HBO As Modern Lit

Last evening I saw John Updike and Bruce Wagner – the latter is arguably my favorite L.A. novelist – in dialogue at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. The event was the release of Updike’s latest novel “Terrorist”, which is receiving mixed reviews but as far as I am concerned even the half-baked work [...]

Play It As It Lays

Just finished reading Joan Didion’s “Play It As It Lays” for the first time in 20 years. Maria Wyeth’s sad, savage, and utterly soulless journey through Los Angeles, Malibu, Las Vegas, and the Mojave Desert still holds up well after all these years.
And this passage alone was well worth the sordid journey to the darkness [...]

Left Coast Gothic

In the summer of 1974 my mother rented a house on a quiet residential cul de sac in Anaheim. It was a step up from the last home we had leased, that one being in the sleepy little Bay Area suburb of Fremont. The Fremont home – oddly enough, it was on a corner lot [...]

Charles Bukowski: The Anti-Romantic

Throughout cultural history writers have slain miles upon miles of trees in their endless quest to understand affairs of the heart. As much as I admire F. Scott Fitzgerald, his idealized notions about love and romance are sometimes enough to make me yearn for a one-night stand with a loose and lively bar floozie.
That’s where [...]