with my friends, and we are grokking the proceedings. Then come the questions and answers. Someone in the audience asks "Who designed the Enterprise?" to which Shatner answers, incorrectly, "Gene Roddenberry."
Well, this won't do. I cup my hands around my mouth and I shout out "Matt Jeffries! Matt Jeffries!" Shatner squints down toward the disruption, points at me, and says, "You. Come up here." What follows:
ME: (looking around, asking my friends) Who is he talking to you?
TREK FRIEND: (aghast) You! He's talking to you!
ME: (this does not compute) Me? (mouthing to Shatner, pointing at myself) Me?
SHATNER: You.
(I gulp and walk up onto the stage, heart in my mouth. Shatner puts a friendly arm around me.)
SHATNER: What's your name, son?
ME: Mark.
SHATNER: Well, Mark, this might surprise you but you probably know more about Star Trek than I do.
ME: (heresy!) No way! Nuh-uh!
SHATNER: You know, I was on that show ten years ago and have worked a lot since then and I don't really remember all the details.
ME: (impressed) Whoa.
(A brief, awkward silence follows. Then:)
SHATNER: So. Do you have any really profound questions you want to ask me?
ME: (thinks a bit; then) No.
SHATNER: (you funster you) Do you know what "profound" means?
ME: (of course I did, but I was whore for a laugh even then) No.
SHATNER: Well, is there anything at all you want to ask me?
ME: (thinking; only one shot here with the Captain. Then it strikes): Of all the women you ever kissed on Star Trek, which one did you like the best?
(The room, as you can imagine, erupts. Thumbs up from my friends in the cheap seats.)
SHATNER: (after it dies down; a slight leer) I liked them all, Mark. I liked them all.
Of course you did, Jimbo. So, why regale you with this tale? Because when I became aware of Captain Kirk's Guide to Women - given a 6 out of 10 from the gang at TrekWeb (and no, I don't read it, it was a Google alert) - well, I just had to have it, as memories of that day at St. John's University came back in a rush.
As for me, that was all a long time ago and I'm all better now. The number 1,771,561 is with me for life but I am otherwise OK.
Proper literary business resumes tomorrow.
I'm back in town, minus the usual post-Paris depression, but recovering from a vicious bug that left Mrs. TEV and myself incapacitated on New Year's Eve. Quelle dommage ...
I'll be back upright presently and posting will resume but, until then, feel free to check out my Christmas Eve appearance on NPR's All Things Considered with Lynn Neary, in which I discussed some "overlooked" books of the year.
Also, if you're the kind online editor from Barnes and Noble who wrote to me while I was away, would you please write back? I've somehow managed, in my bleary delirium, to delete your email.
More anon.
I'm outta here. Returning to these parts some time after January 2, though not certain exactly when. While I'm gone, some of my litblogging comrades will be keeping the lights on, so do check out the blogroll.
I've been called "earnest," as though that's a bad thing, but allow me to earnestly thank all of my readers for what has been a remarkable, unforgettable year. TEV has never been a monologue, it's a conversation, and it's a rich one precisely because of all of you.
I'm looking forward to returning in January with renewed enthusiasm, continuing to bring you literary news of the day and providing a forum for us all to talk about it. There will be interviews, reviews and plenty of new features. And, of course, as Harry, Revised makes its way into the world, there will be regular updates.
Until then, Mrs. TEV and I are off to Paris, with side trips to Strasbourg and Toulouse. There will be reports when we return.
So what is the significance of the headline of this post? Behind that, a story. Many years ago, my beloved friend Jeannie was in Paris with her then-husband Floyd. Having no reservations for New Years' festivities they found themselves in an American-themed restaurant with long, communal dining tables. As some of you may know, the French custom is that at midnight, you turn to the people around you, shake hands, and wish them "Bonne Année." Well, midnight rolled around, and the non-French-speaking Floyd turned to his French neighbor at the table. Here's what happened.
FRENCH NEIGHBOR (hand extended to shake): Bonne Année!
FLOYD (taking it): Floyd.
FRENCH NEIGHBOR (kindly shaking head, trying to explain): Non, non, non: (slowly) Bonne ... Année.
FLOYD (equally slowly): F... l ... o ... y ... d.
Mrs. TEV and I wish you all Floyd, and we'll see you in 2008.
I've been invited to read an excerpt from Harry, Revised as part of the Class of 2008 @ Boxcar Lounge reading series, which is designed to "provide a sneak peek at the coming year's finest debut authors." I'll be joined by Ceridwen Dovey, Michael Dahlie and Lynn Lurie. The reading will be on January 23 at 8 p.m. and I hope that I'll have a chance to meet as many of my New York readers as possible. See you there!
As most of you know, Maud Newton has been marking the holiday season by running a collection writer's recipes. I was honored when she asked me to contribute one, and so I sent along the family recipe for körözött, a Hungarian staple of my childhood which resulted in all sorts of teasing at school:
It’s also, frankly, a somewhat unappetizing looking little hors d’oeuvre — the paprika gives it a bright orange color and the cream cheese gives it a mushy consistency — and so it brought me no end of grief as a child when it found its way into my lunch sandwiches. My fellow fifth graders were predictably grossed out at the sight of it, and one anointed it “Wild Ape Shit,” which saddled me with an unpleasant mental image that has lingered ever since.
Well, if that doesn't put you entirely off your lunch, you can find the rest of the story and the recipe here.
I generally cannot abide talk radio (or "talkback radio" as it's called in Australia - something I learned reading the new Coetzee) but every now and then I fall into the rabbit hole of one of KCRW's programs. Quite by chance, I caught Will Self last night on Which Way LA?, where he was discussing his latest collaboration with Ralph Steadman, Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place. (If you want to know something about the idea beyond psychogeography, read this.) I strongly recommend you listen to the podcast - the story of Self's walk from LAX to the Watts Towers (he's in town for a reading) was one of those great inspiring conversations that makes you reconsider your home through the eyes of an outsider.
At any rate, the reason I mention all this is because one of the other guests was D.J. Waldie, Los Angeles writer of considerable renown. And I remembered a review of his essay collection Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles I'd written back in 2004 for the Los Angeles Review. Waldie is a remarkable guy, so it seemed worth going back into the archives and reprinting my review for you. Here it is:
PARADISE LEVERAGED
Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles
D.J. Waldie
Angel City Press
206 pp
$16.95
That many of us would consider the title “Bard of Suburbia” to be a dubious distinction is precisely the sort of thinking that drives D.J. Waldie (a man who can lay fair claim to that title) crazy. In the 28 essays that comprise his new collection Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, Waldie, a public official with the City of Lakewood who doesn’t drive a car and has lived in the same 957 square-foot house his parents bought there in 1946, stands poised against grandiose, overblown dreams, a patron saint of modest expectations.
This bracing if uneven volume has been assembled from pieces that originally ran in the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Weekly, Salon and others, and they are linked at their core by Waldie’s steadfast belief in the restorative power of community. That Los Angeles seems perversely designed to undermine that sense of community is what gives Waldie his fire.
Waldie’s vision of Los Angeles is that of Paradise Leveraged, a series of spent dreams and promises paved over to install newer dreams and newer promises, an endless cycle of reinvention. It’s a city that’s unique in “its ability to manufacture snake oil and simultaneously buy it.” Many of the familiar L.A. narratives are here from the infamous water grabs to the police corruption scandals. His essay “All in the Family,” which looks at the Chandler family’s role in forging Los Angeles, is an elegant miracle of compression. And “The City and the River” is one of the best explanations of the history and value of this misunderstood waterway that you are likely to find.
But although he’s not afraid to tackle the large scale, one suspects Waldie is a miniaturist at heart. He’s at his poetic, moving best when working at close quarters, describing the joys and vagaries of a life away from L.A.’s centers of power.
Lakewood’s modesty keep me here. When I stand at the head of my block and look north, I see a pattern of sidewalk, driveway and lawn, set between parallel low walls of house fronts that aspires to be no more than harmless. We are living in times of great harm now, and I wish that I had acquired all the graces my neighborhood gives.
Waldie brings light to these small, quiet moments again and again. The wonderful essay “Fallout” describes a childhood spent in the shadow of defense factories, a childhood mixed with equal measures of Rod Serling and prefabricated fallout shelters. In “On the Bus,” he perfectly captures the disregard with which motorists and bus passengers treat one another. The motorist will never see “the civil gesture of the tall, young black man toward the old white man whose leg he must brush aside to pass down the aisle of the packed bus …” Bus passengers are equally oblivious to cocooned motorists as they await the arrival of their buses, straining under the weight of plastic shopping bags – “that red line across a numbed hand is the pedestrian stigmata.” Waldie is insistent that L.A. be considered in its entirety, that the vital lives of the suburbs not be lost against the glare of Hollywood klieg lights.
The complaints about the collection are minor. Because these essays were run in separate publications there is a certain amount of repetition of ideas and even turns of phrase, and a keener editorial eye might have eliminated some duplication. And some of the shortest essays – as little as a page and a half – are unsatisfying. (“The Golden Dream Goes Dark” itself goes dark as abruptly as a plug yanked from a socket, and “L.A. Literature” is little more than a tantalizing blurb of what might have been.) And when will publishers learn to identify each essay with its publication name and date? Finally, the collection is ill-served by Patt Morrison’s self-indulgent, tedious foreword.
But the cumulative force of Waldie’s passion and arguments is undeniable. Which leads me to a confession. I am Waldie’s worst nightmare, the sort of resident he dismisses as a “tourist.” Living a narrow life essentially bounded by the 10, 110, 101 and the ocean, I’d never even really studied an L.A. map (without seeking a specific destination) before reading these essays. Now, standing before a wall-sized Thomas Guide, I located Lakewood, nestled on the flats between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers, just as Waldie describes. I took in the names of places I’d never ventured into: Cypress. La Mirada. Norwalk. Artesia.
And so on a recent overcast Saturday morning, I got into my car and drove to see Waldie’s city for myself, which is a more cheerful place than his essays suggest. As I drove through the uniform grid of well-tended streets, I was struck by how much is hidden behind freeway retaining walls. Mayfair Park advertised an upcoming Patriot Day concert. Families with children enjoyed a friendly public pool. I saw garage sales, kids on scooters, and open houses. I saw a community living its life quietly in shadows of the freeways, not looking “for more, only for enough.” And although I inevitably made my way back to the familiarity of the Westside, it may be - to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes - that a Thomas Guide once stretched by an idea will never regain its former shape.
Our neighborhood is now out of danger. The Fire Department confirms no evacuations will be necessary. Thanks to the many who wrote in with kind wishes. Please continue to extend those wishes to those have suffered real losses this week.
In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
