David Kipen, the National Endowment for the Arts’ Literature director, may live in Washington, D.C. now, but he’s a Los Angeles native, and it shows. Just before stepping up to moderate a Zócalo panel on Dashiell Hammett, Kipen waxed nostalgic about his L.A. youth, and warmly greeted the L.A. writers in the crowd.
Q. What do you wake up to in the morning?
A. I usually wake up to the BBC on XM Satellite Radio.
Q. What’s your favorite word?
A. Actually I’m about to do an essay for an anthology about writers’ favorite words. They want me to do some Yiddish, but I don’t know what my favorite Yiddish word is, unless it’s nudnick, the Yiddish translation of nebbish, or I was thinking raffish.
Q. What inspires you?
A. Great literature.
Q. What comforts you?
A. Great music.
Q. What do you consider beautiful?
A. Los Angeles.
Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Writer, editor, reader, romantic, Angeleno.
Q. If you could live in any other time, past, present, or future, when would it be and why?
A. Los Angeles in 1934. It’s where I set the historical novel I’ll probably never write. It’s when [Dashiell] Hammett stopped writing and [Raymond] Chandler started, and it’s when Upton Sinclair tried to end poverty in California.
Q. When are you most creative?
A. When the deadline is looming.
Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. Lyricist.
Q. Whose talent would you most like to have?
A. Thomas Pynchon’s.
Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Going to Kiddieland and Ponyland on the site of the Beverly Center today, and fishing off the Santa Monica and Venice piers.
Q. Who is your favorite Beatle and why?
A. George. He’s unsinging and unsung.
Q. What teacher or professor if any changed your life?
A. Jamie Snead, my sophomore year in college, put Gravity’s Rainbow on the syllabus and nothing’s been the same since.
Q. Who is the one person living or dead that you would like to have a beer with?
A. Raymond Chandler.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.