{"id":5854,"date":"2024-05-07T07:17:25","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T14:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5854"},"modified":"2024-05-07T07:17:25","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T14:17:25","slug":"books-on-cities-carey-mcwilliams-southern-california-an-island-on-the-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5854","title":{"rendered":"Books on Cities: Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 2011, Los Angeles Times<\/em> architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne launched into a yearlong book-blogging project called “Reading L.A.” The earliest of its 27 titles about the city was Louis Adamic’s The Truth About Los Angeles<\/em>, published in 1927; the most recent was by Robert Gottlieb’s Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City<\/em>, published in 2007. Between those books came a couple that I’ve since written about myself: Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies<\/em>, whose 45th and 50th anniversary I observed in the Guardian<\/a><\/em> and at Archinect<\/a>, respectively, and the late Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles<\/em>, a subject here on Books on Cities in 2022<\/a>. Hawthorne’s inclusion of Holy Land <\/em>by D. J. Waldie got me reading all of Waldie’s writings, and in 2021 I even reviewed his latest book <\/a>Becoming Los Angeles<\/a><\/em> for the <\/a>New Yorker<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hawthorne’s post on Holy Land<\/em> inspired me to interview Waldie on my podcast <\/a>Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/a>,<\/em> just as his post on Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-rays of the Body Public <\/em>led me to invite on that book’s author, architect Doug Suisman<\/a>. When I took the show to Portland, I even attempted to interview (but ultimately couldn’t pin down) Richard Meltzer, who wrote Richard Meltzer’s Guide to the Ugliest Buildings of Los Angeles<\/em> and L.A. Is the Capital of Kansas<\/em>, which I read on Hawthorne’s recommendation<\/a> \u2014 a recommendation he gave me when he appeared on <\/a>Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/a><\/em> himself<\/a>. I could go on, but suffice it to say that “Reading L.A.” had a considerable influence on me. Part of that owes to Hawthorne’s having done it the same year I moved to Los Angeles, but even now, in Seoul, I’m still reading through his selections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carey McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land <\/em>came third onHawthorne’s chronologically organized syllabus,having been published in 1946. At the time, this put it outside my immediate field of interest: though obsessed with Los Angeles, then as now, I thought of the nineteen-forties as belonging to a period of the city’s history when the cultural and urban phenomena that interested me \u2014 Ed Ruscha, dingbats, Koreatown, the Bonaventure hotel, neo-noir movies, Jeffrey Daniels’ Kentucky Fried Chicken on Western, the subway \u2014 had yet to manifest. In a sense, I conceived of Los Angeles as beginning anew around the early-to-mid-sixties, which isn’t entirely out of alignment with McWilliams’ historical scheme: he regards Southern California as having been shaped since the late nineteenth century by a series of distinct booms and subsequent waves of migration, each of which had mostly, but not entirely, overwritten the one before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at Substack<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2011, Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne launched into a yearlong book-blogging project called “Reading L.A.” The earliest of its 27 titles about the city was Louis Adamic’s The Truth About Los Angeles, published in 1927; the most recent was by Robert Gottlieb’s Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5854","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=5854"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5856,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5854\/revisions\/5856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}