Y is for Yoshimoto, Banana

I was glad to find out that "Banana" Yoshimoto is a pen name and not one of those unfortunate appellations bestowed at birth by parents who should really, really know better. The writer is pushing 50 now, but she still does teenage angst better than almost anyone, except perhaps S. E. Hinton. Her first novel, Kitchen, was published in 1988 (to wild acclaim and commercial success) and since then, she's been busy, with 12 novels and more than a few collections of essays. Her novel The Lake was published in English in 2010, but it was originally published in 2005. I wonder what she's up to now?

X is for book titles that begin with X

I belong to Goodreads and one of the things I really like about the site and its community is the endless array of lists that the readers have put together. Just out of curiosity, I went over there to see what they had to say about X and I found this list of books with titles beginning in X.turns out the list was created specifically for bloggers doing the A to Z challenge, which I appreciate.  Ihad to go down to number 15 before I hit a book I'd read, Lynn Hamilton's The Xibalba Murders. the first in her series of mysteries about  Lara McClintoch, an archaeologist.  There were 11 books in the series, with the last one coming out in 2007, the year before her death.

As it turns out, the only other book I've read on the list (which includes titles from writers as disparate as Edith Wharton and Andre Norton) is #27, Walter Greatshell's Xombies. 

Why Ask Why?

My first foray into "indie publishing" was in October of 2010 when I put out a collection of short stories called Just Another Day in Paradise.  I was a total newbie at the time, but guided by the incredibly patient and helpful G. Wells Taylor (author of my favorite vampire novel Bent Steeple), It got it together and put it up for sale. I made some mistakes--the TOC isn't interactive, which it should be, and I paid, way, way, way too much for the awesome cover image. (I'd do it again, though. I saw the photo when it was first published in the newspaper and then tracked it down with the most intensive Google image search ever.)

The collection was never a big seller, so at some point, I made it "perma-free."  And as it turns out, there are a lot of people who wn't pay 99 cents for a collection of short stories, but are more than happy to pick it up for free. (Yes, I CAN give my work away.) So month after month, I've watched people "buy" the book.  Some of them have been nice enough to leave reviews (thank you very much) and in the intervening four years, the collection has rarely been out of the top 10 of free book collections. So I have to ask--why has there suddenly been an uptick in downloads of the book this month, nearly four years after it first became available?  So far this month, I have "sold" more than 300 copies of the collection and it is now rated #3 in athologies and collections/horor and #6 in anthologies and short stories in the fantasy/sci fi genre.

I'm not complainng, I'm just curious.  If you haven't read the stories and would like to, you can find the collection free here. 

W is for Woody Harrelson

Woody Harrelson kind of sneaked up on me. One minute he was in an endless loop of Cheers reruns, and the next thing I knew he was playing everything from a bad-ass zombie killer to a political strategist to a corrupt Louisiana cop. (I loved, loved, loved True Detective and it was mostly because even when the story got out of hand, watching Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey was an absolute pleasure. I liked them together in EdTV too.) Before True Detective, my favorite Harrelson role was in Game Change with Julianne Moore and Ed Harris.

I really admire actors who move beyond their comfort zone when they're choosing parts and try out new things and change things up. And Harrelson's done everything from Hunger Games to No Country for Old Men to Now You See Me.  His next project is a movie called Triple Nine, which I read when it was being shopped around to distributors. It's a thriller with a great cast (Casey Affleck and Kate Winslet and Chiwetel Ejiofor are just some of his co-stars). I can't wait to see it. And I can't wait to see what he does next.

V is for Veteran

Illustration by Mark Satchwill

Just when I'm getting crankypants about CNN pandering to the lowest common denominator, they blindside me with a story that just about broke my heart. You may have seen it--a brief report about a homeless Air Force veteran wo died in his van and has been unclaimed ever since. A former waitress is trying to raise the money to bury him somewhere other than in a pauper's grave. (It's unclear why the military isn't stepping in to provide Michael John Pardalis a resting place in a Veteran's cemetery, but the woman who is trying to raise money to bury her former customer does mention she needs to get a copy of a particular form. I remember that form. When my father died, we found it in a trunk full of apers pretty much by accident and if we hadn't had it, my father would not now be buried in Arlington Cemetery.)

At any rate, it's a moving story, which you can see here. And with the story there's once again a light on one of America's most shameful secrets--the way veterans are treated when they return from serving their country. My father werved in the war before the war before the one we're in now and the one before that as well. He came home from North Africa and went to law school and then re-enlisted in the Army's Judge Advocate Corps, building a career as an Army lawyer. He was already married when he saw overseas service in the Korean War and by the time the Viet Nam war was heating up, he had three children. He was offered a promotion if he accepted a transfer to Saigon but at that point, he and the Army parted ways and he (and we) settled down while he worked as a consultant for private citizens with claims against the government. Turns out (and I know you'll be shocked by this) that the government often makes promises to people that they don't keep. A lot of those broken promises are made to the men and women who serve in the military.

At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, there's an inscription that reads, "Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God." There are a lot of soldiers out there and God knows all their names and so do a lot of people. And every one of those soldiers deserves to rest in honored glory and not in an unmarked grave where they'll be forgotten.

The illustration here is by Mark Satchwill, who created it as part of our NoHo Noir storyline inspired by the murders that were then taking place in Southern California. The victims were all homeless people, several of them veterans. The illustration has haunted me for years. I think it's the most powerful thing Mark has done.

U is for Ulin, David

David Ulin is a writer, a book critic and an editor. He edited one of my favorite books about Los Angeles, Writing Los Angeles, which brings together writers as disparate as Chester Himes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Christopher Isherwood. (And of course, Raymond Chandler.) The book has an elegant cover too, clean and graphically simple and yet evocative. 

David Ulin's book The Lost Art of Reading ("Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time") is based on this essay he wrote for the L.A. Times. Ulin used to be the Times' book editor and then became a critic in order to focus on his own fiction.)  I've never read any of Ulin's fiction, but I have several of the books he's edited on my shelves. This is a man who celebrates the act of reading. This is aman whose name writers should know.

T is for Troubled...

I am troubled.
I came of age during the last gasp of printed news so I saw the rise of both local "happy news" and the birth of CNN.  From the very first, i was a fan of CNN because they seemed to value substance over style, and their anchors seemed chosen more for their skills than their appearance. I still got most of my news from newspapers, though, until about the middle of the first decade of this millennium when I cancelled my L.A. Times subscription in a cost-cutting measure because the WGA strike had cut my income considerably.

I get most of my news online now and mostly I turn to CNN.com. That means that along with reading the news, I have a choice of video content. And lately, some of the choices they've made for that content have been troubling to me. Today (it's Tuesday 4/22) there are two multi-media stories on offer that go beyond what I think of as the scope of a news story and into the realm of ,,,pandering to prurient interst. One is a video of a poison gas attack.  I'm not sure what the purpose of the story is--to act as evidence against the perpetrator of the crime? To show what happens when poison gas is used? To get more people clicking through?

The second story troubled me more though. It was a story about the people who called for help when the Korean ferry started to sink. "Audio reveals panic as ship sank."  How many people will click in hopes of hearing some of that audio? And what purpose will that serve? Here in L.A. it's long been news policy to release as many juicy details about celebrity deaths as possible, including 911 calls. Even if you're not looking for that kind of news, it's almost unavoidable. But inviting strangers to listen to calls made in what might be the last moments of a person's life....It's not news. And I'm not going to click.