Los Angeles' literary landscape

[kent mueller]

I'm trying to recall if Bukowski was born in LA or not. He's another
California landscape, sort of The Nickel/Fifth in downtown LA. I read that
LA's skid row is 30 blocks square, this is amazing, since most cities have
lost their skid-rows in the last 30 years or so. They made it sound like one
huge open air drug market...

Kent Mueller


> From: Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
> Date: Mon, 01 May 2006 11:46:57 -0400
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Los Angeles' literary landscape
> 
> A kind of interesting thing about the fiction entries is that, of the
> authors'  names' I recognized, no one  was originally from the L.A
> area.  Joan Didion was from California, but up north in Sacramento.
> 
> I wonder if it might be necessary to be from somewhere else to fully
> sense the by-now widely perceived "strangeness" of the place.
> 
> On May 1, 2006, at 10:49 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
>> Los Angeles' literary landscape
>> 
>> By Thomas Curwen and David L. Ulin, Times Staff
>> Writers
>> 
>> In "Ramona," her 1884 novel of Southern California,
>> Helen Hunt Jackson did more than tell the story of the
>> illicit romance between a mestizo orphan and an Indian
>> sheepherder. Caught in the pages of her famous
>> melodrama is a picture of the land that is perhaps
>> more timeless than the tale itself.
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> Writers since Jackson have consciously ‹ or
>> unconsciously ‹ tumbled to similar truths. Whether the
>> backdrop is bucolic or sprawling, nostalgic or
>> postmodern, the drama of Southern California is often
>> caught up in the topography or the development of this
>> urban environment. Fiction writers portray it,
>> nonfictions writers explain it, and between the two is
>> a rich body of literature.
>> 
>> No list of these books is complete, but these 20
>> titles are a good starting point.
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> Fiction
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> The Crying of Lot 49
>> 
>> By Thomas Pynchon
>> 
>> When Oedipa Maas first beholds San Narcisco, a vast
>> sprawl of houses somewhere near L.A., it is all
>> dystopia sheathed in smog ‹ and ripe for a conspiracy
>> as dark as any Jacobean tragedy But what matters most
>> is that Pynchon in a little more than 100 pages
>> captures a topography straight out of our local past.
>> The high jinks at Yoyodyne, the cavorting at Echo
>> Courts, and the pink glow of the sky at night ‹ we
>> fail to recognize this world at our own risk.
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-
>> re-125books30apr30,0,6783777.story?coll=cl-art
>> 
>> __________________________________________________
>> Do You Yahoo!?
>> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
>> http://mail.yahoo.com
> 
> 
>