By Brian Dunlap
I received this email last week from the Library Foundation. It’s about the revamped ALOUD Reading Series. I know everybody in the Los Angeles literary community was upset last fall when the Library Foundation abruptly announced sudden changes to its staff–the firings of ALOUD Director Louise Steinman and Associate Director Maureen Moore–and to its central program, ALOUD, a program no one thought needed any retooling. However, major retooling has befallen ALOUD, and according to this email, very little, if any, literary programming is actually featured in any of its announced programming.
As you can see below, Library Foundation President Ken Brecher has partnered with the New York Times to help ALOUD discuss arts and culture in Los Ángeles. As seen in several tweets from various community members, and from the history of L.A., having an outside voice as a primary partner in discussing Los Ángeles, is deeply problematic, and continues the long, destructive history of outsiders, most famously embodied in New Yorkers and the New York Times, discounting L.A. It’s where the city’s most famous stereotypes come from. Los Ángeles is a cultural wasteland, it’s people are really superficial, everyone works in the entertainment industry/the city can only be contextualized through the entertainment industry, just to name a few. Below are several of those aforementioned tweets and one Facebook comment:
Why not let some of L.A.’s own critics–Justin Chang; Mike Sonksen; Carolina A. Miranda, winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism for her work at the L.A. Times; Ruben Martinez, and others–speak on the city they know better than the back of their hand? rather than risk the chance that the New York Times’ presence will steamroll L.A.’s culture? Why not let L.A. speak for itself?
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Los Angeles Literature 