Sundown Salon #21: L.A. LITERARY

DATE: October 23rd, 2005

ORGANIZED WITH: Gabriela Jauregui

FEATURING: Chris Abani, Eileen Myles, Trinie Dalton, Rachel Kushner

A literary salon of writing, reading and reciting

Readings by:

Chris Abani's novels are GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005) and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His poetry collections include Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He teaches in the MFA Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. A Middleton Fellow at the University of Southern California, he is the recipient of the 2001 PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Award and a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship & the 2005 PEN Hemingway Book Prize.

Trinie Dalton lives in Los angeles and has an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars. As a journalist, she writes about music, books, and art. She's also a visual artist. Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is, an art book she co-edited, is available from McSweeney’s. Her book Wide Eyed was just released.

Eileen Myles is currently finishing up a novel about the hell of being a female poet. A work that covers life in two centuries. It's called the Inferno and it'll hopefull be out oh god maybe early 07. Since 2002 she's been dividing her time between New York and San Diego where she is enjoyably teaching writing and lit at UCSD.

Rachel Kushner is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found, most recently, in Fence, Artforum, ArtUS and Bomb Magazine, where she is a contributing editor. She is currently at work on a novel about, among other things, colonial folly, air-conditioned columbariums, Raudive voices and the Zazou aesthetic.

> What time is it where little Saigon meets Little Havana meets little Tokyo meets little Armenia and we all meet the sea speaking in tongues? (Rubén Martinez, from “Manifesto”)

> 14 / In the Los Angeles Basin, the possibility of rain is ignored until the rain falls. Since it hardly ever rains, ignorance has prevailed as climate. (D.J. Waldie, from Holy Land)

> Psychedelic / When you’re young, psychedelic is a primary color and a most mesmerizing high. Santa Monica was full of free multihued trips. The color-burst free-love murals on Main Street seemed to come to vibrant cartoon life when I passed them. The whales and dolphins frolicked in the clouds and the sea lions and merry-go-round horsies turned cartwheels in the street. The spray-any-color-paint-on-the-spin-art creations at the pier were fifty sent Jackson Pollock rainbow heroin hits that made your skin tingle and the grains of sand swell up and rise to the sky like helium balloons. Looking into the kaleidoscopic eyes of a scruffy Bukowski barfly sitting in the lotus position along the bike trains fractured your soul into hundreds of disconnected psychedelic shards. Each sharp piece of your mind begging for sobriety. (Paul Beatty, from The White Boy Shuffle)

> Like the film, the hamburger is a non-Californian invention hat has achieved a kind of symbolic apotheosis in Los Angeles; symbolic, that is, of the way fantasy can lord it over function in Southern California. (Reyner Banham, from Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies)

> What’s great about living in Van Nuys is that we uh… we have a pretty good variety of take-out. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s something they sure don’t have in Minnesota. (Sandra Tsing Loh, from A Year in Van Nuys)

> A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image. (Joan Didion)

> She tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant. (Oscar Wilde, from Collected Aphorisms)

> Well, well, perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am-my friends get round me-we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories-and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I've been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be. (Kenneth Grahame)

> Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him. (Samuel Johnson)

> So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. (Virginia Woolf)

> Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past. (G.K. Chesterton)