The Sun Always Rises: How to Stay Indoors This Summer
Don’t be fooled by the smell of barbecue in the air, the popping lids of iced cold beer, and all the smiling people in trunks and bikinis riding bicycles. The source of their pleasure is a scorching gaseous star emitting cancerous UV rays that want to kill them. If anything, stage a revolt this summer: Stay indoors. Defy the sun by opening all the windows and finding a good book to read.
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Sure, in this age of the e-reader, a whole library can be taken with you wherever you go, including to all those sunny outdoor places, but have you ever tried to get sand out of a Kindle? Me neither, but it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Plus, there are crowds to contend with. You’re better off in the comfort of your own home. Why throw rent away? The truth is, with the right reading material it won’t matter. Let books take you where you want to go. And why not start at the top with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Sure it’s over six hundred pages of dense reading, but relax, you’ve got all summer! If you don’t read it now when will you ever? Plus, it’s an adventure story. Takes place on the high seas. Perfect for the season. And quit whining about difficult reading, you’re an adult now, time to put the Harry Potter down.
Okay, maybe you’ve just got something against whales (hmm…I’m telling you, you may want to check this book out!). Maybe, you get seasick easily, or I don’t know, something else, like it’s not quite the tale you’re looking for. Or maybe, like me, you’ve spent the first month of summer in a dark bar obsessing over World Cup matches and now have this giant void to fill. Sure, the Spanish may have taken the trophy from one of your favorite teams or crushed that pool you had going at work, but it’s time to give them their due. I’d start with Cervantes. And yes, I’m talking about that other great adventure story: Don Quixote. Or maybe you just can’t get over the way French people behave themselves in other countries, try l’enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq’s great novel about sex tourism, Platform (and when you get a chance, read The Elementary Particles, arguably, still the best contemporary novel out there, not to mention a newly translated collection of poems, The Art of the Struggle, to be published in the UK this August). Or how about one of these: Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, Patti Smith’s Just Kids, Philip Roth’s The Humbling, Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22.
And for those farmer’s market folks who prefer to buy locally, and have already ingested John Fante’s Ask the Dust and The Road to Los Angeles as well as a number of works by Bukowski, consider some recent or forthcoming local releases: Beside the City of Angels: An Anthology of Long Beach Poetry (World Parade Books), Modest Aspirations by Gerald Locklin (Lummox Press), The Dodger’s Retirement Party also by Gerald Locklin (Aortic Books), A King of Infinite Space by Tyler Dilts (Amazon Encore), Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems by Charles Harper Webb (University of Pittsburgh Press), Tao Driver and Selected Poems by Rafael Zepeda (World Parade Books), The Green Season by Donna Hilbert (World Parade Books), and Rise of the Trust Fall by Mindy Nettifee (Write Bloody Publishing).
And if none of that seems to do it for you, then okay: I guess there’s always sunscreen.
Clint Margrave has work forthcoming or most recently published in New York Quarterly, Pearl, 3AM, Chiron Review, as well as in the anthology At the Gate: Arrivals and Departures, published by Kings Estate Press. Currently, he teaches English and Creative Writing at Cal State University, Long Beach. Clint can be contacted at clint@intraffik.com
An Open Letter to No One in Particular…
by Jonathan Slowik
April 10, 2008. It’s been 612 days since I last sat on this beach at night. I wrote a letter that night too, but to a different recipient. Much has transpired in the meantime—not all of it entirely surprising, but I certainly didn’t think that at this point in my life, I would still be trekking to the beach at night, alone.
The Ferris wheel has undergone a makeover since that spring night. Instead of flashing your garden variety carnival lights, it now screams a long, intricate, and positively psychedelic light show from the pier. Amusing, I have to admit. But I’ve always preferred the view to the north—brake lights snaking along the PCH, stretching to the twinkling lights of Malibu, where the Santa Monica Mountains meet a confused sky.
The Los Angeles stratosphere can never really decide what color it wants to be at night, but usually ends up settling on some shade of barely visible pink. In Santa Monica, where Ocean Avenue resorts meet the black nothingness of the Pacific, all bets are off. Pink, black, gray—it’s all of these things and none of them. With diminished competition from sodium vapor lamps, dozens of stars meekly peer from behind the fabric, unsure if they’re invited.
The beach, at night, always seems like a good place to get some questions answered. I think the solitude, the calming, rhythmic crashing of the waves, and the crisp ocean air facilitate the kind of free associations we don’t normally make. Sounds like just the elixir for a night like this, since our minds don’t seem to wander as much as they used to.
Tonight’s ocean, however, is not fielding questions. Rather than that rhythmic crashing I so often find, the scene I encounter is decidedly unfriendly—a constant barrage of waves crest far from the shore and then spit foam for as long as the rising sand will allow. Bathed in moonlight, the menacing water is quite haunting, like something from a spooky scene in a children’s movie. I begin to wonder if a younger me would be frightened or delighted, and realize I’m making some free associations after all.
After a time, an oldish man approaches and stands facing the water, gazing longingly at the waves. It appears to be a good time to call it a night. He seems like he has some questions for the ocean, and perhaps he will find it more receptive than me. I’m content to trudge back across the cold sand, blanket in hand, no conclusions made—except that, improbably, it’s a beautiful night, and we should do this again sometime.
photo originally published here