Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2020 i Journal of Alta California

Sara Borjas is a Xicanx pocha, a Fresno poet, and the author of Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019). She teaches at UC Riverside, lives in Los Angeles, and stays rooted in Fresno. To the Woman Who Said She Could Hear My Accent We were walking down 1st St—a street I’ve only been down twice this being the second time I’ve felt seen by a woman I wanted to be seen by. You said you could hear my accent and it was the first time I believed anyone when they said that. You heard my voice and heard my father’s truck tires spinning through the neighborhood and not the one he had, the one he dreams of having before he dies. And not the father…

Unfortunately, the coronavirus isn’t as novel as its name implies. Pandemics and plagues run deep in the history of the American West, their implications and consequences recorded in journals, letters, and other artifacts. Documents such as this collage may help us make sense of the COVID-19 crisis. These acute moments—from the late 19th century forward—when infectious diseases arrived, bringing fear and death with them, provide context and understanding to our situation today. In every case, disease is one thing: what it is, how it is transmitted, how it sickens, and how it kills. The response to disease is another thing, always more complicated. People react in myriad ways. They are afraid, they take precautions, they care for themselves and their loved ones. But sometimes they strike at outsiders, at those…

What is science fiction? The question is trickier than it appears. For all the clichés, the sweeping futuristic sagas, it remains (like all literature) an exploration of inner, as opposed to outer, space. The best, or most resonant, science fiction imagines individuals in extreme situations, or at least in different timelines, different worlds. At its heart, science fiction begins with a question, or a set of questions: Who are we and how do we live? In such a context, it is humanity that is most important. That’s why, when the first film in the Star Wars franchise was released, in 1977, many viewers were struck by the jerry-rigged nature of the technology, which seemed so recognizable and well-worn. When it didn’t work as it was supposed to (or, for that…

Author’s note: This piece is an anomaly, for me. It’s a substantial outtake, a chapter that needed to be left behind when my present novel-in-progress, The Arrest, took a stylistic and narrational left turn. An absurdist pastoral set in Maine during a near-future technological collapse, The Arrest represents a kind of “return” to science fiction for me (if you ask me, I never left). The first draft was written in a frothy first-person voice from the point of view of the main character. Then, at the wizardly editorial suggestion of my friend Steve Erickson, I converted the book from first-person to third-, losing a lot of the froth in the process. In the meantime, I’d been reading “I Am Trying to Describe Things I Don’t Understand” aloud and getting a great…

In the 2016 film Arrival, the end of the world happens suddenly. People can barely remember what life was like only days before an invasion—in this case, by extraterrestrials that could as easily be a virus—and while alarm and panic are common, initially humanity is incapable of sorting its way through chaos, stupidity, and delusion to arrive at courage, coordination, and farsightedness. All of this is to say that if you saw Arrival when it was released, it was one movie, and if you watched it hunkered down in your overground bunker during the Great COVID Storm of 2020, it was a different movie. By the same token, this piece you’re reading now about science-fiction movies—which, in the time-looping spirit of Arrival, was written before I wrote it—is different from…

Matthew Zapruder is the author, most recently, of Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017) and Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019). He teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California and is the editor at large of Wave Books. In summer 2018, I went to the North Shore of Oahu to teach at a writing conference. How quickly such a sentence has come to seem unreal in these pandemic days. The conference was at this former Boy Scout camp, right on the beach. Most of the people were there to work on memoirs, but I taught a little poetry class about how to start writing from nothing, and then how to use music and association and not mere logic to move forward in a poem. In “The Mythologizing of Reality,” Bruno Schulz writes: “Poetry…

By the time U.S. president James Polk’s dreams of plantation hegemony invaded Mexican territory in 1846, Alta California had already garnered a reputation as an opportunist’s paradise—a remote outpost where a frontier soldier could find himself rewarded with a 50,000-acre rancho brimming with cattle and crops. In June of that year, 33 undocumented U.S. immigrants continued in that spirit as they sought to overthrow the Mexican government that ruled Alta California. They seized a garrison in present-day Sonoma County, stitched together a flag with a bear on it, and declared themselves founders of the California Republic. A few weeks later, the bear flag came down and the Stars and Stripes went up. General John C. Frémont, Polk’s appointed instigator, secretly encouraged the insurgents to stage their revolt and welcomed them…

I have lived in Los Angeles most of my working life, but I am also a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. And so it came to pass in January that I was present at its annual awards dinner, a chummy affair at a vast, multitiered Chinese restaurant in lower Manhattan complete with winners, celebrity presenters like Brad Pitt and Alec Baldwin, and, of course, the critics. Not all of us had voted for all the awardees, far from it, but everybody was on their best behavior. Almost everybody. When it came time for writer-director Quentin Tarantino to accept his Best Screenplay award for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, he cut short his ingratiating ramble: “Peter Rainer, writer for the Christian Science Monitor, you have never given me…

ACROSS 1 California river, or class clown’s first subscription 4 Class for non-native speakers (abbr.) 7 Flatulence 10 “Dude” in East Los–ese 11 The Chairman in Adams’s The Chairman Dances 12 ___ and downs 13 Group of Oranges & Lemons 14 ___ and outs 15 Law enforcement at Ft. Irwin 16 Smoother circle 19 Lena or Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s author Gerald 20 Characters 22 Daub with oils 24 Tresses on California Chrome 25 Inspiration for Inherent Vice heroine’s name 27 Hawkeye Pierce’s unit type without the U.S. Army 28 Adele’s “That’s It, I _____’m Movin’ On” 29 Romantic figure from “Idylls of the King” 31 Switchblade sound 33 “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the ______….” —Apple commercial 35 Business honcho 36 Setting…

Happy face. Proud face. Surprised face. Sad face. I spot him practicing expressions in the rearview mirror. He’s watching himself, and I’m watching him. It’s a rare moment—usually his eyes are fixed on the passing terrain. Today, the landscape is unceasing midwestern farmland, ripe and verdant, the air thick with humidity and crackling with cicadas. Like many children with autism, Isaac doesn’t easily “read” faces, doesn’t necessarily grasp what someone might be saying through a raised eyebrow or a furrowed forehead. For the last few days, my husband, Ed, and I have been playing facial reaction games with our 11-year-old son over breakfast. Glancing now at his exaggerated smiles and big-lipped pouts, I’m gauging how much he’s caught on. Then the radio breaks out the opening line of “Whiskey River”…

When Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel Looking Backward in 1888, he would never have referred to it as science fiction. How could he? Although by the 1860s Jules Verne had begun to produce the speculative adventure novels—Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and many others—that have long been regarded as among the earliest science fiction, there was no label to apply to what Bellamy was doing. Verne called his books Voyages Extraordinaires, which is certainly part of science fiction’s visionary appeal. Like H.G. Wells, whose novels The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) are also considered proto–science fiction, or even Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley (her 1826 novel, The Last Man,…

Whit got lost in 1971 and couldn’t find her way back. She hit the fail-safe button but nothing happened, and meanwhile she kept getting thrown off by all the foreign landmarks, which turned the city into a maze. The Embarcadero Freeway, this wall of reinforced concrete, cut across the waterfront, with a view of the half-finished Transamerica Pyramid and the scorched ruins on Alcatraz. On Ocean Beach, scores of people squatted among cardboard and plastic across from a hastily built artificial reef, cleaning oil-soaked birds by hand. New stenches hit at every turn: piss, petroleum, smoke, untempered car exhaust, patchouli, wet rot. Everywhere Whit looked, San Francisco stood in ruins or, even worse, in some limbo of urban development gone awry. Nobody else on the streets had a face, because…

D.A. Powell’s books include Repast (Graywolf Press, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press, 2012). He teaches at the University of San Francisco. Imagines1 what else moves like a rivera hand erasing its shadowas it writes in green ink cheep and trill among the rushesexhausted sigh of atoms on the air careful not to repeat myselfI repeat myself the moon tonightI can’t tell youit’s too good 1 Imago, n. The final metamorphic stage for certain insects (pl. imagines). Summons A goodness that isn’t in usuntil it’s in us little cakes, jam fillingsomething to tide us over except it comes from insideand has no decoration. What if I reached down deephe said, and there was nothing. That’s when I got scaredfor all of us. What if what…

I began my life as a reader by escaping. I read to be anywhere but here—here being a suburb of Sacramento, California. Its tidy planned streets all named after Civil War battlefields. Each house a palm tree. Sprinklers set to water-conservation levels. When my parents drove off to work, I climbed atop our baking shingle roof and squinted through the pages of Charlotte Brontë, George Orwell, and Alice Walker. The further a book took me from the Central Valley, the better. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach clobbered me, simply because Australia was so far away it might as well have been Narnia. In reading this way, I wasn’t rebellious. I was actually mimicking the trajectory of all my English classes. For a public school student, I was very lucky. My…

Wanugee hovers over the mahjong tiles, eyes closed, chanting a mantra. He moves his hands like magic moons—waning and waxing over the little white squares—to summon his soothsaying power. My request is unusual. Instead of his customary targets—love, health, wealth—I ask him to tell a fortune for all of us, a world upended by the coronavirus, still, at this point, in its early stages. “That’s pretty macro, not really my sweet spot,” Wanugee cautions. But he’s game. “I’ll try anything, you know. How about we look towards the next six to eight months?” Perfect. With his purple and gold shawl and reassuring tone, Wanugee seems about as good an authority as any on the uncertain days ahead. After all, fortune-tellers have been called upon to predict the future in times…

That night at the dinner table he brought it out and set it down beside her plate. Doris stared at it, her hand to her mouth. “My God, what is it?” She looked up at him, bright-eyed. “Well, open it.” Doris tore the ribbon and paper from the square package with her sharp nails, her bosom rising and falling. Larry stood watching her as she lifted the lid. He lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall. “A cuckoo clock!” Doris cried. “A real old cuckoo clock like my mother had.” She turned the clock over and over. “Just like my mother had, when Pete was still alive.” Her eyes sparkled with tears. “It’s made in Germany,” Larry said. After a moment he added, “Carl got it for me wholesale.…

Berkeley in the early 1970s was a hotbed of hope. On good days, the place was like a really nice acid trip crossed with a successful political protest. But for Ernest Callenbach, a science-book editor, the city’s utopianism stood in stark contrast to reality. The scientists he published at the University of California Press were predicting environmental collapse from pollution and wildlife extinctions. Meanwhile, his marriage was unraveling. And yet Callenbach didn’t give in to despair; instead, he decided to remake the world. Callenbach wrote an odd, awkward little novel called Ecotopia, about a near-future separatist nation comprising Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. Ecotopia was run by a female president, and its technology was entirely renewable, with an internet-like network linking everyone and carbon-neutral public transit. The region’s prisons had…

“Knowing you has been the brightest part of an extremely bright twenty six years.”—Jack “I love him more than anything.”—Inga Inga Arvad and John F. Kennedy found each other at a cocktail party in Washington, D.C. “In a noisy place, I met a boy who was supposedly brilliant, and who laughed the whole time,” she later wrote him, referring to him in the third person, as she often did. “There is determination in his green Irish eyes.… When you talk to him or see him you always have the impression that his big white teeth are ready to bite off a huge chunk of life.” It was the fall of 1941, long before Kennedy’s entry into politics. He was 24, fresh off the publication of Why England Slept, his bestselling…

In 1884, Robert Frost visited saloons all over San Francisco with his father, who was running for city tax collector. The future author of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Road Not Taken” was 10 years old. He had never climbed a birch, never been snowed on, and the roads he took each day were San Francisco’s streets, some paved but others muddy or dusty, depending on the weather. He had been born in San Francisco and raised in cheap digs on the backside of Nob Hill. His father, William, was a newspaperman; his mother, Isabelle, a fey spiritualist poet. The family moved often, probably for reasons of economy; when flush, they liked to live at the Abbotsford House, a small hotel at Broadway…