The Pacific Ocean is seen within the distance past palm timber and the charred stays of properties destroyed by the Palisades Hearth within the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, on January 13, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP through Getty Photos
cover caption
toggle caption
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP through Getty Photos
Los Angeles has lengthy been a type of dreamscape, town of the silver display, on the sting of a terrific ocean, that pulls in individuals from all around the world, regardless of the looming threats of being shaken by earthquakes or scorched by wildfires.
Many nice writers have been drawn to Los Angeles.
“Los Angeles was the type of place the place everyone was from elsewhere and no person actually dropped anchor,” the good crime author, Michael Connelly, who’s initially from Philadelphia, writes in his 2008 The Brass Verdict. “Individuals drawn by the dream, individuals working from nightmare…everyone in LA retains a bag packed. Simply in case.”
Héctor Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants, writes in his 2011 novel The Barbarian Nurseries, “The prepare had introduced them to this place referred to as Los Angeles, the place the magical and the true, the world of fantasy books and historical past, appeared to co-exist on the identical prolonged stage of streets, rivers, and railroad tracks.”
Robert B. Parker introduced his famed Boston non-public eye Spenser to LA for his 1981 novel, A Savage Place, and noticed, “L.A. was a giant, sunny buffoon of a metropolis… the place the dream had run up in opposition to the ocean…”
Raymond Chandler, one of many inventors of detective fiction, grew up within the U.S. Midwest and London earlier than he settled in California. He opened his 1938 quick story “Crimson Wind” by saying, “There was a desert wind blowing that night time. It was a type of scorching dry Santa Anas that come down by the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves leap and your pores and skin itch.”
Those self same Santa Anas, which blow dry air from the Nice Basin to the California coast, fueled this month’s ruinous wildfires.
“Los Angeles climate is the climate of disaster, of apocalypse,” Joan Didion, a local California author, mentioned in her 1968 guide of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
“(T)he violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana have an effect on the complete high quality of life in Los Angeles, intensify its impermanence, its unreliability,” wrote Joan Didion. “The winds present us how near the sting we’re.”
We could really feel a sharpness in her phrases to shake us all, in Altadena, Asheville, Tampa, and Greenfield, Iowa, as we wrestle by ever extra fires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes.
