Column: Literary types see L.A. as apocalypse hiding under shallowness and excess. Don’t let them define us — especially now
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Fearsome winds are howling across Southern California. Wildfires could spark at any moment. The Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires continue to burn. And spreading just as fast are quotes about how winds and fire menace and define the region.
There’s the Raymond Chandler one, of course: “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.”
And Joan Didion: “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”
Nerds especially love Nathaneal West, whose novel of broken L.A. dreams, “The Day of the Locust,” is best known for its closing scenes of the city aflame, bringing to life a painting by the protagonist: “He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and thereby appear less fearful, more like the bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible holocaust.”
And of course, Mike Davis, whose essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” has been hailed as prophetic literature by progressive Angelenos — and cursed just as vociferously by conservatives and suburbanites — since it appeared in L.A. Weekly in 1995.
For decades, I’ve seen journalists and other folks share those four works and more every time a fire starts or it’s Santa Ana season — “Gathering heat from the distant desert, enraged it invades the city, creating the season of heat and fire” (John Rechy), “Hills are filled with fire” (Jim Morrison in the Doors classic “L.A. Woman”). And then there’s “Beverly Hills 90210” — eh, you can go find the infamous Santa Anas episode on YouTube.
I don’t tire of reading them, because they’re well-crafted thoughts that few writers can ever hope to top. This time around, though, so many folks have posted the same quotes to the point that the brilliant is becoming banal.
In the face of so much suffering, why do so many regurgitate the regurgitated?
“There was a desert wind blowing that night,” Raymond Chandler writes in the famous opening to his novella “Red Wind.”
I called historian William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and one of the smartest people I know on Southern California lore and culture. Many of his friends and colleagues have lost homes in the Eaton fire, leaving the Pasadena resident “surrounded by smoke and sadness.”
A friend recently sent him a Didion quote with the snarky byline “Joan of Didion.”
“We’ve allowed [Didion and the usual suspects] for maybe good reasons to be latter-day Jeremiahs,” he said. “They do have that power to put phrases together that make us think, ‘I would’ve loved to say something like that, but can’t do it really as well.’”
The problem, he feels, is “we’ve ceded to them the right to be an authority instead of other people who know a lot, too.”
He cited fire historian Stephen Pyne and UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain as writers on Southern California weather who should be more known but probably will never be, because most of their work is in the academic realm.
“Maybe part of our challenge,” Deverell said, “is that we reach a little too far back, when we have people who are alive and well whose quotes could be every bit every bit as germane.”
That’s why he hopes that the words of survivors of the Pacific Palisades and Eaton disasters will be read and spread far by future generations, just as much as better-known voices.
“When it’s appropriate, we need to get their oral histories, so that some good can come from so much bad,” he said.
Lisa Alvarez is an English professor at Irvine Valley College who teaches students about the literature of Southern California winds and wildfires “so they know where they are now, who was here in the past, and who will be here in the future.”
She doesn’t mind seeing the canonical quotes passed around every time Santa Anas and fires flare up, “because I’m a Californian,” she joked. “There’s a comfort in sharing what we know. You want to be a part of a moment. Fire is an old story. Fire in California is a very old story.”
But reading them ad nauseum reminds her to challenge friends and students to read more widely.
The current state of social media has made the online experience of the L.A. wildfires even more stressful than previous disasters.
“They got published [in prominent publications] and they get read,” Alvarez said of people like Davis and Didion. “You have to make an effort to find the others. That speaks to the nature of our literacy.”
The Modjeska Canyon resident is volunteering for her community’s fire watch and has had to flee her home multiple times during conflagrations but has never lost her home. The spring semester just started at Irvine Valley College, and she plans to share lesser-known writers on wildfires and winds, like poets Ray Young Bear and Liz Gonzalez. Another piece she’ll make her students read is a great 1993 Times essay by longtime L.A. chronicler Michael Ventura that I had never heard of until I saw it on Alvarez’s Facebook timeline.
“We need more prophets,” Alvarez concluded. “We need a better prophecy.”
There’s one writer whose work I’m seeing quoted a lot right now who should be shared more: Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, a Pasadena native who’s buried in an Altadena cemetery that was partially burned last week.
The 2020 racial reckoning brought her work to a wider audience, especially “Parable of the Sower,” a 1993 novel set in a dystopian Southern California of 2024 that’s disturbingly similar to the one we live in today.
In Butler’s book, climate change has brought destruction to what was once paradise. Social inequality is obscene. Crime is out of control. Misery is guaranteed for nearly everyone. And whatever hope might be out there, Butler argued, needed to be tempered by the reality that we must suffer first.
“In order to rise From its own ashes,” she wrote in the sentence I’m seeing bandied about the most, “A phoenix First Must Burn.”
With all respect to Didion, Davis and the other literary legends who have written about our devil winds and fires, that’s the quote Southern Californians should take to heart right now.
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