Category: Interviews

Jon Christensen interviews Malcolm Margolin

The Boom Interview

From Boom Winter 2014, Vol 4, No 4

Editor’s note: Malcolm Margolin doesn’t answer questions. He tells stories. Sitting down to talk with Malcolm is like settling into the shotgun seat of an old pickup truck. You know you’re in for a ride. You’re going to go places you’ve never been before, explore back roads and byways, stop in on some old friends, and sit and chat for a while.

Getting out of the office and deep hanging out—Malcolm says that’s his job as publisher of Heyday, which this year is celebrating forty years of publishing books on California. Looking back across four decades of Heyday’s backlist and perusing each beautiful new catalog as it comes out every season—the catalogs themselves tell stories—the gifts that Malcolm Margolin has brought California overwhelm any attempt to contain them. A new book appears about every two weeks.

As is his wont, Malcolm is moving on to find the next thing of beauty to bring back to Heyday and all of us. But before doing so, he sat down for a spell in Heyday’s Berkeley offices with Boom editor Jon Christensen to talk about books, publishing, and his California.

Jon Christensen: There will be a lot of people who will read this who haven’t, amazingly, heard of Heyday and Malcolm Margolin. So what is Heyday? Tell me a little bit about its mission and its history.

Malcolm Margolin: It wasn’t deliberate. I didn’t want to set up a publishing company. As I’m getting older, people are giving me credit for great vision, that forty years ago Margolin had a vision of a magnificent California publishing enterprise. He’s worked hard, and he’s fulfilled that vision. The vision that I had was wanting not to work for anybody. The vision I had was being free and independent. The vision that I had was getting through the week, and it’s been forty years of getting through the week. It’s been forty years of doing what’s been in front of me.

As for history, it started somewhere around ‘73 when I got fired from the East Bay Regional Park District. I turned thirty—I actually turned thirty three years before, but it took me three years to work on it. Houghton Mifflin gave me ten thousand bucks for a book that I’d written. I was a free man with money in my pocket, and I spent the next year hiking in the hills and looking around. I just took off and celebrated the amazing, incredible beauty of the world, the fact that I was free. I had thought that I’d been had. I thought that I was trapped. I thought that I was going to be a pawn in this whole society, that I’d be pushed around by forces beyond my control. But I got my hands on the steering wheel of my life, and I discovered it was a sports car, and that the freeway was leading to someplace that was utterly marvelous. I just stepped on the gas and I took off. I hiked around, and I wrote these marvelous thoughts about hiking in the East Bay, and I put them together in a book that I typeset and designed and put out. The book ultimately sold a hundred thousand copies. It’s called The East Bay Out.

I loved writing and I considered myself a writer. But I now discovered that I loved the physicality of putting the type down on the paper. Many years later, I met the poet and printer William Everson, and he was particularly eloquent on what it was to generate something out of your mind that never existed before, to create it, to put it on paper, to give it a physical form, and that physical form I loved. And I also ended up loving getting it out in the world. There was something about just writing a manuscript and giving it to somebody else that seemed so incomplete and unsatisfactory. It would be as if I was a writer and only did the verbs and let somebody else do the nouns.

The process of writing is getting something into somebody else’s mind, and I loved being part of that whole process, of getting it out into bookstores, and giving readings, of being part of the distribution, of being active in the world. And the whole business of sitting there writing, it was so lonely and so filled with delusion and so helpless, so dependent upon other people. But publishing was a way that I could be active. I could get something out in the world. I could ride that horse out into the meadows, into the valleys, into the mountains. I could explore things.

So its origins were to do one book and do it well. So then I did another book.

Christensen: And here we are with twenty-five books a year.

Margolin: Twenty-five books a year, a couple hundred events a year, a staff of about fifteen.

Christensen: How do you describe what Heyday is today and what its mission is today?

Margolin: The official mission statement has something to do with deepening people’s appreciation and understanding of the natural and cultural resources of California, and something about boundary-breaking ideas, and a lot of other shit like that. What I do is, I go out into the world. I go out into the world and I find beautiful things and I bring them back in here, and I bring them back in here to make the people that work on them beautiful. We don’t just shape the stuff that we work on. The stuff that we work on shapes us, and I’ve watched the people at Heyday be shaped by it, and I’ve watched it go out into the world to shape others.

Perhaps the real mission of Heyday is to create a beautiful place in which there’s joy, in which there’s creativity, in which there’s pride, in which there’s a soundness, in which there’s playfulness, and to see this spill over into the world at large. But, once again, it has to do with my being regional. It has to do with my being nearsighted. It has to do with my not being too good at systems. It’s the specificities that I go for, projects and people that I’ll bring into the office and astonish everybody, including myself.

Christensen: So that specificity and that regionalism, why California?

Margolin: Because I was here. If I’d been in Indiana, I would have been the best publisher in Indiana.

Christensen: Is there a California literature, or literatures?

Margolin: You know, going on my own experience—let’s not talk about Joaquin Miller. We could, but let’s not. Let’s talk about more recent times, and let’s talk about it from a publisher’s perspective.

Back East major and long-established publishers dominated the scene. When I came out West, it was swarming with little presses. When I started Heyday, in Berkeley alone there were dozens of them—Alta had Shameless Hussy Press, and John Oliver Simon had Aldebaran. Bob Callahan and Eileen Callahan had Turtle Island. Ishmael Reed had I. Reed Books. Don Cushman had Cloud Marauder. George Mattingly had Blue Cloud. Jerry Ratch had Somber Reptiles Press, a wonderful name for a press. There were these and so many more. And these were all enterprises that had grown up around personalities. And yet it was all invention. This was invented whole cloth. This was not a Houghton Mifflin. This was not a Harper & Row. This was something that sprung up at the spur of the moment, bursting with freshness and energy.

My wonderful friend, Ron Turner, had Last Gasp, with all these underground cartoonists, with Crumb and all these characters arising up. Printers like Clifford Burke were doing limited edition fine-art books. Ferlinghetti had just started publishing under the City Lights imprint. Stewart Brand did the Whole Earth Catalog. There was an inventiveness and excitement to it all. It was a snubbing of the nose at the proprieties and at the stuckedness of major publishing. I remember that Harper and Houghton and all these places were sending scouts out because something was happening out here. They didn’t quite understand what it was, and they sent scouts to see what they could find out.

But there was something about this self-invention, and there was something about the looseness of this whole thing, that I think gave rise to the Lou Welches, to the Richard Brautigans, to the Gary Snyders, to the Maxine Hong Kingstons, to the Ishmael Reeds, to the James Houstons and Ray Carvers, to the Bob Hasses, to all these people that created Western literature, and I’m not sure they could have created it back East. I’m not sure that that rigid structure would have allowed that sort of thing. And this goes back to the Gold Rush days, when California was cut off from the East, and it created its own literature. It created its own magazines. There were wonderful magazines back then, and there was something in that self-creation that made it different, it made it more accessible, it made it more vibrant and more connected to the people, to the place around here.

From Take me to the River: Fishing, Swimming, and Dreaming of the San Joaquin by Joell Hallowell and Coke Hallowell. Courtesy Sally Adlesh.

Christensen: Describe for me this idea of the roundhouse model of publishing. It’s more than a book. What is it? Where did the idea come from?

Margolin: The idea came from the sad experience of doing books that would go out into the world and not work very well. Splendid books that would have such a short lifetime, like a mayfly that just kind of flutters around briefly and then disappears. But whatever the sales, doing books is a wonderful way of organizing ideas. The doing of the book brings out greatness in people that do them. The editing process, the design process, the commitment of the publisher, they’re all tremendously valuable. Once it gets out into the world—or maybe doesn’t get out into the world—there’s often disappointment, regret, and apology.

And, despite the explosive growth of digital publishing, for many kinds of books the commercial vehicles for distribution are attenuating—there is this shriveling of opportunity. There has to be some other way of getting stuff out into the world. And what we deal with are ideas, and what we deal with are emotions. I’m an emotion junkie. I’m not an intellectual. I’m an emotion junkie, and Heyday is an emotional place. When somebody comes in with something beautiful, the staff will spend a lot of time talking about the core of beauty that it has, the core of meaning that it has. What is it that the world has to know, and how do we get it out? And we’ll get it out through multiple channels. So there’s the book, there’s the events, there are the museum shows we originate, the alliances we form with other cultural and environmental organizations, there’s the fact that the roundhouse doesn’t just support itself by sales. It has donors. It has foundations that support us. We’re a community center, and I love it when people come into this place. There’s a porosity to this place. People just come wandering in and they find things. We have a marvelous archive. People are furthered by it all. If people need advice, they’ll come to us for advice. They’ll come to us for connection. It’s a social center. I think the bookstores of the future are not going to be bookstores. I think they’re going to be community centers. I think they’re going to be intellectual centers. I think they’ll be replacing universities—not for professional training but more as refugia for the life of the mind. I think they’ll be clubs. I think there’s something else that people are hungry for, and it’s that sense of community. It’s a place that exists on real friendship.

The first law of publishing is you don’t deal with anybody you don’t like, and the second law of publishing is anything that gets you out of the office is good, that you don’t find truth in the inbox. You just get out into the world. And there’s something about being out in this world, in multiple platforms, in multiple forms.

From Vital Signs by Juan Delgado and Thomas McGovern. Photograph by Thomas McGovern.

You know, we do twenty-five books a year, so every two weeks or so, another book comes back from the printer. Anna will bring me a copy of the book, or Diane will bring me a copy of a book when it comes. I’ll take a look at it. I’ll admire it. I’ll compliment everybody on it. I’ll heft it. I’ll look at the price of it. I’ll think about it. I’ll put it aside. I’m proud of it. I’m proud of the quality of it. I’ll stand by it proudly but I may never look at it again. What I love is the social network that created it, the artist, the editor, the writer, the people that criticized it, the conversations that were around it, what formed the idea. What I love is what comes out of it all: the radio shows, the reviews, the sales, the publicity. If the book were to disappear, if there were to be no book but everything else were intact, there would certainly be a loss, but what remains would still be of immense value.

Christensen: The roundhouse idea comes from the Native American communities you’ve been involved with and publishing with, and the roundhouse is a kind of community center.

Margolin: The roundhouse is a community center. It is a multipurpose community center. It’s a church. It’s a university. It used to function as a hotel, and in some places as a recreation center. In the old days, when it was built, people would come from different places. They would help construct the place that corresponded to where they were coming from. There were seating arrangements in those old places, where you would sit in a precise place that defined your relationship to the society around you. Maybe your clan and my clan have reciprocal undertaking arrangements. We bury your dead; you bury our dead. Where we would sit in the roundhouse would reflect this relationship.

Where you would sit was the physical manifestation of the community. There would be a center post, and that center post was a living entity. Those center posts had memories. The center posts had intelligence. The center post was a living thing. And when you were next to that center post, you had to speak the truth, and if you didn’t speak the truth, then terrible things would happen to you, because that center post had the power to do that sort of thing. There was something in that place where you would come to tell the truth.

When you go into those old roundhouses, the light is always the same. There’s a fire going on. There’s a fire there. People are sitting around waiting for a dance. When you go into those old roundhouses, it’s the sense that this is the permanent world. The rest of the world, the birds and trees and rivers and cities, it’s just an illusion, that this round space is the center of the world. It’s always been there, it’s eternal and it’s immortal, and this is what’s holding the whole thing together. It is the most beautiful kind of thing.

Christensen: What’s interesting is that the roundhouse has to be rebuilt. It’s a permanent place, but it has to be rebuilt every generation.

Margolin: There was that story that my Miwok friend, Dwight Dutschke, told me, of how a roundhouse has to be built so that it will collapse every twenty years, so that every generation will have the experience of rebuilding it. And what he said was, if you want to build a roundhouse that will last, there’s one method of doing it. If you want a culture that will last, there’s something else you have to do. It was built for that kind of transmission.

I once did the most marvelous study of Indian pedagogy, of how people learn things, and how knowledge was preserved in this world before books, before writing, how you preserve sacred text, how you preserve technical knowledge, and the various means by which knowledge was embedded in things and people, and that marvelous Indian way of knowing. There’s a different way of knowing that they have. The stories that they have of how buckeye is married to rattlesnake and gives birth to grizzly bear, and all those stories that are so completely incomprehensible to us, they preserve wonderment. They don’t preserve knowledge. They preserve wonderment. They preserve relationship. They teach us our place in the world and they define attitude. They’re laid over the world like a blanket, to give it meaning, to give it texture, to give it relationship, to give it magic, to bind opposites together. They don’t kill the magic in the world. The magic in the world is embedded in these stories, in those ways of seeing things, and there’s that wonderful sense that you get there, that the world is bigger than our capacity to understand it, that the world is inherently mysterious.

There’s that great story that Jaime de Angulo, a linguist and storyteller active in California during the first half of the last century, tells of being up in the Pit River country, talking to some old guy, and asking him about the creation of the world. And the guy says, “Well, in the beginning, it was coyote,” and Jaime says, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. In a nearby village they told me at the beginning, it was silver fox.” And this Indian says, “Well, there they say it was silver fox. Here we say it was coyote.” In Europe, you would have had a religious war in which three million people would have been killed to settle who the true creator of the world was. In this older California, they say it one way, we say it another way. What a marvelous world, a people so at home in it that they don’t need to cling to brittle illusions of certitude.

And the story goes on that Jaime tells. There’s a point in the creation—Bob Hass wrote a poem about this one. He got it from me, and he wrote a poem about it, and he garbled it in the most marvelous way that only Bob Hass has. In garbling it, he improved the part. But the guy says something like, “So, at one point in the creation, the world maker was about to do something, and he says, ‘I better not do this because what will people think?’” And Jaime says, “Wait a minute. There’s no people around. He’s creating the world. He can create any kind of world he wants, he can create any kind of people he wants. What do you mean, what will people think?”

And the Indian says, “You know, I always wondered about that. When I was a kid I asked my father about it, and my father said, ‘You know, I always wondered about that. When I was a kid, I asked my father about that.’” It’s a world in which there were questions that were being asked. It’s not a world that’s defined tightly. It’s a world where people recognized that the wonderments of being alive are so great, and the human intelligence is so limited, that all we can do is be in awe of it all. These stories pay homage to the wisps of knowledge that swirl around the great mystery, rather than try to nail the thing down and kill it.

From Edges of Bounty by William Emery. Photograph by Scott Squire.

Christensen: Your daughter, Sadie, says, “My overseas was here in California, visiting Indian country, places where you can imagine an alternate history to what we have now, perhaps even a history that should have been but isn’t.” What did she mean by that?

Margolin: We can give her a ring and find out what the hell she meant.

Christensen: Well, what are your thoughts about that?

Margolin: I think that that alternate history is a different way of looking at history. We look at Indians as a function of the dominant culture. They were a defeated people. They’ve been marginalized. They’re trying to regain their culture. But we contextualize it within our own dominant culture. We try to make them fit into our own narrative. It’s nothing more than continuing the conquest. When you get into an Indian perspective, you see something else. You see survival. You see change. You see transmission. You see evolution of things.

Let me see if I can get at this, because there’s something remarkable about that other perspective, when you see things in a different manner. We have a triumphalist view of history. It’s the triumph of the Western people that have come in. Indian history is not a triumphalist history. This is a different history. It’s a history of pain. It’s a history of humiliation. But it’s a history of greater victory. So we’ve got this character working for us now, named Vincent Medina. About two years ago, we had twenty local Indians that I invited to our office. We invited some foundation people to listen to them, and I wanted these foundation people to hear what the Bay Area Indians had to say about their world. Vincent is somebody who was twenty-six years old. He’s relearned the Chochenyo language from the wax cylinders that his ancestors had created in the 1930s, the last speakers of this wonderful language. They left behind some wax cylinders and some notes. He has relearned the language with utter fluency and utter grace.

So it goes around the table and Vincent is sitting there, and it comes to him and he says, “My name is Vincent Medina. I’m twenty-six years old. I’m Chochenyo Ohlone from this area. I know my language. I’m practicing my customs. I didn’t have the same experience as you people in this room. I’m younger than you. I grew up in a different age. I never experienced the brutal prejudice. I never experienced the hatred. I’m not filled with resentment and anger. I’m so grateful for everybody at this table for keeping things alive during such difficult times, but I want to let you know that I have my language, I have my culture, and I’m going to take it somewhere where it’s never been.”

And there was something marvelous in that statement. There’s something of a victory to that statement, and something in having resurrected something and kept it alive that’s such a different vantage point from our own history. There’s something in it that’s so rooted, that’s so emotional, so inconsequential to the culture at large, and yet so self-defined and central, in and of itself. I find that utterly beautiful, and I find going to these pockets of integrity, going to these places of memory, going to these places of emotion and attachment—there’s another history in there. There’s another way of seeing things in there, and leads me to a hopefulness.

Christensen: Describe for me deep hanging out, as a method.

Margolin: If you have to describe it, it’s hopeless. It comes naturally.

Christensen: What don’t we know about the rest of California?

Margolin: I’m not sure.

Christensen: Do I need to clarify who I mean by “we”? So it’s partly a question of what are the things that you think that we need to know about the rest of California, and by that “we,” I mean those of us who live in the cities, the Bay Area, Los Angeles. But maybe it’s the other way around, too. What don’t we know about each other?

Margolin: This is such a big and wonderful question. Some weekends ago, I went down to Southern California with Lindsie Bear, who runs the roundhouse. We stopped in at Sam Maloof’s house—Sam was a well-known furniture maker—to talk to these people about doing a book on Sam. And then we went off to the Morongo Reservation, where my wonderful friend, Ernie Siva, had a fundraiser for his Dorothy Ramon Learning Center. His aunt, Dorothy Ramon, was the last full speaker of the Serrano language, although Ernie speaks it, too. He has a center devoted to her, and this was a gala to celebrate the center.

We got up early the next morning in Banning and went out to the Mission Inn in Riverside and had breakfast. We then walked up to the street to this Mexican restaurant that has this outsider art in the backyard, magnificent sculptures. Each and every one of these was a self-defined world that somebody had made. Each was a world off the grid. And the capacities of people not to follow the agenda, to create their own worlds of great beauty is just, to me, an utter marvel. And maybe I see this as a publisher. Maybe people come to me only when they have great ideas or something unusual to say.

I think that what we don’t understand is the capacity of people for joy, for creativity, for lives of meaning and for lives of beauty, for lives of devotion to causes, and this great sincerity and this great integrity that people have around us. I’m always stunned by it. I’m always so moved by it. I’m always so moved by the loyalties of people, to their own culture. I’m so moved by the authenticity of the “Hapa” generation, of these mixed-bloods. Whether it’s Indian or Asian, it’s a crossover of people that are forging something new that means something to them. They’re not just taking their identity off the shelf. They’re creating new identities for themselves, and these people among us that are doing things that are so quietly creative and heroic.

And I think what we have to know is there’s been something in the general tone of the media that diminishes people, that diminishes our capacity for joy, that diminishes our capacity for political solution, that diminishes our capacity for competence in the world, that would present people as a race of incompetents that are addicted to toys and are greedy and are living in a world that’s deteriorating, too lazy, selfish, short-sighted, and greedy to be effective. I think you go around and there are people that are just so marvelous, the Mas Masumotos of the world, the people that are doing great things. And this is what I’ve been doing. I’ve been going off and meeting these people, and recording their stories, and they’re people I’m attracted to. I don’t know whether this is statistically widespread. These are the people I know.

From Scrape the Willow Until it Sings by Julia Parker. Photograph by Deborah Valoma.

Christensen: How many Californias are there, or how many should there be?

Margolin: The population is thirty-two million. You could say that there are thirty-two million Californias. But I think California has this reputation for self-invention. I think everybody is convinced they own California, and it’s such a flimsy concept. It’s such a undefinable concept. In 1849, a bunch of alcoholics sitting around a table in Monterey drew some lines around a map through places that they’d never been, and created this thing called California, and we’ve been stuck with it ever since. It’s not real. It’s not real. In no way does it conform to geography, culture, or anything else in the real world.

We’ve been doing a lot of work up in the Sacramento Valley. To some extent, parts of the Sacramento Valley are a culture area. You go up into the rice-growing areas up there, and there are people that live up there that are the most peculiarly traditional, conservative, optimistic people. They’re so inventive in their technology. They’re so forward-looking. And, at the same time, they’re so conservative in their social values. I don’t know how you make people like this. Bryce Lundberg and the Lundberg family, they’re just astonishing people. The people that have Sierra Brewery, the people that are out there on the farms—and this is a culture area, and I’m not sure how far it extends. The people that seem to live around Davis seem to have more of an organic, small-community sort of thing.

We did a lot of work down in what’s called the Inland Valley, and there it’s completely fragmented. Riverside has its own culture. San Bernardino has its own culture. Colton has its own culture. Fortuna has its own culture. Idyllwild has its own culture. In the Bay Area, Berkeley has absolutely nothing in common with Fremont. Fremont has absolutely nothing in common with Marin County. Marin County has absolutely nothing in common with San Jose. Nobody knows anything about what the others are doing, and yet we call ourselves the Bay Area. I don’t know how many Californias there are. You tell me.

Christensen: I argue that we’re one. We have one state.

Margolin: Well, maybe we can have one state. As a political entity, maybe we do have one state. There’s a great statement by Walter Lippmann, “Where all people think alike, no one thinks very much.” There’s something about these differences and dynamics that are so invigorating. So you think there’s only one California. How about less than one?

Christensen: At times it seems that way.

[Laughter.]

Margolin: Why stop at one? Why not continue?

Christensen: But it’s more of an argument, right? It’s an argument I’m making, about more than one California. I’m happy to entertain these ideas that there’s more than one California, or there should be more than one California, but if there are, I want them to be things that are useful for us to think with, or think about the California we have, rather than things that are destructive. I think that Tim Draper’s proposal for seven—

Margolin: —for six or seven Californias is idiotic.

Christensen: I think it’s destructive. It doesn’t help us think about the California we have.

Margolin: It’s completely destructive. It’s completely destructive. It assumes that unanimity is good. It assumes that homogeneity is good, and you end up having homogeneous groups, and this is good. And it’s one way of eliminating conflict, but with it comes no thinking. With it comes no progress. And we’re connected. The waters connect us. The air connects us. It’s all bullshit about California being an island. California is not an island. In California, the storms come in from the Pacific, the salmon come in from the ocean, the whales come down from the Arctic, the geese and the ducks come in from Siberia and Alaska, the people move throughout, the transmission—the air pollution comes from China. It’s always been part of the world, and this whole business of insulating something from the world is just absolutely—well, I can’t say I care for it very much.

So what are some of the changes you’ve seen since you’ve been in California? What do you think of California?

Christensen: I think perhaps the reason why I agreed to take on this foolhardy proposition of editing a quarterly magazine—and dedicating it to California in the world and the world in California—is that I’m trying to figure out this question. Or perhaps just keep asking it. I don’t know that I’ll ever figure it out, but it’s an interesting question to keep asking.

Margolin: So Jim Quay came by for lunch. He was head of the California Council for the Humanities, and for thirty years he would ask the question, “What does California mean?” He never found out. He never quite pinned it down. What I keep thinking about is that there’s been a major shift, that for the first time in our history, more people are born in this state than migrated in. For most of our history, people have come in as migrants, so they have left family and culture behind, they’ve come to a new place. They’ve come to reinvent themselves in some way. And there was something in that reinvention that I think defined California. It defined it in the Gold Rush, when some schleppy young farmer from New England with zits would come out here and suddenly take on another identity of Tennessee Joe, and take on a romantic past that created a new identity for himself.

I’ve created an identity for myself. This is not the kid that grew up in Dorchester. I left that person behind. And it’s a place where you could re-create yourself, and there’s something in that milieu that allows people to change, that creates something. There’s a dynamism to this culture that’s really great fun. Silicon Valley began here. Underground comics began here. A new type of music began here. There was something about the innovation of the place, it’s the innovation of people that are allowed to reinvent themselves, and maybe that’s what here.

Christensen: Thinking about this story of the ancient Polynesians setting out on boats to colonize Hawaii, packing seeds of things for the future, what would you pack for the future?

Margolin: For the future of Heyday or for the future of California? There’s a difference.

Christensen: Well, let’s take one and then the other, for the future of Heyday.

Margolin: The Rolodex. I’d pack the Rolodex.

Christensen: You still have one, actually.

Margolin: Yeah. I think the question is better than any answer I have. I think that a person lives on a body of values, and it lives on something. I think I would pack it into a theme song. I think I would pack it into an app, a kind of morning prayer, and the prayer would be for the capacity to take risks, the capacity to be open, understanding that this is not a dog-eat-dog world. It’s a kind world and to be kind to other people. I think it’s a body of values, that I would bring along. I think this is all that I have. I don’t have possessions. I don’t own a house. I don’t own anything. I own absolutely nothing that if I lost it, I would care about it. This is not just an idle Zen kind of comment. I think that if I was stripped of everything, I wouldn’t care. I just don’t care about these sorts of things.

I think what I have to offer is a kind of system of values, and it has to do with playfulness. It has to do with risk. It has to do with a desire to see other people happy. I love the happiness of the people that are here. I love to see them happy. I don’t want to dominate. I want people to be strong, and I want them to be in a position and place where people are thriving. There’s something about that, I think, I would end up capturing that in some kind of a poem, some kind of a song, where a sentence could repeat, and it wouldn’t be corrupted by time. These things tend to be corrupted by time, and I’m not sure how you keep that core that has not been articulated. I think that I would keep alive disgust with meanness and selfishness. People come in here with that kind of stuff and I just have no use for it. I just have no use for it. I just don’t see it here.

Christensen: What about for California?

Margolin: I think what you would end up packing for the future are environments. I think there are environments that need to be protected, and I think that what has to be protected is not the species that live on these places but the capacity of a place to change, the capacity of a place to be fruitful and fecund and healthy, and I think it’s the underlying health of a place that has to be preserved. And I think that great areas of land have to be taken into the future. I think that we have to preserve the limited waters that we have. I think for California, the future is in the natural resources that have to be preserved.

I would love to be able to preserve the literature of California. I once created something called the California Legacy Project over at Santa Clara University, to get that older literature out. Somehow, there’s been no cultural interest in it. There’ve been no courses in it. The state of the new, this worship of the new, nobody wants to read this Gold Rush stuff anymore. Nobody wants to read these marvelous works from the past. And somehow or other, I would like to see these preserved. I would like to see these memories preserved of what places were like, what the tonalities of people’s lives were like, what the hopes of the people that came here were, what their aspirations were, how these aspirations got molded and realized or obliterated. I think I would love to keep alive the lives of people.

I would love to see more deep hanging out. This art of deep hanging out, it’s not done too often. People have become like billiard balls on a table. They click against one another, and they bounce off into their separate worlds. I go into these Indian communities. I’ll go to somebody’s house. I’ll knock at the door and somebody will open the door, and this old woman will look at me—this has happened recently—and she’ll look at me and she’ll say, “Malcolm. How good to see you.” And you know you’re in for a three-hour visit, in which nothing much may get said, but you sit there for three hours and you absorb each other’s personality, and the bigness of their lives, the sadness of their lives, the humor of their lives, and this whole business of just getting to know one another. It’s so essential.

Buckled gypsum, from Saltscapes by Cris Benton.

From Boom Spring 2014, Vol. 4, No. 1

The Boom Interview: Richard Rodriguez

It’s hard to read Richard Rodriguez’s essays and books without feeling that there is something deeply Californian about them. Every one of his books—Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: Arguments with My Mexican Father, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, and Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography—takes place, at least in part, in California. Rodriguez has lived in California nearly all of his life. So what is it that now makes him say he once was but is no longer a California writer? There is something world-weary in the statement. Rodriguez has seen too much of the world in California, and perhaps too much of California in the world. At his writing table in his apartment in San Francisco, Rodriguez spoke with Boom about California’s soul, why he is no longer a California writer, what’s the matter with his hometown, San Francisco, these days, and love.

Boom: In your last book, Brown, and in your new book, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, you write about your friendship with the late Franz Schurmann and his book American Soul. Could one write about a California soul?

Rodriguez: I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I do think that I tended to read California as a Midwesterner. I had conflicting images of California. One was my uncle from India. The others were my parents from Mexico and the Irish nuns, to whom I dedicate Darling. They were almost all foreign people who had come to California.

But when I was a newspaper boy for the Sacramento Bee, everybody on that route or at least the majority, I would say, was from the Midwest. I would collect their subscription money—I think it was $2—every month. I would be at the door, and the lady would say, “Is it cold outside?” I said, “It’s freezing out here.” She said, “Oh, honey, that’s not freezing. If you want freezing, go to Iowa. This isn’t freezing. It’s a little chilly out here. Why don’t you wait in the hallway?” So I had an experience through her eyes.

So I guess I had a Midwestern soul as I was growing up, and a sense of relief for living here, but a sense of wonder, because I didn’t see snow until I was about twenty-two years old. I had never seen snow, except in the movies. The Central Valley of California got very hot, but it was also life giving—agriculture everywhere. You could smell the burning in the fields in the autumn, and at the State Fair at the end of summer, almost as a climax of summer before school started, there was a central pavilion, which of course was torn down, in which every county contributed agriculture. Tehama County. The agriculture products of Tehama—I don’t even know whether I’ve been to Tehama County even to this day—were beautifully displayed. It was so beautiful to see that California, that benevolent California, and even a place like Los Angeles was contributing lemons to the fair, you know. You didn’t see Lana Turner. You saw lemons. I knew that I was related to that place. And the Sacramento Bee used to have on Saturday a special section with agricultural news. It was called “Superior California,” and I did not understand what that was, whether it was superior in the sense that we were better than other Californians or what. I found out later from my brother it just meant Northern California.

Well, did I have a California soul in those years? I guess I did. When I came to Los Angeles, which I discovered after having been in London, I discovered a city that suited me. It suited me in the sense that I liked all of it. I found its architecture reminded me of Sacramento a great deal, and somebody would tell me, “Well, this little house, this little bungalow cost $2 million.” I would find it amusing. It’s like the bungalow I grew up in, except once you went inside, of course, they tarted it all up and so forth.

LA seemed to me both the combination of something I knew in Sacramento and then not. And the not was Mexico. It was filled with Mexico. Mexico was teeming around me. And the people, you know. Coming out of a breakfast in Santa Monica, this skinny kid would come up to me and start talking Spanish and say he just arrived. He would ask me for impossible directions. I had no idea how to get to Tarzana. I didn’t even know where Tarzana was, because my LA was so limited. And then in the middle of all this kind of blond, bleached, muscular, exercised, gaudy, glamorous Santa Monica, there was this kid who was desperate. I couldn’t manage it. I didn’t know how to relate to him.

And then LA became more and more a city that in my imagination became more Mexican and more a desert city. I felt the proximity of desert. By that, I mean metaphorically desert, a city of want.

The other California was Asian, and I feel that profoundly now in San Francisco. I don’t know whether I’ve satisfactorily accommodated myself to Asia. I was talking to a mathematician last night about his students. He’s a university professor. And he said 80 percent of the students in his math classes are Asians. And I said, “Why? What is that? Is it linguistic? Is there something about learning Mandarin that allows you to decipher mathematics more easily? Why don’t I have that?” And he said, “Well, I think I am seeing first-generation immigrants. I think I am seeing kids who are coming with such a sense of urgency to California that they will do anything. They don’t fall asleep in my classes. They want to do more than I give them.” I said, “But that’s not an answer. There are a lot of first-generation immigrants around. There are Russians. There are Mexicans galore. Brazilians. There are Chechens. What are you telling me, that they’re first generation? That doesn’t tell me anything.” I think the ambition of Chinese California is so lavish that it just dwarfs anything that we dreamt of as Gold Rush people. It is just this magnificent place.

Toward the end of his life, Franz Schurmann was of the opinion that America was in decline, but the American dream was quite alive. I saw an interview with a Vietnamese shopkeeper in San Jose once. His English was not very good, but because his shop was the shop that sold the winning Lotto number, he got a million dollars. The people who won the Lotto didn’t come. They didn’t want to be filmed, but he was more than willing to be filmed. And the state officials put “million dollar winner,” or something, on a big banner outside. And they asked him, “Does the American dream exist?” And in Franzian tones, he said, “Yes, yes. I am the American dream.”

Well, I think to myself, there is that. But you have a little Saigon in Orange County. And maybe in a generation, it won’t be the case, but there is still the memory of tragedy so intense that it feels to me different in tone than the experience of Midwestern California that I experienced as a child. People who came from Kansas were not leaving, generally, tragedy behind. They were coming for a softer winter. That is very different from coming from a civil war where your father was killed, being a boat person off the coast of Southeast Asia. That experience of tragedy, of losing is just not characteristic of the California that I grew up in, and it feels more Mexican to me in the sense that you come here out of desperation, not to become a movie star, but to pick grapes.

I remember talking to these Mexicans at a really fancy house. Friends of mine up in Napa. They have a vineyard. And I just went wandering around one day, started talking to these Mexican guys about their lives. Their California was so basic and so unromantic. Even though they loved the landscape around them, and they thought this place, these vineyards were really beautiful, and they worried about the weather, they worried about the season; they did not, most of them, admit to drinking very much wine. They drank beer more easily. They recognized that they were within a culture, this kind of Tuscan California that was built by the very wealthy.

Once I went to the Mondavi mansion—it was on top of a hill—and the living room is a swimming pool. It’s an Olympic-size swimming pool. And I thought why not? And I said to him, “This really is the most unusual house I’ve ever seen. This makes Versailles look like Potter’s Field”. And he said, “You know, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t enjoy your life to the full.” Well, there’s every reason. He was elegant and European, even though I think he was American-born, Robert Mondavi, but he was wealthy enough to indulge fantasy. And the thing about California, about this landscape, because it is so moderate a climate, is that you can build anything on it, and you can build a castle. You can build a pyramid. You can build anything on this landscape and it takes it.

And then it does take it, if you don’t take care of it. I gardened as a kid. As a teenager, I worked with this guy. Jan was his name. I liked the sexual ambiguity of his name. Jan was a woman’s name to me, but there he was. This is a young man. I thought he was an old guy. He must have been late thirties, early forties. I had worked with him on weekends and summers till my mother said I couldn’t, because I was getting so dark-skinned, and it just terrified her, the harshness of nature. But he would take his shirt off. The sun was out, and Jan would take his shirt off. He had a wonderful torso in that fifties sort of way, but just naturally muscular. But there were these spots on his shoulders. And I didn’t know about skin cancer. I mean, I knew but I didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to appraise his skin. I didn’t know whether he was too light-skinned to be doing this to his skin. He would get very dark in the summer, a reddish brown. The last time I saw him in Sacramento—this was many years ago, but his skin had just turned to a kind of—it turned into my wallet. And then I knew that California would take its toll. And California would not forgive. And California would remember everything you did in the sun, as it reminds me. There is nothing you did that day, carefree you in the California sun, that California doesn’t remember.

So did I live in California? Yes. But I don’t know which one, and I’ve lived in several, and now I live in the Chinese city that’s populated with kids who are making billions of dollars by distracting us from our reality. So, yes.

Boom: Do you think of yourself as a California writer?

Rodriguez: No, I don’t think so anymore. I used to.

I have almost no relationship to Los Angeles, for example. I have friends in LA, and I go to LA. I had a good time in LA. But I have no relationship to the city anymore. It just seems either uninteresting to me or uninterested in me, which might be the same thing. So, for example, I’ve never lectured at UCLA. I’ve never lectured at USC. I’m giving a lecture on Darling at Loyola University in February. It’s very rare. It almost never happens. I haven’t been on an LA radio or TV station for twenty years. So I don’t exist in that city.

Darling has had all of its success on the East Coast. It’s really quite amazing. I don’t have any relationship to LA. It just doesn’t exist for me. It doesn’t exist in my life. So that if I get an invitation for an interview, it’s usually Boston. Or Providence, Rhode Island, will review Darling, or Buffalo, New York, will review Darling, and not Seattle, not Fresno, not San Diego. And the LA Times is tepid.

So if you ask me about LA, I just don’t belong there anymore. I know that sounds petulant but it’s just I’m more often in New York than I am in LA now, and I live a lot of my imaginative life in London, for whatever reason. I’m in London a great deal. And I’m very much interested in the death of Europe, the reverse of Europe right now. When I come back to America, this country seems exhausted. I think this war between the conservatives and the liberals is just deadly. It’s the death rattle.

I think what changed me, too, and what made me an old man was AIDS. I helped a lot of guys die in those years, a lot of guys. So I really got burned out. There are characters in some British novels who survived the First World War and who end up walking in Piccadilly, and they’re in the swim of the crowd, but they’re wasted. They’re just not there. I went through a period like that after that many deaths. I couldn’t go to a funeral. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do all of that anymore. But I could do some things. I knew when to call your mother and when to say this sounds like it’s going to be tonight, and if you’re going to come, you should come now. I knew that. I knew how to give you morphine, not to give you too much, but give you enough. I knew how to hold your hand. I knew what to say to you. I knew how to make you less afraid.

Well, from all of that, even now in this city—I’m going to start crying, but even now, I can’t go to certain places in the city without thinking, “Oh, that’s where Tom or that’s where Will spent that last year,” or hospitals, so many hospitals.

When my parents died a few years ago, it was nothing. It was like the coming of autumn. It was the most normal experience. But to see that much youth cut down. And the celebration of hedonism sort of ended in California that way. That really did change a lot of things, and I became very, very tragic. That whenever I would see this car crash, two kids die, I thought, oh, there’s youth cut down again.

Even now in the Castro District. I go to this gym in the Castro. There’s death everywhere for me there. It’s really treacherous. I have to be really careful not to walk by it too much, but it’s there, and so that was my California too. And I met people from all over the world in those years who thought they had come to paradise. That motif—that we had found a place of bliss and freedom with a temperate sky—was so large in my rendition of California. I grew up in a destination for so many people, and so many of those people I knew had died. It really changed a great deal. I can’t say too much about that, because it really was profound, but at a level in which it sounds maudlin to say it now, you know?

Boom: Yes. When you travel around the world and tell people you’re from California, how do they react now?

Rodriguez: Oh, they still react with a great deal of interest. California is its own country. It’s its own mythology. I saw a survey recently of young teenagers in China and the place in America they would most want to visit. And Mountain View was on top.

My closest friend was once the mayor of Mountain View. She was really wonderful. There’s a little street by the city hall named after her, and she loved Mountain View. It was just at the point in which Mountain View was becoming Mountain View. She came from Long Beach, and she was passionate about kids at Crittenden, the junior high school where she was a teacher and a counselor. That was the same school that Steve Jobs went to, but Steve Jobs was so overwhelmed with the sense of black and brown at Crittenden that he got his parents to move him out of the school. They moved to Los Altos. Steve Jobs the great cosmopolite, the great internationalist, could not deal with brown and black California in Mountain View.

Well, Marcie, my friend, taught there, and she loved those kids. She was a real Californian. So when I see someone say that’s the place they want to go to, I think, “Oh, I misjudged Mountain View. It’s really that interesting.” I guess, in a way, it is interesting that all of that happens there.

I go to the gym and I come back to my apartment about 6:30, and as I get to these neighborhoods, the big buses are going by. They’re dark-windowed and very, very gleaming buses going to the suburbs. That already is interesting that there are kids of the suburbs who made huge fortunes in the suburbs who would prefer to live in the city, even one that’s as false as San Francisco, as unreal as San Francisco. And at some expense of their time, they are taking these buses. Presumably, they are wired in these buses, so they can work. And there is no destination on the marquee of the bus. It’s just floating through these neighborhoods.

Boom: A lot of people seem very concerned about the change that those buses signal in San Francisco. Do you share those concerns?

Rodriguez: No, because I’ve always loved wealth. I’ve loved being around it. And if I knew you were wealthy, I would have made friends with you in grammar school. I knew the house where Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan lived in Sacramento, because I played there. I knew those people. I knew all the people on that block. They went to school with me. My trick was to know your mother, because I knew that if I ingratiated myself to your mother, if I was very polite, if I was invited to lunch or dinner, remarked on how good the lunch was, that she’d invite me back. She’d say, “Who is that nice little boy?” And the kid was not interested in me, with two exceptions. There’s one kid who died of an oversized heart. He taught me to listen to Frank Sinatra. I thought that’s what rich people listened to, because he loved jazz.

I love rich people, and so I love them at the market, these impossibly beautiful Indian women who obviously have money. The way I used to go to the food market in Brentwood and I would love seeing rich people shopping. The way I would watch Fred Astaire walking up to communion. It’s just interesting how they deal with it, their impatience standing in lines, their bratty children, their beauty, their anxieties, their loneliness, their glamour, the sound of their car doors shutting, which doesn’t sound anything like my Honda. It interests me. It’s like living in London in the eighteenth century, a place of people with such enormous wealth living among people who don’t have that wealth.

Look at the lines of people when there’s a Lotto of any magnitude. This is my American character. I’m not threatened by great wealth. I’m interested in it, not that I will have it for myself, not that I even want it, though I have a lot of charities that I’d like to give money to. I don’t have enough money. But there’s so much want. Gosh, just so much, and so many food banks, so many libraries and teachers and organizations, school districts that don’t have anything, scholarship funds.

And then when I see somebody go buy a Lamborghini or a Bentley—I saw this woman in a Bentley the other day, caught in traffic as I was, and she was distracted. And when a beautiful woman is distracted, she can be even more beautiful. But I thought, oh, I wonder where she’s been or where she’s going, and that interested me. And I was happy to live in this city. I was happy to live in the city.

You know, there is a Virginia Woolf novel, Mrs. Dalloway, where the main character is walking up Bond Street, and a royal goes by in a Rolls Royce, and she only sees the arm holding the little support by the window. And there’s speculation about who it is, a prince, princess, or even indeed the king, and the traffic sort of gives way. Well, when I see these buses, I know they don’t live in my world, and yet they do. I mean, they live up the block, and so, of course, it interests me.

I walk home from the gym, up Fillmore, and for two blocks, we’re in the projects. And for one block where there is a police station, there is also a congregation of young males, black males, and obviously drug traffic. And the persistence of white gentrification is such now that white people walk through this like it doesn’t exist. It’s really thrilling to me that the people can be that oblivious and protectedly oblivious too. You don’t make eye contact with these people.

But the other day, there was a shootout. This was at four in the afternoon, on a Saturday afternoon. A kid was dragged out of a car, and he ran. And then right in front of a restaurant—we’re getting just to the edge of gentrification—here were gunshots. I was petrified. I didn’t even think to go behind a telephone pole. I was just watching—bang, bang, bang! And then he runs toward the Safeway parking lot. By that time, the police sirens are sounding, four in the afternoon, a clear, bright day. The odd thing about the sound of the gunfire is that it brings out people. It brings out kids. They’re suddenly coming out of the projects to see what’s going on, whereas, the old people, are going into the coffee shop to get away from it all. The kids make a run for it, and the cops chase after them. This is within two minutes of the event.

One kid, as he’s running away, sees me watching, and we hold each other’s glance for a second. It is really intense, and then he runs past.

I live in that. I live along that Fillmore too, and then in three or four blocks, normalcy has established itself. Within five blocks, we are safely within the yuppie precinct, and it is impossible that that just happened. That’s very interesting to me.

You know, one of the things that is happening in the world right now is that increasingly people are going to restaurants that are in dangerous neighborhoods. In Tijuana, Mexico, for example, there’s a new, very experimental, kind of nouveau something in neighborhoods that I would consider too dangerous to go to. And there are beautiful people going to those restaurants. I do not understand. My nephew, who has a number of restaurants in Oakland, he’s a great believer in being edgy and taking good food to the edge of safety. I don’t know what that is. I find it really interesting.

The relationship of sexuality to criminality, I lived with for many years until we became legal. But the relationship of food now to criminality is really interesting to me, and the proximity of those two realities in our lives is interesting. At the same time that food is advertised as being extremely healthy and in portions that are not overwhelming, there is this possibility that you’ll be killed when you go back to your car.

Boom: Your new book, Darling, is filled with love, as the title implies. What has been California’s role, San Francisco’s role, in changing how we think about love?

Rodriguez: Well, the City of Love. We replaced Philadelphia briefly. Come to San Francisco for the eternal summer.

I want to say several things.

When I wrote Brown, I was quite struck with how much lovemaking there is in America that never gets described. Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson and their descendants cannot be buried to this day in the Jefferson family plot. I mean, we are given American history, and we are told this is American history, but it’s a compilation of hatred, of these wars, of that disagreement, of that shooting, that assassination. That’s American history. The Civil War, those young men dead in Gettysburg.

Then there will be these family stories about a love affair, and you will see these people, this Italian immigrant sitting in a family of black people in North Carolina, and you wonder who in the hell is he. Where did he come from? How does he work? Well, in my family, this blond lady starts showing up at our family Christmases who is always with my uncle’s nephew. He’s very political in San Francisco. I know that. And my first vision of him was with an Adlai Stevenson tie. And then I find out that they got married. And that woman, the blond lady, is there in the middle of all these Mexicans and Indians because—my mother’s words in Spanish—they fell in love. And I realized what this explosive thing is, this love. This takes you places where you never know where you’re going.

So I know there is something brewing in me, this little emotion brewing in me, which can get me killed, you know, if I ask the wrong guy, if I say to the wrong guy, you know, “I’d like to be your friend.” So you learn not to say anything.

It becomes almost this story that just shatters me, because you would hear these people, a little church in South Carolina that gets burned down, the minister and priest, and they all gather around. We talk about hate crimes. I think to myself why don’t we talk about love crimes in America, how people are killed for falling in love, or how people are destroyed because they fall in love, how people are put in jail for falling in love, how even glancing at her for a black man could get you lynched in America, you know. Let’s talk about love crimes. That’s what I want to say first of all about love, just how explosive it is and how unruly.

And I guess what I want to say now in the world is that I don’t understand a lot of what goes on. I remember as an altar boy—because I used to go to lots of funerals and lots of weddings, what I knew as an altar boy in my Catholic church, a beautiful church, still is—was that if the groom or the bride weeps during the service, it will usually be the groom. It will not be the bride. What I also knew at funerals is that if anybody weeps at a funeral, it will be several rows back. It usually won’t be in the front row, because they had to clean the shit, and they know what a blessing death is.

Anyway, I guess what I feel right now is there is this enormous disconnect between men and women in our society. And what I was struck by at an early age as a young man in Los Angeles and then in Northern California is the fact that at a time in which there was this gay liberation going on and my gay friends told me about all this sex they were having, it was kind of a carnival. I wasn’t having any. Men were not interested in what I was selling, but women were, and I developed a number of relationships with women, two of which were sexual, but all of which were very deep—the darling in the book in Los Angeles being one of them. Many of these women were married. A number of them had been married several times or divorced, and there was a relationship that we had, a sardonic gay man with a thrice-married divorcee, that was really interesting, partly because we regarded men with some chagrin and partly because—a lot of my straight friends will say, “Well, the reason you knew so many women was because you were free of this animal urge,” you know, that we could be friends. We could have conversations. We could look in each other’s eyes and not seduce each other into a hotel room. I think there was some of that, but surely, I would say to my friends that you have that relationship with a sister. You are not driven by a sexual urge—or with your mother, presumably, although Freud might disagree. But I think there was always that odd relationship, and it’s one that we satirize as we were the interior decorators that they would call upon to decorate their houses because their husbands didn’t care, and we would furnish their houses, or we would cut their hair, the salon in Beverly Hills, or we would take them to lunch. Nancy Reagan had one, you know, because we would amuse them. We could tell them stories when their husband had nothing to say.

I developed quite early this relationship with women, so that I began to hear these stories about their unhappiness, and increasingly, this ambition to be Ms., to be judged not as somebody’s wife or even as somebody’s mother, just to be judged in a civic life as my own woman. And it really did lead me to the conclusion, which now I believe, that my emancipation came from women—came from heterosexual women, that the suffrage movement in Europe, which extends into the early twentieth century in America, the desire of women to leave the parlor and to march down the great streets of Europe and America to demand the vote, demand in the public realm equality with a male is astonishing, because here are women who do not want to be, as they’re going to a ballot box, somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother. They may be both, and that may be the motive in their vote, but they are being judged as essentially a woman in their own right. That freedom it seems to me preexists the gay liberation movement, which is casually and stupidly referred to as the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, which were a wonderful sort of refusal to kowtow to the police and to demand the freedom of one’s own leisure in the night. But the decision of women to seek out freedom in the city apart from their relationships at home, I think it’s the beginning of something that is really quite astonishing.

And that taught me to see that the women I knew as my teachers, the nuns, who were as covered up as Arabic women now—never saw their arms, never saw their hair, never saw their necks, they were completely covered—that was their freedom. And when they begin to emerge in nineteenth century Europe, they are the first women who are allowed to do that, precisely because they are like this. The burka becomes their freedom essentially, and they are able to open hospitals, run hospitals, open schools. When they come to San Francisco, they are able to do things that no one can do. And the local anti-Catholic newspaper says, “We don’t want you here. You’re whores.” What are they doing here? They are sleeping at the back of St. Patrick’s Church on Mission Street because there is no place for them. They are remembered on the north side of the State Capitol. There is a monument to them, those Sisters of Mercy. These were vulnerable women, and the only reason for their decline is they became influential, and they essentially created generations of women, like my mother, who would follow them, who would become educated—my mother didn’t—but who would get jobs outside of the family, who would learn skills, who would in the end, as my mother did, earn more money than their husbands and so forth.

You can sort of mute the power of love, but when it explodes, it explodes, and it is really something, really something.

The dynamic of male-female relationships is so strained now by that assurance that women have in the world, even when it’s a job at Walmart that nonetheless pays more than the unemployed husband is getting right now. It already establishes a dynamic that we haven’t worked into mythology of what a family feels like or looks like. I think that what women are doing right now feels like a negativity that’s moving away from marriage, but you asked me about love, and there is an Israeli writer who I quote in the book who says, “You know, if God had come to Sarah saying, ‘Give me your firstborn son. I want to kill him,’ rather than to Abraham, she would have said, ‘No way. There’s no way you’re going to take my kid to do whatever you are going to do on top of a mountain.'” A woman came up to me on Temple Square in Utah, in Salt Lake City, and she knew me from television. She wanted to talk about having a gay son, and she said, “You know, the church teaches me that God loves everything.” It is a desert religion and the patriarch is there. “But then they want me to disown my son,” she said, “I won’t do it.”

What I hear increasingly from women is this antagonism toward religion, what they called the patriarchal religions of the desert, and I am quite interested in that. What I am increasingly interested in is just the unruliness of love and how surprising it is, how unexpected, and how dangerous it is. I still think now that what love is, is so strong that we better get out Valentine cards and candy. We better put it at a distance, because it is really, really strong, and you give a society reasons to be distracted, easy sex, pornography, fast cars, and you can sort of mute the power of love, but when it explodes, it explodes, and it is really something, really something. That’s what I think about love.

I think last of all, to understand this in the churches, I think they preach love all the time, but they have no idea what they are proposing. I remember the nuns used to warn us when we were little kids about the danger of mixed marriages, by which they meant marrying a Methodist or something. But then one could fall in love with someone not of one’s kind, you know. That was in some way even more likely. So I’m walking up J Street—I must be about ten years old—with this secret looming in my chest that I am in love with the wrong sex, and I see this black man walking—this is in the late 1950s—hand-in-hand with this woman, this blond lady, who is really white. I mean really white and buxom. And I know enough to know that this is not safe. No one is going to lynch him in Sacramento, I think, but I want to protect them, because I know that this thing that they are doing is really risky. And there is California all around, you know, and we are all continuing on our way. Wow! California story.

So there are streets now in Irvine where there are children—children being born all over California, all over the world—who don’t have a race and who belong to several races, and faces now in California that are so enchanting for being indescribable, unattributable. Yeah, that’s pretty good. California cuisine. Pretty good.

Notes

This interview was conducted and edited by Jon Christensen.

Portraits of Richard Rodriguez by Timothy Archibald. © TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD.