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Coffin Nails/Food For The Silverfish

16 Sep

Yesterday ended with the glorious culmination of a prolonged search for a rarefied treasure. In my formative years, I was a carnivorous reader (and can still largely claim that title), spending magnanimous amounts of time in my elementary school’s tiny library. In this library, I discovered a passion for fairy tale’s and corresponding literature, such as a poem devoted to the woe’s of a greedy child and the lengths her sister goes to save her. Comprised of goblins, golden hair, fruit and a moral in there somewhere – the scene would enact itself out in my head. Then I graduated and didn’t really think about this story or other tales I had read. Years later, in college, these stories reappeared in my conscience and I had to have them back. I scoured the internet, I went back to my elementary school (thrown out – or something – that crochety old librarian!) , but the books I had loved were gone. I wasn’t finished. I was armed with just the plot line.

Photo by Javier Cruzado
Yesterday, I laid out the plot of one title, called Shadow Castle to a co-worker (ok, I knew two of the titles, this one and The Woodcutter’s Daughter). It sounded to her like Plato’s Allegory of The Cave, and she urged me to Wiki it. Instead, I got online and thought – I’ll look on Amazon – just real quick.I love Amazon, it offers many opportunities with its money saving options and grouping of booksellers from across the U.S. We go a long way back, and I’ve never had a bad experience, only impatience while waiting for items to arrive in the mail. So, there we were, face to face – me and my favored website, hoping it wouldn’t fail me now. There it was, Shadow Castle by Marian Cockrell and Olive Bailey (back in print), and others such as George Macdonald’s likened tales to Tolkein, but I still didn’t have my poem filled with Goblins. I went back online and typed in elements of the plot via Google. Through some obscure discussion group, I found it – Christina Rossetti’s Goblin’s Market. How come I couldn’t find this all before?

Dead Hour: Photo by Jason Larkin
To read this poem now, I’d never have guessed I read it first as a small 3rd grader. It is not the definition of facile. I assume the tales’ proclivity towards strange and creepy made its mark, as I tend to read things of chthonic nature to this day, albeit less demons and more dark. Only, my lengthy search reveals one thing – it is my tactile satisfaction of a book that enhances its enjoyment (i.e. crumpled pages of a well-read tome). It is poignant then, that the future of rarefied books and their availability (juxtaposed against cyber-want-it-now-mentality-craving culture) is coming to a crippling end. Publishing had another nail hammered into it’s coffin yesterday, and I’m concerned. Who cares enough to maintain books integrity? Must they all shuffle into public libraries and private collections in lieu of Amazon’s Kindle and iphone’s online newspapers? Like the way of Lehman’s and AGI, with reclining newspaper and magazine distribution rates, low reading statistics and the ease of our digital age, we’re all in for a nosedive.

Looking Back: Photo by Garry Rafaele

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Geisha, Interrupted

8 May

Bar Flower, a novel written by Lea Jacobson, now takes a place among my stash of favored literature. Her writing is eloquent and intelligent, thoughtful and easy-to-read, otherwise described as straight forward – with no guessing at metaphors and vocabulary. All in all, a very skilled artist. In the wake of my increasing thirst for all things Japanese and the country’s darker underpinnings – including those of hostess clubs and virulent prostitution – Bar Flower emerged at precisely the right time. Lea keeps a blog called Geisha, Interrupted that is equally engulfing for the reader. A homage to her life in Tokyo, Japan.

My thoughts today have nothing to do with her book and the world of hostess clubs, but rather Haruki Murakami, who writes in his latest book After Dark this poignant paragraph, chosen by Lea and advocated by myself…

Archetype and Octopus

The following is a passage from page 92 of After Dark, the latest Haruki Murakami novel in English translation. For some reason I found it so brilliant, and, so perfectly bizarre!

* * *

Takahashi: “As I sat in court, though, and listened to the testimonies of the witnesses and the speeches of the prosecuters and the arguments of the defense attorneys and the statements of the defendants, I became a lot less sure of myself. …To my eyes, this system I was observing, this ‘trial’ thing itself, began to take on the appearance of some special, weird creature.”

Mari: “Weird creature?”

Takahashi: “Like, say, an octopus. A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean. I’m sitting there listening to these trials, and all I can see in my head is this creature. It takes on all kinds of different shapes- sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers….What I want to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.”

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Daily Serving

23 Mar

There’s a surprising few of us getting coffee, hanging out, and catching up on the fine cuisine offered around L.A. – and then blogging about it. My curiosity about the people in the Los Angeles blogosphere led to me to these L.A. expatriates and colleagues. Enjoy!

LA FILTERED

CAROLINE ON CRACK

CITY FEEDS LA

FRANKLIN AVENUE

LOS ANGELES METBLOG

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Loving Writers

11 Mar


Writers are to me, some special creation, with knowledge of how to slice life and put it into words. In advocating my love, I quote Adrian Leeds: Francophile, real estate investor and New Yorker in Paris, “writers are really fascinating people. They are both intellectual and creative at the same time. Their words paint images on blank paper not very differently than drawing lines or painting strokes on a canvas to make an impression. They are curious by nature. One can’t express even a simple emotion without reflecting on it, questioning it and research is key. For that reason, they travel, they explore and they wake up each day needing their ‘fix’ to express themselves in a solitary way, with no one but themselves to criticize.”

Such is the life of a writer. The ones that ended up in LA can be counted as some of the best. They write screenplays and sitcoms, selling entertainment to the rest of the world. I searched for LA writers and found a host of communities and opportunities to flex your writing muscle. Most interesting though, was the history that writers have with Los Angeles and how each individual’s perception managed to shape the outsider’s view – no one finds LA to be the same place. In Adam Kirsch’s article L.A. Without A Map, he explains that leafing through an anthology of Los Angeles titled Writing Los Angeles (see below), he felt that, “if you are a native of Los Angeles, paging through all the travel notes and memoirs and short stories is a strange sensation. Where you expect to find the city itself, there is only a carnival of metaphors,” and there again is the point that LA is not the same city to anyone. Where there’s failure, for another it’s success – such is the life of an L.A. foreigner turned native.

Links to the hub of writers in the city: This list is barely a hub (sorry, I will update asap, but to get you started)

The “BIG 4,” representing some of the top talent in the industry, get to know them well: William Morris among them. I actually had a hard time finding information on the big agencies. There’s an LA story about a job list released by these agencies. Story is, the assistants who see the list usually score the jobs that lead somewhere, leaving everyone else to struggle with the menial, and effectively stay on the outside.

Writers Guild of America (click here)

The OFFICIAL LA writers site. Join a writing group: (click here)

A litany of LA perceptions evoked by writers:

Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology by David L. Ulin.

The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle For A Livable City by Robert Gotlieb, Regina Freer, Mark Vallilanatos, and Peter Dreier.

Another City: Writing From Los Angeles by David L. Ulin.

Imagining Los Angeles: A City In Fiction by David Fine.

All of these can be found at Amazon (click here)

Licked

8 Mar

Dawn licks the serrated edges of the city, threatens to douse the night in lurid illumination.  The darkness quivers, and I stir from sleep.

It is the City Of Angels, but only devils brood here.  They draw new blood everyday. The dark heart of Los Angeles is seeded by baneful demons.  I was an angel once, but the devils breathe smoky strife. Their noxious breath infects the plumbing and pollutes the air. I am here; never immune. The infection spreads from one person to the next. As each betrays the other, our dystopia threads the angst that frisks our bodies, setting in, a virile mix.  Love is lost. Another empty vessel emerges into day from the depths of unrequited love.

We are here; Stripped bare, beaten up, hearts set firmly in ice.  We drive in heated traffic, scratching at the walls that surround us, at our isolated existence. Anger sets in. It burrows deep into our flesh impregnating our bodies with unhappiness.   LA promised.  We were moths to the flame, we never had a chance.  I am a remnant, left in the fire to burn to ash.  Not knowing what to make of the evil devices against us, we hide in protective crevices, which avail nothing.  We are bloodied by the dawn.

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This Is My Brain on Blogs

5 Mar

Many a night have I pried open my eyelids to finish books and articles written by writers whose voice provoke a sense of accomplishment, and my faith in humanity. Meaning, I finally found someone who’s intelligent – at least on paper. Witty, dextrous, thought-provoking, hit your knee hilarious or let’s face it – cutting-edge bitchy – writing is always welcome to my time. It makes my day. In Derek De Koff, I found credence. In his article This Is My Brain on Chantix, he thinks on the struggle of smoking and medicinal induced suicidal tendencies, with big help from a small pill.

Educate Yourself….Read Something Already…………

The bloggers of NY Magazine’s The Cut…..Their fashion judgments are brutal but you’ll be laughing so hard, you won’t care they’re so catty.

Jezebel: Celebrity, Sex, Fashion: Without Airbrushing….If you think the gays and girls from The Cut are ruthless, you’re about to get a lesson in clever putdowns and cutting remarks. Run mostly by women, I’m surprised I don’t hear more about this blog in mainstream media.

Copyranter…….This saavy New York copywriter knows how to turn a phrase and make it count. He guarantees two blog postings per day (guarantee void everywhere).

Something Rotten……Copenhagen is a hot bed of interesting social observation. Aaron is adept at making his observations to the point and thoughtful, and sometimes just down right funny as a Londoner on a quest for love in the city of cycle culture.

Finally, to open up your network, the Fistful of Euros site will show you where to find the blog winners of 2007 here.

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