Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2020 i Journal of Alta California

GUSTAVO ARELLANO “Farewell, Frieda,” page 110 You’ve profiled so many people in your career. How is it a different experience when you’re writing about someone who’s passed, as you do this month in your appreciation of produce pioneer Frieda Caplan, a.k.a. the “Kiwi Queen”? You try to place them among the eternals—get the scope of their life, yes, but also make the argument that they mattered. It’s a challenge, but one that I find readers love even more than profiles of the living. SUSAN STRAIGHT “Tiny Bottles of Nirvana,” page 50 Is your essay on Vietnamese immigrant Ann Nguyen part of a larger project? For five years, I worked on In the Country of Women, my first memoir, about six generations of women in my family who migrated west. With…

Last fall, two very different approaches to addressing climate change unfolded in the Bay Area. One Atmosphere commissioned a 60-by-30-foot mural of climate activist Greta Thunberg for San Francisco’s Union Square. Painted on the side of an eight-story building, the fiery teenager looks determined and unbowed, gazing down at pedestrians and traffic with eyes the size of windscreens. Per the sponsoring organization, a rendering of the Swedish teen as big as Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore is an effective way to honor and amplify a message of environmental stewardship for a warming planet. Meanwhile, across the bay, Tony Santoro’s Guide to Illegal Tree-Planting debuted. The 23-minute video—released the week before the mural’s reveal—is the work of a tattooed, foulmouthed Chicago transplant who for the past few years has been quietly…

I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy but I kept looking at her body and I didn’t care.” So writes Charles Bukowski in the opening chapter of his 1971 debut novel, Post Office. Today, it is unimaginable to think of an author so vulgar and baldly misogynist publishing anything like it. But Bukowski’s work—six novels, numerous short story collections, and more than 30 poetry collections—continues to be widely read 26 years after his death. It even attracts tourists to Los…

It’s the last day of the dry season. The winds herald a coming Sierra storm—they blow the golden leaves off a black oak along the trail to the Boole Tree, a giant sequoia and the world’s sixth-largest tree. I first made the trek to the Boole in 1989. Half a lifetime ago for me, but barely a blip in this 2,000-plus-year-old tree’s time on Earth, an epoch during which it has survived lightning, wildfires, windstorms, blizzards, drought, and the industrial-scale logging of the forests in Converse Basin, 60 miles east of Fresno. Last time around, it took me less than an hour on the gentle three-mile loop that climbs about 500 feet to reach the secluded bowl where the Boole Tree stands, towering over century-old sequoias that sprouted after the…

It occurs to me now that poverty is often associated with parasites—and not just in literal ways. In every election, I can count on one or another politician to rail against people who “live off” taxpayers’ money, receiving food stamps, rent assistance, or medical services while making no discernible effort to become self-sufficient. California, where I have lived nearly half my life, is particularly hostile to the poor. Before he conjured up the “welfare queen” on the presidential campaign trail, Ronald Reagan had won the California governorship in 1966 on a promise to end “freeloading at the expense of conscientious citizens.” At that time, the number of Californians who were benefiting from federal assistance—Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC—was growing by as many as 40,000 new recipients each…

When Ginger Gaffney arrives to consult at an alternative-sentencing program on a ranch in New Mexico where the inmate-residents have lost control of their horses, she feels, understandably, overwhelmed. Not only are the horses in a state of overt rebellion, but some of the inmates appear to be in only marginally better shape. Gaffney must earn the trust of the horses—comparatively easy, given that such animals are her passion and her life’s work—but, even more important, she must earn the trust of the men and women for whom this ranch is a rare line of defense against a traditional and brutal prison culture. Both the animals and the humans are, in the words of one resident, “more than half broke.” Initially, Gaffney is in over her head and knows it,…

Rishi Reddi’s first novel, Passage West, is an audacious piece of work. On the one hand, the author situates her story in a California most of us won’t recognize: the Imperial Valley early in the previous century, when South Asians worked the irrigated desert, growing cotton and produce. On the other, she is not a Californian but came to this material because of what it says about identity and displacement, issues that have complicated U.S. history from the start. Still, if California is a tricky territory, Reddi has done her homework, not only about the place but also about the time she re-creates. “I want to say—I cannot say too often—any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the…

I bend the truth constantly when I want something,” admits Prue Van Teesen, the narrator of Anna Dorn’s electric debut novel, Vagablonde. And Prue wants something constantly—she has a loving girlfriend and a promising career, but the 30-year-old Los Angeles lawyer is a collection of desires. She wants to stop taking her antidepressant. She wants to be the center of attention, all the time. More than anything, she wants to be a famous musician like her idol, Wyatt Walcott, who parlayed an appearance on a reality show into a career making pop music and lighting up the Instagram feeds of Southern California’s party set. Prue meets a music producer named Jax Jameson, who recruits her to join a hip-hop band called Shiny AF. Their first single is an instant hit,…

What is your favorite place in the West? My home country is the San Francisco Bay Area and the Sierra Nevada. How has your translation work affected the poems you create? From the beginning. The language of the Old and New Testaments that has filled my ears since childhood is an English translation of Hebrew and Greek texts. Our political language in the West is full of translated phrases from Latin and Greek. The word poetry is a translation from the Greek. But more specifically, for me, translation that I’ve done myself is a form of close study, and close study gets the work of others under your skin in ways that make it impossible to know exactly how it’s affected you. Who influenced your work most significantly? Probably the…

Lidia Yuknavitch is known for placing those we don’t see or choose not to see at the center of her work. In novels such as The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children and her memoir, The Chronology of Water, she gives life and agency to characters who struggle on the fringes, suffering and occasionally thriving; the Oregon-based author writes about people and situations that would otherwise be absent from literature, just as they are marginalized in life. In her first collection of short fiction, Verge, Yuknavitch continues to uncover possibilities where we might least expect to find them. You’ll be wholly unsurprised that her favorite color is blood. The stories in Verge interrogate the spaces between beauty and violence, especially “The Organ Runner” and “Second Language.” In…

How does it feel to see your work collected in this book? The whole time I was making it, I would remind myself: “You’d love a book like this, a book about a woman artist that was so intimate.” To make a work about work…it’s like a hall of mirrors. When you’re working on a project, how do you find the faith to move forward? You have to find a way into the soft, porous side of the world. The internet is the opposite of this. So you can’t be passive about that—you have to be aggressive with yourself when it comes to limiting it. You cite the “unconscious frisson” of creating movies. How do you invite that spontaneity into your writing? I have all kinds of tricks, but the…

When the most prominent names in the Los Angeles dance scene convened for a panel discussion last year at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, an offhand comment inspired the city’s single largest dance event: the inaugural Los Angeles International Dance Festival, to be held April 11 through 26. “I said what we need is a dance festival,” Nigel Lythgoe recalls telling the audience. Cocreator of the television show So You Think You Can Dance, Lythgoe was a dancer-choreographer for most of his life in England before moving to the United States and producing American Idol in 2002. Philanthropist Glorya Kaufman, who has donated millions to the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance as well as $20 million to establish Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at…

Precautionary electricity blackouts are now a standard of Golden State living. Designed to help prevent wildfires, the outages also prevent your freezer from freezing, your lights from lighting, and your air conditioner from cooling. In response, citizens across California are taking power-generation into their own hands—and those hands are full of options. Residential solar power has grown more affordable in the past decade. As a result, California is home to one million solar roofs, and solar installers report that as many as 40 percent of their customers want to pair their system with a reserve battery. It’s not just Californians with solar panels who are looking into backup energy sources. Generac, the leading brand in home generators, recently reported that California sales were three times higher than a year ago.…

On a Monday morning in downtown San Francisco, the Blue Bottle on Second Street, like all Blue Bottles (and Starbucks and Peet’s and Dunkin’ and independent coffee shops everywhere), is packed. People sitting at blond-wood counters with coffee in paper cups capped with plastic lids, even though ceramic for-here cups are available. People standing in line empty-handed, waiting to pick up paper cups capped with plastic lids. People walking out the door—myself included—clutching paper cups capped with plastic lids, headed to meetings, to the bus, to stare into their MacBooks. It’s an everyday ritual as routine as brushing our teeth. But it’s about as endangered as the planet itself. America’s harried, to-go coffee culture has contributed, in its own significant way, to the climate crisis. Which means: our coffee culture…

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. —RICHARD FEYNMAN There is a long-established theory of publishing that the real goal is to attract a vast audience and then assemble, dissect, and merchandise that audience for advertisers. It’s not exactly wrong. It has worked well for publishers like Facebook who have aggregated an audience on a scale of hundreds of millions. They have developed wonderful technology to attract that audience and partition it into units, which are of economic interest to branding companies, politicians, and state actors. Lately, even the algorithms of Apple News have detected which kinds of sensational headlines garner clicks—after all, the goal is to attract a big audience. In some ways, these algorithms have rediscovered the insight of H.L. Mencken: Nobody ever went broke underestimating…

The great disruption in consumer home entertainment that is now being labeled the Streaming Wars began for me almost 20 years ago. In December 2000, I signed up for a Netflix account. Receiving DVDs by mail in those iconic red envelopes was a revelation. No more indecisively trudging the aisles of a Blockbuster to select a film, only to return home and have the noose of late fees dangling over my head. With DVDs arriving as if by magic every couple of days, Netflix freed me of those rental shackles and introduced a way to binge-watch series like The Sopranos long before that term found its way into popular culture. As Netflix launched into streaming in 2007, then original shows in 2013, my viewing habits evolved along with the company.…

I WAS HERE BECAUSE I WANTED TO BE. I DIDN’T HATE SCHOOL, I especially didn’t hate learning. The main thing they taught me, yelling into my face, was that I was wasting their time and money. It did take me a few incidents, and growing years, to allow the words of these wise teachers to work for me: Wasting their time and money? So I got done with their troubles and their finger-pointing at me. At the part-time job I already had—my uncle Jorge (pronounced in easy Anglo, George) ran an industrial laundry he called the plant—and I asked him if I could go full-time. He didn’t have a question, didn’t blink. He said he’d started working before they’d invented school. To him and lots of people I came up…

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener’s Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is both a fierce political and cultural history and a geographic corrective. The Los Angeles of the 1960s is so much more than the hilly bohemia of folk-rock balladeers, their lives and loves. Laurel Canyon’s music scene is important, but far from its hippie echoes came very different sounds. Riotous chants for civil and gender rights in Watts and the San Fernando Valley. The sharp crack of LAPD batons on activists’ limbs and skulls in marches and sit-ins. KPFK-FM’s pioneering radio programs that contested the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in the Bay Area at the start of the decade. Young people speaking their minds, blowing out of classrooms to fight inadequate and unequal educational opportunities…

How does a fixation on borders undermine the idea of identity and culture? Nations and borders are relatively new concoctions in the history of humanity. They emerged as capitalism stretched out from Europe. I’m interested in the larger idea that all human beings belong to the earth. Did your DNA test results change how you see your ancestry? It’s interesting to find out our ancestry. But we are not this part “race” or that part “race.” Regardless of how we got here, we come complete and whole as we are. The DNA test just confirmed what I already knew—I have the whole world in me.… But, also, the biggest part of the “pie” is Native. How is poetry necessary? A poet can be the modern-day court jester—who calls things as…

William T. Vollmann writes in sheets of sound, creating psychosexual, historical, and theological narratives that can test patience but reward endurance. Surely the only contemporary novelist to reveal himself as a Unabomber suspect, the Sacramento-based author has had a compulsively prolific career encompassing everything from An Afghanistan Picture Show (1992), in which he recounts when he sought to join the mujahideen’s fight against the Soviets, to the 2005 novel Europe Central, which won a National Book Award for its acuity in tracing the interconnected lives of a wide cast of characters, from Hitler to Stalin, Anna Akhmatova to Dmitri Shostakovich. His seven-volume opus Rising Up and Rising Down considered the causes and consequences of violence. More recently, two linked works, No Immediate Danger and No Good Alternative, volumes 1 and…

DAYS OF DISTRACTION • By Alexandra Chang • Ecco, 320 pages, $26.99 This tender and candid first novel is narrated by a Chinese American woman named Jing Jing. She plays multiple roles here: grown daughter in a broken immigrant family, technology reporter in Silicon Valley, and supportive girlfriend in an interracial relationship who moves across the country to support her partner’s career. Jing Jing’s most poignant observations come as she examines her parents’ pasts. The narrative unfolds in fragments, one memory conjuring other, distant ones. Not all the details are revelatory or remarkable, but the author establishes a profound intimacy with the reader. The writing aches with sincerity, and we are moved by Jing Jing’s voyage of empathy, her impulse to understand her parents as a way to make sense…

1. The priest and his wife were seen skiing together before they were married; or, rather, she was seen skiing and he was around, somewhere. She took the lift to the slope reserved for advanced skiers. She was wearing a black parka and formfitting ski pants, also black. Her blond hair hung loose and straight. Those who watched with binoculars from the deck of the lodge said it was an exercise in discipline. She allowed herself none of the indulgences of the advanced skiers. She plunged straight down vertical slopes, shooting off at an angle over horizontal ones, slaloming between invisible poles even when her momentum would have seemed to indicate certain disaster. She never shifted weight suddenly from one leg to the other. She never skidded, never fell. She…

The world goes silver when a storm comes up—a sudden silvery green. Not sure what the verb is for cottonwoods in a princeling wind. Their trunks never seem to stand so still as when the leaves leap and shudder on their stems. Shiver on their stems. The pines, a darker, inkier green than an hour ago when their shiny needles were consorting with first light, driven rain not yet leaping off the pond, the wind not yet amusing itself by juddering the aspens, know what they know and hardly move at all, the trunks rock faintly, the branches wave very slightly, as if to acknowledge an embassy from some inconsequential vassal state. It’s late— or the early part of late—in the ancient world to which they belong and in which…

If you’ve driven California highway 101 or 82, you’ve seen them: cast-iron and concrete bells, standing miles apart like sentinels, from San Diego to Sonoma. The road has another name—a once and future name—recalling cruelty carried out at a king’s command in the name of faith. California’s heritage was plowed in the path of El Camino Real, a road featuring bells that don’t actually ring, on a highway that didn’t actually begin in California. This camino began as interconnected trails bridging indigenous communities from central Mexico north to Alta California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and south into Central and South America. With the arrival of Spanish settlers, the trade route was transformed into El Camino Real—the king’s highway—which expanded the trails to connect Mexico City to Spain’s northern and…

IT WAS THE SUMMER OF DEAD BABIES. At night I sat drowning in coroners’ reports and case files. Coyotes frolicked in the wash behind my house. Dry by summer, it held remnants of snow play—bright yellow and electric-blue plastic bits of toboggans. Brittle palo verdes littered with refuse from teenage parties, things like bottle caps and empty bags of chips. The hour of molting. The wildlings came in groups of three and four—clearing the mean ash-green pincushions and devil’s fingers in gleeful jumps. They danced, silhouetted against the black. Bats twisted above. Over the past three years, I’ve been reporting on the murder of eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez. While I was sitting in on his mother’s boyfriend’s trial, it occurred to me that this is about more than one child and…

Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames per second.” Jean-Luc Godard’s famous, albeit miscontextualized, remark is cited twice in Jon Wilkman’s Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America. If Wilkman doesn’t actually quote Godard’s words in their entirety (“…and every cut is a lie”), it’s because he doesn’t have to: Screening Reality is dedicated to the proposition that documentary filmmaking is a necessarily slippery business, its claims to truth invariably compromised. Fair enough. The pleasures of Wilkman’s book surface in its ability to encompass many things. We get disquisitions on the shorts commissioned by the U.S. Office of War Information in the 1940s (among them lesser-known works by Frank Capra, William Wyler, and John Ford), as well as on the Zapruder film, Edward R. Murrow’s coverage of the McCarthy hearings, and…

COFFEE • By Dinah Lenney • Bloomsbury, 192 pages, $13.45 Your morning cup of joe is more complicated than it looks. Just ask Dinah Lenney, author of Coffee, the latest in Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series—which asks writers to ruminate on ordinary things in complex terms. Lenney’s distinctively urgent voice is perfect for this form. She presents herself as a connoisseur (her coffee ritual includes freshly roasted small-batch beans brewed in a Chemex) but not an elitist: Chock Full o’ Nuts gets the same attention as the pricier stuff. Where Lenney really shines, though, is in her ability to interweave environmental, sociopolitical, and cultural concerns with reflections on time, womanhood, and family. Her lyrical prose is as invigorating as a strong jolt of caffeine. —LISKA JACOBS THE MAGICAL LANGUAGE OF OTHERS…

What does it mean to write a story about immigration in our current political climate? The results of the 2016 election made me mold the novel in a more concrete way. I suddenly had something crucial and urgent that needed to be conveyed. What can we learn from your characters’ connections to the land? I wanted to raise questions about what it means for a person to be “from” somewhere, or to “belong.” When one looks closely at notions of blood and soil, the historical meanings assigned to those words fall apart. What do people take for granted about California? Out East, and even in the Midwest and South, we don’t always appreciate the complexity. The story of America’s creation remains a more simple narrative of British colonial domination. In…

Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut novel, Valentine, takes place in Odessa, Texas, in the months following a Mexican American girl’s rape by a white oil rigger. It’s 1976, and an oil boom has made Odessa bright and cruel, a place where “we are all praying for you” and “bless your heart” are slights. Women bolster and conform to male perspectives. The rape case is adjudicated on porches and in fellowship halls before it ever goes to trial. Valentine, though, means to push against that way of seeing. The novel is narrated by a chorus of female outsiders, including Gloria, the 14-year-old who was raped; Mary Rose, a young mother and the first to see Gloria after the assault; Corrine, a new widow eager to drink herself into oblivion; and Debra Ann, a…

Kay Ryan’s new book, Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose, is a pleasing size: 200 or so pages, small enough to balance in your hand. The titles of the essays—“A Consideration of Poetry,” “I Go to AWP,” “Inedible Melons,” “To Be Miniature Is to Be Swallowed by a Miniature Whale” (taken from one of Ryan’s poems, “This Life”)—convey that same strange, funny, compelling intermixture of the large and the tiny, the sublime and the ridiculous, that marks Ryan’s marvelous verse. The book begins with a typically brilliant introduction by the poet Christian Wiman. Reading it made me wish Wiman would turn his attention to other major figures in contemporary poetry. “The economy of the book belies its range,” he writes, which is definitely true, though in the spirit of Ryan’s precision, I…

Bob Kaufman had been everywhere, man. Born in New Orleans in 1925, he joined the merchant marine when he got out of high school and saw the world for much of the 1940s. He took his mail in New York, but by the late 1950s he’d also called San Antonio and Monterey home. He was considered a Beat, but at the same time, he was something more than that—a restless spirit eventually tied to San Francisco’s North Beach. In his lifetime, the African American poet was a subject of attention and much confusion. He was an outlier among cultural outliers. He had an intense, faraway gaze and a gift for larger-than-life gestures, like when he dyed all the clothes in a laundromat red. By the time he died, in 1986,…

It’s difficult to be interested in modern American culture and not be at least nominally aware of Miranda July. The New York Times Magazine has called her a “prolific polymath.” That’s often shorthand for “dilettante,” but July is in no way trifling: Her novel was a bestseller and her stories appear in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. She is a performance artist whose work winds up in museums. She’s an indie auteur whose films—Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future—win awards at Cannes and Sundance. Even her name is a creation. At 16, she rechristened herself after a character in a story published in a zine—dropping the family surname Grossinger. Raised in Berkeley, July lived in Portland, Oregon, for many years, and now makes her home…

In November 1930, a diminutive 23-year-old woman from the village of Coyoacán, just outside Mexico City, arrived in San Francisco with her new husband, a celebrated artist 20 years her senior. It was her inaugural visit abroad. “San Francisco is very beautiful,” she wrote in an effusive letter, “from everywhere you can see the sea.” Her trip was filled with new experiences, from first witnessing the ocean—“I loved it!”—to her initial encounter with the world of Gringolandia, as she dubbed the United States. Though as yet unheralded, young Frida Kahlo made an immediate impression on the city. According to photographer Edward Weston, “dressed in native costume even to huaraches, she causes much excitement on the streets of San Francisco. People stop in their tracks to look in wonder.” Kahlo herself…