What are you reading?

[Solnishka79]

I'm re-reading a lot of Carolly Erickson's historical biographies and historical fiction. Currently "Royal Panopoly" and "Josephine, Bird of Paradise".

[whitelight]

I've been re-reading Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, and working on Jared Diamond's Collapse. Both are brilliant.

[dirac]

Just a brief thank-you to those who are posting and keeping this thread going!

[cubanmiamiboy]

Yesterday while at the beach-(what a great hot sunny day it was! )-i resumed the provocative and wonderfully varied David Leavitt & Mark Mitchell's compilation "The Penguin Book Of Gay Short Stories". Wow...anybody...?

[Petra]

I'll bite. I'm reading the Lonely Planet's guide to Coastal California and the Unofficial Guide to California with Kids!! The trip is 3 months away, and I think I'll have those books by heart by then.

By the way, any recommendations for 'real' books, fiction and non-fiction, about the area?

[bart]

I enjoy these posts. I also enjoy learning about the circumstances in which the books are being read.

I've always been scattered all over the place when it comes to reading and tend to have several titles -- fitted into several categories each -- going at the same time. They sit on a special "book table," and I tend to group them by categories or goals of interest to me at the time. Currently, or just finished, are:

1) Be a Well-informed Citizen: Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy. Weisberg is editor in cheif of Slate on-line magazine. The book tells us much more about how our current President got to be the person he is then some of us might want to know. But it does explain some of the administrations priorities and enterprises. For some reason, I have to put it down after every chapter or so and some time off.

2) Always have a ballet book or two going: Just finished Richard Buckle's George Balanchine, Dance Master. I prefer it to Taper's book or to the brief, selective volumes by Gottlieb and by Teachout. Also: you can't wait for Arlene Croce forever! I learned of this out-of-print book on Ballet Talk and ordered a used copy on Amazon (click above.) The same was true for Keith Money's fabulous coffee-table-sized volume (2 inches thick!): Anna Pavlova: her Life and Art. There are many, many illulstrations and a long, detailed, and fascinating text.

A book I've not been able to finish: Peter Martins''s Far From Denmark . What can one say? Suzanne Farrell, Allegra Kent, Merrill Ashley, or even Gelsey Kirkland he is not.

3) Don't forget what the world was like when you were young and impressionable: Fred Kaplan's biography of Gore Vidal and the first volume of Vidal's own memoirs, Palimpsest. Vidal is from the generation just before mine. I grew up watching Vidal on the tv talk shows (even Jack Paar and Johnny Carson could be serious in those days). He was mesmerising in his intellectual self-confidence, his command of the English language, and his across-the-board supercool.

[dirac]

He was mesmerising in his breadth of knowledge of experience

He speaks in perfectly parsed sentences and paragraphs, too.

I thought Peter Martins’ book was a pleasurable read – straightforward, tactful, and unpretentious. Perhaps someday he’ll write a sequel. Comparing it to Farrell’s and Kent’s books, or Kirkland’s is a bit like apples and oranges – Martins is writing from the standpoint of a career in medias res, not looking back post-retirement or doing a tell-all like Kirkland. It’s closer to Ashley’s book in viewpoint and approach, and I like it just as much.

In addition, Far From Denmark has an appendix that I wish was required for all dance bios – a detailed list is included of Martins’ roles, where and when he danced them, the names of his partners, and whether or not the role was made on him. Very nice.

By the way, any recommendations for 'real' books, fiction and non-fiction, about the area?

Steinbeck, natch. Kevin Starr has written a series of well researched if uninspired books on California history. I recently read and liked Mike Davis’ Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, if you wind up that far south.

I've been re-reading Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body,

I’d like to revisit that one. I learned a lot from that book.

[papeetepatrick]

I'll bite. I'm reading the Lonely Planet's guide to Coastal California and the Unofficial Guide to California with Kids!! The trip is 3 months away, and I think I'll have those books by heart by then.

By the way, any recommendations for 'real' books, fiction and non-fiction, about the area?

I've got tons of recommendations about SoCal, one of my fetishes, so you can tell me if you want any SoCal fiction and more guidebooks, of which I always read many, many for Los Angeles. Because it's the kind of place you need to know more about before going there or you'll be disoriented. You DO need to know those by heart.

I liked 'Far from Denmark' as providing some good information. It was useful, and I do tend to remember odd details from it, for some reason.

[Ray]

I'll bite. I'm reading the Lonely Planet's guide to Coastal California and the Unofficial Guide to California with Kids!! The trip is 3 months away, and I think I'll have those books by heart by then.

By the way, any recommendations for 'real' books, fiction and non-fiction, about the area?

Joan Didion!

[dirac]

Joan Didion!

Sometimes, when she's on. But other times I have the impression that her true subject is Me and My Sensibility, and not California at all.

I've got tons of recommendations about SoCal, one of my fetishes, so you can tell me if you want any SoCal fiction and more guidebooks, of which I always read many, many for Los Angeles

Papeetepatrick, I’m sure we’d all want to hear more about some of your favorites. Please share them with all of us!

[Petra]

Thanks for all the recommendations so far! Papeetepatrick, please share. Is there any writing on the Santa Barbara area?

And maybe this discussion should be moved to a separate thread?

[bart]

Still wending my way through Gore Vidal, struck by how much I admire his writing while not always enjoying his high lvel of self-regard. On the other hand, he does tell a good story. Here is another of his ballet bits:

Frederick Ashton had a long complex relationship with the heiress and socialite Alice Astor, who also became a close friend (and neighbor in Dutchess County) of young Vidal. This is from the early 50s

Alice was in love with the choreographer Frederick Ashton, who was not in love with her but accepted, sometimes with ill grace, her numerous gifts; he often stayed with her at Rhinecliff, where I got to know him. He affected to be in love with me. I said no; but enjoyed his company. He was pouter-breated, with a permanently crooked finger that was ideal for a wicked witch in pantomime but not so good in other roles. I watched, with him, the first Ashton ballet that I ever saw in New York, Les Patineurs. I thought it very pretty but not Tudor, Robbins, or de Mille.

Freddie was a great mimic -- mime, too -- and one of his best numbers was that of Ida Rubenstein, a rich woman who commissioned ballets for herself to dance, with decor by the likes of Picasso, music by Stravinsky, and so on. Somehow, the young Freddie ended up with her company. As a prima ballerina, Ida had but a single flaw: She could not, properly speaking, dance.

As "Madame," Freddie would take the floor in Alice's drawing room. Slowly, awkwardly, he would get on point. Arms in a spaghettilike adage. Then a stricken look as he realizes he is about to fall off point. Teeters toward sofa. Clutches sofa. Radiant smile as he gets behind the sofa and comes off point with a crash, accepting the cheers of a great audience.

Can this routine, which Ashton was performing for friends as early as 1931, possibly have influenced the subsequent choeography for Miss Piggy, dancing on Sesame Street with Nureyev? If so ... you heard it first on Ballet Talk!

Incidentally, Astor figures prominently in Julie Kavanagh's biography Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton. Gore Vidal gets a few mentions as well.

[canbelto]

I'm reading the absolutely heartbreaking "Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would be Human". As animal lover the chimp's journey from a Manhattan brownstone to a medical research laboratory to a chimp retirement farm is one of the most entertaining yet disturbing books I've ever read.

[cubanmiamiboy]

I could- (finally)- start on Patrick Mullins "Day of Cine-Musique"...

... ...

[papeetepatrick]

I could- (finally)- start on Patrick Mullins "Day of Cine-Musique"...

... ...

What an admirable way to use one's time!

GWTW--Ray's Didion recommendation, of course, with special emphasis on the non-fiction: The early collections of essays 'the White Album' and 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem' and the 2003 'Where I Was From' (this is marvelous) as well as her Hollywood novel 'Play It As It Lays.'

All of Raymond Chandler's detective novels are the Holy Grail of the L.A. Noir tradtion. Martinis at Frank & Musso's on Hollywood Blvd. are supposed to be 'pure Raymond Chandler'. Other detective writers of the area (with often changed place names) include Ross McDonald and James Ellroy, for the rough stuff. Kenneth Anger for Hollywood gossip (true type, skip the Jackie Collins stuff--but I imagine I need not enumerate fairly well-known Hollywood lit, of the diva-bio sort: That won't really help you with a vacation or tour, and if you're interested in the old Hollywood houses of stars, go to Benedict Canyon and a guidebook to those will tell you who lived/lives where on Roxbury, and where to drive in Bel Air to catch a glimpse of something Liz or Barbra owned/own, etc.)

'Picturing Los Angeles' by Jon and Nancy Wilkmon is a coffee table book that has wonderful history, in words and photos of the area. I'm delighted to own it, but you'd have to buy it most likely. There are many other histories, though, going back to the 60s that you'll easily find listed.

Other guidebooks that I can think of using (and Los Angeles is a city that really needs to be known well before wandering into it as an explorer, although imagine you've been there anyway before), as you do more of the decision-making than it does, compared to cities that didn't put up their Downtowns after they'd put up all the surrounding areas) are Hidden Los Angeles and Southern California. I recall this being the one from which I got the best information, so I'll make only that one recommendation in the guidebook category, since you've already got a bunch of those.

As for Santa Barbara, I don't know it in literature much except as a place gone through. It's too prosperous to work well as a fiction location, and is well away from urban blight (Bel Air and Beverly Hills, on the other hand, are always a part of Chandler and other noir things, because they are adjacent to plenty of urban blight). I'm sure there are some things, though, you could find if you want a basic history.

Of contemporary Hollywood industry, Bruce Wagner's novels are good, although I find that they sometimes confuse realism with crassness. And they are literarily suspect in that there is a lot of 'intertextuality' with actual Hollywood types, in a smug and condescending way. They are actually very provincial while always posing as cosmopolitan, but they are admirable in their own way, and I've read about 5 of them, including the trilogy.

I also remember T. Jefferson Parker's 'Laguna Heat', an 80s detective fiction, that is okay, and reminds me that I've never gotten down to Laguna.

[cubanmiamiboy]

What an admirable way to use one's time!

Ehem, Patrick...again...

[Petra]

papeetepatrick, thanks for all the details. Now I just have to get to the library and start cracking.

[vagansmom]

I am currently reading a novel by the Irish writer, Jamie O'Neill, called At Swim Two Boys. It's set in the early 1900's, around WW1, and documents the early years of the IRA while exploring the lives of two culturally different Irish boys who later become lovers. So it's both a great novel about the Irish fight for freedom around the Easter Uprising and an intriguing and lovely romantic story.

O'Neill's prose sings. It's so delectable that I find myself reading and rereading, just to savor the novelty of his word usage and the vivid images his prose calls up in my mind. It's not just that he is writing in early 1900's Irish vernacular. He creates new verbs that feed the imagination. The only other contemporary writer I've read who has matched O'Neill's creativity is Annie G. Rogers, whose autobiographical book, A Shining Affliction, about the abuse of client/patient relationships (not in the way we automatically assume to be abuse though), was mesmerizing not just for its content, but also for her prose.

Although my daily life is often filled with native Irish people here in America, I still had a bit of trouble getting into the rhythm of the language in O'Neill's book. But having been around so many Irish people my entire adult life, and visiting Ireland every 5 or 6 years, I'm conversant in the culture. That really aids my enjoyment of the book, especially since, at least so far in my reading, O'Neill quotes song passages frequently and cracks jokes that require one to understand the song's history. However, neither of the two people who recommended this book to me know much at all about Irish culture and song, and yet both proclaimed it as their favorite book in several years.

[dirac]

Thanks, papeetepatrick, for the list. Chandler is great but as a tour guide, I dunno, and his L.A. has dated. It’s interesting that Chandler thought little of Macdonald (I agree) and Ellroy doesn’t think much of Chandler (I disagree; Ellroy is just trying to push Chandler out of the high seat). I can’t read Macdonald or Ellroy myself. Would be curious to know what you think if you do, GWTW.

You should note that Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon books are pretty sordid with some crudity in the writing. Not for every taste. Should you check them out of the library, don’t leave them around the kids, if they are younger. Also he cannot be relied upon when it comes to details, which often as not he gets wrong. His account of the Black Dahlia case, for example, is quite unreliable.

I am currently reading a novel by the Irish writer, Jamie O'Neill, called At Swim Two Boys. It's set in the early 1900's, around WW1, and documents the early years of the IRA while exploring the lives of two culturally different Irish boys who later become lovers. So it's both a great novel about the Irish fight for freedom around the Easter Uprising and an intriguing and lovely romantic story.

Thanks, vagansmom. Good to hear from you.

[Quiggin]

Has "The Last Tycoon" been mentioned as a book on LA? It is dated and as romantic (romantic and banal is the maybe the general tenor of LA) as the Chandler books are, but I think the part about the cameraman who can't find work--there is a rumor going about that he is losing his sight--is very true to life. When I lived there, everyone pretended Los Angeles was easy going and there were few rules but there were and they were invisible and lethal.

It's also interesting that everything real in Los Angeles is seen from through the eyes of a detective. Or the ex-patriots: Stravinsky, Renoir, Adorno, Brecht, or the Swiss photographer Robert Frank.

Musso & Frank: I was not yet up to the Martini stage, papeetepatrick, (it sounds like I missed out on something very interesting) when I lived on Poinsettia Place, but many of my afternoons were saved by the luxury of Musso's dependable 1.75 soups. They did bake their own bread when no one else did, made bread pudding from the crusts and their hearts of iceberg lettuce salad was always a great treat. The chef used to cut out coupons from newspapers with his carving knife at the lunch counter late in the afternoons. And what the waiters referred to as "new" room had been built in the 1940s.

John Rechy: The church, whose steps he is standing on--he's dressed in a rather strange, fairly unerotic huster's jump suit--in the author's photo of his new book, is just around the corner from Musso's, on Las Palmas, just beyond the outdoor newsstand. Dirac's warning is correct, Rechy's retelling of moldy old Hollywood tales is very untrustworthy. His fiction is, at some level, untrustworthy too. Alfred Chester got in lots of trouble for panning Rechy's first book in a review that begins this way,

"This is the worst confection yet devised by the masterminds behind the Grove epater-la-post-office Machine. So fabricated is it that, despite the adorable photograph on the rear of the dust jacket, I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy—and if there is, he would probably be the first to agree that there isn't—" [Full text at NYRB - $]

[papeetepatrick]

Quiggin, that's all interesting, just quickly first--I'm glad you brought up Rechy, but dirac was, I believe, referring to Kenneth Anger's two Hollywood Babylon books, which are not fictional but may have suspect facts (they are not nearly all, though--there is plenty about Fatty Arbuckle, Clara Bow and Rudolph Valentino that is just as documentable as his visit to the Tomb of the Unknown Starlet). But if anything is not for children in book form, it is just kept away from them--that is, certainly all the fiction we've thus far mentioned. 'Innocent LA fiction' may be an oxymoron. There's also John Fante, famous for 'Ask the Dust', where you get big doses of old Bunker Hill just as are filmed in the 1955 Mickey Spillane movie 'Kiss Me Deadly', which i recently re-watched and think is brilliant, one of the best of the whole genre.

I rather like Rechy's dirty books about gay LA, but strongly doubt GWTW needs any of them. Interesting the things you've said of him, I don't know many facts about him. The books are all strange but have a peculiar lurid beauty from time to time, expecially 'the Coming of the Night.' They document a gay subculture, and that is all they do. The first one interests me in being a kind of document of what Pershing Square used to be, and the nowhere location it now is close to the Civic Center.

Yes, 'The Last Tycoon' should be included, I'd momentarily forgotten that, and there are many interesting things about the story conference scenes early on, as well as the 'born in Hollywood' element of Cecilia Brady as opposed to Monroe Stahr that Didion points out in The White Album, in that that description explained what the difference would be for someone born in los Angeles and to whom the fantasy was nothing special--Cecilia grew up with those things that other people find fantasy being the normal things.

Oh yes, there is Otto Friedrichs' late-80's 'City of Nets', a marvelous non-fiction 'portrait of Hollywood in the 40s' (this I highly recommend, but had forgotten), and dirac had mentioned Mike Davis, a Marxist who has written some interesting scholarly city studies of Los Angeles, 'City of Quartz' and 'Ecology of Fear', as well as the San Diego one she mentioned, which I've also read. Davis appears to be very authoritative, but his gloomy forecasts ought to always be kept in mind, insofar as the 'certain dire predictions' very often seem not to have happened: The rot about tornadoes appearing frequently and of at least strongly-moderate-wind--but somehow never being recorded in the LA Times--has not worked for me, given that I read these 10 years ago, and still have never read anywhere of a tornado at the Music Center that knocked anything over. Earthquakes in Beverly Hills were supposed to have happened, in any case he knows they still wll. I read a lot of him, and I am not convinced.

Love your stories of Musso & Frank's, and find it delicious you lived on Poinsettia Place, which I've walked on in several of my visits there. That part of Hollywood between Western and Highland, but above H'wood Blvd., even if you don't go up into the Hills (there are wonderful places you can even walk to there as well, but not everyone is as intrepid about that; but I love Whitley Heights and Camrose Canyon for old Hollywood architecture), some of those areas along Franklin and Poinsettia Place and up by Runyon Canyon have the odd old 40s picket-fence type house still there, operative, well-maintained, lived-in and looking as if out of films that were set in the Midwest. I was surprised to see these. There's an old Talmadge-sister-owned pile up near Camino Palmero, and the old Nelson House, on which the TV Ozzie and Harriet house was modeled is still in good shape in Hollywood, I believe that is right on Camino Palmero.

Chandler somehow reminds me of the nearly-total demolition of the Ambassador Hotel and the rusty-looking hulk of the Coconut Grove that was still there in full wreckage this past Xmas. I wish I had gone a few years ago. They either are or are not going to keep at least only the Coconut Grove as a high school, the reports are by now conflicting. It was strange to see the Coconut Grove for the first time only in this condition, and this is on Wilshire around Catalina, I believe. This, though, is a 'vintage LA' kind of thing, but the Oscars were awarded there at least 6 times, I believe, it's a shame this happened.

I can see why you might say 'romantic and banal', but I think these happen side by side in L.A., not simultaneeously, otherwise one gets a banal romanticism, which truly sounds too drear.

[Quiggin]

papeetepatrick and dirac, I apologize for my Rechy / Anger dyslexia -- I sometimes cross them up. I remember once driving to see Anger films passing along Rechy's Santa Monica Boulevard to see them, maybe that's some of it.

To add to the growing list: Susan Sontag, who (I think) went to Hollywood High and listened to Arthur Schnabel records at listening booths at (I assume) at Music City at Sunset and Vine (she didn't specify where and I didn't ask her the one chance I had), also wrote a nice account of going to visit Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades (where Nijinska also lived).

Romantic banality, instead of banal romanticism I would have it--or yes, banality and romanticism side by side, marbled as in marzipan.

[dirac]

Kenneth Anger's two Hollywood Babylon books, which are not fictional but may have suspect facts

Unfortunately, many of the details just can’t be trusted. But if you want an overview of Hollywood scandals past they’re a good place to start.

I think the part about the cameraman who can't find work--there is a rumor going about that he is losing his sight--is very true to life. When I lived there, everyone pretended Los Angeles was easy going and there were few rules but there were and they were invisible and lethal.

Hello, Quiggin, thanks for mentioning ‘The Last Tycoon.’ IMO it’s not really ‘An Unfinished Novel’ as Edmund Wilson described it. It’s a fragment, and who knows how much of it Fitzgerald would have kept in the end. As you note, it’s romanticized but there are things in it that still apply in the Hollywood today. (“Writers are children.... I’ll give them money. But I won’t give them power,” etc.)

It's also interesting that everything real in Los Angeles is seen from through the eyes of a detective. Or the ex-patriots: Stravinsky, Renoir, Adorno, Brecht, or the Swiss photographer Robert Frank.

Chandler was a kind of expatriate, too, raised in England for many years. I think of Hockney, also.

The detective motif comes from Chandler mainly, I think. It’s impossible to imagine Macdonald’s work without Chandler’s precedent, and the same is true of Ellroy, even if only in reaction to Chandler. (Ellroy’s heroes are often cops and not private detectives, I think, and he also avoids using a lone protagonist.)

But if anything is not for children in book form, it is just kept away from them--that is, certainly all the fiction we've thus far mentioned.

I read Chandler, Fitzgerald, and Macdonald as a kid and I don’t think they will do any harm. I issued a parent alert about Anger’s books because of the graphic photographs – you want to see Carole Landis dead on the bathroom floor, here’s your chance – and the sometimes crude prose.

I’ll dissent from the Didion chorus and say that I thought ‘Play It As It Lays’ was annoying.

Susan Sontag, who (I think) went to Hollywood High

Yup. Graduated at fifteen, I remember reading. Disgusting.

[papeetepatrick]

[Yup. Graduated at fifteen, I remember reading. Disgusting.

I found about Sontag's Holywood High years from the fake Blackfoot Indian, Jack Marks aka Jamake Highwater, in his book 'Shadow Show', after the facts about his made-up background had taken hold and and he was thrown out of the big Indian associations, with especially damning articles by Hank Adams, which can be found on the net. He was actually a modern dancer and choreographer named Gregory Makropoulous, and lied as well about his age (some 15 years chopped off). Sontag outed him still further in the 90s, as he always wanted to talk about how 'close Susan and I are', and she responded with 'I did know a Jack Marks in high school, but as for the person who calls himself Jamake Highwater and whom I don't know, I wouldn't believe a thing he said!' This was good work on Susan's part, although I think both dirac and Quiggin are bigger fans--I believe more of what she said than 'Highwater', but that does not end up being a large quantity even so. I would not, either because of or despite my lack of enthusiasm for most of her work, include her as part of California literature, although that's as convenient as anywhere else to remind one of Hollywood High, which has murals of Judy Garland and other great scholars who graduated from there. Sontag soon enough became very identified with New York and Paris (living at one point in one of Sartre's apartments), but she hasn't actually written anything of importance about California, has she? unless you include her hierarchy of movie stars in the Notes on Camp. Even Norman Mailer's book 'Marilyn' would tell you a good bit, though, however full of the usual hyperbole. But, in fact, even if 'Highwater' faked being a Blackfoot Indian, changing his story many times, once he was in bad odour with Bill moyers, Mortimer Adler, Columbia University and all the other people he'd fooled, the book I mentioned above does occasionally have some good oblique bits about some figures--concluding with an unbelievably stupid lecture to Salieri, identifyhing as best he could with the Mozart of 'Amadeus' and telling Salieri 'the Music lives on!' How totally tawdry.

He's got fairly interesting little flotsam and jetsam about James Leo Herlihy (Midnight Cowboy), whom he probably did know, psosibly even wisely and not too well for all I know. 'highwater' was an extraordinary con artist, I know of no other who got into more elite positions by lying his way into them.

Agree on Steinbeck, but surely there are some other important writers from Northern California.

Chandler better for atmosphere, and I prefer to MacDonald, but I still like MacDonald too.

Edited to add: I definitely needed to include Didion's late husband John Gregory Dunne, whose essay collection from the late 70s 'Quntana and Friends' is first-rate. Also, his novel 'Playland' is quite good. He writes about Torrance and Palos Verdes as well as the industry insider stuff, and although she's considered the better writer usually, and definitely quoted about SoCal (and the rest of CA. as well), he is pretty definitely more in love with the place than she was, and that's worth taking into account.

[dirac]

Is there any writing on the Santa Barbara area?

Ross Macdonald, mentioned by papeetepatrick, set many, if not most, of his books in a fictional city called Santa Teresa, which is actually Santa Barbara, where he lived.

Raymond Chandler’s Bay City is Santa Monica.