{"title":"I had bandini: reading ask the dust in prison","authors":"Joel F. Williams","doi":"10.1515/9780823287888-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823287888-012","url":null,"abstract":"Williams recounts the true story of how he was well into his third decade of a 27-year-to-life prison sentence for murder when he discovered Ask the Dust. The gritty-poetic voice of the novel and its tragicomic treatment of the struggles of Arturo and Camila spoke so directly to him that his love of reading grew into a need to write, and he set to work crafting his own short stories. A serendipitous encounter with a visitor who put him in contact with Fante biographer Stephen Cooper turned into a long and transformative correspondence, mentorship, and friendship. The results: a book of short stories in French translation entitled Du sang dans les plumes, brought out in 2012 by the Paris publisher 13E Note Editions; and then, after 28 years behind bars, parole and freedom.","PeriodicalId":347092,"journal":{"name":"John Fante's Ask the Dust","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117145017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Writing in the dust","authors":"Alan Rifkin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv102bj6q.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv102bj6q.15","url":null,"abstract":"In this elegant and insightful piece of literary journalism, Alan Rifkin offers a sweeping account of how John Fante’s Ask the Dust has come to be a touchstone among contemporary writers in Los Angeles and southern California and a wellspring of the region’s literature. Combining his own personal journey as a writer of fiction and non-fiction with a survey of the works of such authors as Steve Erickson, Carolyn See, Joan Didion, Salvador Plascencia, Kate Braverman, and others, Rifkin traces a line connecting all of them to Fante’s signature work and its dreamlike image of the metropolis: “Every Los Angeles writer at the outskirts of vision feels a connection to Ask the Dust, the 1939 novel that, more than any other, seems to weep over this city’s corpse in the ecstasy of possessing it.”","PeriodicalId":347092,"journal":{"name":"John Fante's Ask the Dust","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133822802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"John fante: the passion that became a festival","authors":"Giovanna DiLello","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823287864.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823287864.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"The John Fante Festival “Il dio di mio padre” started in 2006 in Torricella Peligna, a small town in the Maiella mountains of Italy’s Abruzzo province, where John Fante’s father Nick Fante was born. After making a 2003 documentary film about John Fante, Giovanna Di Lello founded and still directs the festival, which is organized by the municipality. In this essay the author explains her passion for John Fante and how over the years the festival has become a reference point for Fante enthusiasts around the world, featuring numerous writers, musicians, artists, and scholars from Italy, the United States, and elsewhere who come to pay homage to Fante and his works through lectures, concerts, and readings.","PeriodicalId":347092,"journal":{"name":"John Fante's Ask the Dust","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115523804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Ramona in Reverse”:","authors":"Daniel D. Gardner","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv102bj6q.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv102bj6q.7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":347092,"journal":{"name":"John Fante's Ask the Dust","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115499004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Ramona in reverse”: writing the madness of the Spanish past in ask the dust","authors":"Dan Gardner","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823287864.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823287864.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"At the turn of the twentieth century, real estate boosters seeking to promote southern California drew upon the national popularity of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel Ramona, in particular its fantasy of the Spanish past. The fantasy’s colonial discourse deployed stereotypes marked by an ambivalence that romanticized “going Spanish” even as it portrayed Mexican communities as burdens necessitating subjugation through various strategies including repatriation. John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939) repudiates the stereotype of the colonial fantasy by critically mimicking the Spanish past. By reversing the discourse of Ramona, Ask the Dust exposes the imperialist nostalgia of the fantasy, recognizes the instability of the regional sense of colonial authority, protests the racial injustice of the discourse, and recuperates the voice of the Other that the fantasy seeks to silence.","PeriodicalId":347092,"journal":{"name":"John Fante's Ask the Dust","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116223762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Amid the dust","authors":"Miriam Amico","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv102bj6q.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv102bj6q.12","url":null,"abstract":"“Amidst the Dust” pays homage to the author’s personal experience conducting research for her MA thesis on Italian-American writer John Fante. Her two months spent in Los Angeles—the city where Fante set many of his literary works—were crucial to developing a richer understanding of Fante’s perception of his identity as a son of Italian immigrants. The essay focuses on the trove of treasures archived in the John Fante papers at UCLA Library Special Collections, detailing daily encounters with manuscripts and personal notes, and reflecting on the nature of ethnic identity while drawing parallels between Fante’s experiences (and those of his characters) and her own journey.","PeriodicalId":347092,"journal":{"name":"John Fante's Ask the Dust","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124163176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Sad flower in the sand”: Camilla Lopez and the erasure of memory in ask the dust","authors":"Meagan Meylor","doi":"10.1515/9780823287888-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823287888-004","url":null,"abstract":"While scholars of Ask the Dust have given considerable attention to the novel’s protagonist Arturo Bandini, his Mexican American love interest Camilla Lopez has been relatively neglected. Scholarship concerning Camilla has been limited to her destructive relationship with Arturo and her attempts at adopting Hollywood values. By foregrounding the figure of Camilla through the socio-historical lens of the marginalization and deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the 1930s, this chapter offers important insights into Fante’s novel, most notably in its treatment of ethnic identities within Los Angeles. It also provides a feminist reading of Ask the Dust by examining Fante’s treatment of working-class female subjectivity and of how Camilla’s recurring presence and absence draw attention to the Mexican past of Los Angeles, a history often erased in the city’s collective memory.","PeriodicalId":347092,"journal":{"name":"John Fante's Ask the Dust","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129715606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}