SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Los Angeles has long been a kind of dreamscape. The city of the silver screen on the edge of a great ocean, that draws in people from all over the world, despite the looming threats of being shaken by earthquakes or scorched by wildfires. Many great writers have been drawn to Los Angeles. Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor.
The great crime writer Michael Connelly, who was originally from Philadelphia, writes in his 2008 "The Brass Verdict," people were drawn by the dream, people running from nightmare. Everybody in LA keeps a bag packed, just in case.
Hector Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants, writes in his 2011 novel "The Barbarian Nurseries," the train had brought them to this place called Los Angeles, where the magical and the real, the world of fantasy books and history, seem to coexist on the same extended stage of streets, rivers and railroad tracks.
Robert B. Parker brought his famed Boston private eye Spenser to LA for his 1981 novel "A Savage Place," and observed, LA was a big, sunny buffoon of a city where the dream had run up against the ocean.
Raymond Chandler, one of the inventors of detective fiction, grew up in the U.S. Midwest and London before he settled in California. He opened his 1938 short story "Red Wind" by saying, there was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.
Those same Santa Anas which blow dry air from the great basin to the California coast fueled this month's ruinous wildfires.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, Joan Didion, a native California writer, said in her 1968 book of essays "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." The violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles - accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability, wrote Joan Didion. The winds show us how close to the edge we are.
We may feel a sharpness in her words to shake us all, in Altadena, Asheville, Tampa and Greenfield, Iowa, as we struggle through ever more fires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes.
(SOUNDBITE OF TASH SULTANA SONG, "JUNGLE")
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