Three weeks late, I come across this small memorial to John Updike by Garrison Keillor and I’m struck again by the economical virtues of Keillor’s writing. I also find more and more that I enjoy Keillor because of our shared values. Nothing so leads to agreeableness as agreement.

For instance, this, about his young daughter’s score of 96 on a spelling test:

Having begotten a good speller is no small matter to a writer. Writing is an act of paying attention, and if you don’t care about the difference between “their” and “there” or “needle” and “noodle,” then I am sorry for you.

Just so. Keillor is a nice man. With others among us, blood squirts from our eyes when people who should know better confuse “their” and “there” (as well as “they’re”). On Facebook, someone who knows me well enough recommended that I join the group “Seriously, Learn the Fucking Difference Between Your and You’re.” I joined. Whoever started this group must be kin.

I also like this, from Keillor’s piece on Updike:

I saw him a year ago in New York, and my wife and I rode the subway with him from 155th Street down to 72nd, and he grinned all the way, a white-haired gent of 75 in a tan raincoat, like a boy going away to school, and a little nervous. As it turns out, that was my very last chance to tell him, standing above him, the train swaying, that “The Centaur” and the Rabbit Angstrom books are permanent masterpieces and also his Olinger stories, and I didn’t tell him that. I opted to be cool. And then a gaggle of college kids boarded and crowded around him, not recognizing him, and in all that chatter and attitude, Updike sat soaking it all up. Material.

The description of Updike as “a white-haired gent of 75 in a tan raincoat, like a boy going away to school,” matches what I’ve seen of him too; it just feels right.  Something like 14 verbs move that little paragraph, only two of them forms of the indolent “to be.” I enjoy the way Keillor uses “and” to string  you along until the final end note:  “Material.” He often employs “who” in the same way, appending clause after clause, building to a penultimate sentence launched with that conjunctive pronoun before coming to a full stop with a final brief line:

And I think of John Updike, who illuminated private lives and wrote so lovingly of the world, who called snowfall “an immense whispering” and compared a brilliant snowy day to overdeveloped film. Who re-created the backyards and clotheslines of small-town 1940s Pennsylvania and described the way a girl walked in the hall of high school carrying her books against her body, and in a great story, “My Father’s Tears,” three years ago in the New Yorker, he gave us his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform. Nothing was beneath his careful attention.

Keillor has a strong voice. I can hear him in this piece of writing, just as I hear him in “A Prairie Home Companion.” It flows from his phrasing and from his point of view. He has something to say and he says it simply and well.

When I recently said I was quitting my LA Times subscription because I don’t feel like helping Sam Zell eviscerate the paper so that he can make his mortgage payment, a reader of this blog asked how I was going to read “the funnies.” Posed as it was to someone who has read them his entire life, this was an excellent question.

(And just to reiterate:  I never said that canceling my newspaper subscription was going to be easy. I actually think it’s going to be hard. But I’m so furious about what’s been done to the Times that I don’t want to support it with my check. And it makes me feel stupid that 12 million other people are reading it for free online while I’m paying for it — so I’m going to join them.)

While at the time I proposed a couple of online resources to read the comics, today in my playwriting workshop a friend shared the best one I’ve seen to date:  The Houston Chronicle online. They’ve got about 100 daily comics — almost half of them in color. (The LA Times, by the way, has only 31, all of them in black and white.) Best of all, you can build your own comics page and never accidentally read “Cathy” again. Here’s the link.

Next week I start another round of my favorite activity:  painful ongoing dental procedures. Two years ago I underwent an “extraction” that I think more properly should be called an “excavation”:  It involved blowing up the existing tooth, digging and hauling bits out of my jaw, and waiting months while the smoke cleared from the blast hole before something new could be erected. Don’t even ask about what starts next week. Just feel sorry for me and please send cash.

But now I’m thinking I should have gone another route, a route I may choose in the future:  just growing new teeth.

Yes, I’m still endlessly listening to that new Sparks album. And this incredibly catchy song presents an example of why. Here’s “Lighten Up Morrissey.”

In LA County, there’s an effort afoot to redub a mountaintop as “Ballard Mountain,” after one of its 19th century settlers. The peak’s current name? Negrohead Mountain.

John Ballard, by the way, was a “former Kentucky slave who had won his freedom and come to Los Angeles in 1859. In the sleepy, emerging city, he had a successful delivery service and quickly became a landowner. Soon he was active in civic affairs: He was a founder of the city’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church.” In other words, he’s an American success story.

Reading about this today took me back to a bit of my own history. I grew up in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey (or, perhaps more accurately, Pine-Barrens-adjacent). That translates into lots of woods and great stretches of isolation. My family had (and still has) part ownership of a tract of land deep in the Pine Barrens where my father and some other men had a cabin. Somewhere in my mother’s house may be a photo of my father as a small boy in the 1920’s sitting on the crosspiece of the doorframe as that cabin is being built; if not, that image nevertheless lives in my mind as a memory shared to me by my father, because that’s one of the perches he claimed as he watched my grandfather and other men build that cabin. That cabin was at the corner of a triangular set of trails (or unpaved roads) deep into the woods known all through my own boyhood as “The Flat Iron,” because it was shaped like a traditional pressing iron for clothes. If you took the flat iron to its northerly corner and turned right (rather than left) and walked or rode your dirtbike the five miles or so toward the next actually paved road, you would pass the ruins of what looked to have been at one time a prosperous small ranch of sorts, with a ranch house and a farming area and a fenced field out back. The name of that road, leading to that farm? Nigger Farm Road.

This was the name by which it was called all my boyhood. This was the name by which it was called by previous generations. This was the name I once saw when I looked on an actual government-printed map of this rather remote area. “Nigger Farm Road.”

My father told me once that the man, or “nigger,” after whom the farm and therefore the road was named was a man who had come back from the war (a war, whatever war this was) and who had achieved a high rank and who had bought this parcel of land to make his own and to be left alone upon it. I remember thinking that this man was a colonel, but at this remove of almost 40 years later, I cannot remember if that’s for certain what my father said, or if it’s something I invented, or even if he was right in any case. But I do know that everyone all about knew this road as Nigger Farm Road. And that I saw it printed as such on a map. I can’t speak for the other men, but I don’t believe my father meant any ill by that name. It was just the name of the road.

I noted today that Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a public official I respect, gave deference to the era in which Negrohead Mountain was named, as I make allowance for the unenlightened but well-meaning people who gave me directions by way of Nigger Farm Road:

“I believe in not altering history, but in this case the way to honor [Ballard] is to do it appropriately. The mountain wasn’t named that because of its shape. It was named after him,” Yaroslavsky said. “I’m certain that some people back then thought they were honoring him by using that name, as strange as it seems.”

Strange indeed. And it’s just one of the things I was reflecting upon tonight as a good friend and I sat in a bar drinking drinks and toasting our friendship, white men both, and  looking at the television with our new president on it and being awfully glad to see him up there rather than the gang that just left. We don’t care if he’s white or black or purple.

As I complained about here and here, the Los Angeles Times is further eviscerating its newspaper on March 2nd. For the past few years, the paper has been shedding sections and pages seemingly daily. Today — a Sunday — it took me longer to cut my grapefruit than it did to read the entire paper.

As I’ve been telling everyone I see, including an absolute stranger at Royce Hall on Friday night for the interview with Werner Herzog, I’m canceling my subscription. This has been a painful decision, given my lifelong love of newspapers. My first job, at age 14, was with the Atlantic City Press selling classified ads. (This was before every newspaper in the world was outwitted by a guy named Craig working out of his house. Craig now has all their classified ads. Now they’re Craig’s.) At various times in my young adulthood I was a reporter, an editor, or a freelancer. The paper, which ever paper it was, has always meant a lot to me. For 30 years, I’ve loved getting the paper off the lawn and reading it over my first cup of coffee.

But no more. I’m not interested in spending $350 a year to help Sam Zell make his mortgage payment — especially since he’s bankrupted the Times but not himself. And it makes me feel really stupid to spend that (or anything) while he’s shrinking the paper, and while 700,000 of us who buy the paper are subsidizing 12 million who are reading it all for free online. I think I’ll just join the freeloaders.

Will it be hard to give up? Probably, as with all addictions. But I’m going to wait until March 2nd. Because I’m sure that one glimpse of the new, anorexic and tubercular Times will convince me it’s time to remove life support.

…for only person in L.A. not to watch the Academy Awards once again goes to me.

Well, me and everybody else in our house.

I did just go online to read the news and there, among the news, were the results, so I know who won Oscars:  Everybody that everybody thought would win one. Except Mickey Rourke. So I saved three hours of watching Mickey Rourke not win an award everybody thought he’d win. That’s time well-spent.

I was delighted to see today’s New York Times editorial opposing a bailout of Chrysler (or, at least, admonishing caution). Chrysler, let’s remember, was purchased by Cerberus Capital Management; it’s not a public company in the way Ford and GM are. Cerberus made an investment — a bad one — and, to use the Times’ deftly chosen word, has a “cavalier” expectation of the public treasury saving them. Returns are rewards for risk well-made; bankruptcy should be the result of bad investments. Because while we’re at it, what’s to stop Daimler, the previous owners, asking for a do-over?

I feel somewhat differently about GM, which is such an enormous part of our economy that it may be hard-wired into the system. GM’s collapse would take down hundreds of thousands of other jobs in related industries — insurance companies, auto parts stores, uniform makers, and countless other suppliers. For the next 10 years, the U.S. economy would look like that last scene in “Planet of the Apes,” with all of us serving as Charlton Heston down on his knees pounding sand in the wasteland. Of course, that’s not to say that the next 10 years aren’t going to look like that anyway — but let’s do our best not to ensure that future.

So bad that the funeral business is dying.

Last night’s Sparks show at UCLA Live demonstrated again that new ideas keep you young. The band (or duo:  Ron and Russell Mael) has utterly changed its direction countless times in 22 albums over 39 years, resulting in what I’m starting to think is their best album of all, “Exotic Creatures of the Deep.” How passionate am I about this CD? I’ve mailed five copies to friends.

As with all acolytes to an arcane interest, Sparks fans are in it for keeps. An example:  KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt, had the Maels on his show, Bookworm, last week. Here’s that interview if you’d like to listen to it. You might note that the show is about books, and the Maels don’t write books, but that didn’t stop Silverblatt, who also said that he can overlook many things in people, but if they don’t like Sparks, that’s a deal-breaker.

(And while we’re on the subject, here’s a piece from Friday’s LA Times about the band and its quirky music.)