Our Tuesday, Sept. 19, hybrid event on John Fante‘s 1939 novel Ask the Dust is coming up fast. Join us at 7 p.m. (PST) in Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on the Stanford campus. REGISTER FOR THE EVENT ON THE LINK HERE! The event is free and open to the public. Walk-ins are welcome, but registration is encouraged whether you plan to attend virtually or in person. Read more about the event here.
This event is co-sponsored by the Continuing Studies Program and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford, and also the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco.
Two weeks ago, we published a story how Joel Williams’s life as a convict turned around when he read Fante’s 1939 novel. “There were no creative writing classes in prison,” he wrote, but with the help of Fante scholar Stephen Cooper, he became a writer. Read about it here. But meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from another successful author, Alan Rifkin. According to NPR: “One of the true L.A. originals, Alan Rifkin is easy to catch in the act of being brilliant.” Here’s another chance to do so, as he discusses Ask the Dust.
Every Los Angeles writer at the outskirts of vision feels a connection to Ask the Dust, the 1939 novel that, more than any other, seems to weep over this city’s corpse in the ecstasy of possessing it. (“Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”i We all are sufferers. We’re not sure, exactly, if the intimacy of our suffering will survive the novel’s journey to the big screen, to the masses, to the world. But on the page, it’s strictly ours.
Stephen Cooper’s history with Ask the Dust is even more personal. “I was seeking to fill that absence that I didn’t even consciously know defined me,” he says. “And that was the loss of my father. So I would spend my days just mooning around, moving about, like most young writers, haunted by characters, trying to compose them and failing, failing, failing, failing, failing. . . . And then when I came upon Ask the Dust, it was a time in my life when I was living with every pore open to possibility.” (Citations are from Rikfin’s interviews with Cooper.)
Living, in other words, like Bandini himself, who finally writes his look-at-me novel, only to hurl it to the sands where his goddess went mad. “He’s gotten what he wanted, in terms of having written the book … to be on the shelf next to the big guys. But desire is such that it outlives its fulfillment. And so he must desire something else. … It turns to dust, doesn’t it, the fulfillment of desire. So getting what you want is, if you will, just a beginning of the eternal and unattainable story of desire.”
***
Stephen Cooper was my graduate professor at Cal State Long Beach, and as I was writing this essay, he coined a name for this school of writing: Southern California Dream Realism. Maybe Southern California Dream Realism is just the ultimate extension of anybody else’s literary mode—a way of seeing life stripped of time’s pretense. It’s a manner of always seeing the terminal desert from the depths of the paradise dream, or paradise from the stretches of life’s dry march.
I do know that in our past, in the dark of that pantry, I see the East Coast. Some remnant of ancestry, a quaint hope of continuity, a proper burial gone wrong—Waugh’s mortuary. I see how fooled my childhood was by every architectural simulation of history.
But I don’t know what happens to a civilization, and a literature, that grows up alongside the constant vision of dust. Does the rest of the country even make sense to us here? Was all this aftermath built in from the start? Even the apocalypse, in Los Angeles, feels like history now, the erasures of paradise barely detectable, the age of visions five minutes from over.
That is one scenario for where L.A. literature is heading. Then there is Francesca Lia Block’s view, which she offers in an unpunctuated e-mail: “life/death magic/reality young/old spirit/body masculine/feminine the walls seem to be dissolving and the worlds blending” (from correspondence to Block). In other words, “Paradise Next.”
*Claremont McKenna professor Jay Martin has pointed out that what W. H. Auden called “West’s Disease” — an L.A. collision of foolishness, desire, and illusion named after Nathanael West — could just as well have been named after Fante.
