Back in 2018 when Christina ruined my life by telling me she would kill me (by castration) if I wrote about the 1959 nuclear meltdown in Los Angeles at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—the largest nuclear meltdown in US history—I lied to her and told her that I would not actually make my new book about the nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
I told her it would be a book about Los Angeles. It would only pass through the Simi Hills and the meltdown site. The focus would be LA history.
My devious little plan was to buy a bunch of books to back up the appearance of this claim and then quickly figure out once and for all just how Los Angeles ever grew so grotesquely gigantic, how it was that it ever swelled all the way out from the feet of humble El Aliso, stretching far and wide, all the way out to the desert and north across the San Fernando Valey, each new tacky tract leapfrogging the last, the sad stucco perimeters of Los Angeles expanding like some kind of monstrous plasm replicating itself every few years, cellular division by subdivision, growth after superfluous growth crusting outward forever into the hills and mountains and valleys in pursuit of more space, more peace and safety until, well… the metastasis landed eventually at the gates of the radioactive Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
My plan was to read a bunch of books, not just the one that everyone reads, City of Quartz. I wanted to find out definitively how the city grew. How was it that they started building those faux-Tuscan McMansions in the shadow of America’s largest nuclear meltdown?
My plan was to answer that question, and then under cover of dozens of LA history books, go on writing that book about that nuclear meltdown, which needed that question addressed, of course. But I wouldn’t get bogged down in ancient history. No. I was going to go on Oprah, land a full page spread in People, write the first book about the meltdown, sell it off, make a million dollars, go on tour with Erin Brockovich and the lady from Eat, Pray, Love.
It was going to be perfect.
The plan, however, did not pan out. I read way too many books—an evasion, it seems now looking back, a way of avoiding and not dealing with the psychotic prohibition that launched that crazed reading spree in the first place. And all this confused bibliomania, which left me sprawled all over Southern California, my mind stretched out like the metropolis itself, it made it increasingly difficult to find my way back to Woolsey Canyon Road and the secretive Boeing Facility hiding above the San Fernando Valley that was my whole reason for remaining in Los Angeles after the summer of 2017.
One benign offshoot of the meltdown of my relationship and the disaster of the Santa Susana book project, however, has been that I know a s**t ton of Los Angeles history.
Rather than saving the above bit about George Chaffey for the six to seven readers that might eventually make it to page 432 of my forthcoming book about the meltdown that has no publisher and is not finished (shoot me a message if you know a good lit agent; I need an agent…) I figured it might be better if I started putting some of my more delectable research nuggets together in pithy little informational packages that might attract more social media followers (agents and publishers want to see your numbers!). The above is extracted not from Mike Davis’s City of Quartz but another equally brilliant but lesser read beast, Material Dreams by Kevin Starr.
Consider gifting your cousin this Christmas not City of Quartz but some other Los Angeles classic like Material Dreams, or better, Southern California: An Island on the Land, or The Fragmented Metropolis or, your best option, Barret Baumgart’s absurd and slender opus, YUCK.
Speaking of which, I’ll be in conversation with my friend Josh Jackson, author of the important new book The Enduring Wild: A Journey into California’s Public Lands at The Last Bookstore in Studio City on December 17th. Our conversation with journalist Dana Covit will raise money for the Mojave Desert Land Trust and beer will be provided by Angel City Brewery.
Hope to see you there!
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