Recently, my adapted grandparents both died. I say “adapted” because, through no fault of their own, my biological grandparents were not overtly present in my childhood, so my brother and I adapted our neighbors as grandparents. By recently, I mean days ago. Both of them within a week of one another; Daddy Bob from old age, sepsis, and diabetic complications, and Grandma Barb from heartbreak, worry, fear, old age, or something else I do not yet understand. As I write this first draft, I’m missing Bob’s funeral, but Grandma Barb has not yet been planted–she died this morning before she saw him off. As I am stuck in zip code 90028 with 33,086 others, I likely will not make the second service either. But I have learned something talking to my mother as she hustles around organizing: Every community is good at something. My hometown is good at funerals, and I do not mean this in a morbid way. We stand unopposed in celebrating a life. In a town of 439, it’s not uncommon to get 500 plus. I do not mean to go too far, but when I mentioned this to my mother the last time we were on the phone this evening, she said, “Yeah. People are just dying to have their funerals here.”
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You don’t have to live in Los Angeles to know what this city is known to be good at; really, it’d be a waste to of time to list the obvious. If you were to say L.A. is good at literature, you might easily be dismissed. But since I moved here six months ago, I have been exploring the spread community of its literati guided on suggestions from peers and profs at CalArts, from store and library pin-ups and emails, and from announcements tucked here and there in L.A.’s worthwhile Weekly, and I have found several venues worthy of note.
Of the bookstores I have found so far, Skylight is my favorite as it tastes the best in many ways; I wrote a post on it that can also found in this blog. I have also been to readings all over town. My favorite to date, perhaps because I was starstruck, was an ALOUD event hosted at Los Angeles’ Central Library. In conversation that evening were Leslie Marmon-Silko—from which I was starstruck—and Judith Freeman. But I have also been to small readings, held in galleries and homes that have been almost equally as entertaining. (Just a tip, almost all of these smaller readings come with free beer, but be careful, as to get to a literary event like any other event in Los Angeles, you almost always have to drive).
LA Weekly‘s “Border’s Denouement” article tipped me off to my most recent literary outing. The first line read, “Ding Dong, the Borders Books and Music superstore in Westwood is dead.” Its closing sale had been going on nearly a week by the time I read the article, but I was ecstatic. I called to ask, “Will you still be open tomorrow?”
“Yeah, at ten,” said the worker who answered—he sounded asleep and I wondered how many people had asked before me—”But if you’re wanting the sales, all the popular stuff is already gone.”
I had never been to that particular Borders, but to some extent, if you have been to one, you have been to them all, right? This was—as the Weekly exaggerated—a superstore. At one point, there were two stories stuffed with loot, but the day I went, there were merely remnants. The merchandise was reduced to a desperate arrangement of floor shelving with cheap detective fiction and romance paperbacks selling for “99 Cents!!!” and even the shelves, chairs, benches, and tables were already picked off according to sticky-notes that read “Reserved for…”
As for the fiction section, the shelves were surprisingly full. Missing were all García Márquez, Hannah, Faulkner, Kesey, and Proulx titles I have on my reading list, but books had been carted from the back that (probably) should have been tossed away long ago for their lack of popularity. Quickly, I realized the real value of this event was to get me to find different titles by lesser known and forgotten writers, those writers and books everyone else passed time and again. I tried hard not to pick any based on a cool cover, so I judged them on their first few pages, looking for perspective, narrative, and aesthetic choices that interest me.
The books I found have been really great and, for the most part, truly different from others in my small library. Some are by small presses, some are old, and some are esoterically foreign. I remind myself as I write, each was bought at Borders, and begin to wonder if housing such unpopular titles is why this particular Borders died.
Of the few purchases I have read so far, all have gone beyond expectation. The best is Ellen Foster, a 120 page novella (please do not be offended if Kaye Gibbons is your favorite writer and you feel she is well-known). But my bias might be unfairly toward it as I am still riding a two-month high from Barry Hannah’s Ray. Really, as I write the second draft of this—I am in LAX, waiting impatiently for my flight home—I am amazed at the quality of almost every book I found. I recognize how silly this is; of course they were good, they were for sale, right? When I remind myself each was from Borders, I am almost disappointed that first, the books did not come from Skylight or Booksoup, and second, that the Borders is no longer.
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As I sit in my apartment in Hollywood a few days after Grandma Barb’s funeral to work my third draft, I am still a bit tired, meaning I’ve been slow to get back to this. I realize there is a need to wrap this together though I am not inclined to do so, just as I don’t want to hear from anyone from home because I’ve talked to all of them too much lately. So I’m not going to. Instead, I will end on a thought that the Father (it was a secular affair, as was Bob’s, but the man in town who always heads the funerals is the Catholic priest) provided at the beginning of Grandma Barb’s service. He said, “A funeral is a sometimes confusing affair. There will be pain. Sadness. Regret. And longing. But with that, there will be happiness. Pride. And good memories. She would want that like she wanted it for Bob’s service. She was a gal who would be annoyed some of us even wore black today. Please forgive me, Barb…”
About the now defunct Westwood Borders? I would have gone back. Too late now.
by Justus Caudell
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
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