[Note: In the rush and thrill of preparing our first issue to “go to press,” we inadvertently published an incomplete draft of the following article, which is–if you can believe it–even funnier than the one you already read. We regret the error. Those of you reading this for the first time, just…oh, never mind. E.W.]
It is with great excitement and a certain amount of pride that we introduce the Sherman Oaks Review of Books (SORB).
Some may wonder: Does the world actually need another—or, indeed, any–literary review? In our opinion, it does. Of course, we would say that. And we do.
We live in what might be called The Age of Refugees, a time of sweeping migrations, as vast groups of people flee despotic regimes and seek peace, tolerance, and stability elsewhere. And this is as true at the Sherman Oaks Review of Books as it is in Syria or other war-torn places like that.
But to understand SORB, you must begin by understanding its precursor publication, the Rancho Cucamonga Review of Books (RCRB). Begun by Stan and Evelyn Cucamonga in 1953, the journal was conceived as the first literary review published on the West Coast, not counting stuff from colleges. The Cucamongas were, like so many liberal intellectuals, emigrants. They had arrived in Los Angeles after an exhausting transcontinental journey, probably in coach, from the harsher climate and constrictive Old World ways of Brooklyn, New York—this, at a time when Brooklyn was just Brooklyn and not yet cool or hot or sick.
Both the couple and their publication struggled during the first few years. Then Stan and Evelyn moved into a 3-bedroom/2 bath house– and inspiration struck. Cognizant that many of the nicer homes in their neighborhood had fancy-schmancy Spanish-inspired names, they dubbed theirs Rancho Cucamonga, and changed the name of their magazine from Stan and Evelyn’s Literary Monthly to The Rancho Cucamonga Review of Books. From that moment on, success was assured.
As was common in early Los Angeles and the American West, an entire town arose around this one thriving enterprise: restaurants, shops, professional offices, supermarkets, strip clubs, bowling alleys, a Major League baseball stadium, gas stations, taxidermists, a museum of pre-Columbian art, a halfway decent Chinese place, and six world-class international airports arrived to serve an editorial staff that swelled, first to fifteen, and then to twenty-two people.
For decades, RCRB chronicled the best—and, sometimes, the worst—in American and international culture. However, somewhere along the way, in one of those transactions that make sense to accountants and to no one else, the publication was acquired by the prestigious, venerated National Geographic Society. This organization’s august publication—so frequently subscribed to, so rarely ever read—had the good sense to let the editors of RCRB go about their business unhampered. I was lucky enough to win an editorial position on the Review’s staff, and was thankful every day for the freedom afforded us by our Washington, D.C.-based owners.
That all changed in 2015, when Rupert Murdoch acquired National Geographic—and, with it, the Rancho Cucamonga Review of Books. It is unknown to this day whether or not Murdoch was aware he was landing RCRB when he cast his net for Nat Geo, although one wag has suggested that we were his true quarry and everything else was a cover. In any case, Murdoch wasted no time in replacing our editor-in-chief with one of his henchmen, a cynical and penny-pinching Englishman named C.W. Charles.
News of Charles’ installation filled us all with misgivings, and our fears were realized soon enough.
It is a business school cliché that “you can judge the health of an enterprise by its bagels,” and our case was no exception. When I first arrived, the weekly routine at RCRB included the pleasant, thoughtful, and productivity-enhancing institutions known as Bagel Wednesday and Doughnut Friday. The bagels were of the highest caliber—fresh, varied, and numerous. The Friday doughnuts were of the really great, super-yummy kind.
With the C.W. Charles regime, all that changed.
A month into Charles’ tenure as editor-in-chief, we began to notice that the customary three-dozen bagel order from the good place up the street, had been discontinued. We now began each Bagel Wednesday with a single dozen (for 25 people) from the so-so place around the corner—and fully one-third of those were either whole-grain or, worse, blueberry. As for Doughnut Fridays, it was summarily canceled, and replaced with Pita Chip Thursday.
The daily content of our snack drawer showed a similar decline. Where once we had enjoyed no fewer than three varieties of Sun Chips (Original, French Onion, and Garden Salsa), sugar-free gummy things, and several (rotating) flavors of potato chips, we now found ourselves confronted with unhealthful Fritos, Cheetos, and some weird kind of biscuit that nobody could pronounce and nobody liked. The individual-pod coffee maker gave way to a hulking, massive urn. Tea bags went from Twinings to store-brand.
It was devastating, yes, but even worse insults were to follow. The magazine—it is painful to type even today–began to charge us for parking. Post-It pads were collected and counted at close of business each day, the better to prevent “pilfering.” Browser monitor programs were installed on all computers, the better to dissuade us from visiting the usual social media, entertainment, and pornography sites without access to which no modern office can be expected to function.
And there were Charles’s editorial corruptions.
Bear in mind that, until the acquisition, writers and editors at RCRB had enjoyed almost complete editorial independence. We reviewed what we wanted and wrote what we wanted.
However, three weeks into the job, Charles spiked my review of a collection of letters between Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling, and between Trilling and Susan Sontag, and between Sontag and Mort Sahl, in an escalating series of correspondences that involved Saul Bellow, Joan Didion, Mickey Mantle, Norman Mailer, Ed Sullivan, Cantinflas, Tony Bennet, John Foster Dulles, Charlton Heston, Charles DeGaulle, Johnny Unitas, Janet Leigh, Little Peggy March, Soupy Sales, Fabian, and U Thant. The correspondence was a chain letter, so all the texts were identical. For this reason, I was lukewarm about the collection.
My opinion didn’t matter. The piece never ran. In its place, Charles commanded me to review a book entitled Bill O’Really Talks to Kids About…
Its author was, of course, the Fox News personality. Its intended audience consisted of readers ages 9 to 13. Its topics were whatever Bill O’Really had on his fevered, right-wing mind at any given time. Thus we had chapters in which Bill O’Really talked to kids about the estate tax, castrating feminists, the (so-called) War on Arbor Day, the death of Archduke Ferdinand, affirmative action at cosmetology schools, and so on.
All of which was appalling, yes, but much of which seemed vaguely familiar, too. With a bit of research I discovered that the entire text of Bill O’Really Talks to Kids About… was exactly the same, word for word, as that of a book published three years earlier entitled Bill O’Really Talks About…–a book ostensibly for adults.
In my review I noted that the chronology of these two publications at first seemed to suggest that Bill O’Really harbored a high regard for children—i.e., he (and his publisher) had decided that he could “talk to” kids in the same way he talked to adults, and about the same subjects–and that these young readers would understand. But, I noted, in fact the opposite was true: O’Really knew, and had always known, that the adult viewers who watched him on Fox had the mentality of 9-to-13 year olds. Whatever he wrote for adults, he could turn around and sell to kids, too.
Editor Charles was not amused. In fact he was livid. He canceled that piece as well.
It all came to a head on a sad Bagel Wednesday in April, 2014. We arrived to discover a memo declaring an end to Pita Chip Thursday and its immediate replacement with Day-Old Bread Stick Tuesday—and to the sight of the day’s bagel allotment reduced to four, all of them blueberry.
It was too much. Then and there I announced my intention to resign. To my shock, the whole staff agreed with me.
As one, we collected our personal effects and exited the building, taking care to bring with us as many Post-Its, Uniballs, and review copies of books as we could carry. (It goes without saying that we left the blueberry bagels contemptuously untouched.) We all went home.
But we stayed in touch. We held wonderful drunken dinner and lunches and breakfasts around town, as we plotted our next move. And, finally, an opportunity presented itself.
We learned of a community newspaper in need both of new ownership and editorial revitalization–The Sherman Oaks Auto Trader and Tropical Fish Weekly. We acquired the title, moved into its perfectly adequate office space on Ventura at Woodman, retired both the used-car and tropical-fish aspect of the publication, and christened the re-born journal the Sherman Oaks Review of Books.
It is no exaggeration to say that Sherman Oaks is no Rancho Cucamonga.
Sherman Oaks is, in fact, a tiny municipality nestled in the Valley, just east of throbbing, pulsating, well-to-do Encino, and west of semi-scenic, formerly glamorous Studio City. It is a place of contrasts, a small town that in some ways has the ambiance and the feel of a slightly smaller town. More than anything else, it is a place of neighborhoods. Through those neighborhoods wind a number of streets. There are houses along both sides of the streets, and people live in the houses. It is where they make their home. When they leave the houses, they get into cars and drive along the streets.
It is against this backdrop—of people living in houses and driving cars on streets—that we propose to fill the need for a West Coast literary review left by the deterioration of the RCRB. Not that it has ceased publication. Far from it. C.W. Charles and his new staff—many of whom are refugees from buyouts and retirements at the Los Angeles Times—continue to write the Rancho Cucamonga Review of Books, in the process of which they spend half their time attacking and attempting to subvert us.
We, of course, find this extremely funny and amusing and so forth. For your entertainment, then–and to fulfill the requirements we set ourselves in our rather ambitious Mission Statement–we will document some of this onslaught.
But rest assured that we will feature these things in moderation. For the most part, we will present the kind of book reviews, essays, discussions, and cultural journalism once embodied by a publication now in tragic decline but exemplified, anew, by the Sherman Oaks Review of Books.
