October 18, 2004
The LA literary conspirarcy
As I was being bodily removed from Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore, I picked up a copy of David Fine's Imagining Los Angeles, a literary tour of L.A.. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but the writing suffers from being overly derivative, especially of Mike Davis' excellent surveys of post-modern representation of the city, and suffers from poor editing.
I also received a sizeable volume of literary L.A., Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which holds a lot of promise. It's in the same series as the volume on Baseball edited by Nicholas Dawidoff.
