Voltair You Must Have the Devil in You to Succeed in Any of the Arts
On the Shelf
A Salad Just the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature
By Charles Hood
Heyday: 224 pages, $xvi
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Travel writing seems to reward the immature and active. Have any of Paul Theroux's recent books felt as ferociously urgent every bit his outset? Later on-life collections can observe a one time-intrepid (or at least tireless) scribe set up instead to ponder a bad knee joint or worse service at a restaurant, or generally to lament what once was or could accept been.
Charles Hood, a Southern California writer now into his 60s, certainly has regrets. There's his original determination to major in English long ago, a divorce of more than recent vintage, choices he made as a father or teacher. But from these difficulties emerges the fascinating cadre insight of his new collection, "A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat": that what appears to be ugly or awful can, with the correct knowledge and context, be seen instead equally unique, even gorgeous.
The opening essay, "I Heart Ugly Fine art," describes a chore Hood applied for in the late 1980s, teaching writing at a college in the Antelope Valley. "I drove Highway 14 back to Lancaster, had lunch, and so inverse into my suit in the eatery parking lot," he writes. "I took out my earring and put on my wedding ring. I pushed my fingers through my hair. Show time." What they are looking for, it turns out, is a lifetime commitment to teaching remedial English. A would-be supervisor asks: "Had I taken the wrong go out? Did I fifty-fifty know where I was?"
A committed birder, poet, author, globe traveler, simply nigh of all someone who delights in scrounging beauty from an unloved parking lot, Hood tells the committee the truth: that he knows exactly where he is. That in fact his next stop is "the sewage ponds" beyond boondocks, where he is after a certain species, Franklin's gull, named later on Sir John Franklin, a polar explorer who died of scurvy in 1847. "Co-ordinate to campus legend," he notes wryly, "I ended past standing on the table, flapping my elbows and imitating bird calls." Naturally, he got the task.
Charles Hood is the co-author of "Wild LA" and writer of the collection "A Salad Only the Devil Would Swallow."
(Jose Gabriel Martinez-Fonseca)
Hood'due south essays frequently succeed on the strength of such sense of humor and specificity, born of decades of hard work equally a thinker and wanderer in search of things modest and beautiful and often beaked. (He is also co-author of the revelatory guidebook "Wild LA.") Put it another manner: Anyone can tell you Lancaster is more than than simply a place to go gas on the mode to get skiing; Hood will actually persuade y'all to await more closely at that highway median, at the "yellowish static of cheatgrass" that "fills up all the spare pieces of dirt."
Layered over such prose poetry, in a dozen essays virtually the desert, the semiurban corners of L.A. County and some of the many nations and oceans Hood continues to explore, is an equally impressive and lightly worn knowledge of ecology and history. Where another naturalist might come up off as a showy mansplainer, Hood feels like a cool older friend, sunburned and binocular-strapped, when he tells us California has 17 species of pino and 20-odd oaks: black, isle, scrub, Engelmann — "enough species to make seeing them all a tough task."
Indeed, what makes this collection such a consistent joy is ultimately how hopeful the author feels, and how much he continues to enjoy moving through the world despite the twin realities of bad knees and climate change. "I go along journals to certificate my self-improvement," he offers, "even when there is very little good news to report."
Reading Hood'south work will make y'all feel smarter but, fifty-fifty more crucially in this dire age, more open to the sublime. It comes in defiant picayune moments. Hood asks an Indian biologist how many tigers there are in Bombay, population 13 one thousand thousand. He answers 300. "How did they get at that place?" Hood follows up. "They were always there." Other moments of odd beauty include a history of palm trees, those gawdy California transplants that "repeat the lie: you can never be too alpine or too thin." Hood reports that 40 potted palms sank with the Titanic, and that those planted decades ago in L.A. might very well be on the verge of a mass die-off.
(Heyday)
According to some studies, anyway. The truth — about the palms and much else — is that we don't know. Ultimately the volume feels like a challenge to be as cheery a traveler every bit Hood, just as open to finding pleasance in incomplete knowledge and imperfect nature equally in tracking down pristine postcard vistas. "Go earlier the border closes, the crevasse widens, the herd thins, the engine stalls, or the pestilence spreads," he implores. "Have a friend if yous can; go solitary if you must." But at least read this book. It's a true please.
Deuel is the author of "Friday Was the Bomb: V Years in the Middle East."
Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-11-05/review-how-a-socal-travel-writer-found-beauty-in-the-ugly-places
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