{"id":16072,"date":"2011-05-25T08:00:54","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T12:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=16072"},"modified":"2011-05-26T14:07:22","modified_gmt":"2011-05-26T18:07:22","slug":"a-week-in-culture-matthew-specktor-writer-and-editor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/25\/a-week-in-culture-matthew-specktor-writer-and-editor\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Matthew Specktor, Writer and Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photography by Lisa Jane Persky.<\/p><\/div>\n

DAY ONE<\/h3>\n

11:00 A.M.<\/strong> Where better to start a Los Angeles\u2013based culture diary than on the city\u2019s enpretzeled freeways? I leave an editorial meeting and take the 101 to the 5 to the 10 to Boyle Heights, en route to David Kipen\u2019s Libros Schmibros<\/a><\/em>, \u201ca community bookstore and lending library.\u201d It\u2019s pretty much the best bookstore in the world, not so much for its scope (its stock is superb, but it\u2019s an average-size storefront), but for its curation and spirit. Not only is every book in the shop one that any sane reader would covet, but if you happen to empty your pockets while you\u2019re there, you\u2019re free to borrow books you don\u2019t buy. Kipen is clearly some sort of a pinko, but if you can get your head around it\u2014a store that lets you take out works of art on loan\u2014the idea kind of grows on you. (If only someone would make so free and easy with the closely guarded spoils of the music business!) I plan on sending David\u2019s children to college by bankrupting myself in his store. Today\u2019s haul: some replacement Greil Marcuses, swanky hardbacks of Philip Roth\u2019s The Counterlife<\/em> and Our Gang<\/em>, Leonard Michaels\u2019s Time Out of Mind<\/em>, Lewis Hyde\u2019s Common as Air<\/em>, Daniel Fuchs\u2019s The Golden West: Hollywood Stories<\/em>. Also, a handsome copy of Elizabeth Bowen\u2019s The Last September<\/em>. The rest I left, just because I was too embarrassed to ask for a dolly to carry it all to my car. (Edit\u2014there\u2019s no store here! I\u2019m making this up. Book lovers, stay away! David, I\u2019ll be back next week.)<\/p>\n

\"\"4:00 P.M. <\/strong>I drink a glass of green tea, which is all the California health craziness you\u2019re going to get from me, and edit a beautiful essay from Sarah Manguso<\/a> for the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a><\/em>. The Manguso essay is better than the tea. Way better.<\/p>\n

7:00 P.M.<\/strong> Jonathan Lethem calls from the airport. There is a Dog Crisis. Apparently, his high-strung Jack Russell<\/a> is having some sort of meltdown, and he\u2019s been bumped from his flight. The other passengers were having none of it. His family flew on ahead. I cheerfully volunteer a rescue mission, thinking this diary could benefit from the kind of mayhem only a deranged canine can provide. Alas, they make the next plane.<\/p>\n

\"\"8:00 P.M.<\/strong> Dinner at Canter\u2019s Deli, on Fairfax. Those marvelously peculiar stained-glass patternings on the ceiling<\/a>. I see Rodney Bingenheimer<\/a>, the Mayor of the Sunset Strip, in one of the booths. I thought Rodney was dead! I suspect he is. Still, that\u2019s him, eating a Danny Thomas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

11:30 P.M.<\/strong> Fall asleep reluctantly, after reading a large swatch of Ben Lerner\u2019s fantastic Leaving the Atocha Station<\/a><\/em>. Already familiar with Lerner\u2019s excellent poems, this book nevertheless shocks with its keenness and hilarity. A little bit Geoff Dyerish, but then entirely something else.<\/p>\n

DAY TWO<\/h3>\n

5:55 A.M.<\/strong> Rain on the eaves. Where the hell am I, Chicago?<\/p>\n

\"\"7:00 A.M.<\/strong> Not only that, but it\u2019s an intolerable fifty-six degrees. If I were in the movie business, I\u2019d find someone to scream at. Instead, I make it to Kings Road Cafe, where I drink some of their liquid methamphetamine and drop back into Maggie Nelson\u2019s Bluets<\/a><\/em>, which I\u2019ve been carrying around for weeks. One of the great, jagged texts of sex and sadness. \u201cI have been trying to place myself in a land of great sunshine, and abandon my will therewith.\u201d Reminds me a little of Elizabeth Smart\u2019s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept<\/em>, a book Angela Carter described as \u201clike Madame Bovary<\/em> blasted by lightning.\u201d Excellent though Grand Central<\/em> is, I like Nelson\u2019s book better.<\/p>\n

9:00 A.M.<\/strong> Writing today. My own. Spirited by Kings Road coffee, and by some pensive, rainy-day folk music (Michael Head & The Strands’ splendid The Magical World of The Strands<\/a><\/em>, Mickey Newbury\u2019s Looks Like Rain<\/a><\/em>), I ignore the nasty cold I\u2019m battling and get down to carving out a promised novel excerpt for the next issue of Black Clock<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Excerpting seems a ticklish business. I\u2019m never quite sure how complete<\/em> an excerpt should finally feel, whether it\u2019s not asking a novel to do more (or less) than it should, standing alone in its fragments. Fortunately, there are some set pieces, and one in particular that dovetails perfectly with the issue\u2019s proposed theme, \u201cMovies of The Imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n

1:30 P.M.<\/strong> Switch gears to write an essay on Lydia Davis for the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>. Funny how the hardest part of writing sometimes is getting in and out of it. It can take more time to prepare, or change modes, than it does to actually write a piece. Or so I tell myself, while I stare out the window. (Hey, the rain is gone! The jacarandas are in bloom<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"\"1:35 P.M.<\/strong> I take my copy of The Cows<\/a><\/em> outside. W. H. Auden said, somewhere, that the hardest thing was to know when you\u2019re actually working versus when you\u2019re merely procrastinating. I think he said it\u2014Google\u2019s not backing me up here\u2014but if he didn\u2019t, I just did.<\/p>\n

4:30 P.M.<\/strong> The essay\u2019s done, my cold is killing me, and I feel like a complete chump for having just laid out eleven dollars for gourmet juice at some fancy raw-foods place on Beverly Boulevard. Then again, tangelo-coconut is like drinking liquid silk. I read a little more Lerner.<\/p>\n

9:00 P.M.<\/strong> Whiskey! Why haven\u2019t I thought of it sooner? I go to Musso & Frank<\/a> with the excellent Katherine Taylor<\/a>. We drink Maker\u2019s Mark Manhattans. We keep our eyes peeled for the battling ghosts of Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who apparently together wrote Double Indemnity<\/a><\/em> here, \u201cboth drinking heavily because they couldn\u2019t stand each other.\u201d I understand the temptation. Last time I was in, I was almost carted out in a wheelbarrow. Tonight, temperance wins. Katherine and I gossip and soon discover we have an eavesdropper, a young man fiddling with his manuscript. Not a screenplay, but a novel. Indeed, I discover\u2014after I make the mistake of asking\u2014his tenth novel. The first nine are in a drawer. He\u2019s nursing a glass of wine and explains that he\u2019s merely killing time until it\u2019s safe to leave. He\u2019s squatting in an old-folks home and has to get by the night watch. I don\u2019t ask him how this works. I\u2019m too glad to meet a writer possibly even more delusional than I am, and thankful Hollywood is still weird.<\/p>\n

DAY THREE<\/h3>\n

8:00 A.M.<\/strong> I wake up and chase down a Wonder Woman costume, complete with wig. No, it\u2019s not for me<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"8:45 A.M.<\/strong> Nicely hopped-up on coffee and the thought of my daughter\u2019s happiness, I get down to plugging again on my Zeroville<\/em> adaptation<\/a>. A strange challenge. The last novel I adapted, Shirley Hazzard\u2019s The Transit of Venus<\/em> was a gargantuan romance in which every last character was so fantastically eloquent (they spoke like Hazzard herself<\/a>), the dialogue was unusable. No one would\u2019ve believed these words billowing from an actor\u2019s mouth. Steve Erickson\u2019s ear for cineast patter is so immaculate, however, it would be a crime not to use his words. Not even John Milius<\/a> sounds as much like himself as Erickson\u2019s \u201cViking Man.\u201d I consolidate, I excerpt, I contract, I borrow. I think of the urban legend according to which John Huston\u2019s secretary adapted The Maltese Falcon<\/em> while the director was on vacation, simply by typing out the dialogue<\/a>. It\u2019s probably my own work ethic that keeps me from screenwriting more often. Not that it\u2019s easy. But sometimes, a hell of a lot more so than others.<\/p>\n

9:30 P.M.<\/strong> Having somehow, miraculously, wrestled my six-year-old to sleep without a tranq gun, I settle in to watch The Long Goodbye<\/em>. Zeroville<\/em> research has led me to (re)discoveries new and old, from Gaspar No\u00e9<\/a> to The Germs<\/a>, but few have set their hooks in me as deeply as Altman\u2019s Chandler. In part because I\u2019ve always resisted Altman, having had the misfortune of first encountering Nashville<\/em> and others on the small screen, where they make little sense. The sound-mixing alone just kills them. What once seemed muddled now reveals as sublime, however, and while California Split<\/em> remains my dark horse favorite, The Long Goodbye<\/em> is right with it. The dazed, dreamy, cat-hassled Marlowe who shuffles through the first fifteen minutes of the film, the rancid canyon-and-colony atmospheres throughout. These things make me happier than words can say.<\/p>\n

Matthew Specktor is the author of<\/em> That Summertime Sound<\/a> and<\/em> The Sting<\/a>. He is senior editor at the<\/em> Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>. Check back tomorrow for the second installment of his culture diary.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAY ONE 11:00 A.M. Where better to start a Los Angeles\u2013based culture diary than on the city\u2019s enpretzeled freeways? I leave an editorial meeting and take the 101 to the 5 to the 10 to Boyle Heights, en route to David Kipen\u2019s Libros Schmibros, \u201ca community bookstore and lending library.\u201d It\u2019s pretty much the best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2362,217,2360,576,2361,2363,83,2364],"class_list":["post-16072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-libros-schmibros","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-review-of-books","tag-lydia-davis","tag-matthew-specktor","tag-sarah-manguso","tag-screenwriting","tag-shirley-hazzard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Matthew Specktor, Writer and Editor by Matthew Specktor<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 25, 2011 \u2013 DAY ONE 11:00 A.M. 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