Ventura, Michael. If I Was a Highway: Essays. With a foreword by Dan Flores and photographs by Butch Hancock. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2011.

This journalist originally from New York befriends the Southwest US, from Lubbock, Texas to Los Angeles; and, in turn, the Southwest seems to befriend him. In “A Life of Destinations,” Ventura says: “To be that man who only lives to live. That is my task from now on. It isn’t about writing anymore, or finding a meaning, or changing the world, or getting and keeping love, though all of that is important; but it isn’t about that stuff anymore. The task now is to be that man who only lives to live. For whom life, life, life, is enough” (15). What a great attitude!
 
As a Lubbockian (a term the author may have coined for no one I know uses it seriously), myself, I particularly liked Ventura’s essay, “Lubbockian Identity,” He begins this way: “Let us consider Lubbock Texas. In 1973, January through September, I lived in Lubbock—not a resident; a drifter, taking my time passing through. The Lubbockians I got to know all were Texans, mostly born and raised in Lubbock. Ethnically, most were some mixture of Anglo-Saxon-Celt, often with Cherokee stirred in a few generations back. Many traced their American ancestry to well before the Civil War” (35). But this delineation is only the beginning of Ventura’s portrayal of Lubbock—a place he likes more than he doesn’t. Will buy copies of this for friends [and I did] who don’t live in Lubbock—just so they know I’m not entirely crazy for living here!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Rachel Field
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Meara
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Mark Levin
FRI: My Book World | Rachel Louise Snyder, ​Women We Buried, Women We Burned

Loe, Nancy E. Hearst Castle: An Interpretive History of W. R. Hearst’s San Simeon Estate. Aramark. Santa Barbara: Companion P, 1994.

I first visited Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California, in 1978. The tour was conducted more like an informal swirl through a friend’s home. The lighting was poor, and items seemed casually thrown together. The second time I visited the park, in 1997, it had been acquired by the state of California and a visit to the new museum was divided into separate tours. My partner and I were so fascinated that we took all four, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. We became so well acquainted with the docent that we later had drinks . . . that is not true . . . I wish. He was a handsome blond man. Anyway, by that time, the entire property had been curated and updated so that it looked more as it would have in its heyday, the 1920s and 1930s.
 
Loe’s book, which I bought on that latter trip, has remained on my shelf until now, but it is no less interesting. The content is as much about the original owner, William Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnate, and his architect partner, the renowned Julia Morgan, as it is about the property itself. In fact, the book seems more about Morgan, an early feminist and a rare woman architect at that time. Hearst may have liked her in part because she was able to create almost every feature he wanted, even if it meant destroying a newly built basement wall to widen his bowling alley to three lanes from two—a whimsy that he scarcely utilized in his lifetime. But he also respected Morgan’s opinion and taste, because she was usually correct in her judgment. I still find the idea fascinating that a mere mortal could make his every wish come true (except that wish to live forever). What it must do to one’s psyche to get one’s way ninety-nine percent of the time.
 
To some eyes, the castle is a mishmash (or is it now mashup?) of every major historical architectural period and every major culture in the world. To others it represents the hubris of the ultrawealthy. To me it sings of the creativity of two people rich with ideas and nearly unlimited resources. Late in life, Hearst would be forced to sell off certain assets in order to take care of his $126 million dollar debt. Now that’s living! And yet he would still hold onto his Casa Grande, as he so fondly called it, for a bit longer.
​Nice work if you can get it!

Coming Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Marian Wright Edelman
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Gwendolyn Brooks
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Frank Lloyd Wright
FRI: My Book World | Gabor and Guttenberg, American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence (School Safety, Violence in Society)

Johnson, Denis. Angels: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2002 (1977).

I wouldn’t have thought of these words, but a blurb located on the back of the book describes the novel as being about two born losers. And I believe that is the case, unfortunately. A poor woman with two small children meets a divorced man, and they wind up in Phoenix. In the desert city, after mishaps with drugs, the woman finds herself in rehab, on the path toward a new life. The man and his two brothers, however, make a plan to rob a bank, believing their idea is brilliant. The heist, of course, goes awry, and the man winds up in prison killing someone. The account of his execution may be one of the most realistic and chilling scenes I’ve ever read in fiction. Angels makes a fine title on several levels of irony.

TUES: A Writer's Wit | Colm Tóibín
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Jane Green
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Christopher Lasch
FRI: My Book World | Nancy E. Loe, ​Hearst Castle: An Interpretive History

​When I visited California, in 1967, my aunt and uncle lived in Fullerton, Orange County. I was nineteen, and I had been encouraged by my mother to take side trips rather than hang around my aunt’s house all the time. I would negotiate such a concept much better later in life. The three weeks that I was there, my aunt drove me to Whittier to visit a friend I’d made while in college, also an organ student. My sixteen-year-old cousin and I took the train to San Clemente to the beach. And we made a similar trip to Disneyland. Finally, my aunt and uncle lent me their car so I could drive to Long Beach to see the S——s, a family who had once lived two houses south of us on Main Street in Wichita. Mr. S—— worked for a Long Beach newspaper, and Mrs. S—— was a registered nurse. Both of them smoked like chimneys at Christmas.
 
I made it my reading project to finish Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls,a summer read if ever there was one. You devour the pages just to see what happens, usually who does whom, only to feel less than satiated when it’s over­­—like eating a bag of potato chips in less than five minutes.

​In the seventies, I visited a couple, the wife of whom I’d gone to high school with. During another trip I stayed with a guy I’d met in Hawaii the summer before. There I got the gist of what my mother had tried to teach me. I made a day-long sojourn out to see the Queen Mary in Long Beach, and three of us guys would drive up the coast to San Francisco to march in one of the first gay pride parades in 1978. I also saw the Hearst Mansion in Big Sur before it became part of the California State Park system; I visited it once again in 1997, making the trip up the mountain three times in one day to see all three tours.

​In 2006 I attended a writers’ conference in Tomales Bay, and two years later I would return to the conference on one evening to hear the keynote speaker, Jane Smiley, a writer whom I admire a great deal.
 
I have a phobia of returning to California. I believe the Big One is slated to happen any time soon, and I just don’t want to chance it. Besides, it is one of those places long on beautiful sights and fabulous weather but also long on two-legged inhabitants, thousands of whom insist on being in the exact spot you would like to be whether it’s a queue to see Bette Midler or a trail in the woods.
 
California became the thirty-first state in 1850, thus celebrating its sesquicentennial in 2000.