Barret Baumgart
Author Interview - Barret Baumgart
Author of YUCK (The Birth & Death of the Weird & Wondrous Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia)
YUCK is work of environmental, literary nonfiction about the discovery and attempted eradication of the Joshua Tree, Yucca brevifolia, and its deep connection to the landscape and history of Southern California and Los Angeles.
A more fun synopsis:
If you're headed to Joshua Tree National Park this summer, you should be ready to hate your life. It’s not the heat that will wilt your spirit, nor the choke of traffic waiting to trample you at the gates, but the enduring grotesquerie of its cherished namesake: Joshua.
“One can scarcely find a term of ugliness that is not apt for this plant… A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the witching hour it can be almost infernal.”—Joseph Smeaton Chase, California Desert Trails, 1919
Similarly, there exists few terms that are not apt for YUCK. Part prose poem, pamphlet, collage, history, essay, memoir, and fiction, YUCK is a grotesque malformation beset with uncanny connections, jarring juxtapositions, and a buried history that will have you, like the harshness of the desert itself, asking yourself the big questions--particularly, "Why am I here?"
Who knows, but here you are… in the weird and wondrous world of YUCK, a searing and soaring ode to the world’s hottest desert, the Mojave, its divine and dying mascot, Yucca brevifolia, and the magical land that killed it all, Los Angeles.
Author Interview - Mary Camarillo
Author I draw inspiration from:
Oh man. Too many. Let's say the TOP inspirer is Henry Miller, but that's going back to my teens when I first decided to embark on the mistaken, tragic path of an "author." Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi is one of the best travel books ever written and a classic in every regard. Hard to think of anything more life-affirming, vital, and human than that relentless ode to life, living, and art. I remember in college when I picked it up at a used book store in Berkeley, someone had written "Read This" on the front flyleaf of the old paperback. I took it as a sign... and did.
Author Interview - Barret Baumgart | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
In a Starbucks in Los Angeles surrounded by people working on their shitty "pilots" on dying Dell laptops. That or the reading hall of an old university library.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
The narrator of W.G. Sebald's genre-bending fictional/essayistic walking journeys, i.e Rings of Saturn, Capo Santo, The Emigrants, etc. I imagine I'd ask him a question like, "How you doin', man?" and then I'd get some oblique retort related to the history of the building we were stuck in, its uncanny position in the city, how the city was built by a particular type of people, the dominant philosophy guiding the crazed architect at the time, and how it all ties into this moment where we find ourselves trapped, itself a microcosm for ecological precipice now confronting humanity thanks to our ceaseless and myopic exploitation of the natural world. It would be an enlivening, startling conversation, the type you'd walk out of feeling like you were floating, wondering what the hell just happened. Out of respect, I would not ask the man for his Instagram handle, cell phone number, or even his name. And he wouldn't have one. He was likely a ghost.
Author Interview - Barret Baumgart | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
Somewhere senior year in high school it clicked. Might have been after reading Camus, The Stranger. LOL. My two favorite teachers shared a classroom and on the back wall they had a quote from Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." I wanted to examine everything, question everything, and in doing so, keep the flame of mystery alive in the world. As Ken Kesey puts it, in a profoundly simple and perfect expression: "The job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
I've never read an ebook voluntarily. For me, audiobooks are great for absorbing non-literary info-based books. I seek out hardbacks for rare first-editions, of which I have a modest but valuable and growing collection. I have a perverse need to underline and make marginalia while I read (a sign of an "intellectual" Susan Sontag said), notes which I never come back to and which do nothing to deepen my understanding of a text or elevate my intellect. But for some reason, if I can't hold the book, can't bracket one of it's perfect words, draw an arrow beside a paragraph, or underline a $6 million sentence, I feel like I'm not engaging, not fully present, not bringing my full self to that encounter with that text, whatever it is. I don't recommend this reading strategy. It is particularly self-defeating when you are mangling and devaluing one of your recently acquired rare, first-edition hardbacks, say that one I found randomly in the desert recently, Carl Jung's Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
The last book I read:
Algernon Blackwood, Weird Tales. Blackwood is an underappreciated British author from early 20th century who wrote fiction and nonfiction. H.P. Lovecraft considered him the finest horror writer alive. This edition is in the Penguin Classics series. The story "The Willows" is a must read. Brilliant and profoundly disturbing "weird" tale. I've decided recently that I am a "weird" nonfiction writer given the role that coincidence/synchronicity has played in all my nonfiction. Everything I ever dig into deeply as a nonfiction writer has roots in some kind of uncanny coincidence I cannot explain and that should not have happened. In "The Willows", the incremental tracking of the narrator's dawning horror, the progressive slow blooming alarm that eventually bursts into a conflagration of intolerable ontological shock is stunning and a delight to behold. A camping trip to remember that story! I've had similar nights in the Sierra Nevada in California, but not quite as bad...
Author Interview - Barret Baumgart | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
Computer mostly. I dump confused thoughts on a legal pad when I'm stuck. I keep a Moleskine (The Legendary Notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, Chatwin®) for research and notes I know I want to or will need to return to and for travel and research out in the world. The legal pad beside the keyboard is turning into a more and more effective tool. Often, instead of returning to the document I'm working on, I'll find my session turns into a few pages of unintelligible scrawl, arrows, diagrams on a legal pad. Somehow it helps.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
Yossarian in Catch 22, by Joseph Heller
Author Interview - Barret Baumgart | Book Character I’d be Best Friends With
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
Professional Drummer--I've played in a number of legit rock/metal bands. Dream career would probably be a professional surfer, traveling the world to ride perfect waves in a peak experience repeated all over the planet, often in paradise.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
Place I’d most like to travel:
South America, Amazon/Andes ecotone; I would love to see the jungle grade into desolate brutal skyscraping mountains of the Andes, do some ayahuasca, and camp under the stars.
My signature drink:
Athletic IPA (non-alcoholic). I quit drinking a couple of years ago. I'm California sober.
Favorite artist:
Werner Herzog
Number one on my bucket list:
Area 51 in Nevada desert or Chauvet Cave in France, home to the world's oldest and most stunning paleolithic rock art. My first book China Lake is very much about Native American rock art in the California Desert, particularly a single narrow lava canyon inside a military base home to the largest concentration of Native American rock art in the western hemisphere (also likely the oldest art in the Americas!). I got obsessed with rock art writing that book. There's nothing deeper, nothing that opens up more questions that cut right down to the core of the human experience and what it is that we uniquely are--physically, spiritually, biologically, historically.
Anything else you'd like to add:
My next book, a work in progress, is going to be about the largest nuclear meltdown in US history, an event that took place in Los Angeles and that basically nobody has ever heard of outside of the small network of families who it has cursed with cancer. The facility is today owned by the Boeing Corporation, NASA, and the Department of Energy. I don't live terribly far away from it. Read more on my blog series, "The Heights of Weird." https://dumpsterfires.substack.com/p/solar-geoengineering-and-santa-susana
Find more from the author:
About Barret Baumgart:
Author Interview - Barret Baumgart
Barret Baumgart is the author of China Lake (2017), named a best book of the year by Kirkus and Brookyln Rail. A former US Forest Service trail crew worker employed in California’s eastern Sierra Nevada, Baumgart’s essays, interviews, and reporting on the Mojave Desert and the greater Southwest have appeared in The Paris Review, Vice, The Rumpus, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and the prestigious Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa. Born and raised in San Diego, California, Baumgart today lives and works in Los Angeles.
