Erle Stanley Gardner deserves more than a plaque in Ventura.

Gardner’s mystery novels have sold about 300 million copies worldwide. They led to the creation of the “Perry Mason” television series, which made its debut in 1957 and ran until 1966. Reruns continue to draw viewers into the tales of the brilliant defense attorney, his beautiful assistant, Della Street, and his prosecutorial adversary, Hamilton Burger. (Another version of the show ran in 1973-74.)

“Erle Stanley Gardner is perhaps our most famous son,” said Ventura historian Richard Senate, who wrote a book on the late author’s connection to the town and periodically leads tours of Gardner’s old haunts.

Gardner is not a giant literary figure. In fact, I’m not sure he’s a literary figure at all, but he was a talented and entertaining writer who gave America one of its most memorable fictional characters, and as the most famous writer Ventura has produced, the city needs to get serious about honoring him.

Much as what passes for poetry today is not what I could call poetry. Here is a fictitious example of the contemporary, post-modern poem:

Um, actually, that’s not half bad. I just spit that out. Let me try again at post-modern emptiness:

Okay, that’s more like it - vacuous. Devoid of subtly and almost totally lacking in meaning.

Most of what I read from contemporary poets lacks rhythm, lacks music, lacks the layers of onion skin that make delving into a truly well-worked poem so satisfy.

I read Bukowski not because he is a poet to study the way I once studied Eliot or Crane; I read Bukowski because I love his voice. I breeze through his poems enjoying the milieu of his life, picking up bits of observed detail and insight into human behavior. But, with a few exceptions, Bukowski lacks the compressed punch of a Keats or a Donne.

Poet and reviewer Edward Hirsch touches on the snobbery many current poetry critics have about what constitutes good poetry in his review of Richard Howard’s new volume, “Talking Cures.”

Howard is the most unabashedly literary — the most Wildean — of contemporary American poets. His massive learning, a full cultural arsenal, has often made him seem suspect to poetry readers who distrust great fanciness and mistakenly equate a plain style and a supposedly unmediated personal voice with “sincerity,” which is a little like saying that vanilla ice cream is more “sincere” than peach gelato. But if it’s true, as Ezra Pound said, that technique is the test of a poet’s sincerity, then Howard certainly qualifies as one of our sincerest makers, since he has been elaborating his structures — deliberately making something of himself — for more than 40 years now. (emphasis added)

To me, a plain style is perfectly suited to prose, but not to poetry. The point of poetry is to escape the drabness of our plain and ponderous lives; poetry should compact our experiences and excite our senses, not numb us with a sense of sameness and predictability. From poetry, we should gain a new way of seeing old things, not the same old way of seeing everything.

The samples of Howard’s poetry in Hirsch’s review make me think that he is my kind of poet.

… Everyone knows my history,
complete with goddesses, islands, all those hoary lies!
I have no tales to tell, I have only
echoes. The real Ulysses puts in his appearance
between other men’s lines, the true Odysseus
shows up in unspeakable pauses, the gaps and blanks
where life hasn’t already been turned into
“my” wanderings, “my” homecoming, even “my” dog!

This from a poem about Ulysses taking a post-modern view of his legend, but it is written with a modern cadence that lifts it above post-modern boredom.

I think I’ll buy this book.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

Only in Los Angeles would its largest public facility be named after a would-be murderer — and worse yet, a former journalist.
 

I’ve wanted to take a weekend and explore the park, but I guess I’ll wait until 2005. I figure there isn’t much point in going now with the observatory closed.

Mickey Kaus says he used to get a lot of hate mail. I’ve never gotten any hate mail. Hell, most of the time, people who leave comments are even civil.

There is also this trend of ceremonial delinking. As far as I know, I’ve never been ceremonially delinked.

I feel like such a second-class blogger.

The “other” choice on IWantMedia’s “Media Person of the Year” poll is currently winning. I wonder who that could be? (via Welch). Go cast your vote, and I recommend the “other,” too. Why? Because blogs were big news in 2002 and there’s no blogger bigger than InstaPundit.

How many times am I going to change the name of this blog?

First, it was hbo3.com. Then it was Global News Watch. Then back to hbo3.com. Now it’s HowardOwens.com.

Why?

Cause that’s what I feel like doing.

Blogging is a whim anyway, so why not, on a whim, change the name of my blog?

Ironically, I’m changing to HowardOwens.com because I think it’s smarter (if not more pretentious) to “brand” my name rather than my initials.

Also, I decided to make some minor site design changes. Again, all on a whim.

You just never know what I’m going to do next.

Los Angeles is a city of a million stories, I think. There are stories in the people, stories in the old and the new buildings; there are stories even in the cracks of the sidewalks. Whenever I’m in L.A. I feel that way.

If you want to know L.A., you can read Chandler or Bukowski, or you can ride around for a couple of hours with Welch.

How good are you at recognizing fake photos? Find out here.

The photo in this story is real … Could Islamofascism produce a house like this?

Buddy Siegal (aka Buddy Blue) should be a blogger — he’s scary smart, knows politics as well as any blogger you care to name, is as cantankerous as the come, and can write as well as Ken Layne (Buddy will probably complain that he writes better than Layne).

Buddy just has this odd notion that one should get paid for his writing.

Fortunately, the OC Weekly and the Union-Tribune do pay Buddy for his music journalism, and it’s among the best around.

I just finished reading Buddy’s piece on John Pizzarelli. Good stuff. And this passage is dead on target:

And while Pizzarelli is quick to acknowledge his influences and favored artists, he’s just as quick to point fingers at those whom he feels have represented jazz in a bad light. Perhaps because Papa Bucky has a good chunk of history under his belt—the list of his studio contributions is longer than an Orrin Hatch filibuster—Pizzarelli is keen to recycle jazz’s most noble customs, to be something of a goodwill ambassador for the music. What galls him more than anything are the pop singers who tread into jazz territory with a lot of hype and not much of a clue.

“I’ve been wanting to say this for a long time but haven’t yet, so you get the first crack at it. It’s like this new Rod Stewart album, for example,” he says, referring to Stewart’s It Had to Be You—The Great American Songbook. “The problem is that this is what’s being represented as the music I’ve been playing for 22 years—that my father has been playing for 50 years. Legitimate musicians go out and make great records of these songs, and then a guy like that comes along and does it in a real half-assed way, and since he’s who he is, he gets all this publicity, like, ‘Wow, this guy’s a genius.’ Meanwhile, the record’s horrible, and people think that’s what we do. It kills it for everybody else.”

After you read the whole column, visit BuddyBlue.com and buy some of the dude’s music. You’ll think, “My God, why isn’t this guy selling more records than N’SYNC.” While you’re on his site, subscribe to his newsletter (just send him an e-mail), and be sure to ask to get on his “Blue Journalism” list, where he reprints his best stuff. His regular list includes music trivia quizzes, which are damn hard quite often, but real educational.

In the 1960s, a counter-culture sprung up that preached self-sufficiency, living off the land, doing your own thing, flaunting convention and running around as naked and natural as the land around you.

Before the counter-culture was cool, there was Marshal South.

In 1932, at the height of the depression, South decided he had had enough of civilization. He packed his wife and their few belongings into his Model-T and from San Diego began driving east, into the desert. When the South’s reached the foot of Ghost Mountain, they stopped. Ghost Mountain is in the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert. Spanish explorers didn’t call the road from Arizona through the California desert El Camino de Diablo because it is a land of milk and honey. It is harsh, rugged and unrelenting in its hostility to a soft life.

This is where South decided to settle and raise a family. No electricity. No running water. No shelter, in the beginning. South dubbed the top of Ghost Mountain “Yacquitepec.” He built a home from mud and wood, shaped cisterns to capture rain drops, and with his wife Tanya (a Russian immigrant) created three babies on top of that mountain — Rider, Rudyard and Victoria.

The family lived on Ghost Mountain for 14 years. Marshal wrote about their adventures for Desert Magazine. In 1990, I spent a couple dozen hours in the SDSU library reading all of South’s columns and Tanya’s poems. By this time, Tanya was living in La Mesa and I was living in La Mesa. I tried to get an interview with her and she curtly dismissed my request and hung up the phone.

Who could blame her? Those of us who knew the legend of Ghost Mountain had romanticized the hell out of the “experiment.” But for Tanya and her children, it was a hard, bitter life that they did not necessarily want. Rider has rarely given interviews about his experiences in the desert with his father, and the other two children changed their names to escape their notoriety.

South, reportedly an adulterer, died in 1948 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Julian. I tried to find that grave once, but couldn’t. There is a real estate office in Julian with a mural along the top of the wall that South painted. I was introduced to Ghost Mountain in 1987 by M. Rose Anderson, a fellow journalist in San Diego. I made three solo trips to Yacquitepec over the next five years. In 1991, I wrote a poem, “At Yacquitepec.” It ignores Marshal’s ego and cruelty, of course, but romanticized versions of history have their place, too. Please read it. If you like it, feel free to show your appreciation by dropping a buck or two in the tip jar (right side of this page).

UPDATE: In researching my links for this post, I found reference to a book being written about South by Garrett Soden I wrote to Soden and sent him a link to this post. He responds in part:

By the way, I had the same experience you did with Tanya; when she was
still living, I called her but she refused to talk. I have, however,
interviewed Marshal South, Jr., the son Marshal abandoned in Arizona with
his first wife, before he hooked up with Tanya. This is a little-known
aspect of South’s life, and further erodes the idea that he was any sort
of admirable character.

Soden sent along an article from the LAT called “A Feral Family Album” by Ann Japenga. It really captures the biting irony of the failed experiment, and the bitterness Tanya felt over being blamed for the break up of the family while Marshal was lionized. At the risk of ruining the article for you should you ever find a copy (it’s no longer on the LAT Web site, though I can tell you it was published Jan. 6, 2002), here’s how the story ends:

By most measures, the brood raised on Ghost Mountain is a success. They’re financially secure; they have families of their own (Rider has two grown sons from a former marriage) and the families are close. On the caring and kindness scale, too, the kids have prospered. Rider South sends birthday cards to people he’s only met once, and he thinks nothing of driving across several states to comfort a friend in trouble.

But if the kids are a testament to their raising, they are not exactly the sort of testament Marshal South wished to create. His aim was to spring his children from the snares of civilization–”the factory,” as he called it. But Rider went to work in an aircraft factory and stayed there most of his adult life. One of his proudest possessions is a plaque awarded for five years of service without ever missing a day of work.

His idea of freedom is a paid-off house and car and a government pension. Without a trace of his shrug, he says: “Life is pretty good. This is about as good as it’s going to get.”

And while Marshal South was, in essence, a tree-hugger, Rider is a Republican who supports oil drilling in the Arctic and says environmentalism just isn’t pragmatic. As for primitive living and wilderness adventure, “Rider doesn’t even like to barbecue,” says his wife.

Victoria, too, was left with few sentimental notions about the simple life. “I have no use for the desert,” she says. “None whatsoever.”

It seems too pat to say that what one generation rejects the next embraces–but there it is. Marshal and Tanya South chose the wilderness over town, clay pots over Tupperware. Rider South stores those handmade pots in his suburban garage and makes lunch on a Taco Bell Quesadilla Maker.

Now that I have read Charles Bukowski, I’m doomed.

I’m doomed because I fear I will never get enough of Charles Bukowski. I’m doomed because nothing but Charles Bukowski can feed this hunger for his words.

Bukowski’s fans call him Buk. I can’t call him Buk. I think there are laws against a person of my lowly estate calling Bukowski “Buk.” I’ve only read two of his books (and currently in the middle of another novel and a book of poetry), so I am unworthy of calling him Buk. You should probably only call him Buk if you read him before he died, and maybe only if you read him before the movie Barfly came out. Certainly, you should not call him Buk if you’ve only read two of his novels.

I read “Pulp” first, and loved it. I read “Hollywood” next and loved it, too. Bukowski writes with a clarity and a crispness rivaled only by Hemingway, but Bukowski’s rhythms are more intoxicating. I would argue, too, that his descriptions and characterizations are more vivid. There is a lilting numbness to his prose style that warms like a bottle good red wine, or even bad red wine — like, frankly, a whole bottle of it, or maybe it’s the afterglow of good sex. It’s an ambiance and a mood that was amazingly captured in Barfly, which I rented from Netflix a few weeks ago.

It is an aura I found myself craving like an addict for a needle last week. Even though money was tight, I had to buy some Bukowski. I had to read some Bukowski. One book wouldn’t do. I had to buy two. I had to buy a novel and I had to buy some poetry. I bought “Ham on Rye” and “Love is a Dog from Hell.”

These are not the books Tony Pierce told me I should buy.

> b&n should have “notes of a dirty old man” - excellent
> “women” - excellent
> maybe they’ll have “post office” excellent
>

> they might even have The Bukowski Reader, which takes a lot from “post
> office” but also has a lot of poems in there. pretty good.
>

> his poetry collections from the 80s are really good. even if you dont like poetry >

But Pierce and I had exchanged e-mails while I was at work, and I had left this particular e-mail at work, so when I went the store, my senile old mind failed me again, and I got “Ham on Rye.”

I bought “Ham on Rye” because of the way it opened.

The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table. I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under there. I liked being under there. It must have been in Germany. I must have been between one and two years old. It was 1922. I felt good under the table. Nobody seemed to know that I was there. There was sunlight upon the rug and on the legs of the people. I liked the sunlight. The legs of the people were not interesting, not like the tablecloth which hung down, not like the table leg, not like the sunlight.

The cadence lulls you into submission and Bukowski begins his dark tale of growing up in Los Angeles during the depression, raised by a cruel father and indifferent mother. It is hard to stop reading, even as Bukowski goes from one lurid event to the next.

I have not read the books Pierce has recommended — not yet. And he didn’t like the books I read first, the books that caused me to fall in love with Bukowski.

hollywood is decent, he wrote it late in life and in a slightly different
> style than he normally wrote. it’s good to watch “barfly” after you read
> it
> since thats the movie that came from that experience.
>

> pulp was his last book and its terrible.

Ken Layne liked Hollywood, but also recommends books I haven’t read yet.

If you like that one (”Pulp”), try “Women,” “Hollywood” & “Post Office.” They’re all great, and he makes the writing seem easy, tossed off, but they’re really well crafted.

As for poetry, “Love is a Dog” is not from the ’80s as Pierce recommends. It is from 1977. I’m about 30 poems into it and they all seem to be about who Bukowski was fucking or drinking with on any particular day. Not all the poems are wonderful. Few of the poems seem like poems at all. Many are just observations — observations wonderfully drawn, but not so well done they are worth repeating.

But I bought the book because I loved the opening poem, Sandra. I loved this stanza most of all:

Sandra leans out of
her chair
leans toward
Glendale

Ask me why I love that line so much, and I’m not sure I can tell you. I think it is like a good joke, where the ending is a twist, a surprise, unexpected, but strangly logical. Who would think of somebody leaning toward Glendale? But can a telling detail get more specific?

Bukowski is my new drug. I won’t stop until there is no more Bukowski to read, and then I may start from the beginning again.

Remember Cool Site of the Day? There was a time when it was one of the hottest sites on th Web, and every webmaster aspired to a listing there. Then CSOTD lost it’s vision, went commercial, became bloated and uninspiring.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t still cool sites out there. Matt Welch and wife Emmanuelle Richard both scored with great links today.

Matt tells us about CaliforniaCoastline.org. Check it out, and then check out the following three links:

Here’s my neighborhood.

Here’s the dorm I lived in during my freshman year of college.

And in this picture, if you know what you’re looking for, you can find the apartment building I once lived in and the former office of The Beacon, a community weekly I used to co-own.

From Emmanuelle we get a lesson in how clueless some people are about satire (read the letter’s page). Warning, don’t click this link if you have a humor deficit and don’t think subtle digs at passive racism are funny.

So, dear readers, today you get two cool sites for the price of one.

Add in today’s LAT book review — quote at the top of the page: “Los Angeles is perhaps the only great city in the world that has not yet produced a great poet … ” — Dana Gioia, the New York Times.

Under the quote in bold white letters on black: “Haven’t you read Charles Bukowski?”

A picture of Bukowski.

“Bukowski is the laureate of the Los Angeles underground, an eccentric who sees the world with a clarity of vision possessed only by artists and madmen.”

I’m reading a Bukowski book of poetry now. He posses such a fine wit, a fine sense observation, a keen ability to boil down commonplace events into the heightened reality that makes good poetry breathe.

Bukowski is one of the masters. Is it surprising that an East Coast snob would fail to recognize that?

UPDATE: After I posted this, I did a little more research. It turns out that Gioia is not from the East Coast, but from Los Angeles, and disclaims actually ever saying what he is quoted as saying. Still, it’s great to see Buk get some press from his publisher.

As Matt Welch notes, my wife and I are big fans of Amy Alkon.
She is smart, she is witty, her advice is always dead on target and she is such a good writer that the rest of us who string words together are comparable hacks. Dear Abby is dead. Ann Landers is dead. It’s a new generation. Let the old bats rest in piece. I can’t understand why newspapers continue to carry the late advice peons when they could run “The Advice Goddess” instead.
Given that Alkon is so good and most of what newspapers run in lieu of Alkon is so bad, should I really be shocked that a big-city newspaper editor really sent Amy this rejection letter:

I’m responding to your recent letters to us. As I explained in my email below, during our redesign, we thought a lot about the columns that we wanted to use.

We are not interested in adding any others, so I’d like to save you the trouble from writing us in the future. We’re quite content. Additionally, we are not in the market for writers, so again, there’s no need for you to continue to write us.

Good luck to you

Rude is the first word that springs to my mind. It would be rude if this note were sent to an illiterate thug. It is beyond rude to send something like this to any professional writer, let alone a writer of Alkon’s talent, reputation and accomplishments.
It’s also dumb. I mean, if I got such a rude e-mail from an editor, I would never write for that publication again, and as an editor, no matter how overstocked with writers you may think yourself, there will come a day when you’re not so overstocked. Sherry Stern is obviously not a very forward thinking person. Um, well, actually, I guess we can’t really say she is even a thinking person. Is she even a sensate being?
Part of the reason that this gets under my skin is that I’m a writer — I’m a writer who has dealt with major metro papers before — including the LAT, and though I’ve had both good and bad experiences with these papers, I still find the institutional arrogance of major papers to be so overblown that you wonder how some of these editors fit into their Audi coupes.
I also take this note as further proof that the LAT hasn’t a clue about good writing. I mean, they reject Amy and you’ve got to wonder how they can let so much fabulous talent — such as Layne, Welch and Pierce — drift around in their own back yard and they never harness it? If the LAT editors really cared about putting out a great 21st-Century newspaper, none of these writers would be depending on PayPal to supplement their incomes.

I’ve long suspected Clear Channel of being the enemy — the enemy of all that could be good and decent about music, the enemy who drives corporate rock and corporate country and drives the soul out of every bit of music it touches.

Now I learn from my friend Buddy Blue that Clear Channel has canned Jim McInnes, the long-time DJ for KGB-FM (28 years on the air), and the best damn DJ to ever work in San Diego (his show was syndicated the last few years by Clear Channel, so some of you in other parts of the country may have heard him).

McInnes has a great radio voice and his laid back style is perfectly suited to a classic rock station in San Diego. But McInnes was spinning what we now call “classic” rock when it was current rock, and he did so much more than play the latest hits — he played the new stuff, the risky stuff, the stuff no other DJ would play. Many of us heard the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones and Elvis Costello on McInnes’s show for the first time. On Sunday nights he had a show called “Private Stock” where he spun records from his own personal collection. That’s where I heard the New York Dolls and Iggy and the Stooges for the first time. McInnes was also a tireless promoter of the local music scene.

In other words, McInnes is a San Diego icon, and only a soulless corporation could fire a man of McInnes’s stature. Shame on Clear Channel.

To pick up on a theme of a couple of days ago — one of the great things about life is the people you meet. There are many, many good people in this world, and among them are Matt and Emmanuelle.

The original plan for Saturday was for this duo of journalistic free-lance spitfires to drive up to Ventura and take the Erle Stanley Gardner tour; unfortunately, rain washed that away. But with the determination of all good reporters, Matt and Emmanuelle decide that a torenchal downpour wouldn’t deny them their day off of fun and so they escaped Hollywood for a few hours anyway.

The darlings are indeed good people. We had a delightful evening with them of wine, great Mexican food, music and conversation.

I had not met Emmanuelle before. She is, indeed, the young, dark-haired French girl — bright, sweet and with a natural, unpretentious beauty that makes her absolutely charming. My normally shy and private wife took to her immediately and before the end of the night Billie was sharing all sorts of personal details from our biographies. Matt and Emmanuelle, being good people, of course, were polite enough to show interest.

Matt, knowing I collect California history books, was also thoughtful enough to bring me new thirft-store find: “From Wilderness to Empire: The History of California,” by Robert Glass Cleland. It was published in 1959, has great illustrations, and is exactly the sort of book I love to add to my collection. Thank you, Matt.

One of the things I love about life, about being alive, is the people that I meet. There are an amazing number of good people in this world. Even so, it’s a shame there aren’t more of them. But, all of the less-than-good people make the good ones even stand out.

Tonight I went to a club in town called Zoey’s. A band called the Trophy Husbands was scheduled to play. I’ve seen them twice before and own their CD, “Dark and Bloody Ground.” I got to Zoey’s about an hour before show time and had a chance to talk with Dave Insley and Kevin Daly. Dave and Kevin are truly good people. Intelligent and kind and I don’t think there are better compliments I could pay to anybody. It was just that sliver of experience that got me thinking about good people and what a pleasure it is when you get to spend time with them.

I have many good friends, several names spring to mind, including several people who read this blog regularly. I don’t want to single any of them out by naming them for fear that I’ll omit somebody — but they all know who they are. These people, too, enrich my life.

It’s the good people in the world that give me hope for the future. It’s easy to get swept up in the Islamofascist fear and loathing habit, and Islamofascism is a real threat, but in the end what’s going to defeat the narrow-minded, hard-hearted evil people of the world are the good people — the good people like our friends, all our friends. So here’s a class of Chianti for our friends!

Before I sign off on this post … here’s a link to my article on the Trophy Husbands in today’s paper.

My story of a young reporter at a dying Southern California daily newspaper is pretty close to done. I would like to get a couple of critiques of it before I “publish” it. If you have a sense of what makes or breaks fiction, either from your experiences as a writer or as a reader, and would like to critique my story, please send an e-mail to “howard at hbo3.com.” The first three people who volunteer to critique my story will get a copy of it via e-mail. I’ll send it as an RTF (rich text format) file. The story runs to about 12,400 words.

UPDATE: Three requests to critique the story have been received and answered. So I won’t be sending any more stories out at the moment. Don’t worry, if you want to critique it later, you’ll have an opportunity. That’s it for this round.