BOOKS & PUBLISHING
The View From The West - Vol. 4LOS ANGELES 18 July 2010 |
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The other day I was sitting here at my desk, listening to music, staring at my screen. And the lampshade to my left started shaking.
I looked down at my dog and my dog did nothing. We sat there for a moment and then the shaking went away.
One thing you might not know is that an earthquake can make you feel seasick.
In his 1999 book entitled The Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis points out that at least 138 novels and films dating back to 1909 have dealt with the destruction of Los Angeles.
Earthquake. Fire. Flood. Nukes. Alien or human invasion.
A storyline that never grows old.
"The entire world," Davis argues, "seems to be rooting for LA to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed up by the San Andreas Fault."
Tod Hackett, protagonist of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, is a lowly Hollywood set painter with dreams of artistic glory.
His most ambitious work yet: a painting of the city in flames, entitled "The Burning of Los Angeles."
"The city burning," Joan Didion once wrote, "is Los Angeles' deepest image of itself."
800 gated subdivisions. 5,000 mini-malls. 2,500 street gangs. 10,000 homeless.
The capital of the post-literary world. Where movies are made. Where reality television reigns. Where books take third or fourth place, and writers are disposable drones.
Twi-moms squealing along a rope line on Entertainment Tonight.
LA = The Future?
LA = America's -- (and the world's?) -- anxieties about the future?
A dream gone off the rails.
A blank screen upon which people tend to project their own (darkest) fantasies.
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: The year 2019. A dystopian LA. Genetically engineered robots called replicants—visually indistinguishable from humans—are manufactured by the powerful Tyrell Corporation. Actual humans grovel in a chaotic, impoverished wasteland under a perpetual, toxic rain.
Dominant themes in Los Angeles-based fiction:
1.) The collapse of dreams.
2.) The betrayal of hope.
Principal local genres:
1.) Hard-boiled crime story / tough-guy detective tale.
2.) The Hollywood novel.
3.) Ethnic fiction.
"It's impossible to know L.A.," Walter Moseley once said. "It's an extremely diffuse and diverse city....a place of hiding. To be able to know a place, it has to at least in some ways want to be known. And LA just doesn't want to be known. LA is a big secret, which is why it's so good for the detective genre."
Serial killers. Freeway snipers. Race riots. Gang wars.
Seacrest eating scallops at Cecconi's.
Explosive, nonstop, poorly managed growth.
A city charged with hope.
The pursuit of happiness.
Dreaming.
LA's first notable authors were satirists and truth-tellers who took pleasure in bursting the bubble, who wrote in defiance of the pervasive crass optimism, offering up acidic tales of loss and disappointment, dissolution and destruction; who painted the city's population as an unsavory mixture of simpletons and con men, zombies and health nuts, and retired Midwestern hillbillies blinking stupidly in eternal sun.
Simone de Beauvoir saw in LA a "hall of mirrors."
Aldous Huxley: "Dreadful joy."
Jack Kerouac: "A huge desert encampment."
Dorothy Parker: "Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city."
H.L. Mencken: "There are more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on earth."
Mencken, of course, was from Baltimore, where he wrote prolifically for The Sun. He also happened to be John Fante's mentor and chief short story publisher, portrayed as "Hackmuth" in the classic LA novel Ask the Dust.
Mencken wound up introducing Fante to another notable LA writer named Carey McWilliams, and the two men, having much in common, became close friends. Both had endured hardscrabble upbringings in Colorado; both had fled west. They drank together in Hollywood bars like Musso & Frank's, and took road trips up the coast to Santa Barbara.
McWilliams penned a classic social history entitled Southern California: An Island on the Land. He would leave LA for New York in 1951 and would go on to edit The Nation for twenty years. There, he published the early work of Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn. He assigned Hunter Thompson to the Hell's Angels beat.
Fante's Ask the Dust was published in 1939. About a year later, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon arrived. Both novels are set in Los Angeles. Both were written here. Both feature a male protagonist who is deeply affected by the Long Beach earthquake of 1933.
For The Last Tycoon's Monroe Stahr, the tremors foretell a tragic downward spiral.
For Fante's Arturo Bandini, there is a sudden (and hilarious) postcoital guilt fit.
F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the Jazz Age and is most commonly associated with Paris and Antibes and Manhattan and Princeton, but when I think about all of this stuff -- all of this Los Angeles stuff, this apocalypse stuff, this unstable-people-on-unstable-land stuff -- I can't help but think that at least part of his lasting appeal has to do with the fact that he wound up out here, during The Great Depression, and it was here that he met his bitter end.
He symbolizes so much.
And here's a related story for you:
A girl named Lily Sheil. Born in England, 1904. Orphaned. Endured a difficult childhood. Blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Took a job as a toothbrush demonstrator in Gamage's department store. There, she met Major John Graham Gillam, who hired her to work at his iron and steel company. He taught her table manners. Coached the Cockney accent out of her.
They married.
Lily studied briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was hired as a chorus girl by C. B. Cochran.
She began writing. She wrote under the name "Sheilah Graham" and then changed her name officially to Sheilah Graham. She began selling articles about show business to the penny press.
In 1937, the North American Newspaper Alliance offered her a syndicated Hollywood gossip column. She moved from England to Los Angeles and divorced Major Graham.
In Los Angeles, she felt instantly -- strangely? -- at home.
''Hollywood," she would later say, "was notorious even in London for the ignorance of the people who made the films -- no one could embarrass me with erudite conversation."
Freshly divorced, she started dating. Within a year she was engaged to the Marquess of Donegall. At their engagement party, she was introduced to a man with whom she fell suddenly, instantly in love. That man was F. Scott Fitzgerald.
At the time he met Sheilah Graham -- and promptly dissolved her engagement -- Fitzgerald was living alone in a top floor apartment at 1403 North Laurel, suffering from angina pectoris, a heart condition caused by alcohol abuse and aggressive chain-smoking. His across-the-hall neighbor was a young starlet named Lucille Ball.
He was struggling to finish film scripts. He considered himself to be washed up.
The love affair with Graham would last for more than three years. Fitzgerald was paternal towards her...teacherly. He gave her a "curriculum" -- a handwritten list of music and essential reading. He was cruel in his drunken fits, compulsive and pathetic and wildly out of control. She put up with him.
They would move in together at 1443 North Hayworth, a ground floor apartment that, without stairs to climb, was kinder to Fitzgerald's weakening heart.
''I was never a mistress,'' Miss Graham later said. ''I was a woman who loved Scott Fitzgerald for better or worse until he died."
She served as the model for Kathleen, the heroine in The Last Tycoon.
December 20, 1940. Evening. Fitzgerald and Graham arrive at the Pantages Theater for the premiere of This Thing Called Love, a romantic comedy starring Melvyn Douglas and Rosalind Russell. Fitzgerald feels ill.
Later, as they make their exit, he experiences a dizzy spell and has trouble walking. He remarks to Graham: "They think I'm drunk, don't they?"
The following morning, at home with Graham, attempting to convalesce. Fitzgerald eats a Hershey bar. Reads the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Beethoven's "Eroica" is playing.
Suddenly he rises, a startled look on his face. He grabs the mantelpiece...gasps...collapses to the floor. Sheilah, in a panic, attempts to revive him by pouring brandy into his mouth. His teeth are clenched. She runs for the building's manager, Harry Culver, founder of Culver City. Upon seeing Fitzgerald, Culver can only muster: "I'm afraid he's dead."
And he was.
He was 44.
At least he didn't die alone.
I saw Michael Bay once, at a sushi restaurant on Beverly. His shirt was unbuttoned to his bellybutton, and his chest was spectacularly hairless.
***
And now some more Views From The West. Left Coast authors sharing their thoughts about the writing life out yonder. A continuation of the series. (Here are some links to Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3.)
First up: Anne Walls.
Anne is an author of novels, screenplays, and short stories. She creates content for FunnyorDie.com and has written for Saints and Sinners, a Fox television show. She has also written and directed two short films and has even managed to sell the same screenplay...twice. (No, you haven't seen it.) Her prose work has been published in the Gander Press Review, Ladygunn, and the Orange County Register. She is also the co-founder of WordHustler, the world's first online submission management platform for writers.
ANNE WALLS - LOS ANGELES:
Los Angeles is for dreamers. Sounds like a t-shirt, right? It probably is, somewhere down on Hollywood Boulevard or the Venice boardwalk. I've lived on both. (Okay, not on the boardwalks and the boulevards, but close enough.)
And you believe me, right? That I was a jaded junkie who's now an award-winning novelist? An ex-stripper who writes cute screenplays about pregnant teens? A transgendered memoirist who turns out to be a brilliant publicist and puppet master instead?
Of course you do. Because this is Hollywood, home of the dream factory. And the factory is always open for business.
Los Angeles is an endless revolving door of people arriving full of hope, assimilating into the machine, and then heading back to their small hometowns, broken and broke. Or is it? Is Southern California, The Perfect West Coast, actually the land of endless opportunity?
Natives are few and far between -- not because LA doesn't breed them, but because we are quickly outnumbered by the bus- and plane-loads full of fresh-faced Ohioans, jaded New Yorkers, and confident Texans. And let us not forget the rest of the world, jamming into LA daily.
This constantly-evolving trail mix of people is what gives LA its flavor and its edge. The city gets criticized by most of the world, often by people who seek to emulate it. For all of its faults, there is a freedom here, a wild West mentality that seeps into every scene-y restaurant, every hidden cafe, each and every beautiful and broken-down old building. It is the land of dreams because LA is exactly what you make of it, be it prince or pauper. And for a writer, there's a richness here that is hard to find anyplace else.
Plus, I just got a really good parking spot so I don't want to leave.
***
And one more for the road: Litsa Dremousis.
Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Litsa's work has appeared in The Believer, BlackBook, Esquire, Filter, Hobart, McSweeney's, Monkeybicycle, MovieMaker, Nerve, The Nervous Breakdown, Nylon, Paper, Paste, Pindeldyboz, Poets and Writers, the Seattle Weekly, on NPR, KUOW, KOMO 4's site, and in sundry additional venues.
Her essay, "The Great Cookie Offering," appears in Seal Press' anthology, Single State of the Union, and she has a piece in Smith Magazine's HarperCollins anthology, It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs. She is currently in the process of completing her first novel.
LITSA DREMOUSIS - SEATTLE:
I've lived in Seattle my entire life and, as such, I have a love/hate relationship with many of the city's characteristics that the transplants find endearing. This extends to Seattle's literary culture.
Unquestionably, we're hugely fortunate to have a rich assortment of bookstores, and each niche of the city has at least one. And, of course, we have the legendary Elliott Bay Book Company, one of the nation's best-stocked and most vital independent booksellers. It hosts 500 author readings a year and is integral to Seattle's literary community. I've read at several bookstores in town, but Elliott Bay felt particularly special: I've been going there since childhood and each living author whose work has gotten me through those bleak 3:00 a.m. wormholes or provided unending ripples of joy has taken the podium there. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it's a magical place.
Seattle's literary community is cohesive -- we all know each other or are removed by one degree of separation -- and while there's an element of backbiting endemic to any competitive field, for the most part, we're truly supportive of one another. I cheer loudly and sincerely for my writer friends and they respond in kind. And the weasels? I parted ways with them long ago.
That said, my biggest complaint about Seattle's literary scene is my biggest complaint about Seattle: no one wants to be perceived as ambitious. They want success, but most prefer to act as if it'll arrive on the wings of elves. And while some find this charming, I find it irritating as hell. A number of the publications I write for are based in New York as are the two agencies vying for my novel. Paradoxically, while New York is more competitive, I find it easier to do business there. No one pretends they'll settle for the bronze, and this is both refreshing and vastly more honest than wanting to be the best but not wanting anyone to know you want it.
It's hardly a state secret I've had CFIDS (akin in many ways to MS) for the past 18 years, and I've yet to have the simultaneous health and finances necessary to move to New York. If the two finally align or if I accrue enough money to circumvent my health, my boxes will be packed within the week.
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Totally compelled by the Graham/Fitzgerald story. I just googled her, she was incredibly scrappy. I might have to read her autobiography. Good to be thinking about Los Angeles… being from here I don’t often consider it, more just accept it and appreciate it as home. I’m clearly missing an opportunity. When I’ve left here and gotten immersed in other places I’ll notice the city differently upon my return. Hell, when I go over the hill to the valley I notice the landscape differently. But I’m not sure I’ve ever consciously tried to harness it. The city is a character, too. Good reminder to get out of my head and be conscious of what’s actually around me. I can never get that reminder enough.
I find it interesting that while people were first writing about LA “in defiance of the pervasive crass optimism, offering up acidic tales of loss and disappointment, dissolution and destruction,” there were people like Charlie Chaplin who were building up an image of the world such as we find in The Kid and The Great Dicatator - which I guess is the “crass optimism” part of your description. But still, I think those movies made a difference to the world insomuch as they gave people a big, warm fuzzy. Maybe I’m naive; the older I get, the more naive I realize I am. But still, LA isn’t just a place where hope goes to die, I don’t think. It’s also a place that creates hope for a nation of ostriches who just want their food fast, their villains evil, and their heroes Christian.
I really love L.A. I love visiting it. I try to go every year. This is the first year I haven’t been able to make it and I’m sad. L.A. is gritty and dirty and horrible and bright and fake and a pretentious train wreck where well whiskey costs $9.00, but I love it. Because there are a lot of people who live there who are really, truly trying to say something honest to make the world think or feel. I don’t think the half dozen close friends that I have there would remain if they didn’t believe in The Dream.
I didn’t know that story about Graham and Fitzgerald, but it is really interesting. I want to read more now.
I should point out that the first good wave of LA authors were writing against a “crass optimism” that had less to do with general idealism and a desire to dream big and more to do with a concerted marketing effort conducted by city boosters and railroad tycoons and oil barons and the like.
There was a huge push in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to get people to move to Southern California. The convergence of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific rail lines enabled people to get out here en masse. In exchange for building the rail lines, the railroad companies were given huge tracts of real estate, which they then tried to sell for a pretty penny to people from, say, Kansas. Hence the big marketing effort.
So basically you had this huge wave of people moving west, and they’d been promised Shangri-La, and then they got here and lo and behold it was just as tough, if not tougher, than the rest of the world, and from that sprang the satirists and bubble bursters that I speak of.
Hopefully this clarifies.
Ah, so the optimism was less in the product that was coming out of L.A. but more in the bill of goods being doled out by the city planners. Got it. Also, I didn’t know that. Fascinating.
I think it’s still happening, actually. Everyone, everywhere in the U.S. knows growing up that if you have stars in your eyes and you want to Make It Big, you go to either L.A. or New York City. It’s taught in grade schools in Boswell, Indiana and Roswell, New Mexico - right along with the ABCs and the Pledge of Allegiance. And in some ways, it’s still true.
This was a fun read. You know what I loved about it? You start with the dirt on Los Angeles, the landscape, the questions, the quotations, the cliches - then you sort of give it roots, claim some history, literary heritage - and then it just blooms into this romantic ode full of life and passion and detail about just a few of the people that make this place what it is. If writing instructs us to “kill our darlings” then Los Angeles is the greatest literary construct of all. We (here in L.A.) are peopled by a great many players in the collective American drama. And we love to watch them bloom. And we love to kill them off.
Well said. LA is a town that does love a beautiful death.
Great research. Ask The Dust is one of my favorite novels. The Little Dog Laughed! Nice to be reminded of Carey McWilliams. He was mentioned a lot by HST, but I’ve been too lazy to ever look up, let alone read An Island On The Land. I’ll check it out. I love the constant “judge me by my opinion of LA” that we are all endlessly skewered by. Love or derision, you’ll perpetually be explaining yourself, hedging your enthusiasms, damning harder than you really feel. There is no sentence clever enough to encapsulate it, or to put a voice to all the things you miss out on by either being there or not being there.
I don’t know how many cities in the planet go through this. New York, maybe? I can’t think of where else. It seems like everyone in the world has an opinion on LA, because LA is constantly presenting itself to everyone in movies, TV, etc. It’s the setting of common imagination.
Truth? It’s just like everywhere else, with better weather and worse traffic.
Brad, I really enjoy what you’re doing w/ this series. Deeply flattered to be included. And what makes the Hershey Bar even more wrenching as it pertains to Fitzgerald’s death is that it’s something he might have written had he lived longer and canvassed the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Side note: Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini resonates even more if your family brims w/ old Italian or Greek men.
There’s a musician joke in
Nashville something like
Yeah we gotta head out tonite -
got a gig in L.A.
Wow, you guys are playing Los Angeles?
No no. Lower Alabama.
Whenever I think of Los Angeles I think of Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski. I’m not sure why, exactly. Even when I was in LA it never really felt like their LA, but I guess their stories made more of an impact on me than the actual place… But then again, I wasn’t there very long.
It’s interesting just how many movies and books centre around the destruction of LA. A phenomenal number… When I was in San Francisco I heard more than a few people talking about how great it would be if LA was burned to the ground and the rest of California declared itself a separate republic free of the Bush tyranny (that was back in 2007).
I made me think of that old Aldous Huxley quote: “The wealth of Joy City is unprecedentedly enormous. Its light-hearted people are unaware of War or pestilence or famine or revolution, have never in their safe and still half empty Eldorado known anything but prosperous peace, contentment, universal acceptance. The truest patriots, it may be, are those who pray for a national calamity.”
There was a book I read once called Everybody Smokes in Hell. The author dedicated it to LA, with the preface ‘To the city I hate like I hate cancer.’
And I thought, fuck, man. To inspire that kind of vitriolic reaction, there must be something serious going on in that town. Whether good or bad, it would have to be potent..
Gloria’s point above rings true here, too - over in Australia, you learn that to Make It, you got to LA or NYC, and LA is the more glamorous of the two, so if you want to Make It As A Celebrity, you go to LA.
More LA quotes:
“LA is where people from Iowa mistake each other for movie stars.” - Fred Allen
“You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, put it in the navel of a fruit fly, and still have enough room for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.” - Fred Allen
“The plastic asshole of the world.” - William Faulkner
“Is this the city of angels or demons?
And here the names are what remain: stars encapsulate the gold lame
and they need constant cleaning for when the tourists begin salivating.
And I can’t see why you’d want to live here.
Billboards reach past the tallest buildings,
You can’t swim in a town this shallow
because you will most assuredly drown tomorrow.”
– Death Cab for Cutie
There’s also a good one in the Stephen Elliott book, I can’t recall the exact phrasing, but the idea is that it’s easy to be anonymous in LA, because everyone else is trying not to be.
My comment to you, Brad, is always the same: I wish you’d write more.
(That, and you cannily posted this while Becky is on vacation, and thus won’t object to you omitting Minnesota from places FSF is associated with).
I have an iPhone, dude. I’m like the eye of Sauron over here.
My bad. I thought that, by packing your bags for the Misty Mountains, you’d be over the hills where the spirits fly. And where AT&T doesn’t work.
It’s Minnesota, not the Yukon, man. We have flush toilets, too.
My iPhone often doesn’t get reception in my house, and, I mean, I live in the Hudson Valley, not terribly far from the largest city in the country.
One ring to rule them all…and then the connection gets cut off.
When I announced to my family that I would be relocating to San Diego, the snarky comments began spewing forth before I even reached the end of the sentence. My uncle, then in his mid-80s, led the assault on my joy with his favorite flavor of force majeure schadenfreude- “Lemme tell you somethin’- the ‘Big One’ has yet to hit the Republic of California (said with great disdain), but it’s not a matter of if it’s going to hit, but when.
Even The Greatest Generation had a thing for LA imploding from its own excellence. It’s almost like justice and karma cannot exist unless California is repeatedly battered with fires, mudslides, earthquakes, and pulverizing, violent waves of social unrest.
We’re the hot chick of the American high school. People are waiting for California to become barefoot and pregnant so they can wave their hoary fingers at us and say “Told ya so!”
Joe, your description of your uncle reminds me of the last few seconds of this song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIB0Mk3HuO8
Funny.
Holy crap! I was playing that on guitar two days ago! I like that version better than “Still in Hollywood.” You clearly have excellent taste.
Man, talk about “plate of shrimp” phenomenon!
It’s the best version. Actually, that whole CD is top shelf and was on constant repeat on my CD player for many years. It’s from Still in Hollywood - a compilation CD.
http://www.amazon.com/Still-Hollywood-Concrete-Blonde/dp/B000000QH6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1279564534&sr=8-1
Ha@ Love that description of California, Joe. California the hot chick. The hot chick has a heart, too, you know, rest of America/the world!
Brad,
This is a wonderful post. It’s making me think of T.S. Eliot’s: The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, and The Wasteland–(!)
I love your descriptions of a city whose face (as I see it) and personality are as complex as the ocean, desert and mountains that border it. So much grandeur and extremes can’t be grasped at once. –No. L.A. is not like everywhere else. F. Scott Fitzgerald living across from budding star Lucille Ball is one tiny, tiny example.
Jessica
Thanks, Jessica! Appreciate the read.
F. Scott Fitzgerald lived here, too. We did not kill him. Way to go, L.A.
Ha! Have you read Greg’s comment (above) yet?
Now I did.
L.A. Where great writers go to die. Literally. ;P
It’s always said something to me about L.A. that Nathaneal West died in a car crash on the way to F.Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral, but I’ve never been able to articulate exactly what.
Jesus. I didn’t know that.
That right there should’ve been the end of my piece. Nathanael West getting killed in a car wreck on the way to Fitzgerald’s funeral. Sort of sums it up, doesn’t it?
Lord.
Yup.
He and his wife had been delayed coming back from a camping trip and were speeding. He ran a stop sign, and that’s all she wrote.
I’ve read Day of the Locust three times. Every time I do I’m struck by how prescient it was about the entertainment culture in Los Angeles.
Either that, or things really haven’t changed that much…..
Back when I was working at the kiosk, I compulsively read the New Yorker. Cover to cover. Also, I did drawings of animals in pen on register tape. But that’s neither here nor there.
In any event, there’s an article from the November 16, 2009 edition about Fitzgerald and Hollywood and screenwriting. It’s worth a read. (Particularly if you’ve nowhere else to go for seven hours.)
Enjoying this series as usual, Brad. Keep it up.
I don’t really have an opinion about L.A. My great Aunt lives there, and she’s a lovely lady. She’s so lovely, in fact, that I can’t imagine she would stay somewhere un-lovely. So by deduction I have to say L.A. is a lovely place.
I lived in Los Angeles from 1987- 1992 and feel indebted to the city of angels. I always enjoy reading your writing, Brad, and this piece in particular was really breezy, intriguing and enjoyable. I can certainly relate to a cultural interest in “celebrity” relationships, especially those that seem so unusual, or out of the mainstream like the Graham/ Fitzgerald affair. And the landscape: from earthquakes to “armageddon” film epics, those Hollywood Hills and Griffith Park, the ocean splendor.
People still ask: how did you like living in Los Angeles? I used to say I both loved and hated it. But really, the truth was: I both loved and hated me. You remind me of many things I loved about being a “former West coaster.”
i love stories about LA and Hollywood. my first time visiting LA as an adult was after battling a winter in Beijing, one of those dry depressing winters when snow melts as soon as it hits the ground, and it’s so cold, you just want to die. LA was a freaking paradise in comparison.
and every single time i go i have a celebrity sighting - Jessica Simpson at the Standard, Mila Kunis on the JetBlue flight into Long Beach, and countless B-list actors I recognize and don’t know the names of.
i like what Litsa had to say about the reluctant ambition of writers in Seattle. i’m finding a similar vibe here in San Francisco, at least compared to NYC. people here seem to want to succeed but want to come off as nice, which is very different than actually being nice. i’ll take in-your-face-aggressive over passive-aggressive any day.
“i’ll take in-your-face-aggressive over passive-aggressive any day.” Exactly! Well put, Angela.