California from different angles

The image that graces the cover of “My California,” a lively new anthology of writing about the Golden State, is David Hockney’s now-iconic “Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986 (Second Version).” It’s a wholly appropriate choice -- the photo-collage consists of hundreds of snapshots of an otherwise unremarkable California back road that have been scissored apart and reassembled in a way that may strike the eye as a kaleidoscopic delight, a seismic horror or both.

The same fracturing of vision is at play in “My California,” which presents itself as a collection of travel writing but offers much more than a series of quaint and colorful scenes. Thus, Carolyn See contributes a reverie about the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades that ultimately becomes an elegy to her departed life partner, John Espey -- a piece full of her characteristic blend of sass, savvy and grace.

“Every day, I’d swing over to the Lake Shrine ... and make the first circle, swearing, muttering oaths and imprecations, sneering at whoever got in my way,” she writes in “Waters of Tranquility” about Espey’s final illness. “By the second time around, I’d remembered why I was there, how I was losing the man I loved most in the world. I’d lean against trees and weep, sit on those benches and sob. The third time around, I’d hear myself asking for courage, steadfastness, compassion!”

The 27 California writers who contributed to “My California” represent an appropriately mixed bag of backgrounds, styles and sensibilities. Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Arax, coauthor of “The King of California,” opens the collection with “The Big Valley,” an appreciation of California’s often-overlooked heartland. Somewhere in the middle, memoirist and urban historian D.J. Waldie ponders the 957-square-foot tract house where he grew up and still lives. And it closes with poet and critic Dana Gioia’s credo “On Being a California Poet,” previously anthologized. Where else will we find, within a single volume, a paean to the blue-collar community of Hawthorne, where Gioia grew up, or a celebration of the compact suburb of Lakewood, Waldie’s hometown, and a celebration of the stretch of Highway 99 between Fresno and Tulare in Arax’s piece?

“I live here,” declares Waldie, “because Lakewood is adequate to the demands of my desire, although I know there’s a price to pay.”

Hector Tobar, a Times foreign correspondent, rhapsodizes about the freeways of Southern California and what they meant to a bus-bound family of recent arrivals from Guatemala, in a piece titled “Ode to CalTrans.” “I had a strange and very lonely childhood,” he explains, “part of which I filled by studying the maps of the Southern California highway grid.” Journalist and screenwriter Veronique de Turenne takes us on an excursion through the foothills of the Eastern Sierra on Highway 49, and mystery novelist T. Jefferson Parker does the same on Highway 395, in “Showing Off the Owens.”

“Lone Pine, Independence and Big Pine are the five most anxious words in the English language because they mean you’re getting close to the river,” writes Parker, who says he is such a devoted angler that he “can’t walk past the koi pond at [Newport Beach’s] Fashion Island without wanting to rig up and cast into it.”

Now and then, a writer engages in special pleading for one or another corner of California, but the boosterism is never without charm and grace. “Berkeley is rich with good places to be rapt,” insists novelist Michael Chabon, “at the eyepiece of an electron microscope ... at a table at Chez Panisse ... in the great disorderly labyrinth of Serendipity Books, on the dance floor at Ashkenaz while the ouds jangle and the pipes skirl .... “ But he also finds himself compelled to concede that Berkeley can resemble “some kind of vast exercise in collective dystopia.”

He confesses that it “is a city of potterers and amateur divines, of people so intent on cultivating their own gardens, researching their own theories, following their own bliss, marching to their own drummers and dancing to the tinkling of their own finger-cymbals that they take no notice of one another at all, or would certainly prefer not to, if it could somehow be arranged.”

We’ve been offered several roughly comparable collections in recent years, including “Writing Los Angeles,” edited by David L. Ulin, and “The Misread City,” edited by Gioia and Scott Timberg. “My California” is both more and less ambitious at once: The book considers all of California rather than just Los Angeles but presents itself as a travelogue rather than a work of scholarship and criticism. Still, it is full of reflective and illuminating moments, and each of the contributors manages to transcend the thoroughly respectable genre of travel writing to achieve something more exalted.

The point is made, almost as an aside, in poet devorah major’s charming evocation of San Francisco’s now-defunct Playland amusement park in “Cotton Candy Mirrors.” She muses on the antic experience of the Fun House during the summers of her adolescence -- the cackle of the “electric laughing lady,” the air jets designed to blow up skirts, and, above all, the crazy-making mirrors that turned ordinary youngsters “into alien beings, into insects, into comedians.” Here, yet again, is an allusion to the intentional distortions of the Hockney image.

“Although they tore down the Fun House, the mirrors still exist,” major writes. “I went on seeing them in my television set, in the billboards posted around town, in music video and CDs telling me and my children lies about ourselves, distorting our history.... I learned from the mirrors ... not to take reflections too seriously as the real thing.”

All of the contributors to “My California,” a joint project of Angel City Press and CaliforniaAuthors.com, have donated their work, and sales of the book will benefit the California Arts Council, an agency “on the brink of destruction,” as the book’s editor, Donna Wares, notes, “because of the state’s financial meltdown.” Thus, the book is hot-wired into both the zeitgeist and the politics of California in an urgent and worthy way, making it a good read and a good deed. *