Los Angeles' literary landscape

[David Casseres]

I think LA by night from the air is one of the most beautiful sights
in today's world.  A friend of mine used to seduce girls by flying out
of Santa Monica airport in a lightplane, making a straight-out
departure over the Pacific.  After gaining enough altitude, he would
tell the young woman to close her eyes, then he'd make a 180 to face
the lights of the city and tell her to open them.  Scored every time
is what I heard.

But yeah, I know about the BoschHell vision as well. Once I flew into
LA on an airliner, passing low over a large and hellish forest fire in
the Santa Monica Mountains.  A passenger freaked out and demanded to
be allowed to leave the plane.  Back in that innocent age, the flight
attendants talked him down, as opposed to trying to immobilize or kill
him.

On 5/2/06, Humberto Torofuerte <strongbool at gmail.com> wrote:
> There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night...only
> Hieronymous Bosch's Hell can match the inferno effect.
>
>
> On 5/1/06, David Casseres < david.casseres at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The view of San Narciso from a hilltop, looking just like a
> > printed-circuit board, is one of the things that made me bond tightly
> > to Pynchon's books.  It is truly a breathtaking insight about
> > California, and remains as precisely true today as it was then.
> >
> > On 5/1/06, Dave Monroe < monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> >
>
>