Dear Los Angeles
Page 34
9. Call in sick at random and go to Disneyland or the race track or lay in bed half the day. No one will really notice or suffer that you were not there that day.
10. Be nice to all library staff and especially branch librarians because someday they might be your boss or the person that hires your kid.
11. Try like hell to be kind to patrons, it is not their fault they are really clueless about a lot of simple stuff.
12. Participate. While you might feel silly wearing a Cat in the Hat hat you will thank yourself later….
16. If your supervisor takes [himself] too seriously, go somewhere else, they are not going to change.
17. Tell co-workers they are good, especially if they are good.
18. Speak to groups, eventually it gets easy and fun.
19. As horrible as it sounds, go to Guild meetings occasionally.
20. Say something ridiculous to a patron or co-worker every shift.
GLEN CREASON
NOVEMBER 19
1862
I shall deliver at Acapulco or at a place indicated by the government, all the rifles I am able to acquire.
HENRY DALTON, to Benito Juárez
1941
Welcomed charmingly, accommodated superbly in the “motel” in which they lived for a long time—Max had already bought us a car, and Gretel drove us back home from Max’s house, Max leading the way in his car. In the afternoon they took us on a big driving tour along the coast. Landscape of incomparable beauty, reminiscent of the French Riviera. We are happy and hope you will come soon.
Hugs from your child Teddie
THEODOR ADORNO, to his parents
NOVEMBER 20
1854
I have to-day pronounced sentence of death upon David Brown, accused of the murder of Pinckney Clifford. Despite the forming of a threatening mob, he has been duly tried and convicted.
…To Brown, on overruling the motion for a new trial, I made no remarks directly but incorporated them in my observations on the motion, (intending, however, to Soften his feelings, if possible, and I believe he was somewhat affected). To Luciano Tapia, one of the murderers of Barton, I made an address, to explain the nature of his offense as an accessory; I do not think that he comprehended me at all, and am not certain if, at the very last, he recognized the justice of his punishment.
JUDGE BENJAMIN HAYES
1944
Got a wire from Charles Jackson to call him in New Hampshire, lunched at Lucey’s…the first day Lucey’s functioned under its new management. When the call from Jackson came through it was to say the United Liquor interests were trying to make him [insist on doing], or consent to do, a prologue for [the adaptation of his novel] Lost Weekend. Then a long list of criticisms of stuff in the picture he had thought too articulate. It included all of the more effective speeches. I offended him deeply when he used the term “articulate” by saying “Oh, you prefer the ‘Well, I mean’ sort of tradition?” We will change none of them.
CHARLES BRACKETT
NOVEMBER 21
1969
I had to go out to Pitzer College in Claremont to give a reading. I read some of my columns to the somber stare of the students….“But what about your political commitments?” they asked. I had been reading columns about feeling, about finding one’s own way of seeing things, about relating to other people with intensity and spontaneity, about what seem to me to be basic things that have to be self-achieved before you can do much about convincing other people…they had me flummoxed. They seemed to want me to write “up against the wall” instead of anything lyrical in celebration of humanity and its capacities.
“What do you do?” I asked in return. They had a problem, it seems. Everything was too good, they complained. If they wanted to change something at Pitzer, they had only to go to the administration and the administration changed it….What they wanted was something to fight, all the other campuses were in turmoil, protesting, fighting, trying to make changes, and there at Pitzer it didn’t take a fight or a boycott, it was all negotiable. Well, tough shit, too bloody bad, there they were in an optimum situation, able to get the kind of education they wanted and they were frustrated by not having a fashionable enemy….
As I was leaving, the student who was walking with me to the car said, “You know, I think the faculty here is more hip than the students.”
LIZA WILLIAMS
2002
The movers will be here in about an hour, and the only things left to pack are the computers, the cds and everything in the storage unit downstairs, which just so happens to be the same storage unit to which we can’t find the key, which at first seemed like a total disaster, because in a situation like this, when you need to get into that storage unit more than any other time you’ve needed to get into that storage unit, it could be a total disaster. But when you think about the larger scheme of life, like getting to drive up the coast to Seattle to spend Thanksgiving with your brother and his 5-yr old daughter who likes to take Mr. Potato Head and put the body parts into all the wrong places because “that’s what Picasso would do,” and then drive to Utah, arriving triumphantly with liquor cabinet in tow and the funniest dog in the world who will unsuspectingly get to experience cold weather for the first time, who cares about the damn key to the storage unit.
HEATHER B. ARMSTRONG
NOVEMBER 22
1938
It is hereby earnestly proposed that the U.S.A. would be better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the city of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like an individual mental defective. It is only wistful thought….
Los Angeles is the source and home of more political, economic and religious idiocy than all the rest of the country together and a concentration point of shiftless and inefficient culls who, being too lazy or lacking the ability to make good in their native regions, drift in expecting to be fed from heaven or the public pantry….
Los Angeles is a region, not a city….But neither the size of the place nor the incoherence of its government accounts for the lunacy of the place and for which it is known above every other characteristic.
WESTBROOK PEGLER
1963
What good is the dawn that grows into day
The sunset at night, or living this way
For I have the warmth of the sun within me at night
The love of my life, she left me one day
I cried when she said, I don’t feel the same way
Still I have the warmth of the sun within me tonight
I dream of her arms and though they’re not real
Just like she’s still there is the way that I feel
My love’s like the warmth of the sun, it won’t ever die
MIKE LOVE and BRIAN WILSON
NOVEMBER 23
1919
Los Angeles. Helen sets clock for 7:30—but at 6:30 wake & in the dawn indulge in one of the loveliest rounds ever—she lying on her side one arm up. We laugh & dress and at 8 leave for Pacific Station En route to Santa Catalina. Down town on West 1st street. Breakfast in a Cafeteria Quick Lunch—a new proposition to me—Get our own steak & waffles. Then to Station & take 3 car trolley to San Pedro. The mountains in the distance—small towns—Cattle, oil wells etc. Arrive at San Pedro at 10 a.m. & take boat for Santa Catalina. Helen looks too sweet in her light grey gorgette & grey hat. Seats on side of boat….
The gulls on the upper deck. We whisper love stuff all the time. Arrive at 12:30. Walk along Maine Street. Lunch in a cheap restaurant. Santa Catalina doesn’t impress us much. The glass bottomed boat….
See perch & sea goldfish in their native haunts. The diver after Abalone Shells. Back to dock. Aeroplane takes passengers at 100 per minute for a 10-min
ute flight. Then onto boat again. The blue sea. Rainbow. A whale….
We come home and go straight to bed. Very tired but before long we pull a heavy screw, finally getting down on the floor on pillows to avoid the squeaking of the bed….
Wants her beauty eaten by a big rough brute.
THEODORE DREISER
1941
The journey from Los Angeles station to our motel (a group of cabins for automobile drivers, each consisting of two very nicely furnished rooms and bathroom, kitchen and garage) takes a good hour by car. Los Angeles is 30 miles or so more from the sea, while the places around where we are now living still extend past Hollywood—to Santa Monica, Brentwood Heights, Pacific Palisades—in hollows that approach the sea and line the coast itself. The beauty of the region is so incomparable that even such a hardboiled European as myself can only surrender to it.
…Best of all are the incredibly intense, in no way reproducible colors; a drive along the ocean around sunset is one of the most extraordinary impressions that my—by no means highly responsive—eyes have ever had. All the red, blue and violet activity found there would appear laughable on any illustration, but it is overwhelming if one sees the real thing. As well as this, the more southern style of architecture, a certain reduction of advertising and one or two other factors combine to form something that is almost like a cultural landscape: one actually has the feeling that this part of the world is inhabited by humanoid beings, not only by gasoline stations and hot dogs. The entire wider vicinity here is somewhere between city and country.
THEODOR ADORNO, to his parents
NOVEMBER 24
1602
We continued our voyage, skirting along the coast until the 24th of the month, which was the eve of the feast of the glorious Santa Catalina, when we discovered three large islands. We approached them with difficulty because of the head-wind, and arrived at the middle one, which is more than 25 leagues around.
FATHER ANTONIO DE LA ASCENSIÓN
1793
The coast took a direction S. 67 E., sixteen miles to the north point of a deep bay, off which lie two or three small rocks; this point, which I called Point Dume, bore N. 59 W.; the south point of the same bay, being the easternmost point of the main land in sight S. 67 E.; this being a very conspicuous promontory, I named after Father Vincente [Dumetz]….
The north-west side of this bay was observed to be composed chiefly of steep barren cliffs; the north and eastern shores terminated in low sandy beaches, rising with a gradual ascent until they reached the base of a mountainous country….
According to the Spanish charts, I at first supposed this bay to be that which is there called the bay of St. Pedro but I was afterwards informed that this conjecture was ill founded. I had also been given to understand that a very advantageous settlement is established on a fertile spot somewhere in this neighbourhood within sight of the ocean, though at the distance of some miles from the coast, called Pueblo de los Angelos, “the country town of the angels,” formed in the year 1781. This establishment was looked for in all directions, but nothing was perceived that indicated either habitations or inhabitants.
GEORGE VANCOUVER
1847
I was on guard some days ago and was obliged to put private Van Beck under arrest. He has a wife here and she was furious on hearing of it. She had always done my washing, and we were on the best of terms. As soon as she heard of the arrest, she started for the guard house with a pot of hot coffee determined to throw it in my face, but meeting Lieut Bonnycastle, she told him what she was going to do. He begged her not to do it, for said he, “Madame, Lieut H is a very diffident young man, and you will frighten him to death.”
She then went to the Col and told him, of her resolution. He advised her not and told her to take care what she did. She said Col. I thought you were more of a gentleman than to permit Lieut H. to put my husband under arrest. She then came to the Guard house and commenced abusing me at a high rate asked me if I thought she had nothing to do but to bring her husbands breakfast up there and said she had left all my clothes hanging on the line and that she prayed to God that they might all be stolen.
I was all smiles and bows, told her that I regretted very much my having given her the smallest trouble that I was sorry that I had been obliged to punish her better half and begged her not to let any one steal my clothes. She did not throw the Coffee in my face but gave it to her husband to drink It was well she did so for had she done other wise I should have put her in one of the dark cells of the guard house! It created a great laugh at the mess table, at my expense.
LIEUTENANT JOHN MCHENRY HOLLINGSWORTH
1925
Among the many things we have done to arouse the hostility and antagonism of Mexicans has been our treatment of them in our fiction, where they are nearly always portrayed as heartless scoundrels. I believe that a policy of consideration and fairness toward our sister republic in our literature would do much to lessen this hostility.
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS
NOVEMBER 25
1925
A very peculiar change is being wrought in me these days, especially since this “affair” with D.H….All the obscure, half hearted promptings of my emotional nature that I thought were centered around my artistic work, for the past few months have dried up….this central, emotional, imaginative part of me is not interested in law, and always is seeking a way out—books, booze, or women.
CAREY MCWILLIAMS
1940
Los Angeles denies the existence of slums. But go across the river to South Gless Street. You’ll find a woman and her nine children living in a four-room house, every room of which leaks when it rains. Rain drips down into the faces of the children as they sleep. It lays all day long in puddles on the floor. Because of defective plumbing, the family uses a gallon tin can for sanitary purposes, disposing of the contents in the back yard.
Across the street sewer gas leaks into the kitchen where eleven people eat three meals a day and three children sleep at night.
Over on Pecan Street is a two-room shack owned by a loan association which has fought low cost housing for Los Angeles. There is no inside plumbing; there are holes in the roof through which you can see the sky; old car license plates are employed to stop holes in the walls. I called the loan company and asked the rent. Have you ever tried to rent a slum, Mr. Robinson? Expect Spanish inquisition methods. The more children you tell the prospective landlord you have, the more highhanded he becomes. The agent for the loan company opened the conversation with, “You on relief?”
I said no, and inquired what difference that might make. With the most callous candor the agent informed me that a relief investigator would not approve the dwelling. He asked where I worked, and when I named a fictitious firm, he inquired as to wages and the date of payment, and then asked the number of children. You see, it is always taken for granted that the people who must live in these stink holes are what we are pleased to call “encumbered.” (Encumbered with children who are expected to grow up into patriotic citizens to defend their country.) Finally he asked about my health. Was it possible that sickness would cause me to be laid off, thus stopping my income and the wherewithal to pay the rent, making it necessary for the loan company to have me evicted? Knowing the low resistance to disease of slum dwellers, he might well ask that.
THEODORE DREISER, to Edward G. Robinson
NOVEMBER 26
1906
I just had a letter to-night from the Summit where the Santa Fe drops over the divide into [Cajon] Pass, from Mrs. Davis, wife of the Station Agent, but herself pretty smart and a good deal of a poet and an artist. She says there are three feet of snow up there. I was thinking of going up and take a shot gun to defend myself against the quail, which are said to be very dangerous.
CHARLES LUMMIS
1949
We showed an enormous
ly improved picture to an audience which responded beautifully, giving lots of spontaneous applause at the end. I sat next to Bill Holden, who wore glasses and kept his head down, and still was recognized….
I thought with amusement what a surprise it would have been to Mr. and Mrs. Brackett of 605 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, New York, could they have been told that 57 years after the arrival of their matutinal son he would be celebrating on the other side of the continent a pleasant event in a medium of which they’d never heard.
CHARLES BRACKETT
NOVEMBER 27
1602
On the 27th of the month, and before casting anchor in a very good cove which was found, a multitude of Indians came out in canoes of cedar and pine, made of planks very well joined and caulked, each one with eight oars and with fourteen or fifteen Indians, who looked like galley-slaves. They came along side without the least fear and came on board our ships, mooring their own. They showed great pleasure at seeing us, telling us by signs that we must land, and guided us like pilots to the anchorage….Many Indians were on the beach, and the women treated us to roasted sardines and a small fruit like sweet potatoes.