california as a type of speculative fiction
This Week In Reading
West of the West: Imagining California, edited by Leonard Michaels, David Reid and Raquel Scherr
Let's get this out of the way: I'm not going to tell you to read this book. I enjoyed it, but I also recognize that it falls into the genre of "assigned reading for a history gen-ed that absolutely no one opened." Except me, apparently. Like all anthologies, this was a mixed bag. Some essays really cut me, and some were a drag. I was familiar with some of the authors (Joan Didion, John Steinbeck, Maya Angelou, Walt Whitman, Amy Tan etc.) but many were completely unknown to me.
When I read anthologies, I am usually more interested in the way that it is organized than I am the actual content (is that obnoxious? I am sorry). This one was a particularly intriguing mish-mash, mixing together excerpts from novels, personal essays, and academic history writing, with a stray poem or two thrown in for good measure. The editors curate them into abstractly titled sections (“Atmospheres”, “Migrations”, and “Apocalypse”, just to start), stringing together disparate texts with little regard for context or explanation. As you read, you have no idea what year any particular piece was written, if it was excerpted from a longer book, or even if it is fiction or non-fiction.
In some ways, this feels apt. California is at once a real place and a fantasy, an actual physical location that also manages to be a kind of speculative fiction. The lines between facade and truth get blurrier and blurrier the longer you stay here. It's not so much that we are fooled by falsities of this golden land, but rather that we begin to understand that the way we tell the story of California has become it’s own kind of reality. Our fictions of what we want this place to be are just as powerful of a kind of truth as the tedious logistics of daily life.
When people ask me what brought me to LA I have a flip answer I usually give about tacos, and lesbians, and the art scene, and all of those things are true, but aren't why I came to Los Angeles. Somehow, saying I moved to a city where I had no friends and no job because I read a lot of California history is not considered a socially acceptable answer. But the real answer is that I moved to LA because I was fascinated by it on an intellectual level. Fascinated by the way the outside world sees LA conflicts with the way LA sees itself, how both of those perspectives are at odds with the day to day realities of this city. How all of these ideas can coexist together. How a place can be born from a fantasy, can be held together by fiction.
On a smoggy day, LA is revealed to be the trash heap it truly is, dirty and sprawling and gross. But then, even then, golden hour hits and the canyons glow pink and that bumper to bumper urban sprawl seems vast and beautiful and full of promise. LA is both completely artificial and unflinchingly raw. Manicured yards and drive by shootings.
Southern California is a type of Eden, every tree seemingly laden with oranges, the sunset a perfect gradient, unblemished by clouds night after night. But it is also a literal desert, averaging only 15 inches of rain a year. Where does the juice inside the oranges come from? A mystery. The canyons are covered in dry brown grass, rugged and beautiful and so, so, dead. Los Angeles is a place people go to chase their dreams, and is also the place where those dreams are inevitably crushed. But tell someone that you moved to LA to be disappointed and they'll look at you like you are insane. Have I convinced you to move here yet? Please move here and hang out with me.
And yet, the dream lives on. It lives on in every Midwestern actress that lands in LAX clutching a stack of glossy headshots, it lives on in everyone that thinks to themselves: next week, next month, everything will fall into place.
When I first moved here I told Minnar that LA is a place that I would enjoy while I was here, but would not miss when I left. That still feels true. Also true: LA seems like a place I could leave, and then return to and feel like I hadn't missed a beat. Things are moving fast here, but in the way a treadmill moves fast. I could come back in two years and there would still be a caravan of movie trailers on the street, shooting a different movie on a different block. There would still be trash everywhere, and the flowers would still bloom without a drop of water.
One last thing: I've always struggled with all contradictions that live within me. I am the loudest introvert in any given room, my tastes are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow, I constantly ride the line between professional and unprofessional, and I frequently hold two opposing arguments as deeply true. I blame being a gemini. But anyways. LA is a place where all of my dualities can be at rest.
Further Reading
People that write about California better than I do: Joan Didion for essays (Where I Was From being her most California specific I have read), John Steinbeck for fiction (East of Eden is the great American novel), Mike Davis for an academic take on the Californian Apocalypse (Ecology of Fear), Becky M. Nicolaides for a mind bending exploration of housing policy in Los Angeles (My Blue Heaven).