Where I'm From When I'm Away

It was a brisk day, brisk with hope, enthusiasm, expectation; a sharp day in which a wind cleaned the edges of buildings and store windows, making everything seem in sharp focus. A tang of iodine was in the air, or perhaps, being from Santa Monica, you filled in that detail. It was not your imagination that included a few seagulls, scavanging a late brunch. You inhaled deeply. "This is so like San Francisco," you said.

All about you, there was a stunned pause from the group you'd exited the meeting with, before a revealing "um hum," and an accusatory, "This is not about San Francisco. This is about New York. This is way New York. We live for this time of year, when it is like this. You people don't have to wait for times like this."

You people.

Others. Johnny-come-lately. Carpetbagger.

If you are from a place and have spent any time at all there, no matter where you are at the moment, it is always in relationship to that place, and thus if you are from the likes of New York or Boston, then San Francisco and L.A. and even Denver are out West. I am now, you say from the lobby of The Brown Hotel, Out West. If you are from Pismo Beach or Pacoima or North Hollywood, you go back East,particularly if you once lived there and/or still have family somewhere east of the Mississippi River. Similarly, Portland and Seattle and Vancouver are up There unless, of course, you are from those estimable places. Alaska thinks of all of us as below or down, we for our part think of it as Way up there, distinguishing it thusly from such easier venues as Seattle and Portland.

Friends and associates from New Orleans think of it in terms of districts, much as the Parisians have divided their city into arrondisments and the Londoners render their city into postal zones.

When you first came to Santa Barbara, you were tied to Los Angeles in a number of ways that had nothing to do with birth; you got your contact lenses there, took your blue tick hounds to a veterinarian there, could think of no place to get authentic rye bread or corned beef in Santa Barbara (still can't), and so an additional tie. Nor did it loosen any bonds when on occasion you drove past your alma mater on your way to your job at USC, which had a wrench because your maternal grandparents lived in that area and because, from time to time, you lived with them and seemingly were always walking or biking in relationship to The Colisseum, that hulk of a stadium wherein you so frequently watched your alma mater be clobbered in football by USC.

For all practical and impractical purposes, Santa Monica is northwest of Los Angeles. If you are approaching along the Pacific Coast Highway, you are likely to be shunted into the beginnings of The Santa Monica Freeway at a point called The McClure Tunnel, whence you find yourself east bound through a portion of West Los Angeles as a sort of buffer, arguably in Los Angeles by the time you have passed under the North-South 405 Freeway, draping over the Santa MOnica Freeway like an arm-wrestling limb. If you come into Los Angeles "inland," which is to say on the 101, you may be eased into the enormity of it by passing through such outliers as Augorra Hills, Woodland Hills, even Brentwood, which earned a kind of cachet it didn't really need from a former USC footballer who was at some odds with his wife.

When you are in Los Angeles, the familiarity and memory of it surrounds you and even though many of the buildings you knew have come and gone, you still know short-cuts that baffle your non-L.A. passengers. But when you are in Los Angeles, you are nevertheless from Santa Monica, which has undergone relatively as many changes as Los Angeles has undergone. The library is where it is, not where it ought to be. There is a Chinese restaurant at 516 Santa Monica Boulevard, instead of Boulevard Luggage, once an elaborate and nearly successful-on-its-own luggage shop where, were you interested in estimating the relative speeds of thoroughbred horses, you could find the means of putting your money where your opinion was, and in whose cavernous cellar you could indulge anthropological study of such various Asian games of chance as Pai-Gow and the ever popular Fillipino card game, Paiute.

The Los Angeles and Santa Monica you are of are not the same as it is now for those who are there: the old Eastside Brewery is gone, nor does the long lived disc jockey and entrepreneur Gene Norman, broadcast his nightly show from the front window of Glen Wallach's Music City at Sunset and Vine, although Johnny Mercer's iconic Capital Records building on upper Vine remains. No Taix French restaurant on Commercial Street, no Eastern-Columbia department store at Broadway at Ninth, no whacked-out commercials from Madman Muntz, who went from a used car dealership to a manufacturer of TV sets, nor Clifton's Cafeteria, nor Earl Scheib with a $19.95 paint job for any car, $29.95 for a deluxe. No serious Angel's Flight, nor the worn splendor of Bunker Hill, nor the unforgettable smell of fresh peanut brittle wafting from the ice crfeam Awful Fresh McFarlane candy and nut shops, nor indeed the scatter of Curry's stores, with their enticing logo, The Mile-High Cone, which prompted the nick name of your tall, gangly high school chum, Paul Cohen, as Mile-High.

It is true, you know of some who are of a place and who were removed from it almost at infancy. But they, too, have substitute places, foster homes in the more metaphoric sense of the word, from which they relive sights, scents, experiences, applying them to that other place they happen to be.

The more you write of your own L.A. and Santa Monica, the more the memories escape like grammar school kids, eager for recess. The Frank Lloyd Wright house near Griffith Park. The Fox theater on the pier at Venice. The green, wedding-cake architecture of the Wiltern Theater at Western and Wilshire. The Watkins Hotel at Western and Adams. And not to forget the original Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles on Pico.

Where you are from is a gift of the most glorious sights and scents, the biggest dreams and disappointments, the unexpected changes and discoveries; it is the common denominator of a fraction you carry with you that is a part of the heritage that was given you when you, through no fault of you own were led to believe that more pleasures than sorrows awaited you on your way to providing an emotional portrait of persons with dreams in places with pasts.

Subtext, Context, Pretext, and the Oxford Comma

Although I am a skilled content editor and a better-than-ordinary copyeditor, the two disciplines veer away from one another before my very eyes to the point where it is fair to say that I have natural, enhanced skills as a content editor and must rely on my memory for copyediting.

As Liz Kuball would put it, I content edit without thinking; I need to be alert, on guard for copyediting. Nothing I do while copyediting surprises me. In content editing, I constantly surprise myself and the author.

Content editing is the literary equivalent of removing throat clearing and, as Sally would put it, dumb logic. Content editing wants to emphasize the uniqueness of the author's voice and vision. Copyediting is pure mechanics. 

 When I edit an author for content, I become an actor and accordingly act like the author. As a copy editor, I become a robot and emulate such style guides as The Chicago Manual of Style, The Cambridge-Oxford Conventions for Printers, The Associated Press Style Guide, or The New York Times Style Guide.

I have written and edited enough book text that The Chicago Manual of Style is nearly embedded as muscle memory, nearly being translated as my recourse to look something up about once a month. My column for the Montecito Journal is another matter; I have to remember to render book titles in quotes rather than italics. That is only the beginning. The Journal generously allows me a convention variously called the serial comma (a,b, and c as opposed to a, b and c)the Oxford comma, and the Montecito comma.

Such things may seem dumb but they are instrumental in the splendid and tricky process called communication. Graphic artists have to worry about light, pigmentation, and objective standards for discussing colors with specificity. Musicians have to be concerned about tempo and pitch. Writers at minimum have to deal with subtext, context, intent, extent.

My reference desk:

A well-thumbed copy of CMOS, The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. (To show you how extensive matters of usage are, it is quite possible that I have violated style convention by not representing CMOS in italic, even though it is not the full title but rather an affectionate acronym. After all, titles, even affectionate ones, have their conventions too.

An equally well-thumbed 3rd edition of The American Heritage Unabridged Dictionary of the American Language.

The New York Times Style Guide.

Microsoft Word 2003 For Dummies. No, it is not laziness or error on my part, Wylie, the publisher, has registered For Dummies rather than for Dummies as its trademark, making me feel smug and superior for having noticed in a recent edition of Mother Jones the use of the lower case for.

The New York Public Library Guide to Style and Usage.It is probably a good thing that I cannot justify the expense of The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language (unabridged) or, indeed, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (all twenty-nine volumes) because I would get even less work done than I do now.

Nostalgia

Not long ago, you wrote to a student who was feeling defeated by not getting the time she would like to have in order to complete an assignment: "We’re under constant assault from things clamoring for our attention, all wanting to be heard. Some of them are not even from this time, voices and regrets from the past, yowling at us, or voices from the future, wondering what we are going to do then. Thus our attention is yanked from our enthusiasm by the crying babies of immediacy."

As if to ratify this theory, as you were making a list of things needed to be addressed in some degree, including humorous acknowledgments of taking Sally for a walk, you were shouted at with persistence by the crying baby of nostalgia, yanking you from books that need to be written for yourself, edited for others, and read for review purposes, to say nothing of taking Sally for a walk and reading student papers, back to the newsstand at Pico Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, back to the insistent gravure colors of science fiction novels, noir mysteries, and thrillers, back to the unforgettable sights and smells of penny candy.

Tall shelves, filled with apothecary jars, riotously proclaiming the same forthright colors of the paperback novel colors, seem like carnival stalls in their gaiety. If you were in your preteens, your cash on hand would be limited, each decision an agony. Jaw breakers lasted longer, but there was the lure of the miniature wax bottles, shaped like milk bottles, filled with colored liquid. Orange slabs,shaped like scimitars, with the word BANANA embossed on the top were memorable as marshmallowy chewy treats; jelly beans, five cents a handful, long red and black licorice whips. All temptations, things to be catalogued for times when you had more pennies to spend.

But now you are well into your twenties, mindful of your wish to have your own stories published in the likes of Gold Medal, Ace, and Bantam Books with their equally carnival-like covers. (The first thing you did when you became an editor for Dell paperbacks was to request copies of the older editions of the mysteries with maps of the crime scenes on the back cover.) From time to time, you can actually see a magazine in this stand bearing a story of yours. You are broke as a beginning writer is broke, which means you can take pleasure in the small triumph of buying an entire sack of penny candy, eating it while reading an Avon or Dell or Bantam mystery or one of the Gold Medals your friend Day Keene produced every month.

This was the time when you played center field in the writers' baseball game, and sometimes, when many of the regulars were too hungover to play, kids would be invited to take seemingly less important positions, right field or second base, and they would call you sir--throw it over here, sir; or He's trying to steal, sir, or, I have it, sir, and they chewed big wads of bubble gum, the baseball-playing-kid's equivalent of growing a moustache to look older, and even though their cheeks had that faux bulge of professionalism and authority, you knew, you were certain that they didn't know about penny candy.

The Newspapers in My Life

Having just turned in my latest review for the Montecito Journal, and checked to see that the previous one was posted, I couldn't help the yank of nostalgia that drew me, ceaselessly back into the past, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in Gatsby.

My first experience with newspapers came when I lived in Los Angeles, near the La Brea Tar Pits and what has now become the County Museum of Art. My job was to stand on the corner of Third Street and La Brea, selling the afternoon Hearst paper, the Herald-Express. I did not do notably well because nearby was a saloon-type establishment called The Swanee Inn, where most afternoons around four, the featured vocalist came to practice and run through her numbers. Thus as a kid who'd had to lie about his age to get the job, I discovered the remarkable Anita O'Day, one of many chance associations that drew me inexorably into the jaws of jazz.

There was more money to be made, I was told by a neighborhood kid named Harvey, by having one's own paper route. This information shifted me from being a corner peddler to having an enormous orange wagon provided by my new employer, also a Hearst paper, the morning Examiner.

What Harvey didn't tell me was to become my first lesson in economics: people who buy newspapers from street vendors pay cash; subscribers tend to be dead beats or slow pay.

My next venture with newspapers involved being assigned an instrument looking much like a letter opener, made from whale bone. Each afternoon, I used the instrument to fold copies of the Miami Herald into convenient size, then slip them into a canvas pack which held at some precarious grip the afternoon paper, which I was admonished to deliver to my route in central Miami Beach, a process much more precarious than my experiences in L.A., with the Examiner.

Whatever it is now, the Miami Beach of my youth (and, incidentally, of WW II) was by tradition racist, evidenced by signs in front of some buildings that read RESTRICTED CLIENTELE, euphemistic for WHITE ONLY. Indeed, the busses had black lines girding the interior,a kind of racial devide in which front was for white, back was for--well, you get the picture.

Some of the houses and apartment buildings on my route had signs denying entry to those of Cuban descent, and at least two had signs saying No Blacks, Cubans, Jews, or dogs allowed.

Upset with these restrictions, I took to the streets again in what seemed to me an entrepreneurial coup, buying slightly out-of-date newspapers from a junk dealer and selling them to the service men as Home Town Papers. They did come from such places as New York, Chicago, Philladelphia, and, for some reason, Harrisburg, PA, with an occasional Cincinatti and Louisville paper, which remarkably seemed to match the demographics of the servicemen who bought them.

I did not get into writing for newspapers until, back in Los Angeles, I was drawn to the Colonial Gazette,the weekly of Fairfax High School. The mind reels and shudders at the memory of what I wrote under the guise of humor. But this led to coverage of high school sports--boring!--for the Pico Post,a neighborhood weekly, and regular interview-type for features for the paper of Will Rogers, the Beverly Hills Citizen-News.

Some journalism skills were honed at L.A. City College, and teased into a paying proposition and near profession of intended career thanks to the years on the UCLA Daily Bruin.

As a staffer on the DB, one could make a serious monthly pay check. Desk editors got $4 a shift, night editors got $5, proofers and copyeditors $4, meaning I could do all three many nights and manage anywhere from an additional one to five dollars writing the best headline (one that contained some outrageous pun), the best news story, the best feature.

The lure of journalism paled but not the lure of newspapers: soon I was reviewing books for the L.A. Examiner, the L.A. Times, and the then equivalent of the free metro weekly, The L.A. Free Press. Soon I got a call from my UCLA buddy, Larry Swindell, who'd gone as book editor to the Philadelphia Inquirer,which by-line emboldened me to approach the one newspaper I wanted more than any to "work" for, the Virginia City, NV Territorial-Enterprise,, home turn for Mark Twain and the legendary Joe Goodman. The T-E said yes, and I wondered if life could be any richer.

It became so in a way. Swindell left Philadelphia and went to Fort Worth,where he was the new book editor, staying there until he retired. I sent in my copy and had the occasional joy of seeing my reviews appear on the reverse of the page that contained the Molly Ivens column, more riches.

There has over the years been a long flirtation with the L.A. Times, in which, from time to time I'd appear with my pal, Barnaby Conrad; the occasional appearance in the Santa Barbara News-Press,and indeed the Santa Barbara Independent, of which it is difficult to find an appropriate adjective. Quirky? Notional? Stylistic? Not louche, although I do love the word.

And now I have come to the Montecito Journal which, with the exception of its stellar managing editor, Guillaume Doane, and fellow columnist Jim Alexander, is essentially written, edited, and launched on the community by Republicans and Libertarians. Since the early months of '05, I've done the book review for this community paper with about a 20K circulation, but what a 20K; many residing in some of the more expensive real estate in the US. The past president of the Montecito Association, a name so benign in weight that it suggests a terrorist organization rather than a group of conservative homeowners, ventured that the tax base is over six billion dollars, as in, Montecitans pay--You get the picture.

Last week, we had Rudy Gullianni come through to talk to the Republicans, which meant he shook hands with enough force to loosen pocket change, should he decide to run for the Republican nomination. Rudy was so confident of his appeal that he wore brown shoes with a blue suit, a fact that the Montecito Journal did not report. Rumor has it that John McCain, not to be outdone by a potential rival, is going to walk through the Montecito Friday Farmers' Market on Coast Village Road,without his bullet-proof vest.

Montecito is a refreshingly odd place to live and to have one's work appear, creating bonds with all levels of the political spectrum. My mailman sent his former neighbor a copy of one of my reviews. The review was an highly favorable one of a recent work by Jim Harrison. The mailman's former neighbor was Jim Harrison.

Dr. Laura kindly sent me an autographed copy of her latest book. Steve Gilbar, a Montecito author who writes books about books, sent me an email about a review I'd done on Philip Roth,one of his great favorites, enjoying the views in the review but detesting as execrable my pun, The Gripes of Roth.

It comes down to the fact that after all these years, I still cannot get over the high of being paid to read a book I would ordinarily read, then write something about it.

There are those who, alas, get high sniffing glue or nitrous oxide. I get high sniffing books.