In the space of dreams: Wendy Ortiz’s ‘Bruja’ is vivid and dark
by Ellie Robins
From: L.A. Times
If you chart the history of dream writing, you get a map of ideas about fate and individual agency through the ages.
With a few notable exceptions, the ancients and medieval Europeans saw dreams as divine messages; spaces in which you might learn about the destiny assigned to you. In Native American cultures too, dreams have been a means of transcending the individual and connecting with the spiritual world.
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Angel City Review, a journal dedicated to the literary voices of Los Angeles, has just released its 4th issue. This issue of Angel City Review contextualizes writing in terms of the difficult times we live in. In the “Forward” written by Lead Editor John Venegas, writing hones in on the job of “poets and writers [who] continue to ask difficult questions, respond to those questions, keep alive the humanity that often seems lost, and retain hope.” In these times of Trump, where one group of people hate another group of people they do not even know or have never met, what can writing do when it asks and confronts difficult questions? It allows readers “to engage with and experience what it is like to live a life that is not your own.” In other words, writing allows the reader to step in someone else’s shoes.
Anne Rice at Barnes & Nobel Bookstore
Southern California author Matt Coyle discusses and signs his new book, Dark Fissures. Private investigator Rick Cahill fears the next knock on his door will be a cop holding a warrant for his arrest. For murder. La Jolla Chief of Police Tony Moretti is convinced Rick killed a missing person. Although no body has been found, all the evidence points to Rick
The launch of Angels Flight (not the funicular) is the grand blastoff of an ambitious literary salon series to be held at the venerable, quintessentially downtown Clifton’s Cafeteria. The night focuses on writings about Los Angeles history and how L.A. provokes change in our lives. Author and USC English professor Dana Johnson (Elsewhere, California: A Novel) and screenwriter-novelist David Kukoff (Children of the Canyon and the forthcoming Los Angeles in the 1970s: Weird Scenes in the Goldmine) read from their work, followed by a Q&A. Attention writers: You can share your own writing, completed and in-progress, on this ever-fascinating subject. Themed beverages and dining available.
The stories in Dana Johnson’s collection “In the Not Quite Dark” take place in and around Los Angeles, the historical Pacific Electric Building in downtown in particular. Characters across stories live there, either the victims of gentrification or the unapologetic gentrifying. In “Because That’s Just Easier,” yuppie parents try to teach their child that there is nothing she can do for the homeless of downtown. When the girl observes a man prone on the sidewalk, she wonders whether or not he’s alive. Her father kneels down and says, “If he’s not dead … then it’s harder.” The girl decides by the end of the story that the homeless man must be dead then, because — as the title states — that’s just easier.
Tim Wu, in conversation with KCRW’s Madeleine Brand, will discuss and sign his new book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, which explores the rise of firms whose business models are the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. Wu looks at the cognitive, social, and unimaginable ways that industries focusing on human attention are transforming our society and our personal lives.
