Read Your Way Around Los Angeles

At about the identical time Didion was settling into a house in Malibu and writing about our infamous Santa Ana winds, Luis J. Rodriguez was becoming a member of a avenue gang. Rodriguez’s memoir “All the time Operating: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.” is ready within the gritty suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley. It’s an epic story of household, concord, prejudice, drive-by shootings and the on a regular basis pleasures of a neighborhood the place there are nonetheless open fields, swimming holes and different reminders of a latest rural previous. Rodriguez provides us one thing we hardly ever see in films set in Los Angeles: the richness and drama of its working-class life.

So does one other San Gabriel Valley work: “Curse of the Ravenous Class,” the 1977 play by Sam Shepard a few household residing on an avocado farm, with a freeway close by. A number of literary a long time later, you’ll discover the identical panorama filling in with meals stands promoting menudo in Salvador Plascencia’s experimental 2005 novel, “The Folks of Paper.” And eventually, the San Gabriel Valley turns into the surreal stage of the tales in Carribean Fragoza’s glorious 2021 assortment, “Eat the Mouth That Feeds You.”

The place can I get out of my automobile and stroll via a few of L.A.’s literary historical past?

Start at downtown’s Grand Central Market, at its western entrance. To your left, you’ll see the funicular Angels Flight, which supplies its identify to a detective novel by the immensely in style Michael Connelly. Angels Flight will take you as much as Bunker Hill, the setting of many an L.A. novel from the mid-Twentieth century. “Bunker Hill is previous city, misplaced city, shabby city, criminal city,” the noir grasp Raymond Chandler wrote, lengthy earlier than the neighborhood’s previous rooming homes had been demolished.

I like this spot as a result of it’s the closest I can get to John Fante’s “Ask the Mud,” my favourite Los Angeles novel. Fante set most of “Ask the Mud” on Bunker Hill and within the downtown streets beneath, the place his protagonist, Arturo Bandini, meets his love curiosity, the Mexican waitress Camilla. And right here, within the workplace constructing above the market, Bandini buys a marijuana cigarette from a pal who hides his stash in a compartment inside his wood leg.

Didn’t William Faulkner reside in Los Angeles?

Faulkner got here to Los Angeles to jot down screenplays. He famously referred to as it (and I paraphrase right here) the plastic anus of the world. Considered one of his favourite hangouts could be discovered simply two blocks from Grand Central Market: the beautiful (and decidedly non-plastic) Gallery Bar on the Biltmore Resort. Persevering with on my strolling tour, you’ll discover a park going through the Biltmore: Pershing Sq., which options in John Rechy’s pioneering novel about homosexual life “Metropolis of Night time.”