LOUIS ADAMIC : EXCERPT FROM LAUGHING IN THE JUNGLE (1932)

LOUIS ADAMIC : LAUGHING IN THE JUNGLE

page 52)

...These men are the high priests of the Chamber of Commerce whose religion is Climate and Profits.  They are - some of them - grim, inhuman individuals with a great terrifying singleness of purpose.  They see a tremendous opportunity to enrich themselves beyond anything they could have hoped for ten or even five year ago, and they mean to make the most of it.... And trailing after the big boys is a mob of lesser fellows, whom the former awe with their superior economic advantages and control through the Chamber of Commerce and other pay-triotic organizations: thousands of minor realtors, boomers, promoters, contractors, agents, salesmen, bunko-men, officeholders, lawyers, and preachers - all driven by the same motives of wealth, power, and personal glory, and a greater Los Angeles.  They exploit the "come-ons" and one another, envy the big boys, live deliriously for business, bigger and better business, while their wives gather in womens' clubs, listen to swamis and yogis and English lecturers, join "love cults" and Coue clubs in Hollywood and Pasadena, and their children - boys and girls in their teens: "Beautiful but dumb" -...drink and rush around in roadsters...."

pages 53 -54)

...Most of the people come here to be sun-kissed and made well, and so healing is one of the big industries in town.  Besides thousands of more or less regular doctors, there are in Los Angeles no end of chiropractors, osteopaths, "drugless physicians," faith healers, health lecturers, and manufacturers and salesmen of all sorts pf heath "Stabilizers" and "normalizers," psychoanalysts, hynotists, mesmerists, the flow-of-life mystics, astro-therapists, miracle men and women - in short, quacks and charlatans of all descriptions.

Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

Note: Don't you just love it!?

LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL : OCEAN IN VIEW

Reading around the erosion of the beaches around Malibu, in particular Broad Beach, which was one of my favorites,  I found Powell's descriptions almost romantic.

Powell is the man who the UCLA library is named after, for he was the head librarian there for many years.  He and his wife lived in Westwood and then moved out to the Malibu.

Page 401)

Indians are buried everywhere from Mugu Lagoon to Malibu Creek. Every bulldozing operation brings their bones and artifacts to light, as one did just across Broad Beach Road from us - a dozen huddled skeletons, four or five hundred years old, talking no notice of their noisy resurrection.  Our germanium garden, falling to Encinal Creek, is sure to be a burial ground, the gofers tell us.  Mary Austin writes of the residue of personality that always haunts a place once inhabited by man.  Jeffers' poetry is full of these hauntings.  But I cannot say that I have encountered sprits here on the Malibu.  Perhaps the diesels drive them away.  I have no fear of them however.  The Chumash were a gentle people, living on shell fish, roots, and acorn meal.  We who are carnivorous may leave a different residue.  Sometimes I wonder who will follow us here, and what they will make of our artifacts - books on discs ... and less tangible, though perhaps more lasting, our love for this marine mountainscape this world called the Malibu.

From the book Writing Los Angeles

I'm sorry I failed to write down the year he wrote this and the ... is a couple missing words.

ROBERT TOWNE (1974) : PREFACE AND POSTSCRIPT TO CHINATOWN

No script ever drove me nuttier, as I tried one way and another casually to reveal mountains of information about dams, orange groves, incest, elevator operators, etc. As in most states, it finally comes down to exile or death; my wife in her wisdom banished me and my growing shame to any island of choice - in this case the cheapest, closest and as it happened, most perfect, Catalina.

There in the fall of 1972, inside the flaking white and green trimmed dusty, clapboard of Banning Lodge, perched between Cat Harbor and Isthmus Cove, I wrote the heart of "Chinatown" - with the aid and comfort of two friends, one who lived with me and one who visited me in banishment - Hira my dog and Edward Taylor, since college my Jiminy Crickett, Mycroft Holmes, and Edmund Wilson.  Eddie would periodically drop out of the sky on a Catalina Seaplane, Hira would chase forty head of buffalo into the windsock waving at the shore line of Cat Harbor, just on a whim, and I would whine and wring my hands - and slowly discover my invisible collaborator on "Chinatown."


EXCERPT FROM
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

Page 679-680

TRUMAN CAPOTE (1950) HOLLYWOOD - LOCAL COLOR COLLECTION

Yesterday, feeling greedy, I remembered ravishing displays of fruit outside a large emporium I'd driven admiringly past a number of times.  Mammoth oranges, grapes big as ping- pong balls, apples piled in rosy pyramids.  There is a sleight of hand about distances here, nothing is so near as you supposed, and it is not unusual to travel ten miles for a package of cigarettes.  It was a two-mile walk before I even caught sight of the fruit stand.  The long counters were tilted so that from quite far away you could see the splendid wares, apples, peaches. I reached for one of these extraordinary apples, but it seemed to be glued to its case.  A sales girl giggled... "Plaster," she said, and I laughed too, a little feverishly perhaps, then wearily followed her into the deeper regions of the store where I bought six small, rather mealy apples, and six small, rather mealy pears.

Excerpted from:
Page 363-364





Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

JAMES M. CAIN (1933) PARADISE : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

JAMES M. CAIN (1933) PARADISE : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

page 108-109

Wash out, then, the "land of sunshine, fruit, and flowers" : all these are here, but not with the lush, verdant fragrance that you have probably imagined.  A celebrated movie comedian is credited with the remark that "the flowers don't smell and the women do," but in my observation nothing smells.  Wash out the girl with the red cheeks peeping coyly from behind a spray of orange leaves.  The girl is here, but the dry air has taken the red out of her cheeks; the orange trees are here, but they don't look that way: the whole picture has too much pep, life, and moisture in it....

Wash out the palm trees, half visible beyond the tap dancing platform.  Palm trees are here, but they are all phonies, planted by people amused with the notion of a sub-tropical climate, and they are so out of harmony with their surroundings that they hardly - notice.  Wash out the movie palazzos, so impressive in the photographs. They are here, too, at any rate in a place called Beverly Hills, not far from Hollywood; but they are like the palm trees, so implausible in their surroundings that they take on the lifelessness of movie wets.  Above all, washout the cool green that seems to be the main feature of all illustrations got out by railroads.  Wash that out and keep it out."

Page 112)  Here Cain tries to come up with the positives

First, I would list the unfailing friendliness and courtesy of the people.  It is a friendliness somewhat different from what you find elsewhere, for it does not as a rule include hospitality.  The man who will take all sorts of trouble to direct you to some place you are trying to find does not ordinarily invite you into his house; it is not that he has any reason for keeping you out, it is merely that it does not occur to him to do it.

Hospitality, I think, comes when people have sent down roots it goes with pride in a home, pride in ancestors that built the home, conscious identification with a particular soil.  These people, in one way or another, are all exiles.  They have come here recently, and their hearts are really into the places that they left.  Thus, if they do not do as much visiting with each other as you see in other parts of the country, or the gossiping that goes with visiting, they do have the quick friendliness that exiles commonly show, and I must say it is most agreeable...

With the friendliness and courtesy, I would bracket the excellent English that is spoke her.  The Easterner, when he first hears it, is likely to mistake it for the glib chatter of a habitual salesmanship....


Writing Los Angeles

A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

LAWRENCE WESCHLER (1995) FROM AN ARTICLE IN THE NEW YORKER

LAWRENCE WESCHLER - Published 1995 in The New Yorker magazine

He grew up in Southern Cal and became as writer for the New Yorker.  This was published in that magazine in 1995. In this article, Weschler examines the question of the light and air quality in LA, which is famous for smog. First he gets opinions at Cal Tech.

Page 668) Hal Zirin at Caltech speaking

"Well, it's all thanks to the incredible stability, the uncanny stillness, of the air around L.A.  It goes back to that business people are always talking about - a desert thrusting up against the ocean, and, specifically, against the eastern shore of a northern ocean, with its cold, clockwise, southward-moving current.  And the other crucial element in the mix is these high mountain ranges girdling the basin - so that what happens here is that ocean-cooled air drifts in over the coastal plain and it's trapped beneath the warmer desert air floating in over the mountains to the east.  That's the famous thermal inversion, and the opposite of the usual arrangement, where warm surge air progressively cools as it rises.  And the atmosphere below the inversion layer is incredibly stable.  You must have noticed, for instance, how, if you're on a transcontinental jet coming in for a landing at LAX, once you pass over the mountains on your final approach, no matter how turbulent the flight may heave been prior to that, suddenly the plane becomes completely silent and steady and still."... "That's the stable air of L.A."

Pages 669-670)

Angelenos tend to take perverse credit for the uncanny light of the place, as if they themselves were the ones who made it all happen; and, in fact, according to at least one way of looking at things, they may have a point. Someone told me that if it was air pollution I wanted to consider I should go talk to Glen Cass, at Caltech, a jovial, rotund, clear-eyed, and short-cropped professor of environmental engineering with very specific interest in smog....

So I asked Cass,what, exactly, was all that white stuff chocking the view of his beloved mountains?

"Well, it turns out that there are all sorts of different sizes of particles floating in the air -  from absolutely minuscule to relatively large and coarse,  he explained.  "Some of those - and especially the larger ones - simply get in the way of the line of vision between you and, say, that mountain over there.  They blot out or diffract the beams of reflected sunlight emanating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying visual detail to your eyes.  Contrary to what you might think, though, it's not so much the large, coarse particles that pose the biggest problem,  Instead, it's those of a specific intermediate size - about half a micrometer, to be exact - those constitute the jokers in the deck when it comes to visibility."


from
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

LAWRENCE LIPTON (1959) First chapter of THE HOLY BARBARIANS - SLUM BY THE SEA

Lipton writes about Venice Beach.

LAWRENCE LIPTON (1959)  First chapter of THE HOLY BARBARIANS  - SLUM BY THE SEA

Page 421-422

Here, working couples with children find the run-down apartments and tumble - down shacks that the realtor has to offer. To them, too, it is Land's End.  After being turned away in other parts of town with "No children, no pets," they stagger finally into Ocean Park and Venice, foot-sore or with an empty gas tank, ready to rent anything with four walls and a roof, even if the walls are paper-thin and the roof leaks and the toilet is stuffed up. "Wait till you see how I'll fix it up," says the wife with a tired little smile, and Dad has visions of puttering around Sunday morning with a paint brush turning this time-rotted ruin into the American Dream Home of the magazine color pages.

The young who come here have no such dreams. The aged, living in the sealed-in loneliness of their television sets, will leave them alone. The working couples, fatigued after a night on the graveyard shift at nearby Douglas Aircraft, will nod over their beer and listen to the jukebox in the waterfront taverns. If books, painting or music, or all-night gab fest are more important to the young than the mop and dishrag, nobody will read them any lectures on neatness in a neighborhood where it is no crime to leave the beds unmade and two days' dishes in the sink.  Nobody will turn to stare at beards and sandals or dirty Levi's on the beach where a stained sweat shirt or a leather jacket is practically formal dress.

Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1933) GOLDEN LAND

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1933) GOLDEN LAND

"Hush now. Get into your trunks while I fix you a drink.  It's going to be swell at the beach."  In the bedroom his bathing trunks and robe were laid out on the bed.  He changed, hanging his suit in the closet where her clothes hung, where there hung already another suit of his and clothes for the evening.  When he returned to the sitting room she had fixed the drink for him; she held up the glass, watching him still with that serene impersonal smiling.  Now he watched her slip off the cape and kneel at the cellarette, filling a silver flask, in the bathing costume of the moment, such as ten thousand wax female dummies wore in ten thousand shop windows that summer, such as a hundred thousand young girls wore on California beaches; he looked at her, kneeling - back, buttocks and flanks trim enough, even firm enough (so firm in fact as to be a little on the muscular side, what with unremitting and perhaps even rigorous care) but still those of forty.  But I don't want a young girl, he thought. Would to God that all young girls, all young female flesh, were removed, blasted even, from the earth. He finished the drink before she had filled the flash....


Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

September 11 2023  My apologies to the fourteen readers who hit on this post. I suppose spell check did not work or save did not, as there were an embarrassing number of errors on this post. I do sometimes review posts after hitting the word publish but apparently did not catch these. I hope this is corrected now.  This is one of several quotes selected from Writing Los Angeles....  

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD (1939 - 1942) DIARIES

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD  - Published 1939

Isherwood was a British ex-patriot who came to Southern California with his friend W. H. Auden on the eve of World War II.  These excerpts are from his DIARIES.  He became interested in the Hindu gurus  who were here and was once an attendee at the Vedanta Society (as I once was.)

Page 233) From 1939.

..." Krishnamurti was a slight, sallow little man with a scrubby chin and rather bloodshot eyes, whose face bore only faint traces of the extraordinary beauty he must have had as a boy.   He was very quiet and modest man and never talked in ordinary company about philosophy or religion.  He seemed fondest of animals and not at least with children.  Gerald complained that he got violently upset about trifles - like catching a train - and showed little sign of inward calm.  Certainly, he didn't impress me as Prabhavananda did; but he had a kind of simple dignity which was very touching.  And - there was no getting away from it - he had done what no other man alive today has done; he had refused to become a god.

Page 237) From 1940

..."Garbo was at tea with us today.  I think Peter is right when he says she's a "dumb cluck."  She actually didn't know who Daladier was.  If you watch her for a quarter of an hour, you see every one of her famous expressions.  She repeats them, quite irrelevantly. There is the iron sternness of Ninotchka, the languorous open -lipped surrender of Camille, Mata Hari's wicked laugh, Christina's boyish toss of the head, Anna Christies's grimace of disgust.  She is so amazingly beautiful, so noble, so naturally compelling and commanding, that her ridiculous artificiality, her downright silliness can't spoil the effect.

Page 243) From 1942.

Yesterday. the Swami drove down to visit us.  The day passed off quite pleasantly, although there were some embarrassing silences.  The Swami, as always, was very quiet and polite.  We drove him up to Trabuco.  "Is smoking permitted here?" he asked.  It isn't.  But he smoked.


From
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

EDMUND WILSON (1931) : THE CITY OF OUR LADY THE QUEEN OF ANGLES : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

EXCERPT FROM EDMUND WILSON (1931)  THE CITY OF OUR LADY THE QUEEN OF ANGLES

page 96) Writing about Bob Shuler and other preachers of the era such as Aimee McPherson and Dr. Briegleb.  These people tried to have influence on the values of the city and at question was their own relationship to money.

 ... "I came from the poorest of the poor, "he would say.  "I have always been an underdog all my life, and my sympathies and efforts will always be on the side of the common people... I must be forgiven for wanting this city run in the interests of the common people for the benefit of those who need protection and defense."  He did not believe that "an honest officer would be active in enforcing the law against the defenseless and friendless while he flossed his eyes to the lawlessness of the rich and powerful; and he was "against the third degree, against special assessment of the poor, against confiscation of humble homes for public improvements."  "I've found a very few millionaires, "he would say, "Who didn't get their money in a manner that I doubted if God could own or bless."  He was indignant in his intimations that his Baptist rival, Aimee McPherson, had diverted the money she raised on the pretext of pious purposes to her own luxurious living.  When she had elicited, on one occasion, contributions for a monument for her husband's grave, Bob Shuler, several months afterwards, had photographs of the grave taken and would display them to his congregation, showing that there was nothing there but the original ignoble headstone..."

page 106)

... "Poor Dr. Briegleb!  Some basic Germanic simplicity, Puritanical inflexibility, professional respectability, will always, one fears, prevent him from appealing to the public of Los Angeles as Aimee McPherson and Bob Shuler do.  Shuler can still charm every heart with a whiff of the cow-manure from his heels.  Aimee, in her jolly gaudy temple, enchants her enormous audience by her beaming inexhaustible sunshine and her friendly erotic voice.  She writes them operas in which ancient oratorios and modern Italian opera are mingled with popular songs and tunes from musical comedies..."

from
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

HARRIS NEWMARK (1915) : SIXTY YEARS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

HARRIS NEWMARK : SIXTY YEARS IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 1853-1913

Published in 1915

Pages 40-41)

...The charms of climate and scenery (widely advertised, as I have said, at the Philadelphia Centennial and, later, through the continuous efforts of the first and second Chambers of Commerce and the Board of Trade), together with the extension of the Southern Pacific to the east and the building of the Santa Fe Railroad, had brought here a class of tourists who not only enjoyed the winter, but ventured to stay through the summer season; and who, having remained, were not long in seeking land and homesteads.  The rapidly - increasing demand for lots and houses caused hundreds of men and women to enter the local real-estate field, most of whom were inexperienced and without much responsibility.  When, therefore, the news of their phenomenal activity got abroad, as was sure to be the case, hordes of would-be speculators - some with, but more without knowledge of land-manipulation, and many none too scrupulous - rushed to the Southland to invest, wager, or swindle. Thousands upon thousand of Easterners swelled the number already here; dealers in realty sprang up like mushrooms.... Selling and bartering were carried on at all hours of the day or night, and in every conceivable place; agents, eager to keep every appointment possible, enlisted the services of hackmen, hotel employees and waiters to put them in touch with prospective buyers; and the same properties would often change hands several times in a day, sales being made on the curbstone, at bars or restaurant tables, each succeeding transfer representing an enhanced value...

from
Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

WRITING LOS ANGELES - A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY EDITED BY DAVID L. ULIN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA BOOK REVIEW and READING ALOUD

Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002


This book held my interest author after author, so editor David L Ulin made some truly wonderful and wise decisions about what authors and what works would best move the visions of Los Angeles we readers behold here through history and individual points of view.  I've had the book in my possession near 5 weeks and loved that I could pick it up, read one entry, and put it back down since things have been so busy for me.

I'll be posting excerpts from this book over the next few months, pages I stuck post-it-note stickies on so I could come back to it.

Something else I did, which I haven't in years, is that I read these passages ALOUD. 
Reading aloud to oneself or an audience is a different experience, isn't it?  How wonderful it would be if there could be a CD of each of these authors reading their own work aloud, but it's impossible because many of them are no longer alive and didn't live in the days of recording readings.  Why not try it yourself?

The book takes you through an 1884 publication to the near present (Writing Los Angeles, circa 2002, was on the NEW BOOK SHELF at my local library) and authors that you never knew or dreamed ever came through or lived in Los Angeles.

As I mentioned in my review of the book "Pasadena" a few months back, I'm one who enjoys reading that is placed in the local one knows; the topography, geology, even the old Thomas Brothers Maps.  Though books often take us to foreign lands and cultures, there's a sense of more involvement when you can say to yourself, "Yes, I know that road."

Each entry in this book has a short orientation about the author and the importance of the particular piece of work which I found important to situate not only the author but the reader.

If you wish to read all my excerpts in the months ahead, try using the Google Search feature embedded in the side bar using the words Los Angeles.