Red Lemonade takes a different approach to publishing. Want proof, you say? The texts of our published titles are here for you to read, in their entirety. No lame limits. Really!
Ghosts of the San Diego Rialto
A look back at Southern California before Gentrification
This is one piece in a collection of essays about Southern California in progress, originally published in Jim Miller, ed., Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (San Diego City Works Press, 2005). I look forward to comments from RL readers.
The history you present here reminds me a little of Mike Davis writing about LA and just a touch of Jonathan Evison's West of Here, although Evison's historic Olympic Peninsula is less an MTV set than a land of strip malls. I feel like the ghosts in this history are calling out to become fictionalized. I'm totally fascinated by the idea if San Diego as a haven for Vietnam vets who then get pushed out. There's dramatic potential there. I'm not that familiar with the area but wasn't La Jolla once pretty bohemian and now just plain expensive?
Thanks for the read, Richard. Mike Davis' writing was one reason for all the years of graduate education! I'm looking for ways to expand this piece here and there, as it's highly condensed, and retain the urgency and write out the masculinity inherent in the criticism. I'm working on the other piece to get that out of there, and not ready to roll it out yet. I like satiric writing and am worn out with writerly arm-wrestling.
These ghosts are here and there in San Diego fiction, Oakley Hall, Jim Miller, and the highest literary work on the city is Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We are All Looking For, it's one of my favorite books and I hope someone reprints it. La Jolla was bohemian at one point, and the transition in the late 1950s was toward new money, mostly from Scripps, the defense industry, and, of course, real estate.
I appreciate it, and if you feel like slicing and dicing this one up, please do!
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