By PICO IYER
FROM: The L.A. Times

Los Angeles is the city without a heart, we used to hear when I was growing up in England, few of us having come within 5,000 miles of California. Seventy-eight school districts in search of a center, a desert car culture in which every last soul is locked inside her own four doors, a teenage wasteland: The clichés came streaming in on us as we stood in the rain at bus stops in chilly Oxford, on our way to another unheated basement.

Of course, we all greedily devoured the pictures radiating out from L.A., but even they confirmed our sense that it was the City of the Image, home of the two-dimensional. Yes, the metropolis might have inspired weirdly alternative realities from Thomas Pynchon and Joan Didion’s passages of dissociation along the 405, but really it was, we assured one another, Disneyland writ large. Yes, we were secretly transfixed by the mean streets of Raymond Chandler — nothing seemed to have happened in Oxford since 1555 — and, later, the tanned bodies of “Baywatch,” but we told ourselves that even those who loved and lived in the city of fallen angels described life there as performance art. “In Los Angeles it’s hard to tell if you’re dealing with the real true illusion or the false one,” wrote the ultimate L.A. woman, Eve Babitz.

Reputations have a longevity that real life might envy, so even today I know that my neighbors in Japan, my cousins in India, see Los Angeles very often as the place where ideas take a breather and a book is rough material for a treatment. If I could invite them over for a single weekend to dispel such secondhand images, it would be the brilliant April days when the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books explodes across the city.

This year, the 25th such festival will be held in the form of 25 virtual events, broadcast every day starting Oct. 18. Appropriately enough for this year of loss, the great Southern Californian rite of spring is being held in autumn. As such, it joins only a handful of years in more than two decades during which I haven’t cleared my calendar out months in advance to be there. Presenting a book at 18 of the first 20 festivals, I came to see it as the one time in the year when my faith in words — in democracy, in diversity, in openness itself — got a boost, precisely by overturning everything I had assumed of L.A. before I ever saw it. Read Rest of Article Here