down by the roller coaster

Sweet sweet baby I'll never let you go. The Drums

Wayne Thiebaud, Four Cupcakes, 1971

(For my love )

the end

Edward Ruscha, The End, 1991; Eva Roucka; Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions, 1942

disciplining imaginary children

"I do remember disciplining imaginary children in the backseat of my car." Tom Waits on Fresh Air

Illustration: "Birds" by Alyson Fox

slipstream

Today: this photo of The Castro by Hedi Slimane, this interview with Tom McCarthy, using an Alyson Fox illustration as a tattoo, how bittersweet Christopher Hitchens is on Joan Didion's new book via Something Changed, This recording of Red Rain via 2 or 3 things, Kelly Link and how being a teenager is like living in a strange world where you don't know the rules, this playlist from For Me, For You and putting together the first Community Hacks event in Berkeley.

the tuesday interview: mark childress

Thanks to author Lynn Freed I was lucky enough to meet Mark Childress at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley a few years ago and he was everything you'd think he might be if you've ever read his books: funny, gracious and a hell of a storyteller.

From Mark: I know so many writers are superstitious about talking about work in progress that it has become a cliche, but hey I guess I am living that cliche. I find that if I pre-tell the story I’m trying to tell, to my friends and those nice people who care enough to ask, at some point I have already “told” it and the juice goes out of it that you need for the writing of the scenes. Does that make any sense?

I will say that I have fallen in love with characters before and usually they lead me where they want to go. This time is no different. It’s funny - this will be my eighth novel and it hasn’t gotten any easier at all. It is more rewarding, though, because I know whatever obscure little thing I put in there, somewhere there will be a reader who gets it. That is really cool.

I listen to a lot of music when I am reading but not when I am writing. I listen to classical music or sometimes old rhythm and blues in the morning to get my brain cells lined up in order. I like rock, too, and I have all kinds of weird tastes. The Beatles, both Elvises, Bruce, Joni. When I am traveling I go to the art museum like everybody else and try to learn something about the people from the art ... but generally you learn only about the artist. You don’t learn anything general, but everything specific.

There are some books I read over again, as soon as I have read it, because I can’t believe how good it was and I want to take it apart and see what made it tick. Other books, I delay and delay because I don’t want it to end. And then of course there are those that are like the second term of the Bush presidency, an endless dreary slog. I like to read Anna Karenina every couple of years. I like to read most of Dickens again and again. I’ve been on a David Foster Wallace kick since The Pale King came out. I cant imagine a year without reading some Marquez.

I just re-read The Broom of the System, David Wallace’s first book. I had a great time with In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Also a gripping crime novel by Jane Bradley, You Believers.

Every summer I teach writing workshops up at Squaw Valley. This year Annie Lamott and I were talking about books we absolutely inhaled as children. I started talking about a wonderful book called Follow My Leader, by a writer called James B. Garfield. It’s the story of a boy who loses his sight in an accident with a firecracker. He has to learn to deal with being blind, goes off to a special school to learn how to work with a seeing-eye dog. The details of the training were absolutely fascinating to me; I used the glasses we got from the eye doctor with our dilated pupils, and went around pretending I was blind like the hero the book. I read that book about twenty times, I’ll bet.

Afterward, at least two dozen people came up to tell me that was their favorite book too. Many of them had forgotten it until I mentioned it. Apparently it was a Scholastic Book Club perennial choice and a great favorite of kids everywhere. I highly recommend it, although it may seem a bit old-fashioned now. (I was really surprised to discover the hero’s name is Jimmy Carter!)

I’ve never written about a blind person yet, so I don’t think there has been any direct influence of the book. But I always try very hard to plunge the reader into the sensory experience of whatever is happening in the story. And I’m sure it’s because James B. Garfield did that to me, over and over, long ago.

Photo: Joni Mitchell and David Crosby

vacation

Headed to Big Sur and packing: The Boys of my Youth, Jo Ann Beard; Fighting Fire, Caroline Paul; The Kid Table, Andrea Seigel; What it Is, Lynda Barry; Imagining Adoption, Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Marianne Novy; The Night Sky, Ann Lauterbach; and Just in Case, Meg Rosoff.

And what's next for the The Tuesday Interview? Caroline Paul.

Photo: Blondie in a Texas Tuxedo in honor of me and the UE

the tuesday interview: kat asharya

I've known Kat Asharya for a few years as blogger at the fantastic style and pop culture blog, No Good for Me, and am super excited about the young adult novel she's working on.

RQD: Tell me about the novel. What interests you about these characters?

KA: I'm working on a novel, a love story about between a girl skater and an insanely great one...who happens to be a werewolf. I call it my "teenage skater werewolf" book, and everyone's amused by that, but it's true. It takes place during the height of the Reagan era near Chicago, around the outskirts of the punk and skate scenes at the time. It would be shelved in the YA/fantasy section of a bookstore.

Because I wrote essentially a romance, I was really interested in the relationship between my two main characters, the process of bringing these two wary, self-contained, reserved people and discovering why they fall in love and what keeps them drawn together, and how their love for one another fits into their larger arcs as people. My main character had been so emotionally self-sufficient, so almost impenetrable, that she needed the mystery that was central to my skater werewolf to intrigue and draw her out -- and she needed to find someone whose nature was inherently expressive, volatile and passionate to provoke that in her as well. And as I wrote, I realized that I was writing a love story that took place between two essential equals -- that both of them become intrigued and attracted to one another because of an innate respect they have for one another's talents and strength. That was really great to write and explore.

RQD: What artists were you thinking about in relation to this work?

KA: I am definitely influenced by music; for this particular project, music was definitely the strongest non-literary influence, particularly the very early alternative era in the late 80s, just when that subculture was beginning to emerge. Stuff like the Replacements, New Order, the Smiths, early R.E.M., but also records on SST and stuff like Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys. I was also really influenced by the photography of Ari Marcopoulos, who has shot skaters in a really lyrical, poetic, almost dreamy way over the years. That was a feel that I tried to capture in my writing and in the visuals I had in my head.

I'm a filmmaker as well (I have my MFA in screenwriting and directing) and that's a big influence on me always. For this novel, I referenced "River's Edge" a lot, for the time period and a kind of strange teenage Reagan-era nihilism, a fascination with darkness in places that seem to have nothing to offer for the people who live there. I also was inspired by Lynne Ramsay's films a lot, particularly "Morvern Callar," especially in reference to a very silent, very self-contained character. My main character isn't catatonic, but she is quiet and inward-looking, and I looked to the Samantha Morton character to see how to dramatize that a bit. I looked at old episodes of "Headbanger's Ball" and "120 Minutes" and early issues of "Sassy" as well, just as a touchstone for pop culture. (All those old Maybelline and Natural Wonder makeup ads really pulled me back!) I also did my best to recreate a top 40 radio station from 1988 on Pandora: Madonna, Belinda Carlisle, Motley Crue and Depeche Mode was the magical combination.

My werewolf is an artist, and I imagined his work a bit like Egon Schiele's, so I looked a lot at his paintings and sketches a lot. I think something of Schiele's darker, slightly sinister eroticism got into my novel, albeit in a very muted way. And it's not an artwork, really, but the Midwestern landscape -- epic stretches of horizon, rolling fields, stark forests intercut with streams and rivers -- is a really big influence on me.

RQD: What books do you return to over and over?

KA: I actually tend to re-read books often; I like to read my favorite books at least once a year. I think I do it not just for the stories, but because they keep me in touch with the things that made me fall in love with words and reading and books and stories in the first place. But there are definitely some stories that you read again and again that seem to reveal something new about themselves with each reading. For me, it's The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. One's a truly splendid Arthurian/witchy fantasy epic, the other's a decorous yet spiky epic of psychology, but I never get tired of being in those worlds with those people.

RQD: What are you reading now?

KA: I'm working my way through Emile Zola's work this summer; I just finished The Ladies' Paradise, which I loved as a window into the beginning of consumer culture in 19th century Paris, and I'm on L'Assommoir right now. Zola's such a master of action and setting; he would've been a filmmaker if he'd been alive now, his scenes have such movement in them, and they're so dense with detail: the way he describes gestures, fabrics, expressions is so rich. On a less antiquated tip, I also have A Game of Thrones going! High fantasy is kind of my guilty pleasure. And I'm wending my way through St. Lucy's School for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell and it's so truly marvelous.

RQD: What were you reading as a kid? How did those books impact the writing you do now?

KA: The books I read a lot as a kid were big, epic fantasy stories that transported me to a whole different world, made me feel big, wide emotions, and made me believe that I, too, could save my kingdom, travel time or restore peace to the world. Robin McKinley's "The Hero and the Crown" and her Beauty and the Beast retelling were particular favorites, and I also loved "A Wrinkle in Time." That book was one of the first that truly transported me as a kid. I remember being profoundly disappointed that you couldn't tesseract in real life! Like, seriously, totally broken-hearted! I also loved mythology, and would check out D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths and the one on Norse Myths from the library all the time. I also really, really loved Little Women. If I was a kid now, I'm pretty sure the His Dark Materials trilogy would be my favorite thing ever.

My early reading definitely had a huge impact on the writing I do now. It sounds weird, but I felt this strange internal pressure for so much of my writing life to be more "literary," and being an Asian-American, another strange pressure/guilt for not doing work that was more Asian-American or somehow dealing with that aspect of my life. I would try and try and try in my fiction to write something that I felt I should be doing, and of course, that never works. In the end, I looked at the books that I truly loved, the books that I felt had a hand in shaping something of my spirit and sparking my imagination, and they were the fantasy and sci-fi books I loved as a kid, and stuff like William Gibson, Francesca Lia Block, Angela Carter and Neil Gaiman now. It was like a big, obvious wake-up call of where my heart truly wanted to go. Those are the kind of stories that gave my imagination wings as a child, and that's what keeps me going now.

Photo: Ari Marcopoulos "No Cause"

let's dance

put on your red shoes and dance the blues

Photo: Hadnet Tesfai, Freunde von Freunden

an apple a plum and apricot too

For the Berkeley playlist.

Photo via ChomoLight via Justin Massa

but she was the sky

Oh baby, I was bound for Mexico

Photo by Jak & Jil

horses

I rolled out of bed and noticed it was late. I raced through my morning ritual, going around the corner to the Moroccan bakery, grabbing a crusty roll, a sprig of fresh mint, some anchovies. I came back and boiled water, stuffed the pot with mint. I poured olive oil in the open roll, rinsed the anchovies and laid them inside, sprinkling in some cayenne pepper. Just Kids (p250), Patti Smith

sleep deprivation and stories

via Jen.

and your spirit and your clothes

I'd really like to live beside you, baby

I love your body and your spirit and your clothes

from "First We Take Manhattan" Leonard Cohen

Photo: Annie Hall

our house

sentimental, this.

Room: Roman and Williams via defgrip

winsome

"...win some or learn some" I'm Yours, Jason Mraz

Photo: Arktip, Serena Mitnik-Miller

jennifer

showed me this.

bowl cuts

A celebration over at Nearness of Distance.

Photo: Cat Power

the future is unwritten

dizzy for president, 1964

Ramona Crowell was by this point Dizzy's vice-presidential running-mate. Miles Davis was penciled in as director of the CIA, Louis Armstrong as Minister of Agriculture, Thelonious Monk was to be Roving Ambassador Plenipotentiary, and other cabinet members were to include Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Woody Herman and Count Basie. According to Dizzy, the drummer Max Roach wanted to be Minister of War, but was overruled, because, said the candidate, "We're not going to have any." The Library of Congress was to be in the charge of Ray Charles, and Charles Mingus was to be Minister of Peace, "because he'll take a piece of your head faster than anybody I know".

this morning

Listening to Orpheus by Franz Liszt in honor of the UE on her birthday.