Jack Kerouac and L.A.

“In the middle of the night, I got up because I couldn’t sleep…and examined the L.A. night. What brutal, hot, siren-whining nights they are! Right across the street there was trouble. An old rickety rundown rooming house was the scene of some kind of tragedy. The cruiser was pulled up below and the cops were questioning an old man with gray hair. Sobbings came from within. I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life. L.A. is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. L.A. is a jungle.”

From Chapter 13, On the Road by JACK KEROUAC (originally published in 1957)

Photo: Skid Row, Los Angeles, 1955. (From the Los Angeles Examiner Negatives Collection, 1950-1961. Digitally reproduced by the University of Southern California Digital Archive. More information here.)

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” From Charlotte’s Web by E.B. WHITE

Illustration by Garth Williams

Thoughts: Can anyone read Charlotte’s Web and not experience  a full range of emotions? I love this book — it is one of my all-time favorites: a revelation, an inspiration, a wonder, a pleasure, a treasure, an amazement, a classic, a masterpiece!

Once I was bitten by a black widow spider on my inner right arm (my writing hand). My arm swelled up. I had lines of toxic venom traveling down my arm from the bite. My arm was hot and red and scary-looking. And all I could think about was Charlotte!

Yes, I felt I had been visited by my animal writing totem who had given me a gift! (I called poison control and they said if I wasn’t dead already I probably didn’t need the anti-venom. I knew it was a black widow because I found the dead spider on the floor. RIP.)

They say that spiders don’t bite unless you disturb them. In my case, I took some Christmas wrapping paper out of the closet, where it had been stored since the previous Yuletide. Apparently my black widow had been ensconced amid the snowmen and reindeer and I had disturbed the fairyland.

Thoughts About Writing by Graham Greene

“The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You’re there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see – every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.”

GRAHAM GREENE

Drawing by Francesca (franvisions), ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Kurt Vonnegut & Growing Your Soul

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

KURT VONNEGUT, Man Without a Country

Love Letter to Kurt Vonnegut

I have always been a Kurt Vonnegut fan — he was one of the first writers I really, truly, completely loved. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the first thing I did was run out and buy a new copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, then go home and read it from cover to cover without moving from my spot.

For whatever reason — and there were many — this was my response to the horror. I wanted to see how a great artist had dealt with horror (in his case, his presence at the firebombing of Dresden during WWII) and how he had been able to express what had happened.

And then, a miracle. I learned that Kurt Vonnegut would be in Chicago (where I then lived) to give a lecture at the public library (he was in town to accept a literary award) just a few weeks later.

Yes, I was in the same room with Kurt Vonnegut — and he was as wonderful, witty, and warm as you’d imagine. Of course, people in the audience asked what he felt about what had happened on September 11th. I don’t remember exactly what he said. I was overwhelmed with emotion at the time — and could only think of what he’d written in Slaughterhouse-Five: “So it goes.”

Thank you, Kurt. Thank you. Thank you. For me, “So it goes” is not a call to complacence, it is a call to live noble lives, despite it all. We will try to follow your fine example. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”

KURT VONNEGUT, Palm Sunday

Published in 1981, Palm Sunday is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut‘s short stories, essays, letters, and other writings. In Chapter 18, Vonnegut grades his books — comparing himself with himself, not other writers.

Here are the titles and the grades Vonnegut gives his books:

Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat’s Cradle: A+
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A+
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

John Fante & the Palm Tree

“The lean days of determination. That was the word for it, determination: Arturo Bandini in front of his typewriter two full days in succession, determined to succeed; but it didn’t work, the longest siege of hard and fast determination in his life, and not one line done, only two words written over and over across the page, up and down, the same words: palm tree, palm tree, a battle to the death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree won: see it out there swaying in the blue air, creaking sweetly in the blue air. The palm tree won after two fighting days, and I crawled out of the window and sat at the foot of the tree. Time passed, a moment or two, and I slept, little brown ants carousing in the hair on my legs.”

From Chapter 1 of Ask the Dust by JOHN FANTE

Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by Yasunari Kawabata

Girl Who Approached the Fire

            The water of the lake glittered in the distance. It was the color of a stagnant spring in an old garden on a moonlit evening.
            The woods on the far bank of the lake were burning silently. The flames spread as I watched – a forest fire.
            The fire truck hurrying along the bank like a toy was reflected vividly on the surface of the water. Crowds of people blackened the hill, endlessly streaming up the slope from below.
            When I came to myself, the air around me was still and bright, as though dry.
            The strip of town at the base of the slope was a sea of fire.
            A girl parted the crowd of people and descended the slope alone. She was the only one going down the hill.
            Strangely, it was a world without sound.
            When I saw the girl walking directly toward the sea of fire, I could not bear it.
            Then, without words, I actually conversed with her feelings.
            “Why are you going down the hill alone? Is it to die by fire?”
            “I don’t want to die, but your home lies to the west and so I am going east.”

The sight of her – a dark spot against the flames that filled my vision – pierced my eyes. I woke up. There were tears in the corners of my eyes.

From Palm-of-the-Hand Stories by YASUNARI KAWABATA

The Wild Palms by William Faulkner

“He was thinking about his two tenants as he descended the stairs behind the jerking pencil of light, into the staling odor of gumbo in the lower hall, toward the door, the knocking. It was from no presentiment, premonition that the knocker was the man named Harry. It was because he had thought of nothing else for four days — this snuffy middleaging man in the archaic sleeping garment now become one of the national props of comedy, roused from slumber in the stale bed of his childless wife and already thinking of (perhaps having been dreaming of) the profound and distracted blaze of objectless hatred in the strange woman’s eyes; and he again with that sense of imminence, of being just behind a veil from something, of groping just without the veil and even touching but not quite, the shape of truth, so that without being aware of it he stopped dead on the stairs in his old fashioned list slippers, thinking swiftly: Yes. Yes. Something which the entire race of men, males, has done to her or she believes has done to her.” 

WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Wild Palms

Bukowski the Barfly

Jon took us up to see the hotel. It looked authentic. The barflies lived there. The bar was downstairs. We stood and looked at it…It was painted grey as so many of those places were. The torn shades. The table and the chair. The refrigerator thick with coats of dirt. And the poor sagging bed…I was a little sad that I wasn’t young and doing it all over again, drinking and fighting and playing with words. When you’re young you can really take a battering. Food didn’t matter. What mattered was drinking and sitting at the machine. I must have been crazy but there are many kinds of crazy and some are quite delightful. I starved so that I could have time to write. That just isn’t done much anymore. Looking at that table I saw myself sitting there again. I’d been crazy and I knew it and I didn’t care. 

From Chapter 28 of Hollywood by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Photo: “City street scene with neon signs of bars, hotels and theatres along skid row in Los Angeles, California, 1965.” Los Angeles Times photographic archive, UCLA Library. Copyright Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library. More information here.