EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : LA AS A CHARACTER

It's well known that for something to be fiction it must move right along and not meander among the bushes gazing into the next county. Unfortunately, with L.A. it's impossible.  You can't write a story about L.A. that doesn't turn around in the middle or get lost. And since it's the custom for people who "like" L.A. to embrace everything wholesale and wallow in Forest Lawn, all the stories you read make you wonder why the writer doesn't just go ahead and jump, get it over with.

I love L.A. The only time I ever go to Forest Lawn is when someone dies.  A kid from New York once said: ""Look. Which would you rather? To spend eternity looking out over these pretty green hills or in some overcrowded ghetto cemetery next to the expressway in Queens?  L.A. didn't invent eternity.  Forest Lawn is just an example of eternity carried to its logical conclusion.  I love L.A because it does things like that.

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles.  People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do  to be able to stand it....    

Eve Babitz : Excerpt page 7  published 1977

LITTLE FREE LIBRARIES and READING FICTION

I rarely blog about the fiction I read.  I read mostly non fiction, especially memoirs and biographies.  I read around music personalities of the pre-rap era quite a bit. I almost never read what might be called "chick lit " or romance novels. 

My neighborhood has several of those little originally designed and built houses on poles that feature the give and take of free books. LITTLE FREE LIBRARY ORG  The book sharing movement seems to defy the downloading of e-books from your library. Some of these little houses and the books in them have suffered rain and are moldering.  Others seem to feature the latest hardbacks. As a result of finding them I read in recent months two of author Dan Brown (Da Vince Code fame)'s books,  Deception Point (published 2001) and Origin (2017?). 

Brown's work features ancient mysteries and the latest technology, art and art history and secret symbols and codes.  And his professor-hero seems to never get the girl, leaving you to wonder if he ever will, perhaps in some future fiction?  Is Brown setting us up for the professor-hero to finally find love?  How he resists... How unattainable the sexy and intelligent women characters are!

Which leads me to recall an opening scene and introduction to character in the old film Raiders of the Lost Arc, in which that professor, acted by Harrison Ford, in a rather dull lecture, notices that one of his students is batting her eyes at him.  

He takes a look and is surprised to notice that she has written "I love you" on her  eyelids.

Who would guess at the adventures this professor has when he's not in the classroom?

Which brings me to:

TAISHA'S BOOK STILL NOT OUT : WILL IT EVER BE?

Guess what?  If you go to April 1 2023 and see the post TAISHA ABELAR'S LOST BOOK -   STALKING WITH THE DOUBLE (RESTORED VERSION)  you will be able to read a manuscript copy of the book.

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By now this is becoming an "inside joke"...

A little background.

Many years ago when I was a regular at an independently owned coffee house on Ventura Boulevard and taking night classes at the local community college, one of the servers there, who I really liked, showed me her copy of Taisha Abelar's first and only book, and encouraged me to read it. This coffee house friend had recently gone on a vision quest which she believed had oriented her purpose in life and future career.

I read the book and was utterly mystified and intregued. Since then I've read the book twice more, each time years enough apart to not have remembered everything I read before, and each time having a different pov on it in the end, as my understanding or mystification of my own life changes me.

Since then I've also read around the whole Carlos Castaneda controversy; was Taisha one of his cult members? Did the various "witches," or devotees, or whatever they really were, who published books around the subject, all pass fiction off as nonfiction? Or did they really experience what some of them wrote about?

Castandeda died a human death of cancer, and soon after several of these people, including Taisha, disappeared. There was talk of a possible ritual suicide, maybe in an abandoned mine or cave in the desert. Taisha's family filed a missing person report but many people felt that these people had just staged a disappearance and gone off to Mexico or wherever, to continue their esoteric pursuits. Tellingly, money inherited was left behind as well.

One of the Castaneda "witches," who inherited the bulk of his fortune, continues to live and remains silent and protected by an attorney. She has not written anything.

Then, a couple years ago, it was reported that Taisha had a new book that would soon be published. Some people said this meant that all along she had been hiding out and writing and would soon reappear, possibly to take over leadership of the group. A few years have gone by and speculation is that she left behind an unfinished manuscript which, by now, has seen a number of ghost writers.

The publishing house has announced publication a number of times, and so the book became almost ready to order on Amazon. So far, no Taisha, no book.

C 2012 Christine Trzyna / Christine Trzyna Writerly Life All Rights Including Internet and International Rights Reserved.

STEVEN KING'S 11/22/63 : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW

This is a big, heavy hard cover book. It's a long read and it's also a page turner, if, like me, you've been reading around the Kennedys and the Assassination in 1963 for years.

Steven King's 11/22/63 is a book with a few genres intermixing.

It's a story with a mystical - spiritual - quality to it, though King's reputation for gore is maintained with murders and mass chaos. You have to accept that a form of time travel is possible, though it's not science fiction but more a time warp that can be accessed.

There's a love story, one that provides the funniest moments.

But mostly what the Kennedy assassination story and Steven King's book is, is a MYSTERY story. Writing this book was a challenge not only because of the many genres that might have competed for prominence and become confusion in a lesser writer's manuscript, but because it's easy to find yourself searching for the information that his research brought forth, information that you know is controversial, such as if Lee Harvey Oswald was really the assassin and a lone gunman or not, and not sticking with the fictive story.

Steven King is so successful, a master, so maybe it's difficult to say anything revealing about his work overall. I've read Cell and The Dome, and one or two other titles over the years. I'm not a fan of gore but at least he's generally realistic with its possibilities. I do love the way he has set his characters in circumstances. I was left feeling satisfied with the read, which required that I stay home an entire weekend, in bed, with some crackers and cheese and the book.

MICHAEL CRICHTON : NEXT : BOOK REVIEW BY CHRISTINE TRZYNA

"This novel is fiction except for the parts that aren't"
So is the disclaimer statement on MICHAEL CRICHTON's book circa 2006 "NEXT" which I enjoyed thoroughly maybe especially because I read science fact around DNA and the Human Genome Project.

In this story human genes are being put into parrots to make them talk in full sentences and into primates to make them half human as well as other human beings to heal them. Crichton plays with the mad rush of Universities and Science Labs and Medical Companies who want to copyright human gene's that they have taken from people who submitted to clinical trials or experimental treatments: We have no right to what is taken from our bodies.

The book is damn serious but fun too; Neanderthals were the First Blondes - Stronger, Bigger Brained, Smarter than us puny Cro-Magnons.

It's not just the physical though, it's also the psychological that's being gene tweaked. Think tanks throw ideas about how to market a gene - THE COMFORT GENE - or something that cures drug addiction but has the side effect of rapidly aging a person.

Are biotech companies quietly killing off people with their experimentation, that information held from the hard news? Are American executives going to foreign countries to get the gene therapy they want and can afford because it isn't offered here? Are scientists already growing missing ears in labs?

331) "You know how gene therapy kills people? All sorts of ways. They don't know what's going to happen. They insert genes into people, and it turns on cancer genes, and the people die of cancer. Or they have huge allergic reactions and die. These goofballs don't know what they hell they are doing. They're reckless and they don't follow the rules. And we," he said, "are going to smack their asses down."

C 2006 Michael Crichton
HarperCollinsPublishers

CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW of THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE by AIMEE BENDER

BOOK REVIEW by CHRISTINE TRZYNA c 2010

According to the Library of Congress this book is classified first under TASTE, then FAMILY SECRETS, and then PSYCHOLOGY.

But as I read it, it was clear to me that PSYCHOLOGY is the pivotal issue, in a family of members who all have little quirks or serious mental problems; we as readers are struggling through the shades of gray to DEFINE what is wrong with this one or that, which confuses us because we don't know how much we can believe, though we want to believe, through the narrator, Rosie, whose gift or curse is that she can taste other people's emotions through the food they prepare. Maybe the story as Rosie's proves that it is Rosie who is cracked.

Here are the FAMILY SECRETS not secret to us readers: A mother who takes a long time to find and accept her talent after much dabbling, who can't openly admit a cold and distant marriage, an affair that may be preserving her and her family somehow, or that she has a seriously mentally ill son, Joseph, mother's hope being what it is.

Joseph makes it through school as a science nerd with one friend in the world but is never property diagnosed or given help. He "disappears" after many a trial run. Then there's the father who is a successful lawyer but can't step a foot in a hospital, not even for the birth of his children, who hides his thoughts and feelings, without hiding in a bedroom like his son does. And the far-away mother/mother in law, who may be loosing her mind, and who no one visits or invites in, sends boxes full of discards, emptying her home bit by bit. Rosie is a daughter who feels obligated to let the life of a college student pass her by, though that is her heritage, because her brother can't achieve his goals and is railroaded to the community college instead of Cal Tech.

Was it intended or is this book an accidental case of magic realism?

The Particular Sadness of Lemon cake was sad. And it held my interest from beginning quirk to facing the reality that the family can't.


The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
C 2010 Aimee Bender
Doubleday is the publisher

READING FICTION versus NONFICTION (AND MY BLOG COMMENTARIES)

READING FICTION versus NONFICTION
by Christine Trzyna

I've been reading more non-fiction than fiction. But I do love fiction. I write less about fiction in this blog because I have focused on excerpting passages from books that I think illustrate interesting language, or information that is thought provoking, or which stood out when I was reading. For the purposes of the usually brief commentary in the blog - on line journal - format, I find it much more difficult to "star" a passage from fiction. I also feel it is difficult to illustrate through an excerpt or quote an important element of fiction, and that is the plot.

I often treat myself to reading an author who I've never read before, especially if a friend has referred me to a book or it appears on the library New Book Shelf or in the LA TIMES BOOK REVIEW. This year I have read a couple fiction stories that I have not commented upon but enjoyed for one reason or another. I recently read and enjoyed SAIL by James Patterson and Howard Rougan, C 2008 by James Patterson only, and put out by Little, Brown, and Company. NY. It falls into a category that I really enjoy SEA TALES.

From THE END of THE AFFAIR by GRAHAM GREENE

Chapter One, first paragraph -

BOOK ONE

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who - when he has been seriously noted at all - has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet.'

For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry -I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me:as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near hate."