These two topologies stand in dialectical opposition to each other. On the other hand, seen as plopped down in a desert, LA can be figured merely as the gaudy disguise of a desert wasteland, ready to reassert its hideous uselessness and, in fact, unable to foster anything genuine (“nothing means anything here,” is the refrain of The Nowhere City)-watered by stolen moisture, it is but an urban Imperial Valley, a faked landscape. Clay of Less Than Zero may be seeking something like this when he turns in memory to family time in Palm Springs (though in fact his family there is as corrupt and nihilistic as his life in Beverly Hills, as in Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park ). On the one hand, the desert out east or north, the Mojave of Huxley’s Antelope Valley home or movie stars’ Palm Springs, may represent an escape from LA to something “realer” or “purer” (and see already the contrast between corrupt Hollywood and revivifying country in The Girl from Hollywood by Edgar Rice Burroughs, although his rural setting is the mountains, not the desert ). These two valences, I suggest, may explain, in part, the pull of the desert in writing about LA. It is on the one hand a space of austere purification, where sins are atoned and the purified can see the face-or at least, hindquarters-of God, and on the other a vile, useless wasteland other tropes come out of, or are related to, these two oppositions. The desert carries multiple, sometimes opposing valences, both derived in western thinking from tropes in the Hebrew Bible. LA as desert clearly has had deep meaning, literal or metaphoric or both, for writers seeking to evoke something of the feel of the city. For many writers LA is a desert, not only metaphorically, but also in physical fact. Los Angeles occupies, Carey McWilliams observed, “this fortunate coast walled off from the desert by the great arch of mountains….” But the pull of the image is powerful, and fiction need not be bound by the strictures of the geographer. Sober observers have known that Los Angeles isn’t desert. Anton Wagner insisted many years ago that microvariations abound although the semi-arid steppe climate of the Köppen-Geiger BS classification predominates, topographical variation, coastal influences, and the sea all conspire to impose different climatic regimes across the broad LA basin. Of course, interannual variation is considerable across the 139 years for which records exist, Los Angeles has experienced a desert-level shortage 39 times, or about 1 year in 3.5. 375.2 mm) situates the city safely out of the arid fold. 254 mm) Los Angeles’ average yearly accumulation of about 14.77 inches (c. By the standard definition of geographers, deserts receive annual rainfall under ten inches (c. Beyond those mountains-north of the San Bernardinos, east of the San Jacintos-the great Mojave and Colorado deserts roll across an arid countryside all the way to Las Vegas, and beyond.Ĭultural snobbery aside, Los Angeles is no desert. The greater Los Angeles region lies nestled in the clasp of mountains: the Santa Monicas north and west, beyond which lurks the little paradise of Santa Barbara the San Gabriels, just north of the city, which link up, across Cajon Pass, with the towering San Bernardinos, culminating at their east end in the 11,503-foot peak of San Gorgonio to the southeast, the basin-and-rangy ridges of the Santa Anas and, beyond the Perris valley, the San Jacintos sheltering Palm Springs, with the Santa Rosas to their south. The Los Angeles basin is not arid enough to count as a real desert. These invocations of the desert might strike a positivist geographer as strange. The desert figures powerfully too in non-fictional treatments of the city, like Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946) or Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990). “Night falls quickly in Los Angeles,” observes the narrator of Alison Lurie’s The Nowhere City (1965), “as in the desert which it once was.” “The desert” looms over much fiction set in Los Angeles, from Raymond Chandler’s detective novels to Bret Easton Ellis’s decadent rich of Less Than Zero (1985) or the quasi-future city of Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope (1996).
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