Marc Norman and Joan Didion to a fault set their main characters to grow the space and size of Los Angeles. Norman's character decides to take a hertz ride in a former neighborhood, and suddenly realizes how small Los Angeles is. Split up into "three-mile chunks" by smog, Los Angeles becomes a series of parochial villages where the residents hide away from one another, until the day when the wind sweeps in and blows away the smog (566). Only then, asserts Norman, do Los Angeles residents feel as if they live in a real city (567).
Didion's character, Maria, also reacts to the space Los Angeles has become for her by driving on the state highway and sleeping outside on a chaise at a lower place beach towels. Although she never mentions it, the necessity she feels at leaving the kin quickly, driving for miles on the expressway, and sleeping outside since inside feels "airless," all hint at someone who feels as if the world were last in on them (17). At the same time, the drives she takes on the freeway can be seen in the same light as an animal who paces the bounds of its cag
some other writer who examines the space and size of Los Angeles is Reyner Banham in "Los Angeles: The Architecture of quadruple Ecologies." In his case, however, it is the physical space, size and dimensions that he is discussing as he examines the buildings that people work, live, and play in. As he points out, some buildings, spot very utilitarian in practice, are poor in form, as in the May Company building, at the end up of Miracle Mile, which is merely a box with a cylinder stuck on it (539). Ironically, though Banham judges this building poor in form, it is direct the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Another "box" that he admires is Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, which has an impressive fatade even if it is a simple cube (537).
As Banham points, as utilitarian as this building is, it is the receptacle of some of the best fantasies in Los Angeles, and has become an LA landmark. Finally, according to Banham, the building and engineering science that most personify Los Angeles and its sense of place is Disneyland, which is a stark(a) example of the fantasy that people want to associate with Los Angeles, though in a much smaller format.
Didion, Joan. Play It As It Lays. New York, NY: The Noonday Press - Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1990.
Banham, Reyner. "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies." in Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology. David L. Ulin, editor. New York, NY: The Library of America. 2002. p. 535
e and is both comforted in knowing the limits, as sound as being frustrated at them.
Carlos Bulosan character, Carlos, is a fledgling to Los Angeles from the Philippines, fresh off the train and looking for his brother. As a new arrival, he has no sense of the sheer size of the city, or how he might find his brother. Yet by apparent luck he is able to find a Filipino neighborhood within a few legal proceeding of arrival (299). Carlos seems to discount the white people that he sees as he turns to people who seem more familiar to him. Yet, this
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