Lit Blogging 1.0

Over at LAist, Callie Miller asks: Has Hollywood hijacked our writers? It’s part of her response to “an irritating blog post about L.A. writers” that poet and novelist Rob Woodard wrote for the Guardian. Ms. Miller solicits readers for a list of influential modern-day Los Angeles writers but, as of this posting, there have been no takers; in my humble opinion that fact throws another log onto the fire: Do Angelenos even give a rat’s ass about reading and writing? Mind you, I’m referring to any kind of verse that does not begin with the words FADE IN ON.

I started this next graph with the lede “sad to report” but, upon second blush, it occurs to me that most folks who live to be 96-years old probably consider themselves sort of fortunate. That’s how old Laura Archera Huxley, widow of the great writer Aldous Huxley, was when she passed in Los Angeles today. Kevin Roderick at LA Observed has a nice write-up here, as well as a link to Huxley’s website. You might also enjoy Algebra in the Hollywood Hills, a terse Huxley-inspired short I pounded out for L.A. Stories back in ‘05.

The above serves to remind me: if you’re into post-apocalyptic themes, the critical consensus seems to be that total avoidance is the best road to take where the latest film incarnation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is concerned. Instead, you might pick up a copy of Aldous Huxley’s 1948 novel Ape and Essence, a terrifying and bleak account of post-nuclear L.A. in the year 2108. “The proper study of mankind,” Huxley once penned, “is books.”

On to other matters. I do not intend to write about the WGA strike because every one and their mother in the blogosphere appears to have an opinion. As you can imagine, some of those opinions are rather misinformed but none more so than those expressed by “Cutter” over at Blogging L.A. To date Cutter has “refrained from exposing (himself) to the rhetoric behind the WGA’s battle with the AMPTP with the reasoning that it doesn’t affect (him)”. But now that some of Cutter’s non-writer friends in the film industry are being handed pink slips as a direct result of the ongoing labor dispute … well, now he’s full of righteous indignation.

“So screw the writers and their strike,” Cutter opines. ”They felt like they weren’t getting what’s fair. Newsflash - life isn’t fair, but you don’t have to go shitting in everyone else’s cornflakes just because your milk tastes like piss.”

You can go here to have a look-see at what BLA readers think of Cutter’s ill-conceived union-envying stance. The phrase “having his ass handed to him in a hat” immediately comes to mind.

Finally, I was pleased to note today that Joseph Wambaugh has a new novel out in paperback — in “mass market”, sadly, not trade paperback but I’ll still be ordering a copy from Amazon this evening because, goddamnit, Wambaugh rocks. Don’t go all literary snob on me either. This man knows his shit. You really wanna shed crocodile tears the next time the LAPD guns down some punk-ass felon? Read Wambaugh and you’ll get a unique insight into the social, political, cultural, racial, and economic realities that create the vacuum that every member of the Los Angeles Police Department is forced to work within.

Anyway, the new Wambaugh, his first novel in a decade, is titled Hollywood Station and I’m going to read it just as soon as I finish up with Bukowski’s “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town”. I was planning on retreating back into Matt Ruff’s thriller “Bad Monkeys” but when I was one-third through the book I reached out to my bedside table one evening, pathetically attempting to retrieve a glass of water with my psoriatic digits, and spilled every freaking ounce (alright, maybe it was whiskey but if you don’t tell my doctor then I won’t tell my doctor) onto the book, which had been carelessly deposited on the table, bent like a broken-down whore, spine to the ceiling. Oh well. It was an Uncorrected Proof copy anyway. But, hey, if anyone else has a loaner they’d like to send me because, you know, it was a fairly engaging tale –