It's ON!

Well, we were all thinking it - even my teenage cousins who've read all the Twilightbooks - but Steven King came right out and said it.

Wowsers.

Now I'm just waiting for Meyer to make a snide remark about hackneyed "folksy" dialogue and then maybe Wordloaf or whatever it's called can sponsor a cage match or knife fight or something. Me? My money'd be on King, even after the van accident. He's got the background knowledge, clearly is not troubled by gore, and, I dunno, seems like he'd be handy with a pig-sticker.

Although, if we're being honest, King really isn't in a position to criticize anyone's writing of what he calls in the interview "the physical side" of writing. I mean, I've read IT - you ain't foolin' me on that one, Uncle Stevie.

The Dickensian Aspect

As the last episode of The Wire looms ever larger - seriously, if I had a time machine that could only go forward in time, I'd make it Sunday already and consider the intervening days acceptable losses - I thought I'd throw the following out into the ether:

It became very popular for a while to describe The Wire as "Dickensian" - so much so that the creators wrote some snarky little digs into the current season as regards the use of the word as shorthand by lazy journalists. David Simon, in recent interviews, has pointed out that his show looks much more like a Greek tragedy, in which hapless protagonists are pushed around by forces that are out of their control and utterly indifferent to their fate, only with, say, bureaucratic inertia or unfettered capitalism instead of randy old deities with lightening bolts and spouses who have had enough of their betrothed's swanning about.

So perhaps it's time to put the Dickens comparisons out to pasture. That said, I'd like to humbly submit that if we are going to keep that little trope alive, Hard Times is far closer in spirit to what Simon and Co. seem to be up to, and almost as close in execution as the oft-cited Bleak House.

Thoughts?

Dorothy Parker on Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key

Stumbled upon this tonight while idly browsing through The Complete New Yorker DVD Set I got for Christmas last year, from the April 25, 1931 issue:

"It is true that he has all the mannerisms of Hemingway, with no inch of Hemingway's scope nor flicker of Hemingway's beauty. It is true that when he seeks to set down a swift, assured, well-bred young woman, he devises speeches for her such as are only equaled by the talk Mr. Theodore Dreiser compiled for his society flapper in "An American Tragedy." It is true that he is so hard-boiled you could roll him on the White House lawn. And it is also true that he is a good, hell-bent, cold-hearted writer, with a clear eye for the ways of hard women and a fine ear for the words of hard men, and his books are exciting and powerful and - if I may filch a word from the booksy ones - pulsing. . . Brutal he is, but his brutality, for what he must write, is clean and necessary. . .He sets down only what his characters say, and what they do."

The Glass Key, however, she describes as a bit labored. Fair enough, but it (and Red Harvest) did make a heck of a movie.

Also, come to think of it, Hammett and Parker would have been a great team in a screwball comedy.

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* If there is a nerd in your life, you should seriously consider getting them The Complete New Yorker. Thanks, dad!

Bits and Pieces

From Judith Freeman's excellent-looking The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, a map of Chandler's 35 homes, 24 of which were in Los Angeles, and one of which I recently visited.
(Via LAist)

And from today's recipe round-up:

Christmas Cookies from Around the World: Food Blogga's diabolically clever scheme to acquire cookie recipes. I feel strangely compelled to make Finnish Christmas Tarts.
Sweet Potato Scones
Shrimp and Grits (and they're cheese grits, too!)

Los Angeles Field Trip

This afternoon, I went to Hollywood in search of literary history and snacks, and found both.

First, I drove up to 1817 Ivar St., a little Tudor-style apartment building best known for being the hole where Nathanael West shacked up to write The Day of the Locust. Back then, it was called the Parva-Sed-Apta (translates to "Small but Sufficient"), and was inhabited by failed actors, prostitutes, eccentrics, and vaguely criminal types.

Apparently, it's been cleaned up some since 1935, because it looked rather lovely from the street.

West isn't listed in the Los Angeles city directories, but I found the address in Lionel Rolfe's Literary L.A., a highly entertaining read. On West, Rolfe includes the delightful little nugget that West frequently loaned his car to the prostitutes who lived in his building because it tickled him to hear their stories when they brought back the keys.

Unfortunately, I arrived at Parva-Sed-Apta to find that Potts had drained the batteries on the camera and not recharged them (lame!), so I left without photos. However, it turns out that Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) lived in the neighborhood a couple decades prior, so I'll be headed back for photos later.

After that, I drove a few blocks to the Monastery of the Angels at 1977 Carmen Ave. The cloistered nuns here operate a gift shop that sells all kinds of stuff -- everything from hand-knit baby blankets to Christmas ornaments -- but they're particularly known for their pumpkin bread and their Christmas candy.

I wanted to stock up for Thanksgiving, so I turned into the monastery parking lot, making sure to pull my skirt down to knee length and turn off the Afghan Whigs cd playing in the car (I don't know that they've come out and said it, but I'm pretty sure that Greg Dulli is considered an enemy of the Catholic Church). Then, I went up to the gift shop and rang the doorbell to be let in.

After selecting my purchases (2 loaves of pumpkin bread and a box of caramel almond chocolates), the woman who helped me said, "I'll get the Sister to ring up your items."

Now, one of my best friends lived in a convent for a year after college (long story), so I know that nuns these days don't usually wear their habits and come from all sorts of backgrounds and are generally awesome. Still, none of this had prepared me for the Sister.

She was not much older than me, had purple hair, and I totally wanted to swap outfits with her. Which maybe I could have -- she LOVED my skirt.

So, an afternoon of Hollywood food, culture, and shopping, Mary-style. Highly recommended if you're in the neighborhood.

Before & After

In the spirit of our favorite Jeopardy! category, I offer you the following children of Mary's weird brain and my love of Photoshop.

Clue: Plucky young sex columnist moves to Chicago, shacks up with older man. She sleeps around and gets famous; he dies.



Question: What is Sister Carrie Bradshaw?

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Clue: Conniving but fabulous Inuit trophy wife sneaks off on a yacht with her previous husband, only to be shipwrecked on the Tundra - and then led home by a taciturn kid from Juneau who was raised by Arctic wolves.



Question: Who is Julie Cooper of the Wolves?

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Clue: Open war breaks out in the streets of Baltimore between two factions of the largest East Side drug ring. The cool, calm, and business oriented former second-in-command emerges the victor.



Question: What is For Whom the (Stringer) Bell Tolls

And of course, please post your own in the comments.

Historic Homes of L.A. Writers: Ray Bradbury

I've called previous posts of this nature "Homes of Historic L.A. Writers," but since Mr. Bradbury is still writing, and still living in Los Angeles, I had to switch it up a bit.

In 1938, Leonard, Esther, and 18-year-old Ray Bradbury lived in this lovely home at 1619 S. St. Andrews Place.

Young Ray was a bit of a homebody, and was still living with his parents in 1942 when they moved to a house at 3054 W. 12th St., just a few blocks away.

Homes of Historic L.A. Writers: Another Black Mask Boy

He went by the name of Paul Cain for his hardboiled crime fiction, and Peter Ruric for his Hollywood gigs, but he was born George C. Sims, and that's how he's listed in the 1929 Los Angeles City Directory. Today's search for the homes of historic Los Angeles writers led me to a sunny courtyard apartment just north of Sunset where I snapped some shots of 1522 N. Serrano Ave.

Cain/Sims/Ruric lived here three years before he penned the short stories for Black Mask magazine that would become his groundbreaking hardboiled novel Fast One. However, Sims spent the 1920s working as a set decorator and production assistant, and running around with an "artistic avant-garde" set that included a struggling actress named Myrna Williams.

Sims suggested that she change her last name to Loy.

Around the same time his career with the pulps was taking off, he also started to get some writing work with the local studios. During the early 1930s, he wrote The Black Cat, which paired stars Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

Fast One was published as a book in 1933, and featured one of the first hardboiled anti-heroes, gambler and gangster Gerard Kells. The New York Times said of it, "Publishers' blurbs are prone to overestimate the virtues of their respective products, but with the accompanying statement that 'Fast One' is 'the toughest, swiftest, hardest novel of them all,' we almost concur. It is in truth a ceaseless welter of bloodshed and frenzy, a sustained bedlam of killing and fiendishness, told in terse staccato style . . . there is no minute's let-up in the saturnalia of 'black-and-blue passion, bloodlust, death.'"

Very little is known about Sims, although it is generally acknowledged that he drank a bit. After several jaunts to New York and Europe, Sims died in Los Angeles in 1966.

Down a Not-So-Mean Street

In 1929, Raymond Chandler was Vice-President of the South Basin Oil Company, part of the Dabney Oil Syndicate (how's that for a band name), and living with his wife, Pearl at 1024 S. Highland. You can also check out their listing in the city directory.

The house is in a lovely little neighborhood called Longwood Highlands, just south of Olympic. While the neighborhood was developed in the 1920s, I'm not 100% sure this house is the actual building where the Chandler's lived. The L.A. County Assessor's Office has a listing for 1026 S. Highland, the other half of the duplex, which dates to 1947, but no listing for 1024. While I think it's likely that the house was simply hacked in two in 1947, it's possible that an entirely different building was there in 1929.

Larry, any ideas?

Heinlein Wuz Here

The Los Angeles Public Library recently made a selection of its city directories available online, so I got to poking around to see if I could find any listings for writerly types.

And the first bit of gold that I struck was none other than a listing for Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein moved to California in the early 1930s, and pursued graduate studies in physics and mathematics at UCLA. He married his second wife, Leslyn, in 1932, got into real estate sales, and set up housekeeping at 905 N. La Jolla, where the couple lived in 1936. He was 29 at the time.

Within a year or so, the Heinleins moved to swankier digs in the Hills, and it was while struggling to make mortgage payments that Heinlein settled on the idea of writing science fiction to earn some extra cash.

I felt a little weird driving around Los Angeles today taking pictures of people's houses, but nobody told me to stop or anything. I like to think that maybe I was mistaken for a very incompetent private investigator.

More writers and their "before they were famous" houses to follow. Potts and I are off to the mountains tomorrow for a bit of hiking, stargazing, and lollygagging around the fire pit. Hope y'all have a lovely weekend.

Wedded Bliss Amiss: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939

Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939 by Katie Roiphe

It goes without saying that many of our grandparents', and even our parents' ideas about what makes for a happy marriage seem less than desirable to us today. Even among members of our own generation, arrangements like stay-at-home fathers or mothers, same-sex parenting, and open marriages don't hold anything that resembles a consensus. And while the Mommy Wars and the furor over gay marriage have made intimate relationships a public issue, the subtle give and take that shapes relationships occurs, to a certain degree, on a case by case basis.

Roiphe's highly readable accounts of seven marriages show how very unconventional people made a go of a very traditional institution, and in their own way, tried to make it work for them. Each section begins with a moment of conflict that threatens the union in some way, then goes on to describe how the couple resolved (or failed to resolve) it.

Some of the marriages seem not so uncommon as just plain miserable. H.G. Wells and his wife, Jane, had an agreement that allowed him to pursue extramarital affairs as he wished and frequently to live apart from her, provided that he never left her altogether. Similarly, when a young nurse threatens the 18-year relationship of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Una chooses to integrate the woman into their relationship rather than risk losing Hall to her for good.

Other unions stretch the imagination a bit more, like the unlikely household of painter Vanessa Bell, her husband Clive, her lover, Duncan Grant, and occasionally, his bisexual lover, Bunny. In a creepy twist, Bell's daughter with Duncan would later marry Bunny without knowing the truth about her parentage. A strange paradox exists in many of the relationships, couples who are uninhibited about sex, while remaining somehow naive and frightened of discussing it too much.

While the marriages Roiphe explores aren't enviable, they're certainly captivating. This is, in part, due to the fact that many of the couples and their lovers were friends or distant relatives, or at least had their books reviewed in the same papers. It's such an incestuous little circle, one marvels that the children weren't all born with tails.

And despite the sometimes gloomy tales of love gone bad, Roiphe is an engaging and very funny writer. When describing Katherine Mansfield's husband, the odious John Middleton Murry, Roiphe writes that he was the kind of "artistically inclined man who milks the idea of being 'promising' well into his forties," and goes on to say, "In order to avoid conscription, Murry found... a demanding job in the War Office (though one should note that Murry found all of his jobs demanding, and constantly complained of being dangerously overworked)."

If you liked...: Lives of the Muses by Francine Prose, this book is for you.

I So Wanted To Win That Pony

83 years ago today, Truman Streckfus Persons, better known as the enfant terrible, was born in New Orleans.

One of my favorite Capote stories is related by Eugene Walter in his memoir, Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet. Walter knew Capote as a child, because the latter would come to Mobile to have his underbite straightened, and the children called him 'Bulldog.' Anyway, Walter says:

In the Sunday Register there was the Sunshine Page. This lady called Disa Stone had this children's page and this Sunshine Club where children wrote and sent in what they wrote and vied for prizes. The grand prize was a pony. For his contribution to the Sunshine Page and for the contest, Truman had spied on this old man who lived up the street in Monroeville and was a real old crank. Even then he was already mixing fiction and reportage...

Anyway, he wrote this rather long piece called 'Old Mr. Busybody, by Truman Persons.' His aunt, when he told her, rushed to Mobile and went to the Register and said: 'You cannot publish that. It is too true a description of our neighbor. He'll sue us, he'll smash our windows, I don't know what he'll do. I want to take that back.' And she did. Years later when I saw him in Paris, the first thing Truman said to me was 'Oh, Eugene, I so wanted to win that pony.'

Happy birthday, Bulldog.