The Sunday L.A. Times carried an article by Hector Tobar that made this Southern California writer put down her cup of green tea and look for a barricade to storm. Tobar wrote about a New York Daily News blogger’s snarky response to hearing that Eloise Klein Healy was named poet laureate of Los Angeles.
All of the L.A.-bashing came from one blogger, Christopher Young, and I might have dismissed his jibes as just one writer grasping for a way to sound clever and superior, except that I ran into the same attitude at the Institute for Dance Criticism, a workshop held at the American Dance Festival, in 2004. One of the pieces we saw, by NY choreographer John Jasperse, was called “California,” and when we discussed it, I discovered that just about everyone but me got it that “California” was shorthand for everything shallow, vapid, and materialistic in contemporary culture. Huh? I, on the other hand, was the only person who recognized that a large hanging sculpture that was the major feature of the set looked like a map of California turned on its side. (You can turn your laptop on its side to get a sense of what the sculpture looked like.)
Tobar mentions Didion, Fitzgerald, and Brecht as a few of the major writers who’ve called Los Angeles home. For me, beyond the legion of brilliant writers who have lived in the lower left corner of the country, there is something wonderful about L.A. as literary setting. L.A. can gleam in the sun as if it were created yesterday, as if it were free of history-an illusion, of course, and an invitation to go beneath the shiny surface and tell the real stories.