Charles Baxter, Lost Books, and Hippies in Balloons

I've been thinking of writing a letter to Charles Baxter to let him know that I liked The Feast of Love so much I've bought it three times.

One copy got loaned to a friend in Memphis. I didn't remember who I'd given it to, and then I moved to Wisconsin. So that pretty first edition hardback is gone. The second copy got lost at the beach. The third copy I loaned to a friend who was going through some epically bad times, and one passage in the book hit him so hard that he tore it in half and threw it against the wall.

Maybe this has been up for ages, but Baxter has an excerpt from an unpublished novel called In Hibernation (1977) up on his site. It involves a couple chasing a hot air balloon full of missionary hippies around St. Paul, and is pretty funny:

"We want to go for a ride!" Lorraine said suddenly. "Could you take us up? Only five minutes?"

"Little lady," Xavier said, "that might be hard to do. I am thinking about it. All right. Here's what. Two conditions. First, I got to talk to your old man here, alone. Second, all I can take up is you. He gotta stay down here with Lone Star and the woman."

"Why can't you take him?" Lorraine asked.

"On account of God don't like two males in the gondola."

"Oh."

Into the Woods

LA's a heckuva town, but sometimes the endless miles of strip malls and roving hordes of paparazzi get you down. In such times, the only thing to do is to call up some friends and light out for the territories, Huck-style, and spend a little time halfway up a mountain where the air is thin and the trees are the size of skyscrapers.

That said, our trip to the woods was, at times, predictably literary. Mary spent her down time in between hiking and cooking mountain pies nose-deep in Dorothy Allison's Cavedweller, and my head lamp spent most of its time illuminating Dashiell Hammett short stories (instead of the dense French social theory I had vowed to revisit while we were there).

And then there was the campfire brainstorming session in which we and our co-woodspersons came up with perhaps the greatest children's literary franchise since Harry Potter. It is, in fact, so groovy that I am unwilling to describe it on a website, lest some nogoodnik steal our awesome.

So until then I'll leave y'all with the following photo of our blogmistress swaggering through the woods, confident in the knowledge that librarians rock and that we'll soon be swimming in the profits from the tote bags, action figures, and coloring books that will no doubt be pouring into our bank accounts as soon as Scholastic gets on board with our granola-fueled kid-lit shenanigans.

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.

You're a Good Man, Charles M. Schulz

Lowlights and Good Grief moments from the tragicomic life of Charles M. Schulz at Mental Floss:

“You never do get over your first love,” Schulz said. “More than having your cartoons rejected or three-putting the 18th green, the whole of you is rejected when a woman says: `You’re not worth it.’”

You can also win a t-shirt by submitting your most Charlie Brown-esque moment, although I think I would need a lifetime supply of t-shirts before I'd consider turning over any of my Charlie Brown moments to be judged by strangers.

Southern-Fried Magical Realism: Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Every once in awhile, I come across a book that doesn't appear to have a lot to recommend it, yet for some reason, I am helpless to resist its charms. From Bridget Jones's Diary, which all but the dour can agree on, to Raymond Chandler's The High Window, which I seem to be alone in preferring to all other Chandler books, sometimes knowing that a book is good-not-great takes all the pressure off. It's truly pleasure reading. Along those lines, Garden Spells didn't shake the very foundations of my belief system, but I had a very hard time putting it down. Its charms are considerable.

Claire Waverly is a 34-year-old emotionally stunted caterer whose meals have strange effects on those who eat them, while her elderly cousin, Evanelle, feels compelled to give people things they'll need later -- sometimes it's a box of Pop Tarts, sometimes it's a box of condoms. And then there's Sydney, the wild younger sister who left town after high school like something out of a Warrant video, and shows up on Claire's door ten years later with her six-year-old daughter and a pile of big secrets.

The two sisters have never been close, and most of the book centers around their efforts to piece together some kind of relationship out of their wreck of a childhood together. The subplots, however, are what give the book its momentum. Some work, like the story involving local sexpot Emma Matteson, who believes that Sydney has come back to town to reclaim her old flame, now Emma's husband. It's a nicely realized character study about adults who never really leave high school.

Sweet, though less successful are the book's love stories. There's the burgeoning relationship between the awkward Claire and her art professor next-door-neighbor, the gay grocery store owner struggling to win back his long-time partner, and the oddly matched Sydney and her childhood friend, Henry, a farmer. It's through these relationships that it becomes clear that the characters and their motivations are not as well developed as they might be.

That said, it's an exceptionally pleasant book to read, and the folksy, slightly magical lull of small town life is enchanting and irresistible.

If you're looking for a less edgy Dorothy Allison, or heck, even a less edgy Lee Smith, or if you like the food-magic of Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, this book is for you.