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When the poet-critic Dana Gioia wrote last year in the New York Times
that “Los Angeles is perhaps the only great city in the world that
has not yet produced a great poet,” there was an immediate public
outcry, most of it pointing reproachfully in the direction of the
late Charles Bukowski.
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“Bloodvine,” Aris Janigian’s darkly robust first novel, gives us a
Fresno light years away from the enchanted childhood isle of William
Saroyan’s “My Name Is Aram” and “The Human Comedy.”
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An astonishing life passage, a sort of reverse mirror image of the
hormonal surge of adolescence, is the more gradual but insistent
waning of sexual preoccupation, sexual focus one might say, that
occurred over the course of my 50s.
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In 1979, the last year of his life, Charles Mingus was dismayed when
a radio commentator, during a rebroadcast of a Mingus concert in New
Orleans, praised an early composition of his but got its musical
lineage wrong.
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In the early 1940s, Artie Shaw, at the height of his fame as a
swing bandleader and clarinetist, introduced my father and mother.
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While my mother slept on a fold-out couch in the living room, my
sister and I shared the bedroom.
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In one of several reincarnations over the years since his two terms
as governor of California, Jerry Brown turned up in 1994 as the host of a
syndicated public radio call-in program, “We the People,” heard in
L.A.
on
KPFK-FM (90.7) and originating at Berkeley’s
KPFA-FM (94.1).
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After reading a screenplay about Lee Harvey Oswald written by the
young Robert De Niro, the writer-director Paul Schrader is said to have
told the actor that his script was a metaphor for the talent he carried
inside him, ready to explode.
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