Panel discusses L.A. fiction history

By Michael Watanabe
Daily Forty-Niner

Cal State Long Beach professor David Fine examined Los Angeles' dark roots and fiction Friday with three other panelists after the release of Fine's book, "Imagining Los Angeles: A City of Fiction."

Presenting to a literary crowd of about 75 in the East Library, Fine was joined by fellow CSULB English professor Stephen Cooper, Kevin Starr, a state librarian and David L. Ulin, editor of "Writing L.A."

Fine said early Los Angeles was not dark at all.

"That's one of the founding myths about [Los Angeles], that it has no past," he said. "It has no history. One comes here to begin again, to start fresh."

But that began to unravel in the 1920s when fiction writers such as Upton Sinclair started uncovering Los Angeles' secrets. For instance, Sinclair's "Oil," described oil scandals on Signal Hill.

"L.A. became a place to satirize, to ridicule Ö What were the targets? Well, for one thing, the proliferation of cults, sex, healers and psychics," Fine said. "It was a place of endings. Not a place of the fresh start, but the second chance or the last chance."

Los Angeles' appeal may also include the fact that it lies against the ocean, Fine said.

"The ocean is the end of the line," Fine said. "That image, that metaphor as a sign of being the end of the road, an end of the dream runs through the literature.

In the end, Los Angeles is seen as a "hard-boiled city," Fine said, as evidenced in recent films, such as "Devil in a Blue Dress", "L.A. Confidential" and "The Big Lebowski."

Starr, the state librarian, said he would have liked to see more novels based upon an assembled sense of history. Fine countered, by reminding the panel that migrants and outsiders wrote Los Angeles fiction.

"To write the kind of book you're asking for, the kind of epic, ordinarily it requires someone to really know the place, to be here," Fine said.

Ulin, the editor, said he was doubtful there would ever be a Los Angles novel written with a constructed history.

"My guess would be that we will never see that definitive Los Angeles novel in a way that other cities have a novel because it's impossible," Ulin said. "It's a very balkanized area, and that I don't think its possible for one writer to get it. And I actually think that's the great thing about the region or the region's literature. That it's not possible to get it. You can live here your whole life and not see three-quarters of it."