Untangling L.A.

I KNOW you're all blissfully decompressing on Spring Break, but I wanted to let you know that your blog got a mention on the KCET blog by writer D. J. Waldie (about whom I've spoken about  in class).

Here's a little snip:

Whatever the reasons, Los Angeles has resisted embracing its "vast accumulation of individual stories" in favor of a small store of familiar tropes: noir city, La La Land, fifty suburbs in search of a city, city of broken dreams, and the best worst place in the world.

These pages - UpDaily, 1st and Spring, Departures, SoCal, and The Back Forty among them - have been finding and telling other stories of Los Angeles since 2008. And their "vast accumulation" is only a part of what a lengthening roll of online storytellers bring to readers every day. So many storytellers, that it would be an almost impossible task even to survey them all.

And here's your closeup:

But I'd like to offer you one more - the students in Loyola Marymount University's journalism course, Telling L.A.'s Story.

Their encounters with Los Angeles (and the problems of story telling here) have the uneasy shock of first discovery. Their stories also have some of the rough edges expected of student writers. Their sympathies are not yet fully given, as they and the city continue a romance that could end badly.

A blog of million stories - including theirs - is not a mere accumulation, however.

Stories are the measure of a city's grandeur, the nerve fibers of its being, and its memories. The more stories we have and from as many tellers as can be recruited, the more we will redress this city's greatest lack: its failure to know itself.

 Keep digging, keep looking, keep thinking, keep writing.

Kudos to you all!
Onward.

-- L.G. 

photos: Union Station Passenger Terminal, Downtown
credit: L.G.