The Essential California Bookshelf

By: By Ralph Weinstein | December 14, 2010 | In Print

Editors Note:  For the past three years we’ve been receiving a steady flow of hate mail from an elusive Malibu resident named Ralph Weinstein.  He’s actually built up a bit of a fan base.  Though eloquently written, Weinstein’s abhorrent rants criticize virtually every editorial decision we make.  Our photographs are, “pointlessly incendiary,” and our articles, “simpleminded and feeble to the point of biliousness.” Some months ago we wrote to Mr. Weinstein, a self-professed recluse rotting away in the Monte Nido hinterland, and challenged him to write a piece worthy of printing:  An open-ended provocation with no specific mandate.  We expected a vicious retort but instead, after four weeks of silence, the following 2500 word essay appeared in our mailbox simply signed Ralph Weinstein, Monte Nido.

OK neighbors, first, turn off your cell phones and your computers, and cease your e-mailing and your downloading and your texting and your twittering and your twattering, and tear yourself away from the television for two seconds to consider what a great writer, James Salter, has to say about reading: “It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled. Art is in a sense life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.” California needs rescue from the onslaught of the last 40 years. So do I. That’s why I regularly peruse these writers who have their own shelf in my library and a special place in my aging heart:

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) — Thirty-five years ago, when I finally got the idea that reading good books is important, I first turned to Steinbeck and became so enraptured with his gift that turned words into life, I read everything he wrote and wound up enthralled, in love with Steinbeck’s California and always will be. I was a summer soldier and a sunshine patriot stationed at Fort Ord in 1960 and clearly remember Cannery Row, at least its forlorn weathered vestiges since the sardines were gone, but still very much as Steinbeck wrote of it: “Cannery Row … is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream … the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honkytonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men’ and he would have meant the same thing”. OK, so now this cherished venue of history, of literature has been corrupted by the commercial tsunami. There’s a John Steinbeck museum and a John Steinbeck jewelry store and a John Steinbeck fortune-teller and a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. I don’t care. The real Cannery Row is forever in the words. A little further down the road in Salinas, Steinbeck’s birthplace, the town fathers (who definitely weren’t overjoyed when he left them with the whole flawed tapestry of their truths unrolled) have erected the National Steinbeck Center, a gleaming modern shrine to his legacy that I’m sure would both please and embarrass him, and I dare to suppose, re-illuminate for him that the whole world is indeed of mice and of men.

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 4 pages  1 2 3 >  Last »