Counterbalance

Desert Dispatch

I am frequently in the desert now, which is nothing at all like the downtown Los Angeles I left behind. There are golf carts. And people who care deeply about golf, as deep as their suntans. There are others who have had so much work done I can't even look at them. Still more who seem to shop a great deal and then scurry back to their rambling homes with fancy bags from fancy shops, piling it all inside.

Drive yourself out to Joshua Tree and you will find a completely different kind of desert dweller. The artists. The legit dreamers and doers who have sought out a direct dialogue with nature. So silent are their spaces, so vast are their views, so sandy are the roads that lead you to and from their humble homes.

On paper, I'm not a desert person. I burn inside five minutes. SPF 100 is part of my daily routine. I love the fog of San Francisco, the chill of snowy mountains, the cool air clinging to the bedsheets from an open window on a cold night. 110 degrees and Palm Trees? You could've asked me a thousand times about this in the past ten years and each time I'd have said no. 

And yet.

Something led me to the desert this summer. I had a notion that all the dry heat would be clarifying. That the contrast of you versus the heat would reveal what you were made of and require a reckoning. And that's true. In some ways. In other ways, it can seem too easy. A place filled with no urgency, too many empty vacation homes and more Palm Trees than you can count.

The main thing? The sky. The sky and the stars and the moon that is so bright you wonder where that goddamn light is coming from as it's ruining your star-gazing only to see it is the moon in all its glory just doing its thing. And you realize it has always been there doing its thing while you've been running around in Los Angeles like a crazy person with too much to do and too many masters to serve and deadlines that can't be met and projects that need your time and friends you never see and stuff you never use and all the rest. 

That moon and that sky and those stars demand that you slow down and notice them. They require your full attention. The beauty of that? When you give them your full attention, everything else falls away. All the nonsense, all the ugliness, all the shoulds in your life recede. 

And I need that kind of focus right now. A big vast sky to focus on that only asks me to sit below it in wonder.

I might turn into a desert darling one day with my cart and my tan and my puffed up lips. Or I might become a proper Joshua Tree maven with my Jeep and my boots and my leather hat. Or I might never fit in here and drift about, like the few lovely desert folks I've recently met, never needing to fit a label or a scene or have a reason to be here other than the great big sky that requires reverence.

It's early days. We'll have to see what shakes out. 

Reader-Writer Moment #671

I've been consuming books at a rate I haven't in some time. I mark this down to my life at the moment, which has been unexpectedly nutty. I have had to leave a home I did not expect to leave to get out of a crazy situation I did not create. I am now in another place and exploring still other places.

When you leave a home you felt certain (oh how silly, that certainty) would be akin to a forever home and you shed all your things in search of a new home, you begin to change your relationship to the concept of home. What it means, what it came to mean though perhaps it should not have, what a new home in a new place might look like, what being home within yourself means so that an external home and all its outward trappings comes to mean so much less. 

You also examine your relationship to place. Where you've been, what feels familiar, what is perhaps too familiar and your routines have become so routine you overlook daily magic. Where you've not been, what remains unexplored, what a new place might mean for seeing things in a new (better?) way.

All this exploration is not complete without asking the obvious question: who am I in each place? who do i hope to become regardless of place? are there certain places that might faciliate that more than others?

Finally, I've been toying with the idea that so much in life is transitory, ephemeral, not to be counted on. So what is it we can hold on to? What is the thing for each of us that makes us feel at home in the world wherever we happen to be in the world, even if the sand shifts beneath our feet regularly and we find ourselves in new circumstances more frequently than we'd planned?

Cheesy as it sounds, books are that thing for me. Stories are my home no matter what home I'm in. No matter what place I'm in. Whether I begin the day in one place and end it in another, wearing the same thing I did yesterday (and maybe the day before.) It is the dialogue I have with writers as a reader, it is the dialogue I have with place as I read. 

It is also a lot of other things I'm mulling over, linking up, stitching together. There's more work to be done here, for sure. But I've been making notes along these lines for weeks.

So imagine my immediate kinship with Rebecca Solnit when I stumbled upon this passage last night, mere hours after holding court to my husband and dogs and the sparkling night sky about this very thing:

"I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness. And distant places give us refuge in territories where our own histories aren't so deeply entrenched and we can imagine other stories, other selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.

The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story."

                                    -Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Rebecca, of course, nails it in a way I could not. I'm only a few chapters into her book, but my goodness is her writing beautiful. More soon. From whatever place or space or story I find myself in next.

Lit Bits & That Book Everyone Loved (Except for Me)

It's been awhile, hasn't it? This is why.

But CEO or no, I haven't stopped reading and having far afield opinions on all things bookish. And so I've reminded myself (for the umpteenth time) that I don't need to cut out the readerly parts of myself just because another part of myself is really busy. Is this a return to regular blogging here? Probably not. But let's not end the party before I've arrived. Let's just consider this the RSVP and see how we do.

Litty Bittys

Some lit bits that I've been mulling over as of late:

• Remember when I re-read all of Murakami in the lead-up for 1Q84? That was awesome. So why am I so reluctant to read 1Q84? Is it in some way related to why I won't read DFW's Pale King? Is there a support group for last and/or most recent novels that we are afraid to read for unclear but very powerful reasons? Tell me I'm not alone.
• I've been power-reading recently and I note that my superstition about completing a book and needing to start another immediately following (and I mean immediately; as in, moments after) is as strong as ever. I've recently made my way through Panorama City by Antoine Wilson, Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas, The Map and the Territory by Michael Houellebecq, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, All That Follows by Jim Crace, Luminariaum by Alex Shekar, Swimming Home by Deborah Levy and Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil.
• I've moved on to NW by Zadie Smith. The thing about Smith in general is that I read her less for her plot and characters and more for her uncannily spot-on observations of daily life. I often find when reading her I have a lot of "yes! exactly that!" moments. 
• I snarkily tweeted about Houellebecq here and here.
• I really want to make the LA Novels Project happen. I read so many of the novels on the list but was stuck with how to execute a digital exploration of the novels that would be interesting to all five of you. I'm all ears.
• It's a way off, but I'm crushing on the Making of the Great Bolaño: The Man and the Myth event put on by LAPL on May 16th. Reserve now. (Also, funny. Have been thinking of a re-read all Bolaño marathon. But, that could be too whoa for my life right now.)

The Book You Raved About & I Didn't

So. You know all those incredibly glowing reviews for Narcopolis? There are twenty-nine rave snippents included at the beginning of the paperback. Everyone I know (and respect a good deal) really loved it. I, of course, didn't get it. Not even a little bit. And you know me. I can read a book with no plot and characters I could give two nuts about as long as there are a few lovely sentences to keep me unraveling the thread.

What magic was I missing? It felt like one long heroin dirge to me. I was intrigued by Mr. Lee and rather enjoyed his backstory. But that's where my interest started and stopped. Is this book revalatory because it is not what we've come to expect from an "Indian novel," as the jacket copy suggests? To wit: "Narcopolis completely subverts and challenges the literary traditions for which the Indian novel is celebrated." 

The Guardian exclaims "Nothing like this exists in Indian literature."

So, that makes it somehow magical beyond all comprehension? Dear, dear friends adored this book. I feel like I don't know them anymore. What. Did. I. Miss? Again, I'm all ears.

Reader-Writer Moment #583

I'm at a very specific juncture in my life. I have regrets and opportunities and decisions to catalogue. I've not done many of the things I'd hoped to have done by now, but dammit I've done some things I'd never dreamed of, too. I've not kept my word on several fronts (LA Novels project, anyone?) because some pretty incredible things presented themselves in lieu.

I've also somehow realized (with age?) that constant pursuit (of so many things) is not nearly as lovely as constant enjoyment of the present. As the list of those I've lost in my life grows ever longer, I'm finding a desire to simply be, not strive. To live, not document. To vibrate with the gift I've been given to choose among all this and find my own path. And reverse course. And find another. And switch paths again.

One of the downsides of these new in lieu opporutnities is that I've not read novels with any regularity this year. I have missed it deeply. I picked up a copy of Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be? while on a recent work/think trip to Napa and though I've only been able to dip into it sporadically, it has given me jolts of joy.

Case in point:

"There's so much beauty in this world that it's hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live---if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I'm just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given the chance to live.

I am writing a play. I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted and our standard of living maintains itself at its current level, I will weep into my oatmeal."

We are all, I believe, seeking our play that will change the world. As I consider my options, I'll be here. Vibrating in my apartment, lucky I have the chance to consider my options at all.

This Deafening Silence Means Something

The dead air between my #LANovels extravaganza announcement and this post? It is what I've learned to accept in my life. As soon as I announce a big project I'm extremely passionate about in my non-working life, my working life rises to meet that energy and crush it. Wholesale.

But I'm wiser now than in years past and instead of worrying about it and fretting and feeling oh so sure you will all no longer care about my project, I'm taking a fresh approach: sod it. So there was a big gap? I'm human. So are you. Let's do this anyway.

I've been traveling a bit and on my last jaunt up to San Francisco (seventeen posts should come out of that trip alone, we'll see...) I hastily grabbed one of the books on the #LANovels list in hopes it would be a great kick-off point for many locations in Los Angeles that I could explore and illuminate for you. That book? Hector Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries. A good book, if not an infuriating one (for all the right reasons), though not chock full of notable LA landmarks. There are a few good ones in the mix, though. 

So this is where we start. As wiser adults unencumbered by the fear of what others think about our project that got off track and may well do again. We start at perhaps not the ideal novel at not the ideal time. But we are wise now. We will do this with grace. To hell with the avalanche of work just over the horizon.

Stay tuned for the first installment. And a few bits in between.