Latino Like Me

This seems like the right time to mention a blog produced by Tomas Summers Sandoval, whom I've come to know through the California Studies Association. The blog is called Latino Like Me, and I've put a live link on the honor roll to your right.

Tomas's blog is devoted to Chicano critical humanism, but you're liable to see just about anything there. I especially appreciated the point he made after Kellogg's Corn Flakes removed Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps from its cereal boxes; the problem, it seemed, was that Phelps was photographed smoking pot and therefore made a poor role model. Tomas posed a simple question: If it weren't for pot, who would eat Corn Flakes? I also like Tomas's theory that Lent is a vast conspiracy to get Catholics ready for swimsuit season.

Tomas's blog title plays on John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, the 1961 bestseller. Shortly after its publication, Griffin became involved in a new Catholic literary quarterly published in Menlo Park. It was called Ramparts, and within five years, it moved to San Francisco and became the nation's premier muckraker. (You may be hearing more about this soon.)

Heyday Books

I'm a big fan of Heyday Books, which Malcolm Margolin started 35 years ago, so I'm pleased that they launched a blog this week. I'll put a link on the blogroll to your starboard, too.

Heyday publishes on a wide range of California topics, and many of their books are gorgeous. I first started tracking them when I came across Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader. Since then, I've gotten to know their staff and some of their authors well. Check them out, I say.

Black Bear, Coyote, Humboldt County

Without really thinking about it, I started exploring a new aspect of the main theme in my San Francisco State class--the utopian impulse in California culture. The new wrinkle is the form that impulse takes in the northernmost part of the state.

My exploration started with the film "Humboldt County," which I finally saw on DVD a few weeks ago. It's about an emotionally shut-down medical student in Los Angeles who reconnects with the world after he stumbles upon an alternative (read: pot-growing) scene in Northern California. No need to rehearse the plot details here, but the people he meets are deeply ambivalent about the utopian--or is it dystopian?--community they've created.

Fast forward to a PoliPointPress book event here at Book Passage a couple of weeks ago. Peter Coyote joined some of us for dinner before Norman Solomon interviewed Reese Erlich about his new book. Turns out Book Passage had a copy of Peter's memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, which I've wanted to read for a while. I bought it, Peter signed it, and I recently read the passage about his experiences at Black Bear Ranch, a commune founded during the 1960s in Siskiyou County. Fascinating.

Today I discovered a related documentary, "Commune," which is devoted to the Black Bear Ranch story. It includes Peter and features the folks in his book. Again, the utopian impulse behind the commune produced deeply mixed results. I won't ruin it for any fanatical readers of this blog, but it's worth a look if you're interested in the California counterculture of this period.

Joe Mathews on Carey McWilliams

It's a double serving of McWilliams today in the Los Angeles Times. I touch on him in my review of the Mary Austin bio, and an article by Joe Mathews--New America Foundation fellow and former Times scribe--puts the state's current fiscal crisis in historical perspective by reading it against McWilliams's California: The Great Exception (1949). Very nicely done.

Secondhand Sounds

Oh, it's on now. Don't miss the new show on KCSB 91.9 FM, every other Saturday morning from 4 to 6 a.m. Hosted by Ashley Richardson, it runs an eclectic lineup of (mostly) American sounds from Al Green to Jeff Buckley to Pasty Cline. You can stream the webcast it if you don't live in the Santa Barbara area.

I did a little checking around and discovered that some of my friends hadn't heard about the show. Jeez, do I have to do everything around here?

Review of New Mary Austin Bio

The Los Angeles Times ran my review of the latest Mary Austin biography today. Written by Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, the book traces the unusual arc of Austin's career. After writing a slender masterpiece (The Land of Little Rain) while living in the Owens Valley in 1903, Austin achieved her dream of becoming a professional writer but rarely matched that early effort.

Austin was a big influence on Carey McWilliams, and though Goodman and Dawson mention the connection between the two shortly before Austin's death in 1934, they don't explore it thoroughly. It's worth noting, I think, that McWilliams learned about the Owens Valley water caper from Austin, who witnessed it firsthand. Writing about that episode in Southern California Country (1946), McWilliams eventually inspired Robert Towne's Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown.

I also suspect, but haven't confirmed, that Austin called McWilliams's attention to the great land and water empire of Miller and Lux, which figures prominently in Factories in the Field (1939). Again, Austin knew about Miller and Lux from her years living in the San Joaquin Valley in the late nineteenth century.

I enjoyed the Austin book as well as the chance to review it for the Times. (As Goodman and Dawson note, McWilliams wrote Austin's obituary for the paper.) She was a fascinating figure with a big personality, and The Land of Little Rain is an undisputed early classic of environmental literature. I say check it out--along with Goodman and Dawson's bio.

Peter Schrag

Peter Schrag's last regular column ran in the Sacramento Bee today. It won't be the last we hear of Peter, but this a great occasion to honor his achievement. In addition to editing the editorial page of the Bee for nineteen years and writing a column for twelve, Peter has written several influential books about California, including Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (1998).

I read that book when I started at the Public Policy Institute of California, where Peter served on the advisory board. It made a big impression on me. In it, Peter argues that the state's demise began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. Having capped the stablest source of public revenue, the state moved toward less reliable sources of funding (sales tax, income tax, fees, lotteries, etc.). The result has been a fiscal roller coaster and the steady erosion of public services, including education.

But Peter's influence on me went beyond Paradise Lost. Early on at PPIC, I asked Peter what I should read by way of background for my new job. Everything by Carey McWilliams, he said. That was excellent advice, and when I decided to write a book about C-Mac, I asked Peter for more. Those conversations changed the trajectory of my so-called career, since the McWilliams book led to the San Francisco State gig, my involvement with the California Studies Association, and eventually my Ramparts book.

Peter mentions McWilliams in his column today, but someone else should point out the obvious: namely, that Peter has carried on McWilliams's work as the state's shrewdest observer.

The Land of Little Rain

I just turned in a review of a new Mary Austin biography, so it's fitting that I've been hanging out in the desert for the last couple of weeks. As Robert Hass has noted, water is to Mary Austin's 1903 classic, The Land of Little Rain, what marriage is to Jane Austen's novels: the element that explains everything.

Palm Springs Dog Show

My daughters and I attended this event on Saturday. Naturally, the press got wind of our presence there and asked us to comment.

Kevin Starr and Westways

We have a new entry in the McWilliams sweepstakes: Kevin Starr, who contributed a piece on C-Mac to the current issue of Westways, the AAA magazine of Southern California, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Kevin describes McWilliams's monthly column, "Tides West," which ran in Westways during the 1930s.

All nicely done, of course, though Kevin tactfully omits the fact that Westways fired McWilliams after Ruth Comfort Mitchell, the wife of a Republican state senator, objected to his politics. McWilliams applauded John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in the pages of Westways, while Mitchell responded to it by writing Of Human Kindness, a novel that depicted virtuous family farmers and depraved labor union organizers.

I drew heavily from Kevin's books to produce my McWilliams bio. He, in turn, wrote a short (and humorous) foreword for my pamphlet, based on my Bonnie Cashin lecture at UCLA, on Carey McWilliams and the politics of cool.