The Reader Travels

From California, the next stop is Idaho. I admit I’ve never read a book that took place in Idaho. And it’s not that Idaho is right next door to California, because, well, it’s not. But the perception of Idaho is that it’s on the opposite side of the same coin as California. If California goes all the way to the left, then Idaho goes all the way to the right.

The rock band Train recorded a song on their first album called, “Idaho,” and it’s all about that isolationist perception. The idea is that the fearful (racist?) people from the outer states seek solace in the safety of inland (white as the inside of a potato?) Idaho. California is not mentioned by name, but we know what state they’re talking about when they sing, “Mother nature shakes, what then what then?” Their answer to the question is, “She’ll shake you to Idaho, that’s what she’ll do.”

What I’d like to do is rise above this one-sided perception of Idaho as a haven for neo-Nazis. It’s time for Idaho to get a new image. Are you ready for it?

In 2004, the MTV studios released a pop culture phenomenon set in Idaho. It was all about embracing your individuality and accepting people for who they are. Let us now embrace a new image of Idaho. Let us embrace Napoleon Dynamite.

Okay, so some people might think that visiting California is like stepping into an alternate universe anyway, but in The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick shows what California and the (former) United States of America might be like if history had taken a different turn back in World War II.

In his alternate history, the Allied forces lost the war to Germany and Japan. The United States was dissolved and the land split up between the winning countries, with the western states going to Japan. So in this alternate California, people speak Japanese, bow to each other and smoke Land-O-Smiles brand reefer. Woo hoo!

I love the concept of sidestepping into alternate universes. Didn’t Sliders take place in San Francisco, too? Think about all the different possibilities. What would life be like if the southern United States had successfully seceded from the Union? What would the world be like if Jesus had fought for his life and won, if Mohammed had died a martyr, if Buddha had eaten steak?

I love this word. I just want to say it again and again - echolalia, echolalia, echolalia. Okay, so today’s book was all about glossolalia, but echolalia is a much cooler word. Say it out loud. It’s fun.

Anyway, when I tried to come up with books I’d read that took place in California, I found that most everything was either present day or sci-fi futuristic. It’s probably because California has such a limited period of recorded history.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson took place in a futuristic southern California. Now, I’m not actually going to recommend this book because I had a hard time with the writing style, and I’m not sure I even finished it. But I’ve talked to lots of people who did like it, and I found it very thought provoking and funny.

The protagonist’s name was, originally enough, Hiro Protagonist, a programmer turned pizza delivery guy. He finds himself on this great adventure researching some bizarre religious cults, and he can’t understand a word they’re saying because it’s pure glossolalia (you know, speaking in tongues). And it’s all because the government’s a joke, and the corporations run the country.

I’ve never actually been to a charismatic church, so I don’t know what glossalia is really like. It’s quite fascinating to me how people can be overtaken by the spirit and go all spastic like that. That’s powerful stuff, right?

On the other hand, I have been around little kids who annoyingly repeat everything I say. Let’s say this lovely word one more time - echolalia (echolalia).

I can’t explain it. I just think Steve Martin is friggin’ brilliant. Yes, he’s a great comic actor, but it’s the writer Steve that I truly love. And when I think of Los Angeles, I think of him.

He’s written some outstanding screenplays — The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains and Roxanne are some of the best. But my favorite is L.A. Story, what with all that Shakespeare and movieland magic. I loved how they got in the car to drive to the house next door, and how Sarah Jessica Parker’s character spelled her name SanDeE* and lived for high colonics. And that’s just the beginning.

Oh, and it looks like his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile is being turned into a movie too. That one’s really smart, you know with Picasso and Einstein getting drunk in a bar, being visited by a time traveling “stranger.” I can’t wait, even if the cast smells like teen spirit.

What more could there be? Poetry, my friends. Or poetic little stories anyway. Pure Drivel was good, though I recommend you read the book instead of listening to it on audio, because it loses a lot in translation. However, nothing quite compares to his earlier work, Cruel Shoes. I don’t think you could ever understand how truly brilliant this man is without reading this bizarre little book. If I actually owned a copy, I’m sure I’d loan it to you.

Most of what I know about Los Angeles came out of the movies. As far as I can tell, it’s a glamorous place filled with beatifully glamorous and dramatic people - stars and artists and money men. The Go-Go’s sang about their town, “Bet you’d live here if you could and be one of us.”

White Oleander by Janet Fitch is an LA drama, with some really beautiful, really messed up people. Poor Astrid is left to foster homes when her mom gets arrested for killing her lover. So young Astrid goes on a huge adventure, hopping from one messed up situation to another. She goes through some intense changes, while her mother’s life is on hold in the penn.

The movie is a pretty good adaptation, but don’t be discouraged. If you’ve seen it already and haven’t read the book, you’ll get a few extra adventures they didn’t have time for in a two hour film. So do check it out.

One thing I thought was strange in the movie was the silence. Most movies will fill the spaces with music, but when Astrid moves from one place to the next, she goes in pure solitude, no soundtrack to guide her way or smooth her transition. She is alone.

So, every time we hear the violins at a dramatic point in a movie, my man says to me, “Violins are so dramatic.” But not in this film. Here, the drama is in the sheer lack of violins.

The final destination of The Grapes of Wrath is California, land of (dis)illusion. Much like all the would-be starlets who end up waiting tables in Los Angeles and the “actors” who wind up on their knees, the Oklahoma farmers didn’t find the salvation they had longed for.

Nearly 100 years earlier, people were coming for the promise of gold. How many of those travelers ended up poor, with no place left to go?

In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Sal finds himself picking cotton among the “Okies” outside of Fresno. California may not have been what they had hoped, but over a decade after they had arrived, they still weren’t leaving.

Maybe it’s eternal hope. Maybe it’s sheer resignation. Or, maybe it’s because the place is just so dang gorgeous.

After visiting with The Outsiders in 1960s Tulsa, I went back in time to rural Oklahoma in the 1930s. It seemed to me that Ponyboy and Johnny could have been direct descendents of some of the farmers who lost their land in The Grapes of Wrath.

Instead of traveling across the country on Route 66, these folks moved to the city and took low paying jobs so they could feed their families. Or maybe they went all the way to California and back, deciding that if they were going to be poor anyway, they might as well be back in their home state.

I found it quite interesting that both of these books had a beloved martyr with the initials JC. You know, like Jesus Christ? Life was dismal, but there was eternal hope.

One thing I loved about John Casey in The Grapes of Wrath was that he used to be a preacher, but his humanity and humility made him give it up. Little did he know, those were the very traits that made people want to follow him and listen to him even more. He was a servant leader, a shepherd. He was holy.

Don’t you know? Jesus lives in Oklahoma.

How come everybody I know from Oklahoma is shrouded in a cloud of drama? Is there something about Oklahoma? Maybe it’s the ghosts of spurned Cherokees, haunting the land. Or maybe all the lost souls in the world get reincarnated into Oklahoma babies. Who knows?

Or maybe it’s just that everybody I know from Oklahoma was so maladjusted they had to leave home in search of something better, and the closest something better was the shiny city of Dallas, Texas. So, that would mean that the people that stay in Oklahoma are just, well, OK.

Pondering these thoughts, I set out on a short literary journey of Oklahoma, starting with S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. This is exactly the type of drama I’m talking about - orphaned young hooligans, drinking and fighting and searching for love, all misunderstood. For such a small book, it was filled with a whole lot of pain.

Here’s to my Oklahoma drama queens. Stay gold.

Sometimes I live vicariously through my friends’ travels. I look at their vacation pictures, listen to their stories, imagine myself there. One of my dearest friends is a huge fan of Stephen King. In fact I think she’s read everything except his memoir, On Writing (because she doesn’t really do memoirs).

So when the long-awaited final book of the Dark Tower series came out in 2004, she dropped everything to read it. It was the end of the series, but it sent her on a journey she never expected. And where did she go? Forward and backward in time, slantways and sideways, reading through all of King’s past works, following the threads and the clues that tie his body of work together.

It’s not just a matter of picking out the bad guys with the initials R.F. either. It’s way beyond that.

If you’re interested in the journey, check out The Complete Stephen King Universe: A Guide to the Worlds of Stephen King by Christopher Golden, Stanley Wiater and Hank Wagner. They’ll tell you all about it.

There’s this spooky ghost hotel resort called the Overlook, high in the Rocky Mountains near Estes Park, Colorado. So maybe it doesn’t physically exist, but it does exist in the minds of many. Like unicorns and Santa Claus and the boogey man, the Overlook Hotel is eternal.

There are two versions of the hotel. One has this incredible hedge labyrinth, a psychological horror of confusion and captivation. The other has a topiary instead, a bunch of big scary hedge animals that will f* you up if you don’t watch out. Boo!

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was oh-so loosely based on Stephen King’s novel. I’m sure Mr. King was much more comfortable with the TV mini-series version done nearly 20 years later. Like the characters in the book, the mini-series actors were pretty and blond. But Kubrick didn’t go for pretty and blond. He picked Shelley Duvall instead. And of course, Jack Nicholson. How brilliant was that?

It’s not that I hated the book. I just loved the movie. And without the book there would have been no movie. Stanley Kubrick just made a good thing a whole lot better. Great art doesn’t happen in a vaccuum, but it does happen in Colorado.