Like I have been recently on Tuesday mornings, I’m at Cafe Influx, where I just heard the following word:

“Deamericanify”

According to this gentleman at the counter, “deamericanification” is the process by which at one point in time it was possible to exit an American freeway and know that you have arrived to a particular and distinct location to a further point in time when you could exit any and every off-ramp in the United States without any way whatsoever to distinguish them. In his theory, today - Tuesday - we are smack in the middle of the process of deamericanification which will then continue to “deplanetization” (globalization) until a creative revolution - a la 1960’s - will take place and creativity will finally trump efficiency.

As it goes, deamericanification began after World War II - during the cookie cutter house revolution of the late 40’s and 50’s. About 55 years later here we are, with a fairly high level of confidence that we can exit any major freeway and find our Starbucks’ coffee drink of choice, Barnes and Noble bestseller of choice, and whatever the hell it is that people buy at Wal-Mart, K-Mart, or Target all within a couple blocks of each other. We don’t even have to look for them or read their signs - we are drawn to the colors of their logos like Pavlov’s dogs. And notice how certain stores always try to set up next to other stores to politely let us continue our days on auto-pilot. A vanilla iced latte from Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf right after a Chicken Burrito from Baja Fresh. If you look closely, you will find that certain franchise chains try to always put their stores/restaurants in a consistent place from the freeway exit so we are accustomed to looking at the same spot.

So … if today, on Tuesday, we are exactly at the midpoint of deamericanification, then right around 2060 - when most of us are around 80 - 90 years old - we will exit the freeway in blind trust that the sign is not lying to us. That really this is Market Street, San Diego, California - not Market Street, San Antonio, Texas.

I have finally finished William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (congratulations may be sent by way of comments). It took me so long to finish this book because a.) I am a dim-witted slow reader and b.) if, like so many people, articles, and books have told me, The Sound and the Fury is such a brilliant and complex American classic, then I wanted to figure out why.

I failed.

Nick Hornby recently revealed to me in his February Believer article that in 1938 Cyril Connolly wrote a book entitled Enemies of Promise, which divided all the “big books of the 1920’s … into two camps, the Mandarin and the Vernacular.” Green’s Living, Hemmingway’s A Farwell to Arms, and Lawrence’s Pansies were all, predictably enough, labeled as “vernacular.” Joyce’s Fragments of a Work in Progress and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury were of course considered to be part of the “Mandarin” camp.

Connolly was doing what critics love to do: divide the world into high and low culture. Critics love to do this, because it is their responsibility to tell us what is art and what is trash. (and yes, they continue to do so just as much today as 1938 the only difference being that the definitions of high and low culture have changed)

So I went through The Sound and the Fury, furiously reading through bland paragraph after paragraph. And when my eyes started to glaze over I would go back and read them again. I was getting desperate - surely there is something that I’m not getting here. So I went to the trusty internet where there is probably 1000 times more writing about Faulkner than he himself ever wrote. “The man who forever changed American literature” they kept saying.

Too bad for American literature. I found out that most all of Faulkner’s novels were set in Yoknapatawpha County - an imaginary region in Mississippi where Faulkner himself was from. I found that the same characters weaved in and out of many of his novels. That Faulkner created a fictional geneology of the Compson family - the decline of which, The Sound and The Fury is based - from 1699 to 1945.

But I still couldn’t find why the hell Faulkner’s most famous novel is so highly regarded. This was the closest I came:

Traditional aspects of the novel like exposition, plot, and character development are cast aside in the attempt to find a narrative form that could represent the realities of mental chaos, the fluidity of time and memory, and the painful interweaving of separate selves in family life. Though at times Faulkner’s material may seem so inchoate as to be barely containable within language at all, The Sound and the Fury attains heights and depths of expression that are truly breathtaking: it is an unforgettable work that richly rewards the reader’s efforts.

It’s true that Faulkner clearly tries to write in a stream of consciousness style - and from three different character perspectives - a daunting task for sure. But I think that very few readers would be able to relate to their thought processes. (I feel bad for those who can) On the one hand, The Sound and the Fury seems like it’s trying to break free from the mold of 19th and early 20th century American literature, but is constantly resorting to allusions to classical texts and the bible in order to gain intellectual high ground.

I think it’s a crock of shit.

Ok, so it’s Wednesday, just dropped Crystal off at school, Laura’s home cooking some kind of Mexican dessert for a potluck for her English class. I figured I’d stop by the La Jolla Pannikin for a double espresso before going back home to finish painting the deck. Across from me is a middle aged woman reading the Wall Street Journal. She’s friendly but in a high school librarian type of way - her kids probably hate her. Anyway, she saw me reading The Believer (really, I’ll finish it today) and asked:

“Is that some kind of new comic book?”
“Um, actually it’s a literary journal … uh, sorta”
“Really? Do you mind if I take a look? I’m actually a writer myself.”

I never know how to respond to this statement - especially here in La Jolla. From my experience, most La Jollans who say they are writers are either a) wealthy, bored housewives no longer sustained by the 5 minute thrill of shopping or b) trust-fund babies who started listening to NPR a couple years ago, spent a month’s payout on a degree from National University and are now confident that they are working on the next American masterpiece. You can find these people all over La Jolla. They buy ten times as many books as they read from D.G. Wills and Warwick’s. They meet at Starbucks and Pannikin with their manuscripts stuffed in their designer leather cases. But they do not publish. Which is why I was suprised when, thumbing through my magazine, she said:

“I just finished a book a few weeks ago actually. It should be on the shelf everywhere next week: Sushi for Dummies - you know, those big yellow books?”
“Interesting,” I say. It probably sounded condescending, but really, I was fascinated.
“Well, I mean, the whole dummy thing, that’s just a template of course. There are certain formatting rules, but really they give you a lot of freedom.”
“So, it’s like a cook book?”
“Yes, that’s right. Actually, I co-authored the book with a Japanese guy. Yeah, we go through how to make just about every kind of sushi.”
“And … uh, does it go through the history of sushi also?”
“A little bit, but the editor really wanted it to be more straightforward than that. You know, many people think that Sushi means ‘raw fish,’ but really it is Sashimi that means ‘raw fish.’”
“Fascinating.” (OK, now I was being a dick.) “So, is this the first ‘Dummy’ book you’ve written?”
“Yeah, I’ve written other books … actually, my specialty is on pop-culture, and I’ve written on San Diego …”

I was just reading an interview with Mike Davis, who besides Dirk Sutro (doesn’t count, but should), is probably the best known San Diego intellectual. He just finished editing Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, a book I’ve been wanting to read for a long time now. MOre so now that I’ve been on this get-to-know-my-city kick. I don’t know why, but all of a sudden I’ve been wanting to read every book, article, and picture book that I can find about San Diego. So I was truly interested when I asked:

“Really? You’ve written about pop-culture in San Diego?”
“Well, that particular book no. It’s called A-z: 26 things to do in San Diego. You know, things to do in San Diego that you would never think of, like buying a boat and fixing it up.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah, we’ve put out quite a few editions, but not for a while. I’m sure you could still find it.”
Actually, I remember seeing it on the shelf back when I worked at Esmeralda Books (R.I.P.) and I remember thinking, this book should be called 26 ways to spend a shitload of money in San Diego.
I asked her if she would write another ‘Dummy’ book and she said she would if she was able to write it alone and had more time for research.
“You see, writing is a craft,” she went on. “I assume you want to be a writer?”
“No, not really,” I lied, sorta.
“Oh, well, anyway, writing is a craft, a skill and once you learn how to do it, you can apply your craft to anything.”

Then I think all of a sudden she felt vulnerable - that weird power struggle that can happen in awkward conversations and asked me what I was studying in school.
“I graduated already, by my major was Third World Studies.”
“How funny, right now I’m reading this book by Theroux where he’s traveling from Cairo to Cape Town … or wait … From Cape … wait, which one is South?”
“Cape Town”
“Right, from Cairo to Cape Town in the 60’s and I swear. That man is so brave. Africa is a really dangerous place and there he is just trusting everyone. Right now he’s in Ethiopia talking about Rastafarians - your hat made me think about that.”
I was wearing a beenie.

We introduced and shook hands.

The first published La Jollan I’ve met. I’ll keep my eyes out for Sushi for Dummies.

Excerpts from Joshuah Bearman’s Believer interview with Mike Davis:

BLVR: Here’s a question about the illegal immigration debate since we’re down here in San Diego. First: at a theoretical level, liberal neoclassical economics, whose ultimate goal is reducing economic friction as much as possible, sould not want to restrict the free movement of labor. When capital can’t move to cheap labor, as with manufacturing, you have to let cheap labor go to capital, as with agriculture and the low-end service sector. That’s what neoliberal economics, a supposed mainstay of American conservativism, prefers, right? Second: as a practical matter, the conservative hotel-chain owners, developers, and agribusiness guys all need that labor force that their party spends millions to lobby against. If illegal immigration stopped tomorrow, their businesses would fail. So: what’s the deal? It makes no sense. Unless they’re really so cynical as to want illegal immigrant workers but with no amenities or social support whatsoever.

MD: That’s it. They want silent invisible armies of peons who don’t impose any tax costs of fiscal burden and just live off the air itself.

BLVR: But that fails to account for externalities - the social costs and benefits, future costs and benefits - of educating people, keeping people healthy, keeping them within the fold of society and the law. Which is actually the same thing that leads people to put homes in Malibu or build into mudslide areas or not enforce city fire codes. In fact, may of your books’ disasters arise out of economics without externalities.

MD: Yes. If I had written City of Quartz a few years later, after the riots, I would have changed some things, because it played too much into the luridness. That’s also one of the reasons I never did a book about the LA riots. I had wanted to write a community-level history of that episode, a constellation of many different overlapping stories. I couldn’t do it, first because I found it too emotionally demanding. The level of pain in people’s lives was too intense, and I didn’t have the emotional stamina. But I also didn’t want to invade peoples’ lives, which is why I retreated, in a sense, to Ecology of Fear. I returned to science, a topic I’d loved since I was twelve or thirteen years old. Now especially it’s very difficult not to be profiting somehow off someone else’s misery, because in the era of James Agee and Walker Evans documentary used to exploit people in return for the promise of the New Deal’s coming to the rescue. Now there’s now one coming to the rescue.

To get back to teaching. I’ve had my best teaching experiences by getting the students to go out in the world and get some experience. I had two kids who wanted to know about the Colorado River delta. And they couldn’t find enough books about it. And I said: Why read books? Get a case of beer, jump in the car, and six or seven hours later, you’ll be there. They disappeared into Mexico for a week. And this was a radical experience for them, as it would be for many of my students, all of whom are nice people but have yet to be weaned from relying entirely on books. The problem with the academic world is that it’s mobilized entirely against experience.