Myths Of Place And Setting

As I make my way through Steve Erickson's books, while inevitably taking breaks, short and long to dip into all the other unread masters I have heaped around my life,

I'm thinking about his 8-plus novels (only 2 of which I've read), most of which have to do with the cinema, or Los Angeles, or alternative surreal histories of America to some degree, and how they all supposedly constitute one large oceanic novel.

Sort of like Proust, or how Kerouac's novels were all one "Visions Of Duluoz". . .

I've always liked that idea. Which is why short stories, when I write them, tend to share common denominators, common settings, or variations on the same setting.

And why I'm drawn to a project now, a series of novels and "memoirs" that all interconnect and reflect and draw from each other. Featured warped visions of me and warped visions of not-me. False memoirs and true novels.

(A project that is not unlike what people as diverse as John Berger, Jeanette Walls, J.M. Coetzee are doing now. And in terms of the memoir craze, I'm completely of the moment even if, at one point, or many points, I have been ashamed of and/or afraid of the seductive life-writing impulse for reasons that were silly, short-sighted and completely illusory.)

When I think of connected books and how each book is part of a larger book, it's kind of like that saying, not sure who said it, but that you usually only have ONE IDEA in life. . .which isn't exactly true. You have many ideas, many motifs but maybe, just maybe they tie into a larger, more cosmic motif that defines you, often without you knowing it.

Which is like that saying, "The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing. . ."

In my case, and for this prospective project, there is perhaps one thing: The Missing Beloved, which is like The Missing City.

Or the Sister That Ran Away To The Forgotten city.

Which is part of that relentless lineage of books that all feature someone who's searching for a mysterious other person, and in cases of male protagonists often the missing other person is a woman ((a theme that also reoccurs in Erickson's novels)). . .

But never mind that now. What I wanted to talk about was one of the recurring settings that is deeply rooted in my life.

I was down in San Diego for the holidays,

a city that I grew up in, lived in for many years and go back to for short intervals during the holidays, and I'm always, each time I go down, succumbing to different torrents of memory, often of varying intensities and warring degrees,

and the consequence of this can be a sometimes disorienting see-saw between comforting melancholy and uneasy exaltation.

I like the brick and the verdigris of my parent's place. The downtown sea winds. The hot dry brightness and the quotes by Martin Luther King on the stones that lead down to the port. The seascapes down here, perforated and punctured and defined by military prowess are dazzling and somewhat terrifying.

And I always smell the summer I worked on a tour yacht that did rounds of the bay past all the grey ships and the ship builders and the submarines. A summer enjoyed on many levels but wasted on one: pining for a missing blond.

Now, navigating through the Bourbon Street-feel of the Gaslamp Quarter,

you find Broadway where things start feeling dingier and more gutted, and the signs of a few archetypal holiday dives that are featured in a few tales I've told begin to show themselves near the stained bus shelters and the liquor stores and the check-cashing places.

I find parallels between downtown San Diego and downtown Oakland even if these parallels are a stretch. Or are just elements common to any city. What really connects them is the warehouse feel of their downtowns by the water.

The sense that some fundamental, browbeaten history is being obscured.

Chee-Chee Club on Broadway had, in the past and this last holiday, shown my friends and I some of that history. . .

But just being a voyeur never entirely helps.

The idea of a city whose old skins go to recreate its citizens. . .

More later. . .

Spaces, Places, Paintings in Books, Part One

I'm inspired a lot by things I can't do, like paint, make movies, or play music. I'm inspired by doctors, journalists and firefighters too. By soccer-players, prostitutes and soldiers.

(With that in mind, I fully intend to learn the piano again, take up ornamental cartography, start playing soccer again and finish a screenplay.)

Painters, musicians, and filmmakers pop up a lot in my stories, and I seem to make many references, especially, to paintings and movies, as if stories can be considered as verbal paintings and word-films just as easily as they can be called pieces of creative writing.

The painting above is by the Greek-Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico.
He's one of the earliest painters I remember really liking. And then I discovered Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and Francis Bacon.

I tried to paint once. Really. Maybe I'd just get stoned, put on the Cowboy Junkies, sit around naked and play with my acrylics when I should have been doing my algebra homework but I tried to paint, I really did. Instead of succeeding, I think I just absorbed some painterly aesthetics in my early poetry and prose. (Much of my early poetry has been destroyed, along with all those Uma Thurman photos. But I remember my poems were more or less token, teenage surrealism, shot through with "shocking" juxtapositions, sort of like the famous sentence in Lautreamont's Maldoror that became a model for surrealist writing: Lautréamont describes a young boy as "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!")

Final word on my failure as a painter: I was always better at map-making but I'm terrible at reading maps. Most of you can testify to my poor sense of direction too. I guess being disoriented is more fitting for my temperament.

Anyway, De Chirico had a revelation one day that concerned the metaphysical beauty of Roman piazzas. This I just learned, but always thought his paintings seemed like subconscious renderings of the piazzas I spent a lot of time in during my short trip to Rome and Florence. Certain images resonated afterwards: the chaos of the marketplace or the fact that ruins nonchalantly rubbed shoulders with modern convenience stores, or the dark, twisting thoroughfares and the rain whipping across the cobblestones and the boiling water tossed on the plazas and the crazy, death-defying cab rides and the oh-so-sultry statue of The Ecstasy Of St. Theresa.

We stayed in a more native quarter of the city, Trastevere, and although our apartment was robbed, it was a good trip because I was forever getting lost in the labyrinthine streets and plazas of Rome.


Right now I'm working on a short story, or possibly a novella that is both about a man who is hiding out in Rome and about his youth in a dingy coastal town (think Venice meets Santa Cruz) where he lived in a crumbling apartment complex that had a courtyard-like plaza in its open-air center.

In this story, I'm trying to capture a sense of decay, of haunting, of lostness, and ruination by making a place as fully-fleshed as a character.

One of the recurring problems and/or opportunities I will be exploring in this blog is how to create imaginary spaces in books. And how books too are their own imaginary spaces, becoming cities, worlds, labyrinths in their own right.

But back to my rough story: Rome, for my doomed narrator is like a holier mirror of the beach-town he used to live in, back when he courted the cornsilk-blond marine biologist who witnessed her mother's murder but who's in love with the stand-up bassist who, himself, is also having an affair with the lumberjack who isn't really a lumberjack and who has the word DOXA tattooed on his forehead. But those are just ideas so far. Sort of based on people I knew, loved or lost.

One of the visual inspirations for this tale comes from a pretty squalid and notorious place that a lot of my friends lived in back in Santa Cruz, La Bahia (above.)

Although I never lived there, I attended many parties there and was always half impressed and half repulsed by its hip squalor. I was more taken by its beautiful, hacienda-like architecture as well as its lovely inner courtyard that was so conducive to reverie and melancholy and chainsmoking and fretting about love affairs gone south.

Finally, a third recurring place/image in my mess of a story, a place that one of the main characters often travels to on strange errands is Buenos Aires which, actually, reminded me a hell of lot of Rome. Rome meets Mumbai, I've heard it described.

So this story is one of the first ones I'm writing where many different, yet resonant spaces are important to the mode and tone of the piece. It is written as something of a collective, thinly-veiled requiem for people loved and lost, but also a fantasy of paranoia and melancholy that is contingent on the places in our lives. Places that become magnetic because of what happened there, who loved, fought and died there.

I'm interested in how other people conceptualize space in literature, or just space in general. Especially cities. I think this will require a part two and part three.