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with these restrictions, I took to the streets again in what seemed to me an entrepreneurial coup, buying slightly out-of-date newspapers from a junk dealer and selling them to the service men as Home Town Papers.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.

The Universe: out of Beta

Everyone else's computer is faster than yours.

It takes longer for your computer to fire up, and to shut down.

Of all your friends, acquaintances, and students, you get the most spam. If it were possible for computers to fart, your would. There are actually times when you think it does.

Your friends invariably find more interesting web sites.

Even though you have a respected back-up system which assures you it is on the job, you lose more really good material than anyone else you know.

Your friends, acquaintances, and students have better ideas than yours. Even an innocent question such as, where do you want to eat produces a better alternative.

All the teachers you know have more interesting faculty meetings. Some even serve sandwiches.

Everyone you know seems to have at least one extraordinary item of clothing from The Gap, Old Navy, or Ross.

Everyone you know seems to have just finished a book that is more interesting than the book you just finished reading.

Everyone you know seems to have time to read all the books they want.

It is not that you are defensive or self-pitying, or that you brood about your luck having run out or that you indulge in schadenfreude with anyone but the current President and Vice President of the United States. You have some understanding of the pulleys, wheels, and balances of the playing field.

You have a splendid dog, which is worth something, even though she does not always come when you call her as everyone elses' dogs come when called.

But when she does come, the sight of her running toward you, flat out and intent, causes you to hear the pulleys, wheels, and counterweights creaking and you know, you just feel that you are ahead on points.

The Uninvited Guest

Ah, you got to thinking Biblical with that title.

Or maybe visiting family.

Or even a forgotten order for a book from Amazon or Abe Books or some such place, showing up in the mail box with the Spring glut of catalogues, inducements to change wireless phone service, and warnings from desperate Republican politicians that the Democrats are undermining the President's agenda.

Nah; I'm talking about the Spring Books edition of The New York Review of Books. One of the earliest of the modern generation of significant book reviews--The Saturday Review of Literature was toast long before NYBR got its sketchy, graduate English Department look out among us.

I'd made pretty good work through a pile of reviews, even selecting this week's candidate for my own column and getting a nice jump on the reading. Students were beginning to howl, customers were wondering when to expect, but as well as one can be caught up without being thought unconnected, I had things in hand.

Slippery hand, especially when I puled NYRB out of the box and began to note, alas, all the new titles under review and in the ads. University of Chicago Press has a nifty-looking Rembrandt and the Female Nude.Yale has Notebooks of Tennessee Williams,Toby Press, of whom I'd never heard, has a hot-looking novel;Rutgers has an intriguing Jane Austen Companion,Vintage has a Selected Poems of Auden,that looks to be a must-have, and Pantheon, always reliable, has Shakespeare & Company;all this before looking at an appealing series of writers from various countries, in this case Ireland, Poland, and Mexico, and Kansas doing a title that is a grabber, The Last Cattle Drive.

All this, mind you, before getting into the books under review, including one by one of my favorites, Howard Norman, reviewed by Pico Iyer, one of the better reviewers in America, and Jonathan Raban, taking off on the challenging conservative who has fallen out with Mad King George and begun to favor the junior senator from Illinois.

Distractions. Purposeful distractions.

On a more positive note, let's hope they are clamorous enough in voice to distract this man away from smugness or any sense that he is in any way caught up with the work to be done, the things to be taken in and learned.

Due to the random forces of proximity, the NYRB was folded over the Winter edition of The Sewanee Review, a step or two up on the literary later, reaching more to the academy than the generalist reader, and from the look of it, containing not its usual one or two short stories but five. But there it is, out in the open, like a prowling relative looking for a week or two away from his own life.

Perhaps it is Biblical, after all: The Aramaic words appearing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, mene, mene, tekel, upharashin, interpreted by the Prophet Daniel to mean that the king (Belshazzar, not Bush) had been weighed and found deficient. Well, maybe Bush, too.

In my case, you have been held in the balance and found unread.

The Uninvited Guest

Ah, you got to thinking Biblical with that title.

Or maybe visiting family.

Or even a forgotten order for a book from Amazon or Abe Books or some such place, showing up in the mail box with the Spring glut of catalogues, inducements to change wireless phone service, and warnings from desperate Republican politicians that the Democrats are undermining the President's agenda.

Nah; I'm talking about the Spring Books edition of The New York Review of Books. One of the earliest of the modern generation of significant book reviews--The Saturday Review of Literature was toast long before NYBR got its sketchy, graduate English Department look out among us.

I'd made pretty good work through a pile of reviews, even selecting this week's candidate for my own column and getting a nice jump on the reading. Students were beginning to howl, customers were wondering when to expect, but as well as one can be caught up without being thought unconnected, I had things in hand.

Slippery hand, especially when I puled NYRB out of the box and began to note, alas, all the new titles under review and in the ads. University of Chicago Press has a nifty-looking Rembrandt and the Female Nude.Yale has Notebooks of Tennessee Williams,Toby Press, of whom I'd never heard, has a hot-looking novel;Rutgers has an intriguing Jane Austen Companion,Vintage has a Selected Poems of Auden,that looks to be a must-have, and Pantheon, always reliable, has Shakespeare & Company;all this before looking at an appealing series of writers from various countries, in this case Ireland, Poland, and Mexico, and Kansas doing a title that is a grabber, The Last Cattle Drive.

All this, mind you, before getting into the books under review, including one by one of my favorites, Howard Norman, reviewed by Pico Iyer, one of the better reviewers in America, and Jonathan Raban, taking off on the challenging conservative who has fallen out with Mad King George and begun to favor the junior senator from Illinois.

Distractions. Purposeful distractions.

On a more positive note, let's hope they are clamorous enough in voice to distract this man away from smugness or any sense that he is in any way caught up with the work to be done, the things to be taken in and learned.

Due to the random forces of proximity, the NYRB was folded over the Winter edition of The Sewanee Review, a step or two up on the literary later, reaching more to the academy than the generalist reader, and from the look of it, containing not its usual one or two short stories but five. But there it is, out in the open, like a prowling relative looking for a week or two away from his own life.

Perhaps it is Biblical, after all: The Aramaic words appearing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, mene, mene, tekel, upharashin, interpreted by the Prophet Daniel to mean that the king (Belshazzar, not Bush) had been weighed and found deficient. Well, maybe Bush, too.

In my case, you have been held in the balance and found unread.

L.A.: La Puebla de la Nuestra Senora la Reyena de los Angeles de Porciuncula

Whenever I return to L.A., which is at least once a week and booked for Summer School and the distinct possibility of two classes during the Fall semester, I am returning to the city that was, when I was born there and grew up in its environs. I am also returning to the city that has built or paved over some of the places where I lived, played, studied, listened to what seemed like endless rich hours of jazz turning into be-bop.

Then, finished with classes and, depending on whim, having either dined or eaten, I head northward for the hundred miles I have put between L.A. and my life as it is now organized. Alas, that hundred miles in many ways is not far enough, because what I arrive home to is Santa Barbara becoming more like L.A.

When I first managed the move to Santa Barbara, I liked to think of it as though it were the L.A. in which I grew up, which is to say I loved Santa Barbara because it was as accessible as L.A. once was--and no longer is.

There is so much of L.A., and, in some large measure due to people from L.A. moving as I did to Santa Barbara,there is so much Santa Barbara. Now that we are into April, the particular graffiti-that-is-not-tagging begins to appear, on the dust of parked cars then creeping over to collections of posters tacked to telephone poles, then impudently sprayed on the rocks at Summerland Beach and Hammond's Meadow: L.A., Go Home. But L.A. is home, come to stay in second or third homes, pieds a terre, time shares, and flat-out illegal rentals.

You first begin to notice L.A. being here on Saturday and Sunday mornings at Pierre La Fond in the upper Village. Requests for strange, pampered food are tossed about, emphasized with the particular whine of an Angeleno who fears he or she is not being understood. Women with eight- and nine-hundred-dollar-a-pair Manolo Blahniks ask restaurant workers if the tortillas have trans fats; they badger health food workers for orgnic peanut butter ground from Valencia nuts, to which sesame seeds have been added to make the peanut butter a complete protein. The BMWs and Porsches and Lamborghinis bear license plate holders advertising automotive agencies in Beverly Hills, Pasadena, Newport Beach. None of these places is L.A., and yet they are L.A., having been swallowed hole by it.

The second wave of the invasion comes during the week, when Jonathan Winters is out and about, treating all of Montecito as a room to be worked. You see him regaling people from L.A. in The Montecito Coffee Shop, also known as The Pharmacy Restaurant. Their faces are aglow. They have not only seen a celebrity, the celebrity has tosed a bon mot at them, then pounced upon them, ad libbing with the fury of a talented mind run amok. Driving by the coffee shop an hour or so later, you see them still, pinned to the wall by Jonathan's rhetoric and wit, their eyes now glazed in terror at the onslaught of this man, this on-goingly funny man, inventing routine before their very eyes,stunning them.

Like San Francisco, Santa Barbara is finite, there is just so much room to sprawl, to expand,but in San Francisco, and now in Los Angeles, buildings go up, taller, more insistent in their architecture. In Santa Barbara, the prices go up. Fixer-uppers on Salinas Street and Old Coast Highway list for seven and eight hundred thousand.

In some ways, Santa Barbarans can no longer afford to live here; they movenorth to Lompoc or even farther to Santa Maria and commute--because L.A. is here.

In some ways, L.A. is not there. I once thought to take a series of photos of places my family had lived in the L.A. Basin, thinking this to be a lovely birthday present for my sister. I dutifully left Santa Barbara with an extra margin of time to allow me to make more than a mere snapshot of my first target, 6145 1/2 Orange Street, which is to say one block north of Wilshire Boulevard, one long block west of Fairfax Avenue, one block south of Sixth Street. A regal, Mediterranean fourplex, stucco with mellowed cedar roof and eaves.

6145 1/2 Orange Street is not there; it is part of a large condo complex that looks as though it came off a Beverly Hills wedding cake. As so much of L.A. has been built over, that link to my past has vanished.

So has the Texas Chili Villa on what was then a large traffic island with an oil pump on La Cienega, between Beverly and Third.

Ken's Hula Hut on upper Melrose, where Howard McGee, Sonny Criss, Teddy Edwards, Hampton Hawes lit up the weekend nights with the pyrotechnics of emerging jazz.

The Haig, one block off Wilshire, just across the street from The Ambassador Hotel. Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Shorty Rogers, Shelley Manne. Forget it. Gone.

Bunker Hill. Gone. The Angels' Flight. Nah. Not the same.

The old rotunda of Fairfax High remains, but the retro-fitting has changed the landscape. Ditto Los Angeles High, where homecoming events require maps to show alums the changes.

In their places, new landscape for new Angelenos. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Already punked by its neighbor, the splendid, flashy Frank Ghery Disney Center. Quick, who was Dorothy Chandler. Hint, used to own the L.A. Times. But see, that's my point. The L.A. Times used to be something and then it was sold and now it has been sold again.

L.A. is a remarkable, anomalous magnet, a place where people want to come, and do; a place people love to hate, a place people can't afford and thus have to look out in the boondocks, the desert made habitable--for a time, places where people want to be, places they could well find gone before they turn around.

L.A. A place where, even now, archaeologists are digging.

Catch-23

It was love at first sight.

Second sight, too, for that matter.

And a few years later, third sight.

I not only don't expect things to change, I have a fresh copy of Joe Heller's archetypal novel, Catch-22, at bedside and had indeed begun my fourth venture inside its labyrinthine and mischievous pages. This was to have been the week, the Golden Oldies week in my review series for the Montecito Journal.(See link below)

Then the package came. I'd actually forgotten making the order and so, when I saw on the label, from The New York Review of Books, I openly wondered what they were sending me and why.

They were sending me The Horse's Mouth, that delightful romp by Joyce Carey, and an all-but forgotten classic by a woefully undervalued author, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson. Thus had I resolved Golden Oldies through the cruelty of April. (BTW, I have never found April to be even mean spirited much less cruel, and I like to think of it as some personal flaw in Eliot for having rendered April with such distaste.)

I made the mistake of browsing the first page of The Horse's Mouth.

Love you like a brother, Yossarian. Identify with you all over the place, and I willget back to you. Promise. If I had a cell phone, I'd make your number--1-800-catch-22--the first on my automatic dial. In a lovely, catch-22 of its own that you'd appreciate, Gulley Jimson, the fine artist of such epic proportions in The Horse's Mouth, so got hold of me that I'm even checking to see if he nicked my money clip.

Jimson may or may not be a great artist; such things are always difficult to tell, even more so when they appear as characters in books, plays, films. A writer giving the mantle of greatness to a fictional artist runs the immediate risk of undermining our credibility. Somerset Maugham saw this in his character, Charles Strickland, whom we are to assume was a fictional rendition of Paul Gauguin. In his novel, The Moon and Six Pence,Maugham expertly skirted the issue of calling Strickland great by having another character realize, when seeing Strickland's nude portrait of his wife, that Strickland had done more to his wife than paint her. Roiling with jealousy and betrayal, the cuckolded husband is about to destroy the canvas but, at the last moment, relents because even he can see its inherent greatness as art.

I do know Jimson's on-going vision, which seems a plausible rendition of the way that kind of artist would look at the world about him. Also known to me is the way Jimson's art has him in thrall to the point where he thinks only of it. His survival techniques center on how to come by paints, brushes, canvases, or other surfaces on which to render his massive visions. Gulley Jimson will lie, cheat, steal to get the money to buy the tools that will allow him to catch his vision, to trap that lightning in the bottle of his imagination.

He is accordingly gritty, not to be trusted, probably not one to be down wind from for too long. He is a reminder to all of us who have visions that we must check in frequently with an assessment of our own progress. Have we seen any of the on-going miracle before us? Have we looked hard enough, leaped high enough, bent low enough? Have we trod the boundaries of sanity, hoping to get closer to our subject, to send back a message of what it was like inside that insanity? Have we made the connection that insanity is as much a part of the human condition as sanity? Gulley Jimson's great influence was William Blake, arguably a squatter in the wretched buildings of insanity.

As a kind of parting gift, one of my two mentors gave me the exercise of imagining I were a Mars probe, sent off to a remote locale to collect artifact and data, then send those back to Earth so that those here could understand and make use of the information to be gleaned from them.

Don't get me wrong about Yossarian. He surely saw the insanity and duplicity of war. the enormous bureaucracy of deceit and self-interest that moves the young as though they were pawns on a chess board of political gain. Joe Heller, his creator, was gone before Mad King George came to power and established his own catch-22, his version of the Tar Baby. Yossarian has become nothing less than Jungian archetype, and so I set him aside with a wrench in my gut. But Gulley calls as the Sirens called.

Why Is This NIght Different?

I come from a number of cultures.

In lovely, delicious ways, I am of all of them.

In other, lovelier, even more succulent ways, I am of none of them, alone in a sense, but connected by a high-speed, broad-band network of incredible sophistication.

In one of the cultures I am from, it is fast approaching that time of year. Sunset tomorrow. The lights go down, the candles go up. We gather, and someone--in years past, it was me--the youngest of the gathering, asks the first question: Why is this night different from any other night? And we are off and running on the things of which ritual is made.

Here, at this very point, is an indelible memory of an even greater treasure. In the scenario of the Passover Seder, the answer to that question is invariably: Because on this night, we eat unleavened bread.

I can remember any number of occasions, including the ones where I finally got to ask the question, the battles that ensued, the pilpul,or Talmudic hair-splitting, if you will of which was in fact the youngest. Who had the credentials to ask the question? I also remember a jealous cousin trying to disqualify me with the distracting argument ad hominem, He skipped fifth grade.

The only thing of relative weight for me was the scene in Michael Chabon's memorable novel, Wonder Boys,in which the only participants in a Seder able to read and recite the Magilla, (The Book of Esther) were native Koreans; the Caucasians present were, alas, limited to American English.

Although at one time I could read and speak Hebrew, I can no decipher the Hebrew words in the Yale emblem attached to the blazer Barnaby Conrad sometimes wears. And yet, I am of that culture and, as Huck Finn said in another context, rotten glad of it, because I was raised in it, of it, and for it. As anyone from any culture must inevitably feel, I am sometimes embarrassed by it. Try, for instance, ignoring what some of my brother and sister culture-ists are doing to Palestinians. Try, for instance, hearing contemporary accounts of the activities of the extremists in my culture, arbitrarily deciding which of us "belong" in the culture--are, indeed, a legitimate part of it. Further indeed: All outrages against humanity may be found within the culture from which I emerge. The reason being that this particular culture is populated with human beings.

The late great philosopher, George Santayana, himself from a particular culture, said of it (The Catholic Church), "I love her, though I know she lies."

Leonard Tourney, a man more devoted to the ritual of his culture than I of mine, also a man with whom I have co-hosted writing workshops and acted in mystery plays for twenty years, and I are able to smile warmly at the lovely anomaly in which each can with legitimacy consider the other a gentile.

Some of my best friends are of cultures.

I am also of the writing culture of which I may--and do--express the same dismay as with my religious culture, each of my two major ethnic cultures, and certainly of my educational culture. I not only feel about UCLA the way George Santayana felt about the religion he was issued at birth, I feel it morally wrong for UCLA to have lost to Florida in the semi-finals.

In some ways I am a walking package of bigotry, carefully nurtured in each of the cultures I represent. The Vaishnavas, well, they got rights, too, but the Shaktas rock! Somebody has to write plot-driven stories, but character-driven stories are clearly more plausible and textured. Swing was okay, but from the moment Gillespie and Parker began flatting fifths and running chord changes so that "Back Home in Indiana" came out sounding like "Donna Lee," jazz came of age. High baroque was righteous enough, but if J.S. Bach had lived long enough, he'd have invented be-bop.

I keep thinking of my friend, Janet, in beautiful downtown Pennsylvania, who during one of our arguments, referred to me as a sleeper, a step either right above or just below one of our faith who attends services on The Day of Atonement and the occasional wedding or Bar- or Bat-Mitzvah. Not her; she knows a thing or two about lighting candles at sundown, how to give thanks in Hebrew for wine, bread, and a few other of life's essentials. Mind you, it is all done without show; it is simply her ticket into the circus tent.

And yes, I used that metaphor with some deliberation because of my belief that all these cultures of which I emerge, all these different, clamoring egos, demanding to be the youngest, the most senior, the most humble, the least likely to use an adverb, are in a circus with an infinitude of rings, acts, illusions. See Dylan Thomas's poem, "I in my intricate image."

See also what the culture wants from us as a price of admission, then see is there is some way to work--water for the elephants, raising the tents, sweeping up after the monkeys--our way in with our own effort.

Like maybe being a writer, a painter, a sculptor, a photographer.

Did John Coltrane work his way in? Did Carmen McRae? Did Diz? And hey, Wayne Shorter?

You bet they did, and because of it, every night since has been different from every other.