Reviews for Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology

The average rating for Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-15 00:00:00 Dr. Mike Martin Despite the 880-page heft of this, I could have gone another 800 pages. How I wish now I'd kept notes to facilitate my better explaining why I liked this so much, but I was too busy devouring it. This collection of writings about or set in Los Angeles --essays, short stories and novel excerpts-- from 78 different authors spanned a timeframe from Helen Hunt Jackson's "Echoes in the City of the Angels" written in 1883, to a 1997 selection from film writer David Thomson called "Beneath Mulholland." There were very few pieces I didn't enjoy. I even read the Bukowski story and Norman Mailer essays (I am not a fan of either) and half of the James Ellroy (the only one I bailed on). The wide variety of formats, styles, subject matter, and attitudes toward this crazy place I call home, taken together, painted a much broader and more nuanced, realistic picture of the region than any one book or stories could possibly do, allowing for the truths behind the prevalent popular myths but also digging beyond the stereotypes. The century-long timeframe also illuminated the area temporally, showing how certain aspects of local culture evolved over time, but also how underlying perceptions and their hold on people's imaginations has often remained the same. Many of the book excerpts were from full-length works that I had already read: novels such as Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, essays from Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem; nonfiction Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Mike Davis' City of Quartz, and Harris Newmark's diary 60 Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. I haven't read Carey McWilliams, chronicler of L.A.'s social and political landscape in the 1940s and '50s, for many, many years. One somewhat predictable outcome of this book was to make me add an alarming number of books to my TBR, or move some onto my shortlist. (I'm going to be so busy!) And quite a few of the writers were new to me (at least their work, if not their names). Of course, with any collection like this, there will be quibbles about omissions. The most glaring single absence among male writers was Steve Erickson, brilliant contemporary film critic and author of several novels, two of which I have read and loved passionately. But more troubling is a wide gap in gender parity. Of the 78 authors represented, only 13 here are women. Come on, David Ulin, really? While most of the best-known female writers associated with Southern California are here - MFK Fisher, Joan Didion, Carol See, poets Carol Muske and Wanda Coleman --, it would have been nice to see some Susan Straight, Kate Braverman, certainly some Janet Fitch. But most shocking is the omission of Eve Babitz, whom I think of as the ultimate "L.A. Woman" of the 1970s, a woman who "gets" Los Angeles as well as anyone ever has. Babitz is somewhat obscure, sadly, a well-kept secret, but her vignette style pieces would have been perfect for this collection. If her material seems superficial, fluffy, narcissistic on the surface, scratching that surface a little reveals the spirit of the place in a deceptively casual but beautifully rhythmic prose that also celebrates her love for that place and spirit. [A few of her long-out-of-print books have recently been re-issued, so I'll definitely be re-reading those soon.] But that said, the quality of what was here was largely top-shelf: stories by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a sketch by Truman Capote about Christmas in Hollywood, and a dairy entry from Christopher Isherwood about hanging out and picnicking in Topanga Canyon in 1939 with Aldous and Maria Huxley, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell and Berthold Brecht (whose poetry and journals are featured in another chapter). I thought I didn't like John Fantes, but the excerpt from Ask the Dust changed my mind. There was the requisite noir of Raymond Chandler, Ross McDonald and James Cain. The over-the-top boosterism and rampant real estate speculation in Los Angeles in the late 19th century and early 20th are described to comic effect in Steward Edwards White's novel The Rules of the Game, where, Ulin says in an introductory blurb, "everything is bigger, stranger and endlessly promoted . . . ' a great circus without a tent'" and in a section from Newmark's book. In the 1920s Louis Adamic exposes the other side of this in his book in seeing a "ruthless Los Angeles where unscrupulous self-promoters got rich off the unfulfilled hopes of deluded dreamers." He recommends arming oneself with knowledge and a sense of humor, still good advice for navigating the city today. On a more positive, optimistic and appreciative note, Vechal Lindsay's chapter "California and America," from The Art of the Moving Picture describes the new medium of the movies as a "new language" and, from the vantage point of 1915, speculates that "it is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our national text-book in Art." There are the usual send-ups of Hollywood, the movie industry, and stereotypical types populating that world, but not as many as you'd think in a book this size. The European expat artistic community that arrived in the early 20th century is well-represented. In addition to Brecht, Isherwood and Huxley, David Hockney wrote about his arrival in Los Angeles (with an amusing anecdote about how he learned to drive). One of the biggest surprises was a selection from Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine - Flake Streamlined Baby: custom hot-rods as art and the culture that grew up around this enterprise, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Usually car talk is a giant snooze for me, but this was fascinating. MFK Fisher's "A Thing Shared" is a three-page story about a sweet moment in her childhood when she and her sister take a road trip with their father between Palmdale and L.A. This may be one of my favorite MFK Fisher stories ever, and that's saying something. The black, Latino and Filipino experiences are all represented in various pieces, with stories about the damaging racism that's always been prevalent here and its reverberating effects, including Carey McWilliam's account of the Zoot Suit riots and Sleepy Lagoon murder trials of the early 1940s that victimized Latin youth. There's a heart-rending memoir of forbidden love between a Japanese boy and a Caucasian girl in Gardena as recently as the late 1960s (Garrett Hongo's Volcano). There are fiction and essay pieces on historical events such as an excerpt from a 1938 novel The Promised Land by Cedri Belfrage recounting the disastrous collapse of the San Francisquito dam that ruined former hero William Mulholland. A couple of pieces deal with two famous early 20th century evangelists : the controversial Aimee Semple McPherson, whose theatrical sermons my mother experienced as a child, and Bob Shuler who was a power-mongering Methodist preacher with a large radio audience, a bigot who was much-feared, and a thoroughly nasty piece of work, from all I've read. Both of them had enormous influence in their day. I could go on, but I probably lost you several paragraphs ago. Anyone with a serious interest in Southern California history and culture would enjoy this, at least to dip in and out of once in a while. Or to immerse oneself, as I did, is fun too. Oh, and people have been complaining about trying to get from place to place for at least 70 years, as Simone de Beauvoir did in America Day by Day in 1947,when she declared "The traffic is terrifying." Some things never change.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-05-15 00:00:00 Tim Gordon After many years I finally finished reading this anthology. Although it shouldn't have taken this long, to my credit, it is nearly 900 pages long. I bought this book to serve as a source of inspiration for my writing since the project I've been working on for the last 9 years takes place in Los Angeles. For the most part, the book served its purpose and I look forward to incorporating some of the notes I took into my work ahead. As you can imagine from its length, the anthology is very comprehensive which at times I found to be a flaw. It seemed like many of the excerpts were included simply because they took place in LA and offered little reflection about the city. Some themes, although relevant, seemed too repetitive (Hollywood, movies, driving in LA, the dependence on the car)while others (the hidden corners LA and its citizens working in the service industry)were only briefly touched upon through more modern day excerpts. I enjoyed reading the introductory paragraphs to each cited writer and there were some wonderful gems in every genre (fiction, poetry, essay, novel, memoir).