Journal of Alta California Fall 2020

KEENAN NORRIS “One Coyote,” page 6 You write about growing up in the Inland Empire in Southern California. Now you’re a literature and writing professor at San José State University. What do you miss about the place where you’re from? I miss the emptiness of vacant lots and dark, lonely streets. The summer sends everyone but the lizards inside for shelter, but winters in the desert are beautiful. PHIL BRONSTEIN “Last Call for Gumshoes,” page 38 You profile private eyes in this issue. A bunch of journalists have become PIs. Would you consider a career change? Is my job category “struggling businesses”? As the end of the world approaches, a PI’s phone will continue to ring with calls from raging, humiliated, wealthy clients clutching bloody vendettas, trying to figure out how to…

“Ineluctable modality of the visible.…”—STEPHEN DEDALUS’S CONTEMPLATION AS HE WALKS ALONG SANDYMOUNT STRAND, ULYSSES As a student, I was always puzzled by James Joyce’s cryptic phrase. Was it a Zen koan of English literature? A philosophical reference? Something from Thomas Aquinas? Finally, I came to the conclusion that Stephen is thinking about a central problem of human experience: Is what we encounter with our senses “real”? Does it exist independently of human consciousness? One of the enduring satisfactions of mystery and crime writing, the theme of this issue of Alta, is the similar search for “who done it.” Does the person, or situation, which seems innocent or easily explainable on the surface, conceal a deeper, more sinful, truer reality? Good mysteries and noir classics are explorations. They see beyond what…

Between 1985 and 1990, 61,773 Black Angelenos left Los Angeles County. Most resettled in the Inland Empire. My family moved to a quiet cul-de-sac in the newly forming suburb East Highland. Our previous residence, in Rialto, had been transitional, nice in some ways, not in others. My father was from West Side Chicago, while my mother had worked her way up from a hard childhood in the sticks of the Central Valley, so this real-deal Southern California suburb studded with palm trees in the shadow of snowcapped mountains, East Highland, was heaven without qualification. The two other Black families whose homes sat next to ours had similar success stories. The Johnson family was headed by husband-and-wife postal workers, while the Smith family was led by a mother who ran care…

Pinar Toprak’s second child arrived a week early. Her first had taken “his sweet time,” so the composer hadn’t worried about scheduling an expensive 60-piece orchestra session—to record her score for the animated film Light of Olympia—a week before her due date in the spring of 2008, even under the gun of a four-day cancellation policy. She finished writing the last cue on a Friday evening, sent it to her orchestrator, and bought a tub of Nutella to celebrate. Then, her water broke. She gave birth, lied to hospital staff about why she needed to be discharged early, left at 1 a.m.—and was conducting the orchestra shortly thereafter with a 30-hour-old infant, nursing him during 10-minute breaks. “It’s crazy,” she admits, laughing. “But at the time, I did what I…

Not Without Not grasping your hand * on pause Not coming closer * taking a detour Not to dock no dock * more than arm’s length Neither seen with nor transparent * locked in lock down No double shadow * fingertips stopped short of gratitude Not two redwoods * emerging from fog Nor tracing surfaces lightly * as headlights stroke the garage door Neither lapsing, nor * like a tide gone out Not the way color, say the neighbor’s tree * of persimmons speaks Not without portent * from a distance Not as the wind plunges itself * into its own pocket Not the cloud * but where the cloud was Not yet the end * of “we”…

In the summer of 1961, Wayne Thiebaud, at age 40 and just one year into his position as an assistant professor of art at UC Davis, loaded up his car with his new paintings, unpretentious depictions of edible Americana—hot dogs, ice cream cones, cakes, pies, and gumball machines—and drove cross-country with fellow Sacramento artist and former student Mel Ramos to look for a New York dealer. A former commercial illustrator and cartoonist, Thiebaud had an eye for the irresistibility of goods on display and a nose-to-the-glass nostalgia for the sweets and cafeteria staples of his youth spent in Long Beach and hardscrabble southern Utah. He was a self-taught artist with voracious art-historical curiosity and reverence for the old masters (particularly, still-life virtuosos Chardin, Morandi, and de Chirico), and he had…