Los Angeles' literary landscape

[David Casseres]

I used to go to the Follies when I was in high school.  I feel
privileged to be among the last Americans ever to see genuine
burlesque.

On 5/2/06, Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> On May 2, 2006, at 9:36 PM, kent mueller wrote:
>
> > 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
>
>
> He grew up there, went to school there.
>
> LA. has many of everything including skid rows. Maybe if you added
> them all
> up it would come to 50 square blocks.  The downtown one, portrayed in
> "Barfly."
> was still there the last I heard. South Main Street and environs.
> The Follies burlesque theatre was there back a long time ago. Pershing
> Square--around where the city started--was fairly skid row-ish.
>
> My information is hopelessly out of date.
>
>
> >
> >
> >> 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
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>