The Great Right Place: James Ellroy Comes Home July 30,
2006
Hometowns should offer the proper balance of safety and
inspiration. I call inspiration a sense of danger contained.
L.A. got too safe 25 years ago. I got out then. My life got
too dangerous five years ago. I pondered safety zones for a
long interval.
I learned that I'm only safe here....
L.A. bids pundits to spin epigrams. W.H. Auden called L.A.
"The Great Wrong Place." I'll ascribe intent. Auden saw L.A.
as a lodestone for opportunists and psychically maimed
misfits. I sense this because I fall into both categories.
Auden couched L.A. in a film-noir construction. Losers
migrated here to start over and become someone else. L.A. was
a magnet for lives in desperate duress. The sheer
indifference of the place consumed the migrants and drove
them mad. They succumbed to madness in a sexy locale. The
place itself provided solace and recompense. They had the
comfort of other arriviste losers. They entered the L.A.
spiritus mundi. They handed out their head shots. They joined
that unique L.A. casting call.
For picaresque grifters, dollar-driven D.A.s, well-hung
gigolos, hollow-eyed strumpets, hophead jazz musicians,
pervert cops, alcoholic private eyes, sadistic studio heads,
laudanum-lapping layabouts, homosexual informants, religious
quacks and an uncategorizable array of stupes with
indefinable psychopathic mandates and plain inconsolable
despair....
My wife and I divorced. My runner's ways killed the marriage.
I've been blessed with forgiveness tempered with humor. A
steel-buffed friendship remains. The film version of "The
Black Dahlia" comes out in September. I'm writing the sequel
to "The Cold Six Thousand." It will be my greatest novel yet.
Opportunists enjoy bragging rights-if they deliver. I always
have and always will.
It will be my last non-L.A. novel. From that point on, I'm a
hometown writer exclusively.
I moved back to L.A. three weeks ago. It's the only place I
feel safe. I've got a slick pad near my old prowling turf and
an arriviste sports car. I want to live here, I want to work
here, I want to end my days here. I want the all-new and
wholly familiar stimulation that only L.A. provides. I want
to reclaim L.A. with a revitalized and mature
imagination.....
(And a whole lot more. Check out the LA Tomes West magazine
this weekend. Read all about it.)
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 30 Jul 2006 EDT