Writing Los Angeles: A Literary AnthologyAuthor: Ulin, David L. (editor)Genre: Short Stories Publisher: The Library of America Released: 2002 |
A Review by Laurie Edwards
10/07/2002
From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice. Actually, and in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place, full of old, dying people and young people who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America—full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religions and cults and fake science and wildcat business enterprises, which, with their aim of quick profits, are doomed to collapse and drag down multitudes of people...A jungle.It's said that Los Angeles has no history, that it rose full strength from the desert with nary a breath drawn between Catholic missionaries and eternal highways. Its superficiality is explained as the result of too many influences imposed upon it too quickly; no single imprint got a chance to reign supreme long enough to stamp the area with a character. Rather like an ugly woman who appears beautiful when she's wearing the right makeup, Los Angeles has created an attractive style based on its very vagueness...only, as time's gone by, there's more makeup than skin to put it on, and the city looks like a Ringling Brothers clown capering in the center ring of the nation.
Louis Ademic, from Laughing in the Jungle
But Los Angeles does have a history—several of them, in fact. The residents have been creating a past—often mutually exclusive pasts—of whole cloth since the area's earliest civilized days. From gallant Spaniards and peaceful missionaries to Mexicans caught between one country and another to snake oil salesmen and religious cults to the movie business and surfers, all these fleeting impressions of Los Angeles have a hold on the American psyche. These jumbled images have made LA our national City of Dreams.
It took a long time before LA's residents began writing their fantastical versions of their area's history. It was a couple hundred years, in which history became legend became myth, before they began to chronicle their history, and what they wrote (and what residents and the rest of the world accepted as true) had little to do with what had actually happened. The business of inventing reality, as opposed to simply recording it, was thus a block upon which Los Angeles was built, even back to its earliest recorded history.
In a fascinating collection of short stories written by residents over the past two hundred years, editor David L. Ulin has told, not the actual history of Los Angeles, but rather the history as the residents have created it. Things may not actually have happened the way these writers told it, but so strong is the printed word in the absence of other media that these slice-of-life stories create the illusion (the most important word in Los Angeles) that what you're reading is the history that really was.
Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology leaves no major LA image untouched; there's a story written to create/explain nearly all the oddities this city has been through. From Helen Hunt Jackson (Echoes in the City of the Angels, 1883, the first to push the "peaceful Spanish pueblo" story), to Bertold Brecht to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Simone de Beavoir to Jack Kerouac and Joan Didion, these tales of Los Angeles build upon one another as the sights and sounds of the city...sights and sounds of a city which never truly existed.
The list of famous authors included in Writing Los Angeles goes on and on; these are the great authors of the 20th century, each with a new (manufactured) memory of a city with an indistinguishable past. Raymond Chandler, Upton Sinclair, Tom Wolfe, and Tennessee Williams are represented, all melded seamlessly melded together by the inspired guidance of David L. Ulin.
It may be David L. Ulin who's most to thank for this excellent collection. What in lesser hands would have been a mishmash of semi-memoirs and vague psychoanalysis becomes an eclectic and compelling collection. Ulin knew who to include, who to exclude, and how to arrange these stories for maximum emotional effect. This is, without a doubt, one of the best editing jobs I've ever seen.
Finally, though, the question is this: Are these stories merely entertaining and lovely, or should we, in the absence of real history, accept them as the past of this utterly up-to-date city? If Los Angeles is willing to own these legends as their history, can anyone else complain? Ultimately, LA is a deeply shallow city, and it appears less than eager to promote its true background. Instead, these funny and flashy tales tell the history of LA better, perhaps, than any strict historical tome possibly could; as a city constantly reinventing itself over the last few hundred years, Writing Los Angeles tells the story beautifully—a city with no past beyond the imagination of its residents.
I recommend Writing Los Angeles to all residents of Los Angeles, for whom it should be required reading. As for the rest of us, those who appreciate fine writing and those who enjoy fantasy books will feel right at home. This is beautifully put together, thanks to Mr. Ulin, and the stories themselves are the stuff of which dreams were made reality.
...if one lives in Los Angeles...one would be best be properly equipped and armed—not with guns and bolos and mosquito netting, but with knowledge and understanding of the scene—with a sense of humor, with laughter. Otherwise the place is apt to get the better of one, both materially and spiritually.
Louis Ademic, from Laughing in the Jungle
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 10/07/2002
