Valley a Fertile Ground for Literary Hounds

The Valley is full of book people.

Just how many isn’t certain. But there are close to 100 bookstores, if you include those in Burbank and Glendale--metastasizing megastores, endangered independents, dusty used-book shops and quirky special-interest stores that offer everything from theater and film books to the literature of conspiracy.

In 1993, 980 million books were sold in the United States, and avid readers in Woodland Hills and Reseda bought their share.

Who are the serious book people? They are the ones at Supercrown, happy as Oscar winners when they find a recent Anita Brookner on the remainder shelf. They are all the people who believe a book is the best present you can get, good jewelry notwithstanding. They are the folks who give copies of Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” to everyone they care about, including ex-spouses. They are the people with library cards.

For a book person, purgatory is three days without a good read. Hell is going to a four-star resort in Aruba and discovering you’ve already read all the books in the gift shop. Heaven, which is unattainable, is being able to read “Tom Jones” or “The Brothers Karamazov” or Patrick O’Brien’s sea sagas again--for the first time.

Want to find a book person in an airport? See how heavy their carry-on luggage is. Book people pack hardbacks when they fly even when their suitcases don’t have wheels.

Book people don’t feel bad if they paid full price. And they don’t need to read the name to know that’s Eudora Welty’s picture on the bags they pack your loot in at Barnes & Noble.

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Starting today, Valley Weekend will feature a bimonthly column on writing in all its forms. The Valley is the perfect place for such a feature. We have some of the finest literary ghosts of all time. Think of poor F. Scott Fitzgerald in Encino, desperately trying to keep his hands off the gin long enough to write what might have been his masterpiece. Think of William Faulkner during his two-year stint at Warner Bros., keeping despair at bay by reminding himself, “They’re gonna pay me Saturday, they’re gonna pay me Saturday.”

America has no Hucktown or Scarlettville, but it does have Tarzana, an entire community named after a famous literary character. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the man who created the Lord of the Apes, is very much with us, his remains buried under a Gelson’s-convenient walnut tree right on Ventura Boulevard.

But the Valley is no literary graveyard. It is a vital community of writers, from Harlan Ellison to Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey. Ambitious writers from around the world are drawn to the Valley, because so much of the entertainment industry is here, and the entertainment industry pays in dollars, not in copies as little magazines do.

Eavesdrop at lunch at Pinot in Sherman Oaks or some other expense-account eatery: Every third table includes a writer--of screenplays or CD-ROMs often enough--but of serious fiction and nonfiction as well. You can pay for the silk shirts and personal trainer with what you make writing for “ER”; you can even tell yourself you’re writing the electronic equivalent of the Great American Novel.

But eventually a lot of TV and movie writers find themselves sitting alone at their word processors, putting aside the lucrative collaborative work of Hollywood to do the lonely work that typically pays poorly in everything but the sheer joy of stringing words together in an artful way.

Books beget book people who buy books and beget more book people and so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut writes once too often in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

Because they are book people, too, this column will occasionally be about collectors. Sometimes readers and sometimes not, they are a special breed. Visit the twice-yearly Burbank Antiquarian Book Fair and watch the happy addicts move methodically from booth to booth, sustained by the hope that a pristine copy of “Leaving Cheyenne” will rise.

In this space expect to see such cosmic questions raised as why the Valley has no independent bookstore as glorious as Denver’s the Tattered Cover and other matters of grave concern.

Do you think literature is superior to real life because in books you can roam around in consciousnesses other than your own? Do you think the exchange of book lists is an erotic activity? When somebody says, “But that was in another country,” do you want to shout, “And besides the wench is dead”?

So do I.

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Earlier this month, the Eclectic Cafe in North Hollywood hosted a tribute to the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac would have been 74 on March 12), with readings from Kerouac and fellow hipsters Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady and others.

To prepare for his reading of Ginsberg’s landmark poem, “Howl,” Van Nuys actor Scott Smith asked Stewart Brand what he remembered about Cassady--the model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” During the 1960s, Brand hung with writer Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and Cassady drove their psychedelic bus. (Brand, the creator of the “Whole Earth Catalogues” and now something of a father figure in cyberspace, is the uncle of Smith’s wife, Elizabeth Sampson.)

From his converted tugboat in Sausalito, Brand e-mailed back this vivid recollection of Cassady, holder of the Beat record for cars boosted (500 before he was 21) and persons of both sexes bedded:

Neal was precisely rich and sad, notable for his profound inspirational effect on others, such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Kesey. I knew him only in the late Kesey period. His nonstop speed rant was a simultaneous marvel and annoyance. His bravado, male as it comes, was awesome and catching. I recall driving with him, back from the L.A. Acid Test. He begged me to let him drive my VW bus. I immediately regretted doing so, as he shot over Tehachapi Pass in a snowstorm (!), seeing how close he could graze the telephone poles alongside. My ambivalent job was rolling him huge doobies so he could push the edge yet further. He told his customary multileveled tales the whole way, as my poor consciousness wore itself smooth trying to keep up with him and also not expire of sheer anxiety. After I let him out near Salinas, I proceeded to Big Sur and a series of Cassady-esque adventures of my own.