David L. Ulin on Thirteen Question Method
Tuesday, November 19, at 2 PM on KPFK, I host editor, anthologist, book reviewer, and essayist David L. Ulin, who has written about Los Angeles and Southern California for decades, assembling the defining Joan Didion collection for the Library of America, reviewing books and assigning articles and reviews of and about our literary region, and offering his own original short stories and acclaimed essays too. He famously walked the streets of LA as a kind of meditation, in Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles and has been an exemplary literary citizen in his adopted Southern California for decades, a friend to writers, and a booster of the region’s arts and writing culture. So it comes as both a delightful surprise but also a logical creative move that he has vigorously embraced an insider’s appreciation of the perhaps defining literary genre of Los Angeles, noir, in Thirteen Question Method. Nowhere else to go and, in Ulin’s homage, so many places his protagonist can’t help but go, shouldn’t go, as if he’s read Chandler and Cain and Day of the Locust and watched the classic The Lost Weekend but somehow still ends up the patsy, the mark, perhaps both of his own unmaking and a stand-in for every dark hero, doomed anti-hero, the guy who gets tangled up with the femme fatale only to discover his own flawed subconscious in some kind of Jungian alter ego. Ulin, who is one of the sunniest and brightest and kindest people I know, really shocked me with this one, which explores S & M, murder, alcoholism, criminality, blues music and LA, all of course in totally rewarding, fun and smart lines which both shout out to some of his literary heroes and give them a run for their money.
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