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Saturday, March 27, 2004
Location, Location, LocationHere's an addition to my anthology of fine paragraphs describing Southern California. The narrator of Wallace Stegner's story "Pop Goes the Alley Cat" describes an L.A. slum in the years after World War II. Parts of Mt. Washington still have this feel, but without (I think) the banana trees:
The barrio was a double row of shacks tipping from a hilltop down a steep road clayily shining and deserted in the rain, every shack half buried under climbing roses, geraniums, big drooping seedheads of sunflowers, pepper and banana trees, and palms: a rural slum of the better kind, the poverty overlaid deceptively with flowers. Across the staggering row of mailboxes Prescott could see far away, over two misty hilltops and an obscured sweep of city, the Los Angeles Civic Center shining a moment in a watery gleam of sun.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
9:34 PM
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