Dan White

See you all in a day and a half at Literary Orange. If you’re going, get there early; I hear that it’s easy to get lost on campus. My panel will speaking at 1030 a.m. sharp at the UC Irvine event center. We’ll talk about voice, place and memoir (I hear that some folks who missed the last Northern California event will be there.) I’m signing books from 1130 to 1230 and then I’ll stay for the whole thing. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Tobias Wolff wishes he could say that reading Thomas Mann started him out on the road to becoming an author. He remembers reading an interview with Susan Sontag in which she talked about reading Mann and Soren Kierkegaard when she was still in grade school. Sontag even managed to meet Mann in Los Angeles when she was a teenager. “She was very precocious,” Wolff said, dryly, during his opening remarks at the first night of UCSC’S Living Writers Series, which drew a capacity crowd to the Humanities Lecture Hall on Thurday. Each one of us has an author like that, Wolff said. “You look back and think about who it was that made you store up extra batteries in your flashlight so you could stay up reading, and put towels under the doorway so your parents couldn’t see the light shining in the room.” For Wolff, a creative writing professor…

I bet you this will fill that auditorium all the way up. Hope to see you there [but don’t take my parking spot!] Wow — this photo is way too big for this blog entry. It jumps right out of the page. Let me try a smaller one tomorrow.All events are free and open to the public. Jump to the full schedule right here. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I’m off to the Southlands [soon] for Orange County’s biggest literary conference on April 9 at the UC Irvine Student Center. I will be one of three featured authors on a panel that will speak about voice and place. Hope to see you there. Keynote speakers at Literary Orange 2011 are Ron Hansen, author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was adapted for a 2007 film starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck; and T. Jefferson Parker, an Edgar Allan Poe Award winner. Lunch will be served. Looks like you’ll be able to park right there in the student lot near the event center. And this goes out to the folks who have been asking me about this, a UCI news article with some additional info and highlights. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

An updated, expanded version of my New York Times story about Seattle will also be part of the new Taschen anthology of 36 Hours pieces, along with my more recent story about Santa Cruz. Should be available in bookstores worldwide this summer. (photo: Fremont Troll awaits a victim.) http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I just found out about this 11 seconds ago. The Creative Writing Program and Literature Department is presenting the Spring 2011 Living Writers series, and they’ve got a pretty amazing line-up. I’m going to go to as many of these as humanly possible. Tobias Wolff, March 31. Chang-Rae Lee, April 7. Andrew Sean Greer, April 14. Claudia Rankine, April 28. Jessica Hagedorn, May 5. Aimee Bender, May 12. Neo Benshi, Roxi Power Hamilton, Jen Hofer and Konrad Steiner, May 26. All events are free and open to the public. Jump to the full schedule right here. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Just got home from my first St. Patrick’s Day party in 11 years. Drank a pint of Boddington’s Ale (which is actually British, but my friends put a whole bunch of McCormick’s green food dye in it so that makes it OK.) Ate too much corned beef and cabbage. Live chickens were running all over the property. And to top it all off, a family member head-butted me right in the teeth. Good times. To sustain the theme of the week, I’m reading Skippy Dies, which I highly recommend. The author’s name is Paul Murray. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Here’s the best local link I’ve found so far. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

If you saw this workplace unfriendly news story unfolding in any other city in the world, you’d never believe it for a moment. But this is Santa Cruz, so there you go. Loved the profiling line about dreadlocks and farmers markets. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Everyone seems to be OK. However, I took a glimpse at the harbor and it was very scary to watch (from higher ground, of course.) Here are a few videos taken at the harbor that day. The human scale was missing; boats were getting tossed into each other, barrels and whole chunks of the pier were bobbing around. I saw three helicopters flying low, and the Coast Guard trying to keep people off the docks and the boats. Boat owners kept scrambling toward the docks, trying protect their stuff. There were some bad surges still hitting the harbor as of early afternoon– and they seemed to be getting worse for some reason. Several vessels are still knocking into each other — and I saw a boat sinking right in front of me. Seems like they managed to evacuate just about everybody out of that area. The bottom line is that…