Blaise Zerega: Good evening everyone, and welcome to the California Book Club. Happy New Year. This is our first gathering of the year. I'm so excited tonight to help present D. J. Waldie's book Holy Land. I highly recommend this. If you haven't read it yet, you're in for a treat tonight. He's going to be in conversation with host John Freeman and our special guest Lawrence Weschler.
California Book Club is our free monthly gathering. It takes place at the third Thursday of every month like clockwork. It would not be possible without support of our partners. It's really a great list of people who help us promote these events. It's: Bookshop West Portal, Book Passage, Books Inc., Book Soup—you'll see there's a theme here, a lot of bookstores—Bookshop.org, Diesel, a bookstore, the Huntington Institute on California the West, the Los Angeles Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, Narrative Magazine, Vromans, and ZYZZYVA. So please support our partners, and again, if you haven't purchased this book, please visit one of them and do so.
Just to mention, the CBC is free all the time. We have a newsletter, and during that month, we write essays about the author in this book, and they're available online. If you haven't read any of them, please do so. You can also sign up for our free California Book Club newsletter. And a fun fact, every CBC gathering like tonight's is recorded and available on our site for on-demand viewing. So if you've missed a previous one, please go back and check it out.
Also, we are having some parties. We've started doing issue parties each quarter. Our latest issue, about Baja, is out now for sale at bookstores of course. And so to help celebrate that, we're doing an event in Oakland at Clio's Bookstore next week, on Wednesday, January 24. It's free. There'll be drinks, there'll be speakers, people reading their work. Come meet other members of the Alta community. The following week, Thursday, February 1st, we're going to be at the North Figueroa Bookshop in Los Angeles. They're free to attend, please come, we'd love to meet you in person.
How can you support this work that we do, bringing you the in-depth articles, essays, and interviews with authors like D. J.? You could become a digital Alta member for as little as $3 a month, or become a full all access member. It's $50 a year. You get the four issues of the award-winning journal. Plus, right now, special deal, you get the California Book Club hat, there we go, and also the Best Bookstores of the West Guide. It's a really great deal, so talk about a bundle. While you're there, if you're already a member, you can also go to the Alta store and get our back-by-popular demand fantastic tote bag that's also available. It just takes a lot of work to make this all happen, so I thank you for supporting Alta.
That's probably it for our housekeeping. It's a thrill to welcome such a huge talent tonight, D. J. Waldie, and I'd like to bring on our host John Freeman.
John Freeman: Thanks, Blaise. What a pleasure to be here. The point of this book club has been over time to try to celebrate highly original and what we feel are classic works of literature by Californians and about California. The book we're talking about tonight, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D. J. Waldie, might be one of the most exquisite pieces of narrative clockwork I've ever read, structured on 316 numbered segments. It is a metaphysical map of Lakewood, California: the planned community of roughly 20,000 or so homes that were built in almost three years in the late 1940s where D. J. Waldie's parents bought a home in the late 1940s—and where he still lives today.
For 30 years he was the deputy city manager, I think that's the title he retired with, of Lakewood itself. In between he went to Cal State Long Beach and got a degree in comparative literature from Irvine and translated poems by Mallarmé, this French symbolist poet, and others.
But it is this book which began his writing life. He's written many other books at this point now, including Where Are We Now?, Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place, his most recent book. But Holy Land is something so original that I think it has taken nearly 30 years for people to catch up with how prophetic it is, and how decent it is, and the mesmerizing way that it layers urban history, design, memoir, and a kind of poetical
flâneuring through a space that is so against walking, which is Los Angeles (I'm told) and we'll find out tonight why D. J. Waldie still walks and writes where he lives. But right now I think he's sitting down in his house, so please come on and join us, D. J. Waldie.
D. J. Waldie: Thank you, John, very much for those very kind words.
Freeman: It's a pleasure. I first read your book, I don't know, 20 years ago, and it really shattered me, just the ability for someone from a place that in description feels like the suburb that I grew up in, to make it feel as mysterious and mystical and full of history that I couldn't quite touch as you do here. There's a lot of questions that have already come in from the audience, but I'm going to start out with something really basic. Are you in the house that you describe in the book, and what kind of tree is outside that house?
Waldie: Well, speaking to you this evening, I'm not in that house. I'm actually in the cable production studio of the city of Lakewood where for many, many years I was a city employee. But I still live in the same house that my parents bought in 1946. I live there alone. In front of my house there is a sycamore tree, which is somewhat characteristic of Lakewood since there are a lot of them on street trees in my community. Though when I was growing up, the tree in front of my house was a rather ragged looking Brazilian pepper that the developers of Lakewood planted rapidly and cheaply when the city was being built.
Freeman: So the city did become known for its trees, although as you described when you're building the city in front of us in your description, there were no trees at all. It had been a bean field of 3,500 acres bought by three Jewish developers from a Montana outfit. Can you talk a little bit about how this Montana land company came to own so much land in Southern California?
Waldie: Well, in a nutshell, a great deal of Southern California remained largely undeveloped, undivided from the Rancho period, the late Spanish colonial period, and the Mexican colonial period in Southern California. At the end of the 19th century, you had huge swathes of land still under one ownership. That was true of what became Lakewood. There were three large ranchos: Rancho Los Alamitos, Rancho Los Coyotes, and Rancho Los Cerritos. And Lakewood was carved out of one of those, Rancho Los Alamitos.
When the Bixby family who ultimately owned the land sold it to William A. Clark, a Montana robber baron who was a dramatic figure in the late 19th century, a true captain of industry and an all around bad guy. Clark and his brother developed parts of it as ranch land and parts of it as dairy land and parts of it for the growing of sugar beets, and ultimately through a couple of other transfers within the Clark family, it was sold to the three developers, Mark Taper, Ben Weingart, and Louis Boyar in 1949. They began building 17,500 houses all at once and finished them by the end of 1953, and then you had Lakewood, and instant city.
Freeman: And it was the biggest development in the world, biggest planned city in the world at the time. Is that true?
Waldie: It was. It was larger than Levittown on Long Island. Levittown on Long Island took longer to build. Lakewood was somewhat larger and built much more quickly. It was the largest at the time, although other developments quickly superseded it as the '50s rolled on.
Freeman: A couple other things if you haven't been there and you're listening, most of the streets, it sounds like probably close to ninety-nine percent, have right angles at the intersections. Do you want to talk about why that is so?
Waldie: There are several reasons. One reason is pure practicality. The homes in Lakewood were built on land that periodically flooded in the 19th century. To make those homes sellable, to make them viable, make them possible, the land had to drain easily when it rained. When it rains hard in Southern California, you worry about flooding. And so the streets in Lakewood are gridded in right angles to facilitate the flow of stormwater from city streets.
But there's also another reason why the streets are right angle streets. It's a gridded, orthogonal grid of streets, and that is because it's inexpensive to develop land that way, and it maximizes the yield of the land, the number of house lots you can build. Lakewood houses are on lots the smallest size the county of Los Angeles allowed in the early 1950s; 100 feet deep and 50 feet wide, 5,000 square foot lot—the smallest lot size available. Maximize the yield, minimize production costs, make production of the houses, building the houses simple and mechanical, actually.
Freeman: I'm just going through these things because I think they're fascinating, that most houses only had a one-foot foundation sometimes, at the most three feet. Is that correct?
Waldie: The typical foundation for Lakewood was 18 inches. So they're not on the ground, they're not on slab, they're on raised foundations. But houses in Southern California don't have any basements, so that was actually kind of a selling point that they were actually on raised foundations.
Freeman: And all the houses were around 1100 square feet. Is that true?
Waldie: They ranged in size from about 957 square feet to around 1100 square feet. So in that range you had two and three bedroom houses. They all had one bathroom. They're small houses. The federal government identified them as minimal traditional houses. They were not cookie-cutter like the houses in Levittown, which were all the same. They were all Cape Cods in Levittown. Houses in Lakewood were distinguished by different elevations and different layouts of the rooms, but they were small and they remain small.
Freeman: Do you think you could read a tiny bit from the book? I feel like the descriptions in the book are highly accurate and efficient, but they're also deeply poetic. You can feel in your descriptions the backdrop of that poetry that seems to lift it off the ground.
Waldie: I'll be reading from some things that you and I talked about earlier, if that's okay?
Freeman: Perfect.
Waldie: John, you mentioned that the book is 316 short pieces. I call them bits. They're not really chapters. Each one of them is numbered, and in reading for you, I'm going to give you the section number and then read the portion that follows. So this is from Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.
43: This suburb was thrown up on plowed under bean fields beginning in early 1950. No theorist or urban planner had the experience then to gauge how 30,000 former GIs and their wives would take to frame and stucco houses on small, rectangular lots next to hog farms and dairies. In Long Beach, some businessmen assumed the result would be a slum. Others wondered if it would be a ghost town. Someone asked the eager promoter sent by the developers, 'Who will you sell those houses to? The jackrabbits?' Had you seen the delicate houses then going up on the tracks' light gray soil, the ground scraped clean and as flat as Kansas, you might've wondered too.
44: This is not a garden suburb. The streets do not curve or offer vistas. The street grid always intersects at right angles. The north-south roads are avenues. The east-west roads are streets. The four lane highways in either compass direction are boulevards. The city planted some of these with eucalyptus trees and red crepe myrtle on narrow well-tended medians and parkway strips. People passing through the city often mention the trees; they never mention the pattern over which they pass.
45: The streets in my grid are a fraction of a larger grid anchored in Los Angeles. That grid was laid out in September 1781. The Los Angeles grid is a copy of one carried from Mexico City to an anonymous stretch of river bank by a Colonel Felipe de Neve, governor of California. The grid the Spanish colonel carried to the non-existent Los Angeles in 1781 originally came from a book in the Archive of the Indies in Seville. That grid book prescribed the exact orientation of the streets, the houses, and the public places for all the colonial settlements in the Spanish Americas. That grid came from God.
95: His religion and living in the suburb have taught him shame. It is a lesson he takes on his daily walk to work. He passes the houses of people who he does not know, though has lived on his block for 46 years. His walk into the center of the city is little more than a mile.
96: The San Gabriel river crosses my city. The river channel is completely lined in concrete against a repetition of disastrous floods of the 1930s. Set in the floor of the San Gabriel River is a smaller concrete slot, a miniature river that flows constantly with a foot or so of water discharged from the county wastewater treatment plant. Only when it rains is there more water in the San Gabriel river than the shallow band about a dozen feet wide. At night in the reflection of hundreds of street lamps, the substitute river glows.
Freeman: Thank you for that reading. It gets right to the core of the way that this book, which is about a place and about a grid and about the building of that place, is also about what happens on the spirit level and the way that we need or maybe perhaps sometimes respond to aspects of order. Could you talk a bit about those interactions in the book as you wanted them to happen?
Waldie: Yes. I think the best way to describe Holy Land is it's a book about the intersection of a personality and a place; maybe also a book about the evolution of a certain kind of sensibility, a capacity for connecting to a place, even though the place might be unprepossessing of a place that is as ordinary as Lakewood.
The way in which Holy Land unfolds is like the experience of a walker coming upon sites frequently seen, maybe seen every day, but always in a slightly different light, as if the everyday-ness took on a different character based upon the season, the time of day, the cast of light, the effects of wind and rain. The idea that a place that seems fixed in time and circumstance is also constantly remaking itself in front of you. I would hope that part of the experience of reading Holy Land is to experience in an affective way, an experience in an emotional way, how a pattern of encounters builds up a sense of place.
Freeman: We've already had some questions from readers who are fans of the book. Ed Schor from East LA wrote, "How did you go about organizing the separate chapters? Were they written and arranged in a somewhat chronological order? Or did you plot a grid and placed them based on quote-unquote thematic neighborhood?"
Waldie: The compositional practice that evolved for Holy Land began with just an accumulation of notes. I had hoped to write a series of short stories and make that a kind of novel in short stories, but that didn't work out. But I kept working on the notes, the incidents, the bits and pieces of my experience. As I accumulated those and shared them with some friends, they and I understood there might be an actual story here.
And so in writing Holy Land, there wasn't a lot of plotting. The flow of composition was kind of dictated by what was happening in the sections. I would write about, there would be an arc, a chunk that covered some aspect of my experience in growing up and living in Lakewood, and that would suggest something else and that would suggest something else and that would suggest something else, so that the compositional work of Holy Land was organic in that sense. Or, maybe it was just me not being very, very careful.
Freeman: Well, the associative logic is one of the forward momentum devices of the book, and you loop through certain encounters several times. Sometimes those encounters are with a place. Sometimes it's an encounter with history, and so you come back to certain moments within the history of Lakewood multiple times. And as I mentioned in my introduction, you've translated Stéphane Mallarmé, the French poet, who was highly ordered; he wrote a lot of sonnets and worked in an Alexandrian twelve-syllable line often. Not the kind of wild poet of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, but a poet of order in some ways, although deeply symbolic. I'm curious what your feeling is as a writer who sees deeply but uses restrictions. Did you find that in making this notational method, did it liberate you in a sense to write more radically about your intimate and personal life? Because that's a part of this book, too-
Waldie: Yes.
Freeman: ... than you would've felt if you had just simply said, "Okay, page one. Mom and dad came to L.A. after my father was in the Navy and my mother moved from New York."
Waldie: Yes, I think you're right about that. The form of Holy Land allowed me to deal with aspects of grieving over the deaths of my parents, and aspects of my life which some people might find reflecting of a disability. As my readers may know, I'm not able to drive. I've never been able to drive. I have appallingly bad eyesight. And so the book flows out of both a time of grieving and the limitations I have as a disabled person. The fact that I walk everywhere is a consequence of that I don't drive. I don't, don't drive out of some sort of moral superiority. If I could drive, I would, but I walk. And the discipline of walking is fundamental to the making of Holy Land.
But also I set myself a very artificial barrier as well, just as you've just suggested, and that is that no part of Holy Land is any longer than a single double-spaced typewritten page. So no part of Holy Land is any longer than about 200 to 300 words. I never wanted to write longer than that, so I kept myself to short bits, some of them, only a sentence long. I didn't learn that so much from translating Mallarmè, but I'll get back to that in a moment. I learned that an awful lot from being in the graduate poetry writing workshop at UC Irvine and learning a lot from the poets there, and particularly a couple of them.
A wonderful poet and artist, Gary Young, who is author of prose poems and whose poems were particularly grounded in the everyday-ness of nature and the human condition. And Brad Crenshaw, who also in his early work, who was a mentor and provided a considerable amount of experience for me in composition. I learned a lot from prose poets, particularly from Gary Young. And to the extent that Holy Land has a poetic quality, it reflects that educational experience and also that preference on my part to make use of the practices and the strategies of prose poetry.
But I also learned from the professors in that program from Charles Wright and James McMichael. Charles Wright, the Southern poet; one critic called his work, "A search for transcendence in the every day." And James McMichael wrote a wonderful book called For Good Things, which was a book length poem about Pasadena, about civic history and carpentry and aerospace and economics. That was a way of helping me. Reading that and trying to internalize some of its strategies was something I brought to the writing of Holy Land some years later.
Freeman: I thought a lot about Wright, reading this book again, especially The World of 10,000 Things. There's an almost cosmological attempt to grasp the endless varieties of the world, but through a more limited version of it by closely studying repetitions. I want to ask you another question that the audience has been asking several times that slightly bounces off what I just said because there's an aspect of holiness and close attention. Can you talk a little bit about the title Holy Land and why you chose it, what it means to you?
Waldie: Yes, I can. Those may be a little surprising based upon what we've been talking about so far. We've been talking about Holy Land's poetical qualities. We're talking about its aspect of investigation of the everyday, its experience of the world and how the world impinges upon a personality and helps to shape it. But Holy Land is also an argument, an argument with those who automatically disparage suburban places like Holy Land, like Lakewood, with the notion that lives lived in suburban places like mine are by their nature limited lives, that places like Lakewood are dehumanizing. And in the words of some critics of suburban places, the built environment since the end of the Second World War, that suburbs are the place where evil dwells.
And so my choice of the title Holy Land was a bit of a thumb in the eye from a suburbanite to those who have a reflexive disregard for places like the one I live in. It is not a paradise. It is not the Holy Land. It is not by any means perfect. But any place where your parents are buried is a sacred place and aspires to the condition of being a holy land. Any place where thousands of lives have been lived and aspirations have been realized, at least to some degree, is in my tradition of belief a holy land. So the title Holy Land reflects both that degree of anger and that degree of awareness that the sacred does flow out of the everyday and the ordinary and the disregarded and the humble.
Freeman: Well, as a suburbanite from Carmichael, California, I can only say bravo to that. I want to ask another question from the audience which are coming in, and these are really great questions. Dennis Woodson, who's an architect, wants to know, "What's the predominant style of homes? Small, affordable homes for post-war purchase? Local zoning ordinance control the allowable size, bulk, and scale to limit mansions out of the character with the surrounding neighborhoods and maintain a sense of place. Also, are there any original orange or lemon groves left?"
Waldie: No, there were no orange or lemon groves in Lakewood. It was all pasture and dairy and hog farms. It was in no sense that the romantic Southern California of the 1920s and 1930s, Lakewood does have an anti-mansionization ordinance, and very few people have built out to the limits that are set for expansion of homes or modeling of homes in Lakewood. There are very few tear downs, very few teardowns. Lakewood was a blue collar community when it was sold to returning GIs who all were, of course, white and not people of color. That's a reality that has to be understood here as well. But Lakewood today is as diverse as L.A. County is diverse. Back in the early 1990s it was described as being one of the most diversifying cities in California.
The character of the neighborhoods, although the homes are 70 years on in age, is not rigid and uniform. You see a lived-in environment that shows 70 years of investment in mowing a lawn and painting a house and planting a garden. Lakewood is interesting to me in its modesty. Lakewood remains a place I want to hear stories being told because those modest stories are important.
Freeman: Well, someone who has been collecting stories and investigating parts of Los Angeles probably since he was born in Van Nuys is here to join us tonight. His name is Lawrence Weschler, and I cannot believe that we are going to put these two amazing minds together. Lawrence Weschler is one of the best writers of nonfiction of the last 50 years easily.
His works include works of reportage and a Passions and Wonders Series that includes Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders, which was a Book Critic Circle and Pulitzer finalist; it's about the Museum of Jurassic Technology as well as museums in general. One of my favorite books of his, Everything That Rises Must Converge, which won the NBCC Award for Criticism in 2006. His latest book is about Oliver Sacks. But mostly he's been writing a Wonder Cabinet Substack, which I highly recommend you go check out. But for now, he's here to ask some more questions of D. J. Waldie. Please join us, Lawrence Weschler.
Lawrence Weschler: Thank you so much. Hi, Don. It's great to see you.
Waldie: Hi.
Weschler: Don and I have been having conversations for many, many years. And as you say, I come from Van Nuys. I come from the tract neighborhood between Louise and White Oak, just under Victory Boulevard; which parenthetically it's kind of hilarious now, because it's in Van Nuys. But when Van Nuys got the reputation of being the porn capital of America, this particular tract changed its name to Lake Balboa, even though there's no lake there unless there's a flood in which case there will be a lake there. But anyway, and an awful lot of what you write rings true to my experience as well.
I thought I'd just throw a few things at you and then just perhaps invite you to respond. One of the things that's striking that we talked about early on is that indeed you are translating Mallarmé. You are in particular translating his remarkable epic, I guess, or what would you say? A lyric epic, which is A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish. Is that the right word?
Waldie: Abolish.
Weschler: Chance, yeah. And there is a quality of throwing the dice with each of these 316 things. You used to tell me about how, in fact, there was the paper, the one page, but it was also that there was a walk through a grid of about a mile that you had to take each day, and then in effect the arc of any given passage was what you could think of during that walk or the walk back.
And that in turn creates this extraordinary metronomic quality. One way I'd put it, by the way, is that all of the sentences breathe. There's this regular breathing. If you were to grammatically diagram each sentence individually, I bet you could lay all of the diagrams on top of each other. They all have the same kind of subject verb object, but in different particular flavors. I often think about, and the thing that's an absolute masterpiece here, is this is a masterpiece of voice, of tone. When I'm teaching, first I talk about structure and then I talk about voice, and in a way they're related. What happens is that when you're structuring a text, you're in effect building a larynx. And when you breathe through that structure, you get the voice.
What's amazing about your voice that I have really never encountered before or anything quite like it is that the voice I would describe as kind of Tuvan throat singing going on. They're like four or five different voices layering in and out of each other. And you just ask yourself, "How is he doing that?"
How is he going from this kind of analytical historical thing, which is just facts about this, and you have whole sections on water and where the water is and the geology, and then you have suddenly sections on race covenants, and you have sections on financing, how the financed work. But then in the middle of all this suddenly, and it has partly to do with that evenness of the breathing in and breathing out, it's almost like iambic pentameter, but it's not that. There is a kind of breathing.
And you then have these extraordinary moments about grief, on the one hand; about solitude. You had this very strange thing that just comes in little flits and flat that you basically have lived by yourself. At one point you talk about how you once had a woman friend who eventually you didn't become a couple, she married somebody else, and that that couple now has a daughter at the time of your writing who basically—I imagine—is a goddaughter or something to you. But in any case, that you suddenly start saying that you are telling all these stories to this daughter, and she just flits in and then she's gone. And that whole pang of that life story is just da-da-da-da-da.
And then finally, at the end of the day, I think that what the book is really doing is it's about incarnation. You pass that little passage that you were reading before about where the grid came from and it went back to Spanish and it was in Seville and so forth, and that grid was made by God. But you're not kidding.
Waldie: No.
Weschler: I mean, that's not a joke, as becomes clear by the very end where you are really talking about the wonder, the marvel of how human beings are incarnated in a place, but also, as you say, in a person. And that person comes in and out, and in and out. Does that make sense to you?
Waldie: Oh, it makes tremendous sense, Wren, you've got it exactly. The book is an argument. The book is a poem. The book is a sociological exercise. The book is local history.
Weschler: When you say it's an argument, it's like an argument of a metaphysical poet, like a John Donne's argument in a way.
Waldie: Precisely. Precisely. And it's also a very Catholic book in that sense, because my imagination arises out of that experience and that practice. And so when you say incarnational, of course it's incarnational. The book seeks to suggest to readers that the sacred in reality rises out of the everyday experiences of their lives, and attention to those experiences and the places in which they occur is a incarnational experience, an incarnational event. Something comes out of that. In my case, it was a book. In other cases, it might be something else. And I would hope that readers might understand the book in those many different voices, overlaying as they do.
But to also tweak to something you said just in practical terms, every bit of Holy Land was read aloud over and over and over and over and over again; not just sitting in front of a computer screen, but on those half-hour walks to and from Lakewood City Hall when I was working at Lakewood City Hall. And you're entirely right; the rhythms, the internal arcs of the book reflect the physical effort of putting one foot in front of another as I walk from my-
Weschler: By the way, that is part of the rhythm too, is the rhythm of walking.
Waldie: ... yes, it's the rhythm of walking.
Weschler: Walking. And by the way, we're talking to people there in L.A. For God's sake, will somebody please do the documentary of watching Don walk back and forth in those grids and then overlay the text? It's just asking to be done. It will be such a wonderful, wonderful prose poem of a film if somebody would do it. I could just see the feet one in front of the other and so forth.
Waldie: This is what's so delightful about this in talking about this book, is that you've got the practicalities of composition. You've got the realities of a particular kind of Catholic imagination, incarnation-oriented imagination. You've got an argument about the worth or value of tract house suburbs.
Weschler: By the way, you've got three Jewish developers who create a town which they could not live in because in 1940, not only were blacks not allowed, but Jews were not allowed by the covenants, that the Montana people had imposed on the sale of the land.
Waldie: Yes, precisely. Precisely. The early deeds of homes in Lakewood all have the restrictions of an all-inclusive nature.
Weschler: So that's amazing. But then, and I don't want to, well, this is, be careful. This is an alert, I'm giving away something. But just somehow this entire amazing promenade, this argument in the form of a walk, comes at the very end to this extraordinary talk about Catholic hymn where you have the Latin. Can you do the Latin?
Waldie: I can do that. Yeah.
Weschler: Can you actually just read 316? Just read 316 if you have it there.
Waldie: Yeah, I've got it here.
Weschler: Somebody, by the way, also said that 316 is important. Is that just a coincidence?
Waldie: That's entirely coincidence.
Weschler: John 3:16 is something.
Waldie: So for readers who may not have read, for participants this afternoon, this evening, who may not have read Holy Land, it ends with the Catholic services for Good Friday. So it doesn't end with Easter, it doesn't end with the Resurrection; it ends with that melancholy afternoon and evening. It ends with a ceremony for Good Friday, which is the veneration of the cross in which-
Weschler: By the way, the veneration of the cross, the grid.
Waldie: ... yes. Yes, exactly. So here's the very last portion of Holy Land, which in some ways does set some of the book up.
While the congregation knelt and venerated the cross, the choir sang. The hymn the choir sang was Pange Lingua, a hymn traditional for Good Friday. Among its many verses are some addressed to the cross itself. 'Dulce lignum, dulci clavos, dulce pondus sustinens.' Sweet the wood, sweet the nails, sweet the weight you bear.
Weschler: "Sweet the wood," said the man from Lakewood, and, "Sweet the nails," said the man who had written about the building of an entire-
Waldie: Nailing it together.
Weschler: ... nailing it together, and sweet the weight you bear. I mean, that's, again, that incarnational quality, and I say that to you as a Jew who just read this thing, and it was just completely amazing and overwhelming to me. And it remains that way, just having read it again.
Waldie: You've been very kind, Wren, and delightful to reconnect over this book. We've had some wonderful conversations over the years. You've had me speak about my work in classes and other settings, and I'm very grateful for your attention over all these years. Thank you.
Weschler: Thank you.
Freeman: Thank you, Lawrence Weschler. We'll call you back in very, very shortly. More questions have come in for D. J. Waldie. I just want to try to get to them as quickly as possible because one of them is just simply a comment from Karen Allman who lives in Long Beach, worked in home health in Lakewood for over 20 years. She says, "Your book made me really enjoy the travel my job required throughout the city and appreciate its charm and history. You answered so many questions about the city. I was especially amused with the story of how the streets were named. As a dog lover, Freckles Road delights me. I still recall segments of your book as I drive its streets. Thank you."
Waldie: How very kind. How very kind.
Freeman: For those of you who haven't read the book yet, there is a really beautiful section about naming the streets. Is there anything you can say about the sort of arbitrariness? I mean, it seems like at some point one of the developer's sons took over naming the streets, and sort of named them after friends and dogs.
Waldie: I don't know what people think, how places get their names, how things that they may have grown up with they may remember their whole life. I grew up on Oak Street. How come that street got named Oak? Why is it you remember that? And that some arbitrary decision made by some relatively uncaring functionary in the developer's office gave names to these streets and named them after lawyers and accountants and girlfriends and friends of friends. And in one case, in Lakewood, named it after a dog that had been run over, Freckles Road. It's named after a Cocker Spaniel that had been run over.
Part of what's going on in Holy Land is the contingencies that create settings for memory, contingencies that create aspects of one's self identity that flow out of just the arbitrary realities of how things get done.
Freeman: I love that phrase, settings for memory. Someone in the audience who's a writer, and there are many, I can just see them in the comment section, just kind of run with that. Speaking of which, I'm going to try to combine two comments here into a comment/question. One, unless this is an impersonator, is from the poet Garrett Hongo, who writes, "I'm a son of the SoCal suburbs as well, a Japanese American, one called Gardena, also restricted and permitted by covenant after World War II." I want to combine Mr. Hongo's comment with something that someone who teaches your book, Marthine Satris, says she's been reading and teaching Holy Land for years, as well as combining it with Didion's Where I Was From, and appreciates your intersection of place, property, and class and thinks they should be read together. She's asking if in the decades since this book has been published if there's more to say about a post-industrial suburb and community as place now.
I guess the reason I'm combining these two is I wonder if you can say a little bit more about the restrictive covenants and how much they were being used in the late '40s. What changed, and how that's changed the quality of Lakewood, and I guess Long Beach. Or were there no covenants in Long Beach?
Waldie: Well, no. The history of suburban development in the southeast quadrant of the county where Lakewood and Cerritos and Bellflower and Downey and Norwalk and other communities adjacent grew up in the late 1940s into the 1950s. That story of that, of course, is grounded on housing segregation. When the properties that broke up the great Ranchos were being sold off, they were all sold off with covenants that restricted ownership to Caucasian owners, to white owners, excluding everything else, including Jewish buyers. Those covenants were legally enforceable until 1948 when the Supreme Court struck down their legal enforcement, although they continued to be written into the deeds well after 1948.
When Taper, Boyar, and Weingart bought the properties in Lakewood, they came with deed restrictions from the Montana Land Company that literally would've prevented them from living there. They, however, did not abide by those covenants. They were eager to sell to Jewish home buyers, and they did. So that was a break with the development tradition in Southern California.
Lakewood was all white when the first census was taken in 1960. There was no one living here in 1950. 1960, Lakewood was essentially all white. That has dramatically changed since the late 1980s. And as I said earlier, Lakewood is as diverse as the county of Los Angeles is diverse. And in the 1990s, it was one of the most diversifying cities in California.
My neighbors are black and white, brown, Asian, Laotian, Cambodian, Korean, Filipino, literally the great immigration depot, if you will, of southeast L.A County. Lakewood was an affordable community to buy into until nothing in California became affordable. And so it was a destination for lots of first time home buyers. That helped make it then and makes it today a wonderful place to live.
Freeman: I love the way that you stage and scale information across this book, especially covenants did not come into the book until much later. But in the way that it loops through, you're constantly telling readers information that they have not realized that they don't yet have. And so you at some point drop in the fact that many of the farmers who were on the land in the early '40s were Japanese. You work your way backwards to the information that this grid that is underneath everything was brought by the governor from Mexico City, but it came from Spain.
As you work through this wheel, I wonder if, I guess the book is a superior piece of information technology. And it says, this is how information actually can kind of be fed into the story of a place. I guess I wonder, as someone whose book also lives in urban history and design, how do you feel about the ways that places tell the stories of themselves? You did write a history of Lakewood, a more straightforward one. How did you do that versus this? Was it much more direct? How did you scale the information?
Waldie: Holy Land represents a kind of history telling that's radically different from the way history is typically told. The kind of telling that it tries to do has taken on the name of affective history, a history that records how the historical events occurring then and in recollection, how they felt emotionally. So Holy Land is an affective history, whereas the formal history of Lakewood written by several authors, including myself, over the past several years, which is available online from the city of Lakewood's website, is a more straightforward history in the sense that it starts at some point in the past and continues to some point in the present. That kind of history is valuable for the way it delivers information. I think the way affective history is valuable is the way it delivers information colored by the presence of an imagination, colored by the presence of the author's feelings. It is it not psycho-history, although some people have called it that, but it is history informed by the sensibilities of the author.
Freeman: That's right. I did think a little bit of Guy Debord when I was reading this; not just the numbered sections, but his definition of psychogeography as a kind of collision of sensibility and memory and place, and what those intersections make possible by terms of thought. Jeff Dice has a comment and a question. He's curious whether you've heard of the California Forever Project in Solano County where a group of Silicon Valley investors are pursuing a ballot measure to bypass normal planning steps to get permission to build a new city of 50,000. Do you think this development throwback to the '50s and '60s makes sense in California today?
Waldie: I've heard of it and have read a little bit around it. I'm skeptical; perhaps recent history has warned me off the big ideas of billionaires. I'm rather skeptical. The new urbanist program that began in the 1990s promised to build brand new suburbs that were going to be perfected versions of Lakewood. A few of them have been successful as marketing campaigns, but I don't know how successful they've been as communities. The way in which the suddenness of the tract house development of Lakewood occurred did seem to provide enough of whatever it might be to propel these brand new homeowners into some kind of working, workable community. I don't know if that's doable under the aegis of a Silicon Valley billionaire. I'm skeptical.
Freeman: Kathy Ruzioni says, "This wonderful book has been a touchstone for me as a child whose family moved to Holly Park near Englewood when it was first built in former bean fields too. I walk those streets in my memories with great comfort."
I want to add to that a point. At one point you mentioned that when your parents bought their house at the end of the street, there was, I forget what you say, but the environment that was there before is still visible.
Waldie: Yes.
Freeman: It reminds me of Barry Lopez who grew up in the Valley in Reseda. He describes living on a street very similar, where at the end of his future suburban neighborhood there was the unbuilt environment, if you will. I wonder if you have any ideas about growing up in that kind of transitional stage and if that had any effect on you as a person whose imagination was shaped by this place.
Waldie: Yes, I think I can speak to that in a couple of dimensions, but before I do that, I have to say that I had the great pleasure and honor to know Barry Lopez and to have worked with him on a book project, and to have heard his kind words about my work and about Holy Land. I'm saddened to be reminded of his recent death.
The aspect of growing up in a place like Lakewood, which did have a lot of unbuilt components even though it was largely built out by the time I was six or seven years of age, was that the fact was the fact that it did have unbuilt areas where imaginations could run wild. It was the very pinnacle of life to be a boy in 1955 and 1956; to be pushed out of the front door on a summer's day and told to come back when the streetlights come on, but not before, and to spend the whole day in a imaginative play in essentially the waste unbuilt areas of a place like Lakewood where you could build a fort, you could play war, you could pretend all kinds of adventures. And it was, like I say, the very pinnacle of being a boy to be in a place like that. Hard to do these days.
Freeman: It is. We're going to go a tiny bit, tiny bit, maybe a few minutes over time because there's so many questions coming in. I wonder if Wren Weschler could rejoin us because I think there's some questions that he might also be able to bounce off if he's still out there in the chat room.
Weschler: I'm here.
Freeman: I'm going to note that Marthine Satris pointed out that Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, the Booker Prize winning novel, also has sort of moments that are on the edge lands of the newly built suburban estates of Dublin.
The question that I wanted bring to both of you is something that maybe as a person who's lived in Chicago but grew up in Van Nuys and has traveled around a lot that maybe Wren could address to some degree is from Leila Pease who writes, "How is living in the suburbs uniquely lonely versus city living with its high rises and permeable shared walls? And having not read the book yet, how do urban plans like Lakewood remedy or seek to address modern loneliness? Can the suburbs are walking save us?"
Weschler: That's nice. I'll just say that growing up where I grew up in Van Nuys and going to Birmingham High, one of the things that is very strong is the walking around. One of the effects that when you're a kid, you can't drive because you're a kid. And so indeed, you just walk everywhere. And where we would grow up, we were the last tract when it was first built, and then it was all orange groves. And as far as I can tell, the orange groves have receded about a mile every year of my life. They're about probably the nearest orange groves to where I grew up, are now 72 miles away from there. But it's interesting about that. The pang of loneliness is different. Because I've lived in Manhattan at different points in my life. And now I'm kind of in another suburb, Pelham, we talked about at the beginning. Well, I guess, this may have to do with aging also. Loneliness is everywhere, but so is the access out of it.
One thing I was just thinking, by the way, I won't have you read this, there's a whole section called number 252. Which in its entirety reads, "Sometimes I think the only real forces here are circumstance and grace." And circumstance, is that kind of like chance and hazard and accident and gray? The Force of Circumstance, Beauvoir's title. By the way, just in passing, when you were talking about the billionaires, I was thinking of Barthelme's great story, "I bought me a little city. It was Galveston, Texas." That had that feeling, too. But that Mahler may quality, it actually seems to be in that sentence. And that's also incarnationally. The force of just accident of circumstance of things, but the eruptions, the upwelling of grace unexpectedly.
Waldie: Yes. When I talk about circumstance, I'm also meaning contingencies. We live in a world in which we didn't plan or prepare everything around us. We live at the mercy of contingencies. But we make a world that we can live in. We hope we can make a world we can live in from some kind of action of grace. You may see that as a divine grace, but you may also see it simply as the gracefulness of intelligent, caring people working together.
Weschler: Or the gracefulness, as we've talked about a lot, of light.
Waldie: Yes.
Weschler: The light of L.A.
Waldie: Exactly.
Weschler: Those kinds of moments that just descend on you.
Waldie: But to speak about loneliness in practical terms, because many people who live in suburban places in America live in a very different kind of suburb than mine. Which was a mass-produced tractile suburb in which homes, they're about eight homes per acre. Which actually makes it fairly dense.
Houses in Lakewood, as Ollivan goes at some length to point out, are only about 14 feet apart. And the houses are rather flimsily built. They're not built of stone and brick, they're built of stucco and chicken wire. And so, we're a great deal in each other's lives in a place like Lakewood, because life flows through these very permeable house lots and very permeable houses. So if loneliness is a function of isolation, you're not altogether isolated in a place like Lakewood. You can make yourself isolated, but you're not altogether isolated.
And so, the capacity for community building was in part built into the physical structure of Lakewood. It was possible for people to be in each other's lives in a neighborly way. Also, in unneighborly ways too. And as a consequence, community rose out of this accumulation of lives in small houses on small lots. Much of that's harder today. It's very much more difficult to extract community from the very busy and complicated lives that people live, and the difficulties, just the material difficulties of living in the early 21st century and its economic and social and other effects. But it's not-
Weschler: And also screen life. Screen life, all the screens that we have.
Waldie: ... but it's not altogether impossible to find community in a place like Lakewood. And indeed places like Lakewood, Lakewood itself, has a vibrant civic life built around families and homes. Although, those families are much different looking and much more differently structured than they were in 1953. John, the best way I can describe myself is I'm a skeptical optimist. I think my life in Lakewood has encouraged me to see this place in ways that reassure me that a decent life can be lived here. And then from my faith perspective, from my faith traditions, I would say a redemptive life can still be lived here.
Freeman: Wow, that is a beautiful sentiment and belief. And I would love us to walk out on it. This has been a fabulous conversation. There's so many comments we haven't been able to get to. Most of them just thanking you for the book, having read it, people from Menlo Park, people from Walnut Creek growing up back when those developments were first being built. And a lot of people who learned to appreciate where they were from in California, having read your book. Which I think is got to be one of the finest things to be able to say about a book, which is about a very specific place too.
Lawrence Weschler, D. J., it was such a pleasure and an honor to have you both here and to talk to you. Thank you very much. And hopefully we can do this again in another 32 years.
Waldie: Well, again, a great honor to be recognized this evening and to interact with so many wonderful readers, or soon to be readers. Ren, always a joy to hear your voice and wrestle with your complicated and lively thoughts. And John, again, thank you very much for the piece in today's Alta online, a very perceptive essay, which was the first thing I read this morning. Thank you very much.
Freeman: Oh, you're welcome. It was my pleasure. Blaise, I think you're coming back on to walk us out.
Zerega: Yeah, there we go. A little technical difficulties. Wow, thank you so much, the three of you. What an evening. Thank you everyone for joining us. Someone said in the comments, "This is a dream meeting of the minds." And talking about circumstance, and as D. J. said, "We're skeptical optimists. Let's find grace and wonder in the world in which we live."
So again, thank you everyone for joining us. Next month, we're going to have Dave Eggers with his book, The Every. That's February 15, third Thursday of the month. It's always free. We'll see you there. In the meantime, please support our authors, buy their books, support Alta. Get that membership. It's $3 a month for a digital. Or $50 a year for the all access, and you get the hat and the fabulous bookstore guide.
And since so much of tonight's conversation centered on poetry, I also want to plug John Freeman's book Wind, Trees. It's really extraordinary. And we're just so grateful that he is the host of this fantastic book club. So one more thing to plug is our issue parties. Hope to see you next week in Oakland, or in person in Los Angeles two weeks later. Or we'll be coming to a city near you, hopefully. So again, thank you everyone and take care. We'll see you next month for Dave Eggers. •
