Exquisite Words

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I’ve missed out on a week of Exquisite Wordage, and blogging generally, for a few reasons: my site picked up a little malware, for one thing and had to be vigorously scrubbed. Mostly, though, I’ve been focusing on my current batch of writing students and my own work in progress.

I hope to ease into being chatty again in September. In the meantime, here’s a bit from Richard Rayner’s A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age:

Throughout this astonishing period, L.A. was the fastest-growing city in the world. In America only San Francisco had ever grown so fast, during the years of the Gold Rush following 1849. But by the 1920s, San Francisco’s boom was long done. New York, Boston and even Chicago had never known an explosion like the one that was happening in L.A. Every working day throughout the 1920s, builders started more than fifty new homes. Each week a new hotel went up. The year 1923 alone saw the construction of 800 office buildings, 400 industrial buildings, 150 schools, 130 warehousees, 700 apartment buildings, and more than 25,000 single dwellings. Property prices doubled, tripled, quadrupled, eventually rising sixfold through the decade. The city began to spread, amoeba-like, in search f its suburbs, although in those days L.A. still meant downtown, thriving with business and residences.

You can almost see this happening in a black and white time-release photo kind of way, can’t you?

Or this, where I quote Rayner quoting Chandler:

In this defeated atmosphere, the expressionless blue of the sky and the unchanging rhythm of perfect days taht followed each other one after the other added to the melancholy. “Outside the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in the light,” wrote Raymond Chandler.

Facial recognition=teh fail

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My father is back in Canada for the summer from his teaching gig in China, and he and his wife passed through Vancouver on Friday. I took them to Cafe Calabria, naturally, and obliged Frank Junior to shoot us.

photo.JPG

Bear hadn’t been to my current apartment and had to phone a few times to locate me. When he got close–as in a five minute drive away–I told him I’d wait on my corner and flag him down. And so I ended up out there, away from the phone, with no idea what he drives. I haven’t seen Bear in a couple years, and my memory for visual stuff, including faces, is not my strongest suit.

Anyway, it turns out every man of a certain age looks like my father when I’m peering into the cars rushing by on First, trying to guess whether or not the driver looks like he knows where he’s going.

Finally this aging, creaky rusted-out white VW bug pulls up on the cross street. Aha! Decrepit Volkswagons were, at least at one time, my father’s car of choice. And within is a guy with a snow-white flowing beard and the style of hat Bear favors (he calls ’em pimp hats. Think Huggy Bear on *Starsky & Hutch,* if you’re old enough. If you’re not old enough, you’ve missed nothing).

I looked at this man and I thought: Wow, my father has really aged.

The light changed, the car whined, whined, I tell you! as it tried to get across First. It sounded like it was trying to run a rocket engine on something like orange juice instead of gas. I waved like mad at the parking space in front of my building.

Moving at a land speed that would do a leopard slug proud, assuming said slug was newly recovered from a debilitating foot injury, the car pulled over beside the parking space and the window creaked down. Holy cow, I thought. So white-haired! So rickety! So indecisive and confused-looking! Did he look like that before he went to China? Wouldn’t I have noticed? And hey, Bear, would you just park already?

Creak, creak, creak as he rolled down his window.

“Excuse me young lady. Are you waving at me?”

Oh. Not even remotely my father.

I apologized, told him I thought he was someone else, and didn’t tell him it was someone I ought to damnwell recognize on sight. He got his laboring little bug up to walking speed again–I should’ve given him a push–and tootled away. I passed him yesterday and he’d made it all the way to the corner of Venables and McLean, ten blocks north of here.

Bear and Lily showed up five minutes later, driving a car with a real engine and looking like they do in the above shot, except that I deprived Bear of his Edmonton Oilers cap before the shoot. Maybe the pimp hats weren’t so bad.

Books: Little Face, by Sophie Hannah

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I recently finished Sophie Hannah’s suspense novel Little Face. One of my students recommended it; she knows I’m wild for Tana French, and the two of them did an interview together online recently.

Little Face was, ultimately, just okay. Maybe my expectations of the prose were unreasonably high because of the “You like French, you’ll like her,” format of the recommendation that led me to her. And there’s nothing wrong with her prose–it’s very competent–but it was other things that put me off. The central mystery spilled out in a way that I couldn’t buy–the set-up was great, but the outcome didn’t convince me. And the bulk of the novel grapples with these two extremely strained heterosexual relationships that are, at their core, really ugly. Unkindness and systematic humiliation of the weak character by the strong abounds, and I find it hard to take vicarious enjoyment in that particular form of human misery.

There’s a fair amount of darkness and violence in my writing, of course, so it’s always interesting to see what puts me off. It turns out that extended mean scenes are on that list. Even in cases where the victims eventually turn it around, the sense of justice served isn’t satisfying enough to wash the taste of nastiness away.

Exquisite Words

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The opening of Breakfast with the Ones You Love by Eliot Fintushel is a hard-working bit of prose: it establishes the narrator as young and female while also raising lots of curiosity. It’s a terrific hook for a terrific book.

If you want to be safe, a person like myself, you have to kill your face. Otherwise people get their hooks in you, which, who needs it? I already killed my face by the age of twelve. Problem is, my tits invaded. I tried not eating, which I hear stops tits in their tracks, but I couldn’t keep it up. In spite of everything, there is something in you that wants to keep you alive. It’s like a disease that you just can’t shake, no matter how hard you try. At least you can kill your face, see? Me, I can kill people too. I can kill them whenever I want to.

Punchy, mmm? Here’s the cover: