I know, it’s been like a hundred years since my last post. Well, as promised, I’m back and it’s only because I did finish my second book, Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned From My Mother’s Recipe Box. It’s a memoir with recipes, illustrated by me and coming from Counterpoint Press this November, 2013.

It’s about a mother’s stifled desires, a daughter’s realized dreams, cooking and life through multiple California generations. While you wait for that in your local bookstore or at your favorite online bookseller–and might I recommend Barnes & Noble–you can visit youtube for a clip of me reading from Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (with recipes) and my guest spot on public radio in front of a live, paying, laughing audience on Sedge Thomson’s West Coast Live.

If that’s not enough, and you want to start putting your own creative thoughts to paper or online, come join me this fall for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program course Getting Started: A Beginning Workshop for Aspiring Creative Writers. We’ll meet on campus Wednesday nights from 7 to 10 p.m., starting October 2 through November 6, for 6 sessions. Go to their online catalog for more information or to register and maybe next time you come visit there’ll be a clickable link waiting.

Hey, I’ve missed you, too, and it would be great to see you there! And if you’re looking for something to read before class starts, here’s a piece I did for Arroyo less than a hundred years ago. Enjoy!

PHANTOM GARDEN SYNDROME

When I think of the garden I left four years ago when we sold our Glendale home, many images come to mind, including the annual spring freesia festival, bigger every year as the bulbs established themselves in both the terraced front and back. There were also the orange Clivia, the western redbud next to the Ceonothus’ electric-blue blooms, the wild blue iris and the heart-melting sight of the Texas dawn bougainvillea that colonized the boxwood lining my entry stairs. And I can’t forget, though I wish I could, the climbing ice berg rose lolling about the upper pergola, offering a graceful,impossibly romantic branch as though it were a French courtesan’s arm, what I called my Fragonard bower, and underlying that was the yellow Lady Banks rose, like a popcorn blanket laid comfortingly across the top of the pergola. The pergola was built to take in the “view shed,” as my landscape designer called it, or “killer” view as Sunset Magazine dubbed it. And leaving those views and that enchanted space was hard, but necessary and ultimately for the best.

It would have been harder, though, had the jacaranda tree ever bloomed in the two years it was planted at the top of the garden. The plan was that from my home office, where I was supposed to be cultivating a lush writing career, I’d take comfort in its backlit splendor as the overly demanding elder house and seductive young garden continued to drain my energy and attentions and my writing withered from neglect.

I realized that I’d buried too much of myself in the garden the spring I felt the only thing I had to look forward to that year was the Jacaranda’s bloom. It was with Herculean effort I broke the bonds of enchantment, moved to a less taxing address near wilderness that needed no maintenance from me, and filled a patio with potted darlings, a collection appropriately sized to the attention I could in good conscience grant them, while I got some other things done.

But I am surprised to find the extent to which I miss my lost paradise still. There are mornings I wake to a fresh ache of familiar longing and it’s the jacaranda I never saw in bloom with its lavender flowers and lacy green leaves gracing my mind’s eye. Of all the miraculous things I did see, it is the imagined garden of the never was that lingers.

And I’m not alone in my phantom garden syndrome. My friend Jack was working in Washington, D.C., when he and wife Jane bought an old Virginia farm on which he planted an entire orchard of carefully chosen heritage apples. Business and family concerns called them back to California before they sampled a single fruit born of all that effort. Now he buys exquisite heritage apples at a market in the city where he works and I have multiple jacarandas in astonishing bloom in my new neighborhood, so neither of us is lacking in certain aspects of our original desires. Still, we both carry in our minds the visions never fully realized.

My friend Sean has left multiple jacarandas behind over the years as he’s moved in the good-school-for-the-kids quest that so many parents do. Indeed, he’s left behind a grove of flowering trees he’s never seen in full glory, including multiple Chinese Flame trees and a eucaplyptus that’s grown to 25 feet in someone else’s care, all planted in an effort at “redressing neglected landscapes,” he writes from his current abode, where the garden is a potted, more easily transported one. We both now realize the need for gardens that may have to move along. The upside of a potted garden: The soil is less a concern, and the results are easier to control and rearrange.

I know from my friend Rosemary that garden memories can last a lifetime. Forty years out and enjoying a hydrangea filled terraced hillside in the Bay Area, she still thinks of the al fresco dining garden surrounded by flowering shrubs and artfully placed Japanese maple she installed in a blank space accompanying a newly built townhouse in Highgate, North London. She thinks fondly now of what it may have become, the pleasure it might have given those who followed along on her “elegantly paved” path. For that is the pleasure gardeners can take in what they’ve left behind, the unimaginable gifts waiting to be discovered by others while the original gardeners get on with the work of turning over new soil and putting down fresh roots.

Last night at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program Instructors’ Reading at the Skirball Center, I read a version of my Southern California Seasons piece (yes, we do have them, but it’s complicated), which first appeared in the Los Angeles Times’ Sunday Op-Ed pages on October 18, 2009. For all who enjoyed and were looking to read it in print, many thanks for your enthusiasm and interest. This post is for you.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: A LAND FOR ALL SEASONS

It’s October, the mid-1990s, I’m driving north on the 5. The hillsides are dressed in summer’s dead grasses, rusted-buckwheat and silver sage. The sky is a pearl haze with scraps of blue bleeding through. Then, sudden as brake lights in a carpool lane, it hits me: It must be fall in Southern California.

It took more than a decade living here before I sensed this change of seasons. Was that because most folks insist we don’t have them? Yes, we don’t have the color-coded, quarterly system Easterners boast, that endless loop of dropped leaves in last year’s colors, soon buried by months of snow melting into spring’s floral cliché–cue the summer heat, humidity and bugs.

L.A. doesn’t play by this weathered script. Non-native-crybaby-losers love to blame The Weather. You can’t get anything done with all this sunshine!

Some folks need a blizzard blowing at their backs to stay indoors, settle down and work their tails off. Give them the shriveling demands of an incendiary Santa Ana and they get confused, anxious and depressed — especially if they bought a house with a wood shingle roof.

Conventional climate refugees who prosper despite our relentless sunshine need to find flaws to keep others from crowding paradise. “Yeah, but we don’t have seasons here!” they assure their Minnesota guests, while slapping on the sun block New Year’s Day.

Many who do believe in the existence of our local seasons, differ defining them. Some say there are just two — one of fire and one of flood — held apart by mind numbing stretches of sunshine.

Author Carey McWilliams’ was more nuanced in his 1946 history, “Southern California, An Island on the Land.” He called our region “a freak of nature — a semi-arid desert … insulated, shut off from the rest of the continent,” with no less than five overlapping seasons–-two springs, two summers and one I’ll call Rain.

They start when late fall’s light rains end the long dry season I like to call Fire. The hills turn verdant, what McWilliams called our “false spring.” The true rainy season comes between January and March, with downpours that swell the rivers and frighten the populace, put roofs and hillsides to the test and flood the television newscasts with apocalyptic footage.

That’s a good year.

April’s lighter showers announce our second, real spring, what McWilliams called an “aborted summer.” By late May, it is McWilliams’ fall, with emerald grasses fading to summer’s tawny earth tones and June’s flower-lined paths dead ending in months of brutal, but dry, heat.

I’m a fan of our extremes, the awe-inspiring winds and terrifying rains and the becalmed times between that delicately “season” our days.

Our falls are discreet, with changes in the air and light so minor that experiencing them requires slowing down and paying attention. I’m first struck by the vague feeling that it’s time to switch from ice-blended Frappuccinos to hot lattes before I notice how short the days have become and how cool the nights are.

Once Summer’s deadly heat has passed and it’s safe to go outside, I gather my sense of the changing season on the local mountain trails, where poison oak provides the necessary note of autumn red, reinforcing the beloved clichés about Southern California’s sinister landscape. Beyond this are silvered thistles, grasses that look kiln-dried from the sun, and the last, dying traces of orange mimulus: “monkey flowers” still clinging to the rocks, their jade stems fading to umber.

This year, at the top of the mountain, the residue of a recent wild fire bleeds in from over the ridge, gray, black and sepia,infusing the air with a cold charcoal smell. I look down on the mountain’s dizzying drop of steep folds, the slopes appear ready to melt into an ash avalanche. Will the winter rains wash them away? If they hold, they may erupt in snapdragons and whispering bells, their germinated seeds the fire’s gift.

Southern California is full of such surprising possibilities. It’s best, I’ve decided after my share of seasons here, to learn to live with the inability of predicting them.

At the bottom of the trail, the day has picked up heat. At the nearest Starbucks, I order a Frappuccino. It may be fall, but it is still just too hot for anything else.

The Junk Mail Project and I, having survived yet another Hellbent Holiday season, stand before the New Year, look it square in the face and tell it to move along it if it knows what’s good for it. I’ve got work to do and classes to teach and books to write and pictures to paint! I won’t have it standing around gawking at its own dewy freshness while its arteries start to harden and vision begins to fail and nothing gets done. Dance, I say, and make me look back 12 months from now and think “What a Heckuva Year! Hate to see ya go!” None of this muttering about what might have been and wished it was.  

Why, I’ve got my Words and Pictures: Drawing Literature From Art class to teach through UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. We’ll be exploring visual art as a prompt for creative writing, whether it’s essay, memoir or fiction. If it’s anything like last semester I taught it, we’ll have a lively collection of writers AND visual artists who’ve come for some cross inspiration. The eight saturdays beginning January 23 will include trips to the Getty and Hammer Museums, where we’ll enjoy special gallery talks designed just for us and there will be a visit to the Brewery Art Complex studio of acclaimed L.A. artist and Claremont MFA program head emeritus, Roland Reiss, to discuss his sculptures and paintings and narrative in contemporary art.

As I prep for that, I’m also doing another illustrated text piece for Arroyo Magazine, this time on the science of love, for the February issue. I promise surprising information about what makes us fall into it and why we stick around for more. I’ve also been asked to paint the cover, a first for me and the magazine. Arroyo is big and glossy and goes to only the best east side homes and businesses and personally,I can’t wait to see how that turns out! Previous Arroyo topics have included the Rose Bowl Flea Market, Forest Lawn and the critters who made entertaining in my Glendale home such a delightful challenge all those years.

And did I mention the second novel I’m working on, dealing with domestic issues other than entertaining, and my Venice Running Project which I hope will culminate in a text and photo exhibit this October? Whew.
Oh, and somewhere in between it all, Somebody and I are thinking we might finally get that walk in across England. But we won’t be trekking across the Upson Downs June 5, as I’ve got to be in L.A. to teach The Writer’s Banquet: A One Day Workshop Exploring Food and Memory.

If I hadn’t finally figured out that Somebody liked to cook and could do it (with supervision), and if Somebody hadn’t gifted me with Bose Noise Canceling headphones for Christmas so I can’t hear him rattling those pots and pans, I wouldn’t have time to do much of anything this year. But look at me, I’m even blogging, and we’ve only just begun.  

Have a happy and healthy one, and do come back soon for more, cause I know I plan to. But right now, me and the New Year have got to move along…

P.S. If you’d like to hear the lively Los Angeles Times Festival of Books panel discussion titled “The Page Turner” I did this past April with Karen Joy Fowler, Gigi Levangie Grazer, and Debra Ginsberg, moderated by Bernadette Murphy, it can now be downloaded at Audible.com. You can find it under “The Page Turner:(2009) Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.” Enjoy–I know I did!
         

I’m off to San Francisco this weekend to read from Entertaining Disasters at Litquake as part of the Lit Crawl in the Mission District Saturday night, October 17. I will be in the Women’s Building from 7:15 to 8:15 with two other Counterpoint Authors. We’ve been warned to expect a rowdy, standing room only crowd, but since there’s a Smut Fest elsewhere in the building, we’ll see where the rowdies go to stand. Also, FYI, check out my essay regarding the actual existence of identifiable seasons here in Los Angeles on the Op-Ed page of this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Okay, gotta go, still overcoming jet lag from the trip to Venice for the Biennale and still gotta pack for S.F. So, more later and maybe sooner than once every 8-10 months. Maybe. See you all in S.F.!

Then it was onto Doug Dutton’s Lawn (catch the great L.A. Times article by Irene Lacher  posted herewith), which I suggested should become The Dutton, Studio City, a  regular SoCal cultural center on par with The Getty, Brentwood and The Hammer, Westwood.

He’s thinking it over.

Then there were all those readings, first at Vroman’s, Pasadena, then at Village Books, Pacific Palisades (I fear I made the place smell like Gilroy), all with amazing turnouts of SoCal friends (you know who you are, and some of you know twice and at least two of you know three times!)

My Self-Guided-Author’s Tour of Northern California was a real homecoming. I read at Books Inc in San Francisco’s Laurel Village, where the audience included my high school counselor, Natalie Van Tassel, the young woman who arrived in Berkeley in the fall of 1968, fresh from her native Michigan, to shepherd my freshman class at Castro Valley’s Canyon High School, her first as a counselor, through four tumultuous years. She is the woman responsible for getting me into college. She stayed with the school district until retiring just a few years ago. Thank You Natalie, for getting me into college, coming to my reading AND letting me be your Facebook Friend! You really should be writing a book.

We’ll talk.

That Friday night I read at Book Passage, Corte Madera. The crowd was full of familiar faces and some new friends and one elderly gentleman who asked the evening’s last question — “What is the meaning of your book?” I paused for a second, then said “To enjoy life.” Which it is, but I should have said, “read the book and you tell me!” I don’t think he bought a copy and I wonder now if he goes to all the readings in Corte Madera and asks the same question and what answer would prompt him to buy a book?

A riddle for the ages.

After the reading, my husband Tom and I dined with Jack Shoemaker, editorial director of Counterpoint Press, and his wife, Jane Vandenburgh, editor of Entertaining Disasters and author of the wonderful and just published memoir, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century.

The next day, after jogging from our Larkspur Landing hotel along the beautiful bay front to the gates of San Quentin and back, we drove up to Napa where I did 20 minutes on West Coast Live with Sedge Thompson. He read the book, enjoyed it, was funny, smart and serious and the sizable paying audience, in my estimation, got their money’s worth. You decide–there’s a link posted under Media to the You Tube video of our interview. Or there will be very shortly, as soon as Somebody reads the iMovie manual.

Then, lest we forget, I did a reading at Warwick’s in LaJolla, where the warmth of the solid turnout of locals and loyal Warwick’s supporters made up for the chilly weather. And I made another batch of Mom’s garlic cream cheese dip for Evan Kleiman and the gang at KCRW when she recently interviewed me for Good Food.

Looking ahead, I am to be at The Grove in San Diego this Sunday afternoon (March 8), 3 p.m., for a food-oriented authors’ (there will be dip!) event sponsored by San Diego Writers Ink, and Tuesday I will be at the Brandeis University National Womens Committee Author Luncheon in Camarillo, then there’s the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books AND the classes I’ll be teaching for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. Saturday, March 21, will be The Writer’s Banquet, a one day workshop on food, memory and writing, and Saturday, April 18, is the first of six Saturdays for Words and Pictures: Drawing Literature from Art, a lively adventure to include two field trips, one to The Getty, Brentwood, and another to The Hammer, Westwood, exploring visual art as inspiration for fiction, memoir and essay.

So far, no plans to take in The Dutton, Studio City, but we’ll be thinking of you Doug!

Okay, I confess, no one wrote in.

I only feared they would because I couldn’t imagine the U.S. recycling 70 percent of anything, so I checked it out. The only mention of 70 percent regarding U.S. recycling habits I could find was references to it as an achievable goal for ALL recycling, not just paper. Duly noted. We do have to try harder, but that is the American way, no? Yes!

And getting back to the Post Office and its new ad campaign, I found two flyers flogging it recently in my daily dose of junk, I mean BULK mail. Two flyers have come, one an intense pink card with a to do list list headed “Today” telling me all the things that I will do with great speed and ease thanks to the swift and swell new services they offer. Only problem is, while I can now “put a hold on (my) mail from the airport,” I still can’t stop the flow of junk mail coming into my house while I am at home.

Indeed, the only way to escape the daily onslaught of junk mail is to go on vacation–permanently. Leave the country. To that end, I’m checking with a friend who lives in Paris to see what the junk mail stream is like there. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, and after I did all the spiffy new things the postal service wanted me to today, I would “have the time to do more of what (I) want.” The other flyer is aimed for the upcoming holidays we’ll all soon be hellbent for. It, too, promises all kinds of labor saving services that will give you “something you can really use. More time.”

Hey, how about the eight months of my life I understand I’ll be spending sorting through all the junk mail I’m forced to receive daily?

And what would I do with those eight months should I magically have them given back to me? Or even the few minutes I save creating my own “holiday postage” (will the Spirit of Christmas save me a special patch of purgatory if I can’t bring myself to read the directions for that trick?)

What will I do with all this new found free time thanks to the U.S. post?

I will blog and then blog some more until Americans everywhere rise up and insist on a national Do Not Mail list. It would be like the Do Not Call list established by the federal government in 2003 which now boasts 145 million phone numbers registered. It’s been extremely effective. The government has even prosecuted several dozen cases of solicitors violating the do not call law and collected $20 million in fines, according to a recent ABC News story.

It’s been so successful that we’ve all lost a favorite topic to complain about. Where our lives were once afflicted with chronic and invasive unsolicited telephone calls,fresh scar tissue blooms.

Now we complain about junk mail.

And I hate complainers. So knock it off and get yourself to http://www.newdream.org/junkmail/ and send a missive to congress to establish a national do not mail registery.

Go, do it now, I’ll be along shortly, I’ve just got a few more piles of important surveys, free gifts, time sensitive material and life improving catalogs to sift through and toss.

Oh, yes, and then I’ve got to stop by usps.com to see how much time they can save me.

Her company, Nine Dragons, China’s largest container board maker, returns it to us as packaging on inexpensive, and oft recalled, made-in-China merchandise. According to the China Daily News, the “Waste Paper Queen” is “extremely” fast talking, still she has yet to talk the Chinese into recyling more of their paper waste. Only 30 percent of their scrap paper is reused, while Americans salvage 70 percent. Most of China’s waste paper is still buried or burned, while our’s is exported to entreprenuers such as Zhang Yin.

America remains number one in paper production, but China is now the world’s second largest producer of paper at 49.5 million tons and the second largest consumer at 54.4 million tons.

So how much paper is that?

I can’t imagine. My mind’s eye got bloodshot trying to picture it.

Artist Chris Jordan resorts to digital imagery to see this kind of stuff. His “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait” is an effort to visualize our country’s habits of consumption. He does giant, digitally generated photographs capturing the millions of soda cans, plastic bags, trees cut for mail order catalogs and cell phones we run through in the course of our average consumer days. He does it so we can see what the unimaginable and astronimical look like.

A similar impulse prompted me to start “Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project.” I wanted to see what each day’s demanding demi-mound added up to in the course of a year. My visualization exercise resulted in 157 pounds of shredded junk mail to be installed at the L.A. Contemporary Gallery in Culver City November 9-24.

And since I started the project I have encountered other artists trying to make apparent what we might hear or read about but can’t picture in our minds. Like Stan’s Cafe, a six Brit theater troupe, presenting their performance installation “Of All The People In All The World: The Americas,” at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center November 29-December 30, 2007. They use grains of rice to represent individuals, then measure these into piles both massive and mini to illustrate such statistics as the paltry number of women who have served in the U.S. Senate and the 8 million people living in America’s gated communities. They will use 16.5 tons of rice during the work’s run. It’s a number I find hard to conceive of, so, I guess, I’ll just have to get up there and see it for myself.

Her name is Zhang Yin, she’s worth more money than Oprah Winfrey and she wants your junk mail! She’s made more than 3.4 billion dollars (27 billion yuan) importing America’s waste paper, including junk mail, to China.

Her company, Nine Dragons, China’s largest container board maker, returns it to us as packaging on inexpensive, and oft recalled, made-in-China merchandise. According to the China Daily News, the “Waste Paper Queen” is “extremely” fast talking, still she has yet to talk the Chinese into recyling more of their paper waste. Only 30 percent of their scrap paper is reused, while Americans salvage 70 percent. Most of China’s waste paper is still buried or burned, while our’s is exported to entreprenuers such as Zhang Yin.

America remains number one in paper production, but China is now the world’s second largest producer of paper at 49.5 million tons and the second largest consumer at 54.4 million tons.

So how much paper is that?

I can’t imagine. My mind’s eye got bloodshot trying to picture it.

Artist Chris Jordan resorts to digital imagery to see this kind of stuff. His “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait” is an effort to visualize our country’s habits of consumption. He does giant, digitally generated photographs capturing the millions of soda cans, plastic bags, trees cut for mail order catalogs and cell phones we run through in the course of our average consumer days. He does it so we can see what the unimaginable and astronimical look like.

A similar impulse prompted me to start “Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project.” I wanted to see what each day’s demanding demi-mound added up to in the course of a year. My visualization exercise resulted in 157 pounds of shredded junk mail to be installed at the L.A. Contemporary Gallery in Culver City November 9-24.  

And since I started the project I have encountered other artists trying to make apparent what we might hear or read about but can’t picture in our minds. Like Stan’s Cafe, a six Brit theater troupe, presenting their performance installation “Of All The People In All The World: The Americas,” at Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center November 29-December 30, 2007. They use grains of rice to represent individuals, then measure these into piles both massive and mini to illustrate such statistics as the paltry number of women who have served in the U.S. Senate and the 8 million people living in America’s gated communities. They will use 16.5 tons of rice during the work’s run. It’s a number I find hard to conceive of, so, I guess, I’ll just have to get up there and see it for myself.

What am I supposed to do, wait until next year to be aware? Well, sorry, I AM AWARE ALL THE TIME about the environmental terror that is junk mail. So I’m not telling anyone to go to their site and sign their petitions to encourage congress to create a national Do Not Junk Mail registry, something along the lines of the federal Do Not Call registry that put all those telephone solicitors out of work. They’re not calling you during dinner anymore to sell you cemetery plots or support the troops trash bags because they’re busy stuffing billions of envelopes and addressing millions of tons of catalogs you didn’t ask for. Yes, let’s put them out of a job a second time.

I’d link you to their website so you could start signing the petitions but I didn’t get that far in my blogging tutorial. Just Google them, you’ll get there. I did. The Center for a New American Dream. That’s right

Are they gone?

Okay, I just have to tell you what fun I had before my bruising encounter with the above mentioned Dreamers. I was shoving shredded junk mail instead of bubble pack or foam peanuts into the box of invite cards for our upcoming junk mail installation/happening November 9, 2007 at L.A. Contemporary Gallery to ship to my collaborator Barbara Hashimoto for her installation/happening October 20 in Chicago, and feeling pretty darn resourceful, when I started imagining all the great things I could do with shredded junk mail. Why, if that clever Andrea Zittel and her A-Z Advanced Technologies can make pulped scrap household paper into wall panels, why couldn’t I do the same with shredded junk mail? I could sew shredded rows of it into an ante bellum evening gown, or use it to stuff everything from sock puppets to sectional sofas. And if they can make airplanes out of folded paper, why not passenger airliners out of pulped junk mail (it would be light weight but tough–like flying in an egg carton!) Why there’s no end to the wondrous things that can be done with junk mail.

And if I can’t count on the anti-junk mail crowd to keep me up on what’s happening in their cluttered world, I think I’ve found a site that believes in no blogger left behind, a site devoted to publicizing the many positive aspects of junk mail. That site is PostCom.org, the official site of the Association for Postal Commerce. They don’t want us to worry about junk mail overflowing landfills because they have the statistics, the charts and graphs, to prove that there’s a glut of landfill space in America. That’s right. We’re not doing our part to keep America’s landfills full. If anything, we need more junk mail to fill America’s gaping holes.

They also devote a section of their site to “Mail: The American Jobs Machine” “In some sense,” they say, “the Postal Service is like an oil pipeline: It carries a vast amount of material which leads to the creation of other products and services.” Millions of jobs are related to the continued flow of junk mail. How many millions?

“Could there be more than 9 million jobs associated with the mails?,” they ask, and before you can scratch your head, let alone do a finger count, they answer for you with a resounding “You bet.” Sure, I knew the gathering, sorting and tossing of the daily piles coming through my mail slot were a second career for me, and I sensed the annual trip to the commercial shredder in Sun Valley was employing at least one other person on that particular day, but 9 million jobs!?! I had no idea the importance of that humble little paper pile.

I’d love to keep blogging on, tell you about the Chinese billionaire business woman who has made herself richer than Oprah Winfrey by importing America’s junk mail to China, but you’ll have to wait until the next post. I’ve got to go, the dog’s barking and I think the mailman just left another incredibly valuable and filled with endless possibilities deposit from the Postal Service pipeline just inside the front door. I don’t want it staining the rug.

When I shredded this mail myself, an effort that was noisy, time consuming and tedious, I managed to burn out two shredders before I decided to save the mail and let a commercial outfit do the shredding. This seemed like a lot of work for something I didn’t want in the first place.

I realized that each little pile was its own problem to deal with, but what did a year’s worth of this rubbish amount to? I decided the only way to find out was to save a year’s worth of junk mail. Perhaps then I could get a physical sense of our household’s annual share of direct mail deliveries. I began gathering January 1, 2006 and stopped December 31, 2006. It was a year that included moving to a new home in a more affluent zip code that came with an intriguing upgrade in the quality of what was being advertised. Instead of constant solicitations for remodeling, refinancing or credit cards, we were being offered opportunities for luxury cruises, fractional jet ownership and airport limo services.

During the course of that year and in the spare time I had since I stopped shredding the mail, I did some junk mail research. I discovered:

• Americans received 28 billion pieces of junk mail in 1979, and now annually receive, depending on which website you check, anything between 42 billion, 77 billion and 100 billion pieces of junk mail.
• The average American will spend 8 months of their life handling junk mail.
• Junk mail uses more landfill space than disposable diapers and polystyrene foam products combined.
• Forty-four percent of all junk mail goes unopened into the landfill.
• If it’s true, as one source claims, that 100 million trees are cut down to produce junk mail annually, then 44 million trees die annually to make all the junk mail that comes into our homes only long enough to pass through our hands before going directly into the trash.
• In a typical year 1.8 billion pounds of junk mail are undeliverable. Fifteen million trees die to produce this undeliverable pile of unsolicited advertising.
• Fifty-nine catalogs are sent annually to each man, woman, and child. Victoria’s Secret alone sends 395 million catalogs a year.
• Each postal carrier annually carries 18 tons of junk mail.  The post office is the biggest employer in the country next to Wal Mart, with more than 200 thousand mail carriers.
• Mail carriers suffer injuries that can lead to permanent disabilities from the weight of this junk mail. Still, the mail carriers union has lobbied against legislation to prevent or slow the junk mail stream. The post office’s preferred term for junk mail is “bulk mail.”

After learning all this, I felt that even if someone wanted to translate these statistics into numbers of football fields and Empire State Buildings, I couldn’t begin to imagine the physical reality of the American junk mail phenomenon.
While I was collecting the junk mail and its related statistics, I couldn’t help but notice my local mail carrier was wearing a major wrist brace while driving her delivery truck. She had carpal tunnel syndrome, the reason I hadn’t seen her on the job for a long spell. She said it was because of the weight of her daily junk mail deliveries. The holiday catalog season, she said, was “the worst.”

When I asked a post office supervisor if I could stop mail delivery to another address where I do not receive solicited mail, i.e. bills, letters, and magazines I’ve personally subscribed to, I was told that was not an option. If I had a mailbox, they were required to deliver unsolicited junk mail to it. I was required to periodically remove it to enable the delivery of more unsolicited mail. This supervisor explained that direct mail businesses were “our customers” because they paid the postal service to deliver their advertisements to our mailboxes.

Until then I had believed that the American public was the customer of the U.S. Postal Service, a “statutory monopoly” created by Congress and, since 1971, operated as an independent agency of the federal government. To the extent our tax dollars support and sustain this protected federal agency, I believe U.S. citizens are not only forced to pay for this daily trash delivery, but are also being required to volunteer their time to process it. I can’t help but wonder how the eight months of each of our lives might be better spent than sifting through this government authorized trash.  Maybe we should count our blessings, as we sort through our unwanted paper piles, that no other entity besides the U.S. Postal Service is legally allowed to make deposits in our mailboxes.

Early in 2007, I drove the results of my collecting efforts to a commercial shredding facility in Sun Valley, California, where I was able to shred and retain the entire mass. I drove home with seven 45-gallon plastic trash bags weighing a total of 157 pounds. I began to see this accumulation as a rising tide of unwanted mail threatening to drown our cities and suburbs in what I consider a reverse trash stream that steals our time while it pollutes our personal environments.

When I told my artist friend and occasional collaborator Barbara Hashimoto of my efforts, she suggested turning the Junk Mail Project into a dual city effort. In June, she began collecting and shredding the office junk mail of the BauerLatoza Studio, an architectural firm where she is artist in residence, and producing audio and video recordings of this process. The Chicago presentation of the Junk Mail Project’s first phase will be displayed this October 20-21 and 27-28 as part of Chicago Artists’ Month festivities in Hashimoto’s studio in the Randolph Motor Building, a 100-year old former car showroom in Chicago’s historic Motor Row District.

The Los Angeles presentation of the Junk Mail project will be November 9, 2007 through November 24, 2007 at L.A. Contemporary Gallery, 2634 South La Cienega Blvd., Culver City. An opening reception will be held November 9, from 6-9 p.m.

Meanwhile, as my household’s share of annual unwanted correspondence erupts from a row of garbage cans in anticipation of the shredding truck’s annual call, I look forward to blogging further on the issues junk mail raises in our contemporary world. Like how much does each citizen pay for the privilege of receiving this modern sludge and what, financially, emotionally and physically is eight months of our lives worth, is the rise of junk mail contributing to the death of newspapers, do crack addicts really have all the time in the world to piece together my personal information from said shreds and wherein lies the art and poetry in a stack of this stuff? Stay tuned…