Michael Chabon's "Telegraph Avenue"

LONGTIME Californian is one of our favorite writers here at The Misread City.

I had the pleasure to speak to him the other day about his new novel, set on the Berkeley/Oakland border. It's a long, rich book centered around a used vinyl shop that specializes in various styles of black music from the '60s and '70s. (If Brokeland Records really existed I would go digging for an original Blue Note pressing of the early works of Grant Green. And I bet they'd have it.)

This Q & A was my first piece for GoodReads. Here it is.

The interview is fairly long, but here is one more exchange exclusively for Misread City readers.

The other thing that strikes me about Telegraph Avenue is that there’s this buzz and hum to the street life, a kind of Jane Jacobs city life with its love of density. But at least going back a decade or more you’ve written at an artist’s retreat, at which you also have a role as chairman of the board. Why is that valuable to you and to other writers and artists.

I can just get more done, be completely disconnected. When you’re at MacDowell, you have no Internet access – that’s the heart of it. When I started going there, there was barely an Internet; it didn’t play anything like the role it does now in distracting me from my work. But that is what it has metamorphosed for me. More than any kind of getting away I do there, I get away from the Internet.

But a close second is having the opportunity to only be thinking about your work. When you’re not thinking, you’re reading, or walking – nothing else gets in the way. So even when you’re at dinner, and chatting with a composer and a sculptor, the things they say to you somehow feed into the work that’s your doing.

That level of immersion, 24 hours a day, even in your dreams – it’s feeding into the work. You end up using much more of your brain.

While when I’m home, I work all night, I hit my word count… But then I wake up the next morning, there are all this piddly things I’ve got to take care of, from housework to childcare to shopping for dinner, planning the menu, and the Internet, the greatest distraction of them all. I’m not working during those periods. There’s no subconscious work being done.

Farewell to the Man Behind Ecotopia

HE wrote a book that a lot of people haven't heard of, but one that influenced many and presaged a lot of the way we live now, especially on the West Coast, where it's set. That's Ernest "Chick" Callenbach, the Berkeley author of the book Ecotopia. Chick, as he was known, died on April 16.

This month has seen a lot of death in my world -- a very dear elderly relative, an old friend's mother, drummer Levon Helm -- and this one has a lot of meaning for me. When I met Callenbach, at his home in Berkeley in 2008, he struck me as one of the sharpest and most physically fit 79-year-old I'd ever encountered. (I remember him telling me how he walked from his house to the post office every day, which was quite a hike.) I also liked his sincerity, decency and sense of humor.

Because of a reissue of Ecotopia -- a slim novel which looks at a future in which Oregon, Washington and Northern California have seceded and begun an environmentalist utopia with a woman president -- I spoke to Callenbach for an article which became my first piece for the New York Times, my first piece of work after my layoff from the LA Times, and the first post on this blog. HERE's that story, which the paper titled, "The Novel That Predicted Portland."

My story looked at how hard Callenbach struggled to get the book published -- two dozen rejections.

“It was rejected by every significant publisher in New York,” he told me. “Some said it didn’t have enough sex and violence, or that they couldn’t tell if it were a novel or a tract. Somebody said the ecology trend was over. This was New York, circa 1974. I was on the point of burning it.”

Like a lot of '70s culture, the book ended up seeming less antique and more pertinent as we moved into the 21st century the limits to our resources became unambiguous.

I don't often stay in touch with former subjects; here's one I really wish I had.

(Here is a good obit from today's LA Times. And here is one from the New York Times.)

R.I.P., Chick.

UPDATE: Salon has run a piece found on Callenbach's computer in which he looks, as hopefully as he can, to the future. They stand in some ways as his final words.

Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets

THE home where the once-reviled Daniel Ellsberg has lived since the late '70s is hard to find: It's down a small redwood lined street and its address is out of order with its neighbors. When you review what Ellsberg went through in the '70s -- national manhunt, Nixon hiring thugs to break into his therapist's office, Kissinger denouncing him as "the most dangerous man in America" -- it's not hard to see why Ellberg, now nearing 80, would choose to live somewhere a bit removed. 

Nixon and Mao, 1972

A few weeks ago I met Ellsberg to discuss his leaking of the Pentagon Papers -- the record of our involvement in Indochina -- which helped destroy the Nixon presidency and, eventually, bring an end to the war. We talked about the events of those days, secrecy itself, and the very fine POV documentary that goes up tonight on PBS, The Most Dangerous Man in America.


HERE is my piece from today's LATimes. Sobering stuff.


There's some fascinating stuff in the doc, some of which comes from Ellsberg's memoir of the period, Secrets, including tapes in which Nixon urges Kissinger to use nuclear weapons in the conflict. "I just want you to think big." Nixon also told his secretary of state: You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care."

The New Yorker's Young West Coast Writers

THE New Yorker recently announced its 20 Under 40 list of American writers, running some of them in their summer fiction issue and others since.

Two of the bunch – Daniel Alarcon and Yiyun Li – were fairly recent profile subjects of mine, and I’ve enjoyed, without surprise, watching their rise. Both are foreign-born writers who’ve settled in the Bay Area and show the ability – despite nativist stirrings elsewhere in the culture – of the West Coast to absorb talent from elsewhere.

I spoke to Alarcon, who was born in Peru, right before the publication of his mythic, almost post-apocalyptic Lost City Radio, one of the best debut novels of recent years. Here's my piece.

Alarcon -- at the time teaching at Mills College in Oakland – and I discussed Peru’s bloody history, the war on terror, Russian novelists, and the way American publishers stereotype Latin-American literature.

 Among other things, Alarcon is an exemplar of globalism. He told me how his posses in Lima and Oakland are pretty similar:

"The language they speak is different, but we do the same things. We write, read a lot, nurse drinking problems -- typical bohemians. In Oakland we speak in English, in Lima in Spanish. We listen to the same music, have the same references -- there are certain clubs in Lima where they only play the Cure and the Smiths."

Yiyun Li spent her childhood and early adulthood in China – she has eerie members of being a high school student during the Tianenmen Square massacre – and moved to the states in the mid-‘90s. The characters in her first novel are living through the nastiness of the Cultural Revolution. I spoke to her, here.

"The people here don't see themselves as living in history," she told me at a cafe on the edge of the UC Berkeley campus, near her Oakland home. "Politics is like the weather: People get used to bad weather, talk about the weather, but life goes on. People desire the same things everywhere: a little bit of power, a little bit of money, comfort, love. I don't want to make them victims of the times."

Li considers herself at heart an Irish writer – she remembers being in the army as an 18 or 19 year old and reading Joyce’s Dubliners and seeing a whole world open up. Her first story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, is remarkable, especially its story “Immortality.”

Li has another story collection coming, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and she tours on the book this fall. I know I’m not the only reader looking forward to it.

Ozu's Films vs. Adrian Tomine

It's one of the best and most natural aesthetic marriages imaginable: The nuanced, meditative Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu and the nuanced, meditative comics Adrian Tomine, best known for the Optic Nerve series.

Tomine has designed some covers for Ozu's lesser known films, The Only Son and There Was a Father. Here is more info on the films, which the Criterion Collection will release next week. I love Ozu's films -- especially Tokyo Story and the season films like Late Spring, which date from the late '40s to early '60s -- but must admit I have not yet seen either of these two.

Ozu's films are known for their quiet tone, their emotional poignance, the low setting of the camera and the lack of conventional cutting. Some of them look at the tearing of family and traditional society.

I've written about Tomine -- who grew up in Sacramento and lived in Berkeley for years before a recent move to Brooklyn -- several times; this  is the first and most complete. This week The Misread City spoke to him about the Ozu project.

When did you first discover Ozu’s films, and how did they initially strike you?

When I was in college, my mom gave me a vhs copy of Ozu's film Good Morning, and I liked it quite a bit. I immediately connected with the quotidian subject matter and pacing...it had a lot of the qualities that I admired in the work of my favorite cartoonists. I think it's a good "gateway" film into Ozu's work because it's got so much genuine cuteness and silliness. If you dive right in with something like Tokyo Story, it can be pretty devastating.

Your job illustrating this project is to capture and create a visual style… What makes these films visually distinctive?

I think a film scholar could answer this with much more sophistication, but from a personal point of view, I feel like Ozu's visual style could be compared to the cartooning style that books like "How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way" are adamant about avoiding. It's like the supposedly boring side view of Dr. Strange walking into a room, as opposed to the "worm's eye view" of him dynamically bursting through the door. In other words, it's clear, straightforward, honest, devoid of flash, and it's absolutely perfect. .

There's also been a lot written about the famous "Ozu shot," but I think that's the kind of thing that works on a completely subconscious level...you'd never ask, "Why are we looking at this shot of laundry flapping in the wind? What does that symbolize?" I think the beauty of those shots is that they make you feel something that's otherwise inexpressible, in a way that's absolutely particular to that piece of film.

There’s a quiet, cerebral and detail-oriented quality that Ozu’s films share with your comics. Do you see that kind of connection?

I'm sure my critics would argue against that kind of connection, but I will say that I've admired Ozu's films for a long time, and I've learned a lot from them.

A few years ago you wrote your first Optic Nerve with an explicitly Japanese-American theme, and you’ve helped to recover the comics of the Japanese artist Tatsumi… Do you think you see and hear Ozu differently because of your Asian roots?

I think so. When I watch an Ozu movie with my wife, I think we're having fairly different experiences. Obviously a lot of the content is universal, but for me there's a strange, surprising feeling of recognition of certain character traits and behavioral tics that I can see in my grandparents, my own parents, and even myself to a degree. Something about just entering into that world is very comforting to me. But maybe this has more to do with Ozu's filmmaking abilities than the simple fact that he was Japanese. There's a huge amount of Japanese art and culture that leaves me as alienated as the next guy.

What’s next from the desk of Adrian Tomine? 

When I got married a few years ago, my bride-to-be forced me to make some kind of "wedding favor" to give away to the guests. This struck me as a particularly bizarre idea, especially since we were already giving them all the food and drink they could ever imagine. Anyway, I think she had in mind a little card or something and I ended up funneling all my pre-nuptial anxiety into the creation of a comic book about the process of getting married. Since then, I've slowly been adding pages when something would occur to me, or if I just needed a break from my more precise, premeditated work. Now I think I've got almost fifty pages of material, so Drawn & Quarterly is going to put it out as a little book. It's loose, joke-y stuff, and for that reason, I thought it would make a nice follow-up to Shortcomings.

I'm also making slow progress on another, more "real" book, which will most likely be serialized in several issues of Optic Nerve before being re-packaged as a "graphic novel." But like I said, progress is moving slowly, especially now that I've got an 8-month-old daughter and I'm constantly running out of my studio to either change a shitty diaper or watch her do something cute.


Art courtesy Adrian Tomine