[sic]

It was last summer when I read Lucas Crown’s piece in Los Angeles Magazine about the enigmatic life and times and writings of his friend, novelist Mercedes Lambert who died in 2003 at the age of 55.

It was last week when I went into the Border’s across from the office building where I work to get my bay-bee a little valentine, and while I was there I decided to see if any of Lambert’s books were available, which was a great idea being where I was except for the EPIC FAIL that I couldn’t remember any of the titles, nor her name, nor her unique pseudonym. All I could remember to the clerk there was that she was dead and that she wrote using a male’s first name. Michael? David? Bradley? Fuck.

I left with a fancy card and some gourmet jelly beans, but without any of Lambert/Munson’s works. Eventually and still drawing blanks except that I was pretty confident that the first name was Douglas I got around to googling and damn if she wasn’t hard to find. I tried searching the L.A. Times website but came up totally empty same with Los Angeles Magazine. Ask.com was no help and it was only when I returned to the Google and entered some variation of “noir los angeles novels by deceased female authors Douglas” in the search term box did I get a hit — and only then on the third or fourth page in!

I saw her nom de guerre: Douglas Ann Munson and slapped my knee and immediately went to Amazon and snapped up two used copies of her previously published books as well as her last, published late last year, four years after her death.

In a nutshell Lambert was a lawyer turned novelist and the author of three well-received titles: El Niño in 1990, Dogtown in 1991 and Soultown in 1996. All are based in Los Angeles, with the last two centered around a female detective named Whitney Logan. By the publication of her third she was considered one of L.A.’s top mystery writers among James Ellroy, Michael Connelly and Walter Moseley. In 1996 she quit being a lawyer and moved to Washington to finish her fourth title “Ghosttown.” A month later Viking notified her they’d rejected it. After unsuccessfully attempting to retool the book she gave up and moved to Czechoslovakia and taught English until 2001 when she discovered a lump in her breast and returned to the U.S. for treatment. She’d previously beaten breast cancer in the 1980s, but this time she was given six months to live. She exceeded that prognosis, but succumbed in December 2003. Her ashes were returned to California and scattered in the waters off Marina Del Rey.

Source: Douglas Anne Munson Wiki page.

Crown’s piece in L.A. Magazine went into a bit more detail about the tragic last year or so of her life, making her unrealized future as a writer, one cut short by disease and her own demons, all the more poignant. I can’t remember specifics but I believe there was a period where she was almost completely destitute and even homeless on the streets of L.A. for a spell.

I think I’m drawn as much to her mysteries as I am the mystery that she was.

I’m not going to do much explaining here largely because I am still too blown away to translate my feelings. In my inbox yesterday was a note with the subject line “Response To Review” that read as follows:

Dear Will Campbell . . .

I’ve just read you most interesting comments on your website, in which you remark lengthily — and delightfully — about my book, The Silent Sky. Thank you for an engrossing and very pleasurable read.

(I can only add, I wish you had scored with Mindy Fenton!)

Best regards . . .
Allan W. Eckert

I won’t go into the details here. All the background you can eat can be found at my February 2006 post that Eckert references in his note, headlined “Learning The Hard Way.” But in the meantime I can’t quite quantify what it’s like to have the author of one of the most important books (published in 1965) of my youth and my life just suddenly reach across the 25 years since I first read it and say hey.

But of course I wrote him back:

Mr. Eckert,

I do believe my eyes bugged out and I got chills when I realized I’d just gotten an email from the author of one of my favorite books ever. Thanks to the wonders of the internet I am as humbled here by your kind words as I was whenever I was in the presence of Mindy Fenton. Or at least pretty close.

And speaking of the wonders of the internet, long before the worldwide web came into being I spent years haunting public libraries for a copy of your book. I eventually found another in the library of the college I attended when I finally went back in the early 1990s to finish up my degree at 30 years of age. Then a few years ago I decided to see about getting a copy of my very own and while I can’t recall if it was facilitated by eBay or Amazon or Craigslist, I was eventually able to procur a paperback version that I display proudly in my bookcase.

Kindest regards,
Will Campbell

Allan Eckert’s website

Just in case you’re not planning on attending this Sunday’s IAAL•MAF “Serenity Now: An L.A. River ODDysey” bike ride from Griffith Park to Cypress Park and back that I’ve been planning, you’re gonna miss out on an a sincere attempt at and edutaining experience.

I’m so into getting some fact-based talking points down for the roll that I biked over to the library today and checked out “The Los Angeles River: It’s Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth” by Blake Gumprecht (1999, John Hopkins University Press).

Little did I know the wonderful and entire and definitive volume is online here if you want to check it out for yourself.

I opted to bus it to my friend Joel’s regularly scheduled ExecTec networking event in Westwood via the No. 704 “Rapid” bus. Point of order: Nothing is rapid between Silver Lake and the westside at 6 p.m. and it took me an hour to get there from here. On the plus side, it also allowed me to chew up a travel-sized chunk of pages from my current read, John Gregory Dunne’s absolutely awesome “True Confessions,” and I just have to share with you a snip from chapter five when Detective Tom Spellacy is recalling his barely legal past as a repoman, and how during on particular grab a dog bit him badly on the backside and his future partner with the LAPD showed up, to save his butt — literally.

He rubbed his ass.

The dog who bit him in 1933 was named Wolf and Wolf had taken thirrty-seven stitches worth out of his ass when he was trying to lift a black Packard with nine thousand miles on it. Crotty was the cop on the beat and when Tom Spellacy screamed, Crotty showed up and drilled Wolf with one shot. You dumb fuck, Spellac had said, you could’ve got me. Not a chance, Crotty had said. He blasted Wolf once more for good measure. You ought to think about joining the department, Crotty said. It beats hot cars and you can shoot the fucking dogs.

That last line made me laugh out loud, right there in the back of the No. 704 bus westbound out of Century City on Santa Monica Boulevard, and as I looked up from the pages I found one of the MTA’s “Poetry in Motion” series placards hanging above the window across from me. It featured a work by Gwendolyn Brooks titled “Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward.”

Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
“even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.”
You will be right.
For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.
Live not for the-end-of-the-song.
Live in the along.

Who knew one could fall in love with two works of art and their artists right there in the back of the No. 704 bus as it crawled past the Mormon Temple.

Influenced perhaps by my recent avian encounters, my friend Stephen loaned me what looks to be a marvelous book titled “Providence Of A Sparrow,” by Chris Chester and after finishing Jonathan Kellerman’s unsatisfying “Gone” and promptly feeding it to the recycle bin I seemed ready to dive into the memoir that stems from the discovery of a baby sparrow and how it brings about a reawakening to the wonder of life and wildlife.

But it’s gonna have to wait because I made the mistake of starting John Gregory Dunne’s “True Confessions” (ordered because of my disappointment with the plot of the movie that I finally saw for the first time earlier this month) and it pretty much had me at the opening line of “None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore.”

Only a few pages into it and I can already tell it’s going to have the depth and definition that the film’s makers either couldn’t or weren’t allowed to bring to the screen.

I have Susan and her keen hotel-finding skills to thank for allowing us to discover the remarkable Shakespeare & Company. From our room overlooking the Notre Dame Cathedral, the venerable bookseller was tucked in not so much as a stone’s throw away from us, but we didn’t know anything about it until a walk post dinner and post spring shower led us to chance past its storefront…

…whereupon we immediately detoured to explore its intriguing interior spaces.

Susan, who’d said she was in need of a new book had previously been eyeing the entirely en francais literary selections of the various street vendors we found along the Seine. Not more than a few moments inside this all en anglais shoppe among the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling tomes the book she needed jumped out at me in the form of Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana.

“I found what you’re looking for,” I told her as I handed it over. She gave it a once-over and appreciatively agreed.

I spent the next few minutes wandering around in amazement snapping pix of the place until I realized my desire for a new read as well — moreso because I wanted to support this wonderful establishment and not because I needed one. Currently I’m on the hunt for a killer around L.A. with Jonathan Kellerman’s protaganist in Gone, but he got me pfffting through it early on because he’s refered to our infamous Santa Ana winds as “Santa Susannas” and while his lead character was driving around chasing down leads he made a point of noting the intersection of Sixth Street and La Cienega Boulevard, which does not exist (Sixth ends at San Vicente Boulevard, the border of Beverly Hills that’s a couple blocks east of La Cienega).

But finding my next read wasn’t as easy as finding Susan’s. I eyed stacks of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War among several other titles until I laid eyes on a paperback titled Rain by Karen Duve. On its cover stood a quote from The Guardian’s review telling me it’s “Not for the squemish… a modern Gothic” and on the back the teaser told me more:

“When Leon lands a contract to ghost-write the memoirs of a dodgy gangster, his worries seem to be over: now he can afford to move to a dream home in the country with his beautiful wife Martina. But the house is by a fetid swamp where it never stops raining, and, like his marriage, is starting to sink. Then he gets writer’s block and he’s already spent his advance. Their attempts at DIY are hampered by a plague of indestructible slugs eating away at the foundation. And then the gangster, unhappy with the pages Leon’s written, starts to get nasty…”

Sold.

After making the purchase we moved on and wandered around and through the city’s fabeled Latin Quarter and I wondered if I was setting foot on streets once trod by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

For a look around and inside the bookstore, visit this photoset on Flickr.

This easily dates back to 2004. Gawd, maybe even ‘03. One of my favorite occasional stops along the internest then and now is the website of Found Magazine, and way back then they put out information that they were planning a book to be filled strictly with found Polaroid images submitted by readers. I didn’t think much of it until shortly thereafter I serendipitously happened to find a discarded Polaroid sitting in a puddle outside the building I worked in when I worked at the L.A. Zoo. Dutifully I retrieved it, scanned it in and sent it off to them and they were most appreciative and told me they’d keep me updated as to whether it would be used and if so when the volume would be released.

And the wait began. And continued. Every now and then I’d shoot them an email wondering what was up and sometimes I’d hear back politely telling me to chill. Then maybe about a year and a half ago I get an email saying they’d misplace my photo but had located it but had lost the caption I’d sent along with it.  Fortunately this was prior to my big email crash of 2006 and I was able to pull up my original correspondence and forward it on. Again they were appreciative and told me they’d keep me updated as to when the book would be published.

More waiting commenced, until eventually I went to the website and found a message that “Found Polaroids” was coming soon. How soon I e-queried? Really soon, they said.

More waiting, until a couple weeks ago when an email informed me that indeed it was true, the long-delayed somewhat-anticipated project had finally been completed and sent to the printer and would soon be open to the public.

My copy came in the mail today and I was thrilled to find my submission from three or more years ago spread out on pages 26-27 (image is clickable for enlargification):

The caption reads:

On the way from my cubicle here at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens to the cafe for an afternoon mocha latte, I glanced down to watch my step over a puddle of water and found the little girls in this Polaroid looking up at me.

School field trips to the Zoo are big this time of year, so my impression is that this image was taken by a classmate of two fellow students, probably earlier today. Look closely at the red jacket and you’ll see an image of a monkey on it. Maybe it’s her Zoo-going jacket.

Long a FOUND Magazine fan Iove so wanted to come across something that I could send in to you guys. Kneeling down and snatching up the waterlogged and highly distressed picture and shaking it dry, my primary thought was, “Finally, something for FOUND.”

UPDATE: If you’re visiting from Jalopnik, welcome and thanks to them for the link love… I think. As to their subheadline sass over asking “who calls a horn a honker,” the answer is: not me. Down near the end of this post “honker” refers not to a horn itself, but is rather the agent noun form of  the verb “honk” and describes the person honking the horn. But seriously, agent nouns? Yeah, you know… walk/walker, talk/talker, misinterpret/misinterpreter. Clear? Clear.

The good news was that the dude was too wasted to carjack me stuck in traffic tonight there on Vermont Avenue next to the USC campus in the middle of a downpour. The bad news was that he was too wasted to walk a straight line out in front of my truck. where he tipped over across the wet hood with a whump before uprighting and feeling his way around to the driver’s side where at first he politely and almost disinterestedly tapped on the window glass but quickly set to hammering at it when I didn’t respond.

I’m pretty sure he would’ve continued with increasing ferocity until it broke had I not rolled it down and when I did he didn’t bother with the exchange of any pleasantries.

“You gotta give me something,” he said furtively and seriously slurred. “I’m hurting, man.”

I suggested that pummeling his fists against my truck might not be the best way to enlist my support and that was the only time he looked directly at me with eyes that were glassy and distant beneath heavy lids.  Then he looked away and said “Huh?” before repeating that I needed to give him something and do it right now.

“Never mind,” I replied, flipping open the center console lid. “I got some change for you if that’ll help. He semi-grunted and wobbled unsteadily on his feet while  swinging his head up and down the street until a scooped up what probably amounted to about a buck’s worth of nickels, dimes and pennies and held it out to him, dropping them into his cupped hands.

“My girlfriend just broke up with me,” he said.

“Smart girl” is what entered my mind, but “Oh man, that sucks!” is what exited my mouth.

“Yeah, she kicked me out!” He blinked slowly and started a portside list but caught himself before gravity fully kicked in.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “Hope that helps.”

He looked down at the coins I’d given him and for a moment I thought I saw a look of disapproval pass across his face, but the line of cars in front of me had started moving and a sharp blast of the horn from the vehicle behind us got his attention. Seemingly involuntarily the hand holding my donation rose and with extending middle finger was directed to the honker, which caused the money fell from it to the pavement where it tinkled and rang as it landed on the soaked street.

Taking that as my queue to bid the dude adieu, I hit the gas and put my assailing panhandler in my rearview mirror.

Growing up if there was one writer whose new releases I waited for with practically rabid anticipation, it was Stephen King. Richard Adams’ “Watership Down” might be my favorite book, and one that I read even before I’d heard of anything by King, but subsequent Adams tales that I consumed such as “Shardik” and “The Plague Dogs” just weren’t all that.

King, however, could do no wrong. After reading “The Shining” at 14 years old I was hooked. I followed that up with his terror epic “The Stand” (that teased from the back cover with “Soon to be a major motion picture directed by George A. Romero!” which any King/Romero fan knows never happened and the world is less because of it) and to this day get shivers just thinking about the scene where the one-hit-wonder singer/songwriter Larry Underwood has to creep his way through the hell that was the pitchblack car- and corpse-filled Lincoln tunnel in an attempt to escape an apocalyptic virus-ravaged New York. Scaaaaary.

I drove through “Salem’s Lot” reveled in his “Dead Zone” and inhaled his “Nightshift” collection of short stories. In fact, I had re-read them so much that I would have my mom and friends open the volume at random and read a sentence any sentence — even a fragment — and I would immediately blurt out the title of whatever story it was from.

“Firestarter.” “Cujo.” “Christine.” “Pet Sematary.” Whenever a new one popped up I knocked it down without delay all the way through and beyond high school. If I had to pinpoint the work where my wonder started to wane it would probably be “The Talisman” that he co-wrote with Peter Straub. For the first time I got the sense that King was mailing it in. His next book was “It” and I dutifully bought it and started through it, but it was no longer with that “where ya gonna take me this time Stevie!?” wonderment. And in a strange way it was my future ex-wife who was responsible for me kicking my King habit. See, we were living in the same Van Nuys apartment building. Me in a little single and her in a two-bedroom, and after it was decided we should live together I started hauling my stuff down the stairs from my place, across the courtyard and past the pool and up the stairs to her place. On one of those trips I was carrying a stack of books with “It” on top and a mis-step by the pool sent it straight into the shallow end. Though I hurried to fish it out the damage was done and I wasn’t heartbroken or engaged enough to replace it.

After that, other than occasionally wandering through some of his novella/short story collections (which contain some of his best writing: “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”), I’d pretty much jumped off the King train.

I’m not sure why I decided to get back onboard after all this time with his current paperback bestseller “Cell,” but I’m really sorry and pissed off that I did. “Cell” is another apocalyptic tale along the lines of “The Stand” but it pales and shrivels in comparison. This time, the global killer comes in the form of some never explained “pulse” sent through mobile phones that separates humanity into good and evil factions… in this case the “normies” (those who didn’t have cell phones and thus weren’t zapped by the pulse) and the “phoners” (who did and were zapped). As a result of this zapping the phoners are basically reduced to homicidal maniacs who kill and destroy everything they can. The normies are reduced to avoiding the phoners while trying to subsist in this unexplained fresh hell.

Without going too much further in depth, suffice it to say the phoners gradually lose most of their psycho-killer instincts and develop communes along with telepathic and mind-control skills while the small band of normies the novel centers around make their way up into New Hampshire trying to survive and figure out what the hell’s going on… along the way incuring mass phoner wrath and outcast status among other normies by blowing up a huge “flock” of the freaks with propane trucks.

Talk about phoning it in, that’s exactly what King did with this thing. Sure, I know that every writer progresses and evolves in their career and in no way was I expecting “Cell” — despite its obvious similarities — to be another “The Stand.” But I did expect it to be more than just what may have been an interesting kernel of a concept bloated out into 450 pages of listless unimaginative and cardboard-charactered wordpuke.

The back cover blazes with a blurb by the Chicago Tribune who called it “A marvel… You’re utterly at the mercy of a master storyteller.” Really? Maybe if the Tribster that reviewed it had inserted “former” before “master” I’d agree. Because that’s what I was utterly at the mercy of: my memory of when King was a nightmare maker and as such I diligently trudged through this tedious tale very much like King’s normies trudged upstate through the decimated wasteland. Just as they were galled and shocked and ultimately hopeless at what their world has become, so was I at what King’s work has become.

It used to be that good or bad a book I read was forever. These last few years the ones I’ve not cared to keep have gone to the library. This one’s going into the recycle bin.

There’s a reason I don’t usually read overly long introductions to books — especially nonfictionals — I’m about to embark on and Norman M. Klein in his preface to his “The History of Forgetting” definitely had me rolling my eyes almost had me saying “Forget about it!” at several points, such as this one:

“In the first section, I employ the term social imaginary, but not in the Lacanian or post-Hegelian sense, which seemed too elusive for research on urban planning…”

Lacanian or post-Hegelian? Elusive is right. Get the flock outta here! Sure, I can Google Lacan and Hegel and perhaps broaden my mind a bit as to who the hell these people are/were, but while I’m deciding whether or not to do that Klein damn well better shake lose all that arcanity in the intro because if he starts spouting such dry academentia around in the bulk of the book I’m gonna forget about “Forgetting” real quick.