10 for "The 10"
A Recipe for Enchiladas, River Swimming, Art Daddies, Swamp Hogs, and Peace with Your Long Dead Mother
Don’t tell anyone, but I have a book coming out. You can’t squeal because it hasn’t been officially announced yet, but I figure since I have a publication date, April 8th, and since you can pre-order the book already, the cat is somewhat out of the bag.
“The 10” is about my mother, myself, and a trip we took together in 1996 to drive from Sacramento, California to Palatka, Florida, a small town in the center of the state where multiple generations of my matrilineal family are from. In 2019 I moved into a van and recreated that road trip in an attempt to understand my mother and what happened to her, but also to try to see clearly the landscapes interstate 10 covers, namely the Southwest and the Deep South. Maybe if I could understand some part of America, I could understand us.
In celebration of the imminent arrival of my book, and to offer somewhat what of a sneak peak at how I wrote this book (all in all, a nine year process) here are ten books that influenced “The 10,” offered in geographical order, moving west to east.
When people from Los Angeles say they’re going to the “desert” they either mean they are going to Palm Springs to drink by a pool, or they are going to Joshua Tree to do hallucinogens. “The Desert” is of course much, much bigger than this — spanning multiple states and actually more than one desert — and it’s growing. The Great Basin deserts will eventually stretch all the way from inner Mexico, through the western U.S. and into Canada. The immense scale of the desert(s), the diversity of cultures there (hundreds of Native dialects, for example) and the scope of the genocide that took place in the Southwest was all news to me. “Horizontal Yellow,” was where I started the assault on just how ignorant I was. As someone who does much better in cloudy, cold places, I was sure that there was nothing in Arizona, New Mexico or west Texas for me. I was extremely wrong. The author of this readable academic text was also kind enough to meet me for coffee, and told me some funny stories about Coyote. I owe him, and this book, quite a lot.
This collection of paintings and notes from Georgia herself sort of reminds me of the 10th anniversary edition of Calvin and Hobbes that featured commentary by Bill Watterson. On the one hand it’s fascinating to hear from the maker themselves, just to see what sort of vocabulary they have, what approach they have to talking about their own work. On the other, it’s so weird because no way Bill Watterson or Georgia were real people, real people can’t make anything THIS GOOD. And yet I knew that any approach to unraveling the myths I’ve been told about the Southwest had to include taking time to not only think about O’Keeffe’s work and what it said about the land, but about O’Keeffe herself, and what she means to women who want to live and create on their own terms. Since Georgia provides one of the two competing epigraphs that open “The 10” I knew that I would be picking this book up quite a lot. It popped up many times in “The 10,” almost always right when I needed it. When everything seemed lost, including myself.
On the original trip across the 10 I took with my mother in 1996, one of the memories that stands out the most are the days and days and days it took to drive across Texas. That hazy horizon always moving away from you as you move forward, like the famously discomforting film shot known as a “dolly zoom” (as in ‘Jaws’ and others). In 2019 I took my time in west Texas, trying to acclimate to life in the Lone Star State, and what I learned is that Texas and California are like a set of twins who argue that they don’t have anything in common. I was perfectly set up, being a Californian, to not understand any facet of Texas, so I desperately needed a translator. This book by New Yorker staff writer Wright was a perfect jumping off point. The way he breaks down how culture is built (top down or bottom up) was so fascinating, I was actually able to put down the Ninfa’s enchiladas I was scarfing and actually pay attention. No lesser book would be capable of the same.
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans by Lawrence N. Powell and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit & Rebecca Snedeker
I bought both of these books at the estimable Octavia Books in New Orleans proper, when I already had about 8 books on the Crescent City that were festooned with marginalia and Post Its. The thing about books though, and New Orleans, is that I love them, so I couldn’t pass them up. Pound for pound the Powell was the most helpful historical reference point because, as the subtitle suggests, New Orleans has always played fast and loose with its own existence, and I needed to come to terms with that before anything else I wanted to say about the city. I love my hometown, but when push comes to shove, I think New Orleans is just about the best thing America has ever offered the world. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or safe, or understandable, I just think it’s the best. I wrote a huge chunk of the book in New Orleans because I knew it had to be written there. Leaving, and continuing east (and months later continuing west) was very difficult for me, not only because I missed New Orleans, but because I found it very hard to write of NOLA without actually being there. Listening to WWOZ helped, but not as much as “Unfathomable City.” It became a text I could turn to whenever I needed, well… Vibes. Vibes that became data that inspired sentences that got the work done. I still turn to this when I miss New Orleans. So, a lot.
I don’t want to drag Donald Rumsfeld into this, but when you start writing a nonfiction book, there are things you know you don’t know (Why does Houston not have literally any zoning laws?) and then there are things you have no idea that you don’t know about. Right around the time I got to Houston, where you can put a tattoo parlor next to a high school, and the fulcrum point of my trip between Desert and Swamp, I realized something. I had been thinking about this trip as being bookended by two oceans: the Pacific and the Atlantic, when in fact, the Gulf of Mexico was a huge factor in everywhere I was going. I didn’t know shit about it. This book, dense as bone and I think equally enduring, opened up a lot for me and taught me more things I didn’t know that I didn’t know. It’s not all “Salt Life” stickers and oil rigs — though there’s plenty of both. But I don’t think you can understand America unless you take the time to shake hands with the Gulf.
The thing about a journey rather than a trip is that you don’t always know where you’re headed. Several times on the 10 I was rerouted just by room temperature curiosity, but what I saw in Mississippi altered not just the course of the trip, but me. It sent me, burning and ashamed and furious, way off interstate 10. I bought this book at the Legacy Museum of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, which also hosts the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, more colloquially known as the lynching memorial. I would be very hard pressed to pick one place from my trip to recommend, or one book of research I wish all my readers would also pick up… But there is something important for you to see in Montgomery. And while you’re there, buy this book.
I don’t know how “new” a theory can be when it was first published in 1973, but this was a book that helped me on a couple levels. I knew that at some point I wanted to talk about why we travel, and I had a lot of things along the lines of Joseph Campbell’s dissection of the hero’s journey, I had “Women Who Run With Wolves,” and certainly “Eat Pray Love,” to consider as well. Basically I had the woo woo bases covered — and good thing, because I think the woo woo stuff is important! I also, however, wanted to discuss the unavoidable connections between travel and consumption — that good good juicy sociological nerd talk. MacCannell might not have had Instagram in mind in 1973, but the theories he builds around “collecting” experiences were integral to how I started thinking about what exactly we’re supposed to be getting out of all these trips, anyway. Experiences? Wisdom?…Content?
In some ways, Joan is there in everything I do. She’s from Sacramento, so am I. She moved to New York to work at a Condé Nast magazine, so did I, etc. I put this on the list because I had a very specific problem on the road that Joan helped me with. Over the course of the half-a-year or so I was on the road, I interviewed anyone who would let me: the manager of a Waffle House, a Cajun who asked me to two step, someone acting as a green energy advisor to the Navajo nation. I was rusty at first (it’d been a while since I was in interviewing shape from my days at the Huffington Post and Vanity Fair) but improved over the course of the trip. Fact is, I just like talking to people — but writing about what we talked about was much harder. Rereading Joan, as I so often do, reminded me that the most powerful reporting happens when you just show the reader who the person is, and what they said. Trying to interpret only clutters things up. Stay out of the way and the reader will get it.
Something I learned pretty quickly on “The 10” was that in a book about subjects as big as Mothers and Daughters, and Manifest Destiny, I needed to find shortcuts to discuss some things. For example, I couldn’t exactly walk readers through the decade plus of therapy I went through that enabled me to do something like writing this book. Instead, I needed to find a pow! bang! book that could drive home the lessons I had in my back pocket when I hit the road in March 2019. I’m not all that widely read in Psychological books (I’m really just getting into them now, actually) but just dipping my toe in these waters, the first title that came up — and then kept coming up seemingly everywhere I looked (and I pay attention to such things) — was Miller. When you’re talking about mental health, you have to take into some account that not all readers are going to be familiar with psychological language; plonking in a quotation like “Each mother can only react empathically to the extent that she has become free of her own childhood,” does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
This is a bit of a cheat because I use this behemoth for everything I work on. At some point I was a used book buyer at Los Angeles’ The Last Bookstore, and as an employee we got a handy discount on merchandise. I used almost all my allotted discounts on big reference books — I also bought the concise Oxford English Dictionary. It comes with its own magnifying glass! I don’t use this thesaurus to find fancier or more impressive words to replace solid workhorse words, which I think is what most assume a thesaurus is for. I mostly use this to explore or confirm different nuances and meanings to words I think I know, but don’t really. For example, if something is the opposite of another thing, does it also contradict it? The other reason this book is such a treasure, is that each of the editors has their own mini entries amongst the pages to discuss words. Look at this little aside from David Foster Wallace on the word, “if” :
“From experience born of repeated humiliation, I can tell you there are two main ways to mess up with if and make your writing look weak. The first is to use if for whether. They are not synonyms — if is used to express conditional, whether is used to introduce alternative possibilities.”
If you want to know the rest, you’ll have to get the book. The BOUNTY in these pages! Writing lessons from DFW!
So there you have it, ten books that influenced a book that you haven’t read yet. But they give you an idea, yes? An inkling?
XOEA