The Sunday Review: "A Supermarket in Arizona"

In his second weekly OC Bookly column, at the OC Weekly, Andrew Tonkovich posts a wide-ranging review of Chapman professor Tom Zoellner's new book A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America.

excerpt:

What famous American asked: "What is government if words have no meaning?"

​Multiple choice: a) Warren Zevon b) Situationist philosopher Guy Debord c) Newt Gingrich d) Stephane Hessel e) Jared Lee Loughner.

Okay, only three are even Americans. And if you chose everything but "e" you're forgiven. But as journalist Tom Zoellner, lately teaching at Chapman University points on in his newest book, A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells us about the Grand Canyon State and Life in America, the mentally ill Arizona assassin himself offered this actual interrogative at, yes, a public forum years before he arrived at the now-iconic supermarket parking lot to shoot Giffords in the brain with his Glock 19.

To read the rest, click here.

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The Morning Reading: "I can't be human after all."

Wooden
by Kay Ryan


In the presence of supple
goodness, some people
grow less flexible,
experiencing a woodenness
they wouldn't have thought possible.
It is as strange and paradoxical
as the combined suffering
of Pinocchio and Geppetto
if Pinocchio had turned and said,
I can't be human after all.

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with thanks to the beauty we love

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UC Riverside 35th Annual Writers Week: February 7-10

The longest running free literary event in California is worth the drive if you have the kind of life that allows you to wander away during the traditional work week - or at least play a little hooky.

Tuesday-Friday February 7-10

UC Riverside

Writers include: Charmaine Craig, Ben Ehrenreich, Michael Jaime-Beccera, Susan Straight, B.H. Fairchild, Frank Gaspar, Garret Hongo and many others, including Diane Wakoski as Keynote reader.

Check out their schedule by clicking here.

Free and open to the public.

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The Morning Reading: "Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. "The Handmaid's Tale" has done both."

Margaret Atwood, writing in The Guardian, about her novel, The Handmaid's Tale:

excerpt:

Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid's Tale has done both.

The Handmaid's Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions. It has become a sort of tag for those writing about shifts towards policies aimed at controlling women, and especially women's bodies and reproductive functions: "Like something out of The Handmaid's Tale" and "Here comes The Handmaid's Tale" have become familiar phrases...

...I began this book almost 30 years ago, in the spring of 1984, while living in West Berlin – still encircled, at that time, by the Berlin Wall. The book was not called The Handmaid's Tale at first – it was called Offred – but I note in my journal that its name changed on 3 January 1985, when almost 150 pages had been written....

...I recall that I was writing by hand, then transcribing with the aid of a typewriter, then scribbling on the typed pages, then giving these to a professional typist: personal computers were in their infancy in 1985. I see that I left Berlin in June 1984, returned to Canada, wrote through the fall, then spent four months in early 1985 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I held an MFA chair. I finished the book there; the first person to read it was a fellow writer, Valerie Martin, who was also there at that time. I recall her saying: "I think you've got something here." She herself remembers more enthusiasm....

...I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the "Christian" tradition, itself. (I enclose "Christian" in quotation marks, since I believe that much of the church's behaviour and doctrine during its two-millennia-long existence as a social and political organisation would have been abhorrent to the person after whom it is named.)...

...Three things that had long been of interest to me came together during the writing of the book. The first was my interest in dystopian literature, an interest that began with my adolescent reading of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and continued through my period of graduate work at Harvard in the early 1960s. (Once you've been intrigued by a literary form, you always have a secret yen to write an example of it yourself.) The second was my study of 17th and 18th-century America, again at Harvard, which was of particular interest to me since many of my own ancestors had lived in those times and in that place. The third was my fascination with dictatorships and how they function, not unusual in a person who was born in 1939, three months after the outbreak of the second world war....

To read the rest, click here.

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More Books Culture for Orange County!

The OC Weekly, the county's free alternative newsweekly, has debuted a weekly books column - the OC Bookly, penned by Andrew Tonkovich - (the generous intro below is provided by Gustavo Arellano.)

excerpt:

Gentle readers: It gives me great pleasure to introduce our new weekly column on books, written by longtime Weekly contributor, UC Irvine egghead, and host of KPFK-FM 90.7's Bibliocracy Radio, Andrew Tonkovich! Every Sunday morning, Andrew will write about books written by Orange County authors or dealing with Orange County. Today, he gives us a quick reading list--now, without further ado, the Tonk!

Welcome to the Bibliofella's new weekly books blog for Orange County and beyond, a coffee klatch where I drink too much Joe and get overly excited about all the books you should be reading. Here reigns the dictatorship of the booklateriat, me, where I go on and on, but somehow still with brevity, wit and plenty of completely unsupportable claims about what I agree with myself about. Comments from readers? Well, if you insist, sure, why not? I have to warn you I am a real madcap, mercurial yet incredibly, charmingly persuasive.

Who knows: one week I might demand your support of a small, important avant-garde experiment. The following, I could easily pander to provincial middle-brow Orange County tastes, throwing you easy picks by way of our shared limits as regards geography and imagination. You decide. No, don't! I will, insisting on my own terrific opinions. Want to discuss a book you haven't read? Get your own blog. Call it "But I Saw the Movie." (A better name than this one's.)

For now let's synchronize our tastes, yours to the Bibliofella's. Embarking upon our maiden voyage on the S.S. Bookly, full steam ahead, I present a list of required OC literary reading: books you've read already and are conversant in, will purchase and read immediately, or simply buy and display on a shelf in your luxury home, condo, apartment or parents' living room now labeled, "The Bibliofella Recommends." (Send photos.)

Heads up: If you score "already read" on let's say half of these, consider yourself automatically enrolled in my book club. With membership comes an actual club you can use to beat on the head those who haven't, or only threaten them. Haven't read any at all? Read fast. Wear a helmet.

To read the rest (an overview of ten quintessential Orange County texts), check it out by clicking here.

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The Morning Reading: "The wreck is a fact."

Salvage
by Kay Ryan

The wreck
is a fact.
The worst
has happened.
The salvage trucks
back in and
the salvage men
begin to sort
and stack,
whistling as
they work.
Thanks be
to god—again—
for extractable elements
which are not
carriers of pain,
for this periodic
table at which
the self-taught
salvagers disassemble
the unthinkable
to the unthought.

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The Morning Reading: "It is true that half the glory is gone."

Salvage
by Robinson Jeffers

It is true that half the glory is gone.
Motors and modernist houses usurp the scene.
There is no eagle soaring, nor a puma
On the Carmel hill highroad. Where thirty years ago
We watched one pass. Yet by God's grace
I have still a furlong of granite cliff, on which the Pacific
Leans his wild weight; and the trees I planted
When I was young, little green whips in hand,
Have grown in despite of the biting sea-wind,
And are accepted by nature, an angry-voiced tribe of night-herons
Nests on the boughs. One has to pay for it;
The county taxes take all my income, and it seems ridiculous
To hold three acres of shorelong woodland
And the little low house that my own hands made, at the annual cost
Of a shiny new car. Never mind, the trees and stones are worth it.

But it's darker now. I am old, and my wife has died,
Whose eyes made life. As for me, I have to consider and take thought
Before I can feel the beautiful secret
In places and stars and stones, to her it came freely.
I wish that all human creatures might feel it.
That would make joy in the world, and make men perhaps a little nobler –
as a handful of wildflowers
Is nobler than the damned human race.

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I was inspired this morning by an essay in the Los Angeles Times: "Robinson Jeffers, nature's oracle" by Christopher Cokinos.

I once enrolled in a Robinson Jeffers seminar at Cal State Long Beach taught by noted Jeffers scholar Dr. Robert Brophy. It was 1983 or so. I was about 23. I didn't "get" Jeffers and dropped the course. I get him now. I wish I could re-enroll.

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Photograph by Robinson Jeffers by Ansel Adams.

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