Counterbalance

#LANovels Shortlist

I never imagined I'd be writing a post here that included my own shortlist, that's how allergic I've become to longlists and shortlists and prizes that are not awarded, etc. But, here we are.

What I've only come to appreciate (or freak out about) after announcing this fine project of mine is how many amazing novels set in Los Angeles feature parts of L.A. that no longer exist and how much fiction that is "quintessentially LA" for many people is crime fiction. A few contributors bemoaned the "crime" fiction situation in Los Angeles so much that I feel certain they went out of their way to suggest other books. 

After many of you submitted your favorite #LANovel for the project I announced last week, here are the top 20 picks with the most votes (in random order):

• Our Ecstatic Days by Steve Erickson
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
• Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
• Ask the Dust by John Fante
• The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar
• What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg
• Play it As it Lays by Joan Didion
• Black Dahlia by James Ellroy
• The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
• Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• Shopgirl by Steve Martin
• Jamesland by Michelle Huneven
• The Long Goodbye Raymond Chandler
• L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy
• My Hollywood by Mona Simpson
• Zeroville by Steve Erickson
• The Flutter of an Eyelid by Myron Brinig
• This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes
• The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle

Quite a list, no? Now that you've seen it, what do you feel is missing? Are you among those who suggested a novel that didn't make the Top 20? Will you still follow along anyway? Or are you now over this entire thing before it has properly begun?

It should also be noted that many of you suggested I add all of Michael Connelly's books and all of Robert Crais. If there's clarity and consensus among you as to which ones are truly top of the pops and deserve to be on this esteemed-company list, let me know.

The real task looms: How to select a novel that has places I can actually visit vs. simply sharing photo archives of a razed Bunker Hill with you all? As a proper bookish LA nerd, this is a task I'm relishing. Next week, I'll announce my first pick and I'll get to reading. 

Social Reading, Story and The #LANovels Project

I've been thinking and writing about social reading for a long time now and have been advocating for an element of social that is local, even hyper local. My post about social voting vs. social reading was a first grasping effort to quantify what social reading was to me. My first app attempt centered around check-ins. Instead of checking in on Foursquare and knowing what dish the other checked-in folks in the coffee shop recommend, I wanted to build something that would tell me what everyone in the coffee shop was currently reading. Imagine the conversations that could take place offline, in our own community, around books! Nearly two years later, my perspective has shifted.

While I'd still very much like to create this app (and many new apps have sprung up since my wild vision years ago that could almost get at it with a bit of kluge-y usage), I've since realized it would only offer the initial touch point for conversation. It would connect you with others that either loved or loathed the book you were reading, but it couldn't connect you more deeply with the story itself. I believe this - the desire to connect more deeply with the story - is the underlying premise of nearly all social reading endeavors, whether they are ultimately successful or not. And many are unsuccessful because their focus is on the reading of a story, instead of the story itself.

Since I started banging on about social reading long ago, there have been so many definitions and spirited discussions about what "social reading" means, what it is, what it isn't, what tools reflect this, how readers really read, how they really want to interact with authors (if ever) and will they ever use these social tools that have risen up to fill the "social reading" void. Some excellent tools have been developed that allow readers to share and discuss text in a multitude of new ways. Are these tools the final definition of social reading? For some, probably. For me, they are one way "in" to a book but are certainly not the only way. I continue to be primarily interested in "social reading" as something that's not just about technology, but how tech tools can help us shed our online-only lives and connect offline with a novel, a character, a setting, a community or other readers who share a love of the same. This view is part of a larger philosophy I have about stepping away from computers and taking part in the world that lives just beyond your front door...something I fully accept not everyone subscribes to with as much fervor as I do.

I'm not alone in this line of thinking. Small Demons is centered around all the elements within a novel - including place - that you connect to as a reader. Their site allows you to delve deeper into the "storyverse" of a novel you loved (or loathed.) This gets at something much deeper than sharing a quote on Twitter or Tumbling your favorite passages while you're mid-read or hosting a roundtable discussion of a specific novel on your blog or even attending your local book club. This is story as social, not reading as social.

This idea of story as social is what I'm most interested in exploring further. It is what led me to the #LANovels Project. Through social channels (natch) I've gathered up a list of your favorite LA novels. Most of which I've never read (terrible LA resident that I am) but have meant to read for a long time. Here's my plan: pick a novel, read the novel, explore the local landscape of the novel and document that exploration using a variety of tools that may (or may not, this is purely an experiment) help illuminate the story for you. Don't live in LA but loved Fante's Ask the Dust? What if I read it and left audio-notes on Broadcastr at each location in the novel? Never been to Echo Park but it features heavily in your favorite LA novel? How can tech allow me to connect you with the area in a way you can't without being there? How can tech allow you to connect me with a novel setting in Baltimore that I've never seen?

Surely you can argue that any novelist worth their salt would do a landscape or city or setting justice...no additional after-the-fact tech/social enhancements required. I don't disagree. But I'm interested in exploring this notion of place as character which also happens to be the place in which I live. It's already happening around me with every film filmed on my street. With every car commercial filmed outside my window. (It would shock you to learn how many national car commercials are filmed in the same one-block stretch of downtown LA, my 4th-Street-Bridge-view somehow deemed a perfect stand-in for "any city USA.") What you see when you watch a new car commercial is not what I saw when it was filmed. My additional perspective adds to the story in some way. I know what this bridge looks like when no one is filming. I remember the car crash there last year. The choir that sang on it last month. The way it looks just like Paris at night if you have a drink or two and squint just so. Might the same be true for novels? If so, THAT's the social component I'm most interested in. Story. Stories set in your local community...a community of other interested readers and those who cannot physically be here.

This is all a wild experiment that could reveal much or reveal little. I'll be announcing the initial list of novels and the first pick next week. I hope you'll come along for the ride. 

Swiftian Sadness

I've finished Graham Swift's latest novel, Wish You Were Here, and it was all that I've missed in the years that I've not read any of his work. Big aches, long-held sadness, hoped-for-solutions that never come. He is a writer who understands the nature of the human soul and reveals our own nature to us patiently, without fanfare, so that his ability to know each of us is not an ah-ha moment mid-novel but a slowly building sense -- and relief -- that our deepest sadnesses and greatest unspoken fears are fully known.

I didn't find myself marking every other sentence for its brilliance or even noting story structure while reading (something I often over-analyze mid-read which makes for a mess of expectations and let downsthat are entirely of my own making). I was simply in the story. In the pain of it. In the character's own lack of awareness and then awareness. In each family member's fumbling attempt to control their own destiny, to claim it in some way, to mark it as something not-inevitable.

It's been a week or so and it has hung around me like a cloak. Swift has a way of illuminating profound loss so exquisitely that it seeps into me and takes hold of me. I've had a hard time shaking it off.

 Stacey D'Erasmo at NYT captures Swift's ability well in her review:

"He has what might be described as an old-­fashioned humanist sensibility; the unearthing of buried emotion, and the consequences of that unearthing, is his métier. Jamesian in sensibility and to some degree in style, he finds tragedy in the most ordinary conversation, redemption in the way one character offers another an umbrella. You forget how piercing this sort of thing can be until you see Swift doing it so well, and with such patience. The depth of field in a Swift novel, thematically and emotionally, is vast. At his best, he suggests that looking intently at the smallest, most mundane thing can yield a glimpse into the meaning of life."

This is a beautiful book. One of Swift's best. Would love to know if you've read it and what you thought.

The Weight of Ink

i got a tattoo (my first. only?) last week
and though i did not expect it
the experience changed me

all the fear of needles
all the fear of blood throughout my life
the fainting at doctor's offices, passing out during violent movies
(i still have not seen the needle to the heart scene in Pulp Fiction without hands covering my eyes)
all the fear of judgement
the concern about what others think of me (the tattoo placed in just the spot where i may be possibly-judged daily so I can learn to let it go)
i embraced that fear and i owned it, if only for a day 
the day of the first tattoo 

and what the poem, its title now inked, means to me
its title and its rally cry now permanently part of me
what it means to me in terms of living
in terms of making this life mean something
in terms of standing up for myself
for those who are not given the same freedoms i enjoy
in terms of shedding all the judgement from my mother
all the fear she instilled in me
in terms of celebrating all those i've lost in my life
the examples they set for me of a better way to live, unencumbered by fear

where it happened also mattered
though i had planned to get the tattoo weeks later in another city entirely

oh the power of place
the power of place as character in my life
getting the tattoo at that shop, in that place, and all the memories tied up for me in san diego
the shedding of what i once was, finally, becoming someone i truly am and not being afraid of someone not liking it, no longer afraid of someone deeming me somehow not enough (or too much)

it felt like the best kind of fuck you
it felt like the best kind of here i am
it felt like the best kind of "it's okay to be happy after everything you've been through"
it felt like the years of not rocking the boat, of avoiding confrontation, of holding together a family of alcoholics had come to an end
it felt like home
and joe, the artist who would mark me
and his galway accent and all we discussed within moments of meeting each other
all the connections to Ireland, to the bar I met my husband in, to the long lost Irish belonging I felt moments off the plane in Dublin
and the solar eclipse, so auspicious on the day of our meeting, of his suggestion, only hours into knowing me, that i might be someone who'd over-think their tattoo and mind-fake themselves into not getting it (oh, really? you don't say...)
appointment for late june cancelled
appointment for two days later noted in the books
joe would mark me on a tuesday

and then

watching that first line of the h
feeling it burn my skin
watching the curve of the s, the arc of the a
then all that excitement and all that fear and all that adrenaline crashing down
upon me, around me, inside me
sweating
cold
dizzy a bit
i had to look away
i had planned to go in there and be a champ
for him
for me
for everyone in the room
that's how i saw it going down in my mind
but i faltered
i was not a champ, but i had wanted to be
and i was there, in that chair
and it was happening
and i had made it happen
there was an inevitability to it that was beautiful
and wasn't that something?

the way he distracted me during the tense moments
reminding me to breathe
asked me about a conversation my brother and i had two days before
during my brother's tattoo
joe was the old lady you don't think is listening, but he is oh he is
he remembered about the wine. i was touched.
had i finally told my brother which bottle it was i forgot to bring?
i had.
and what did my brother think of that, joe asked.
i looked at my brother.
he said it was an amazing bottle i'd left behind. he was sad we could not drink it.
(the 2001 Chateau d'Yquem awaits)
i know, i said. but at least it exists in this world.
and joe repeated it with a laugh and a smile.
at least it exists in this world.

and we were all there in the moment of my undoing and remaking
we were there to witness it together and each of them in the room had a sense of how big it was for me
they had an idea
but they could not possibly have known how big
i didn't even know until the drilling stopped
until i felt that swipe of the glove and the vaseline applied (that i had seen so many times on my friend's tattoos or on any reality tattoo show, you pick) and i realized the tattoo - and the experience of getting my first - was over.

and i was exhilarated and proud of myself.
and sad.
i had not wanted this moment of personal triumph to be over so soon.
i wanted to luxuriate in it. extend it.
i asked questions. too many.
about tattoo care.
about the next time.
didn't want it to end.
didn't want to break the spell.
he said he was honored to be the first to mark me.
i, as an open wound (literally), took that in and owned it. instead of the usual inner voice that would say "ah, he says that to everyone", i just took it. believed it.
was honored right back.

and then

out on the street, the sun shining, we're in search of a guinness
in search of a way to celebrate
to seal the deal that was already permanently ink-sealed
to celebrate that i had done it
to celebrate that my brother could not believe it
to celebrate all that had come before in san diego
to celebrate and honor all that i was leaving behind, shedding, saying goodbye to
so as to make room for all that lies ahead

and we drank
and we toasted
to tattoos
to firsts
to san diego
to fucked up families
to art
to bravery
to all that lies ahead

it's been a week since i got my tattoo
i don't want this spell to end
this experience - this minor tattoo - holds more in it for me than any gift of any monetary value i could give myself
the gift? permission
to be me, unapologetically
to be imperfect
to be vulnerable
to accept i deserve happiness on my own terms
to know those terms will change and to be fine with it

i'm emboldened now in ways i never had been before
don't like me? fine
don't like this permanent mark on my wrist? also fine
getting to "fine"
getting to "take me as i am and all i'm trying to become"
may sound simple to you, though it is everything to me
i have finally become, in part, the person i'd hoped i would be

this mark on my body may seem like a cliche to you
or misguided or something to future-regret 
to me, it ushers in an entirely new era of possibilities
if i can do this thing i never thought i'd be brave enough to do
what else will i accomplish with my newly found nerve?