{"id":1804,"date":"2013-09-02T16:55:19","date_gmt":"2013-09-02T23:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1804"},"modified":"2013-09-02T16:55:19","modified_gmt":"2013-09-02T23:55:19","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e5-the-great-wrong-place-with-richard-rayner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1804","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E5: The Great Wrong Place with Richard Rayner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Colin Marshall sits down at the University of Southern California with Richard Rayner, author of the novels Los Angeles Without a Map<\/em>, The Elephant<\/em>, Murder Room<\/em>, The Cloud Sketcher<\/em>, and The Devil’s Wind<\/em>\u00a0as well as the non-fiction books The Blue Suits<\/em>,\u00a0Drake’s Fortune<\/em>, The Associates<\/em>, and A Bright and Guilty Place<\/em>. They discuss the three or four Los Angeleses in which he’s lived since arriving in the city from England in the early eighties; the “up-for-it-ness” of the Los Angeles he first discovered; the reporting he later did from the 1992 riots, and the “geographical apartheid” he saw; his lack of a driver’s license, and how he addresses the question of where the buses go; his observations of how the city once flung itself outward from downtown, and now flings itself back inward; Los Angeles’ simultaneously unsurpassed optimism and<\/em>\u00a0pessimism; USC’s Doheny Library as a metaphor for blunt capitalism in action; why we crave stories about Los Angeles’ foundation on wrongdoing; how Los Angeles gets liked more in deed than word; how the current wave of interest in local history began; Los Angeles’ era of booster books against anti-booster books; his escape from English history only to plunge into Los Angeles history; what his unfinished novel of a man who loses his memory in Wales revealed to him about his own life in America; how his English hometown diversified, and how Los Angeles did the same; his cycle through “dustbins of jaded cynicism,” and the different sensibility his students (one of whom has written “the gay Korean Los Angeles novel”) bring to bear; his favorite bus lines to take notes on overheard conversations; and how his enjoyment of the riots, in a sense, got him writing about his own criminal past.<\/p>\n

Download the interview from\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down at the University of Southern California with Richard Rayner, author of the novels Los Angeles Without a Map, The Elephant, Murder Room, The Cloud Sketcher, and The Devil’s Wind\u00a0as well as the non-fiction books The Blue Suits,\u00a0Drake’s Fortune, The Associates, and A Bright and Guilty Place. They discuss the three or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-los-angeles","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1804"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1807,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1804\/revisions\/1807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}