Los Angeles

The poet claimed he wrote for people 'half-tired.' It sounded like something said at a small dinner party of semi-literates who've made a lot of money and read books only to talk about them with other people who've read the same books.

My grandmother liked to say that if you drove from the beginning of Wilshire Boulevard downtown and headed west at 30 mph you'd never hit a red light. She was from the deep South, she said lots of things like that to me, things that hit notes between wisdom and fear.

Los Angeles's genius is that it's found a way to live without a soul. The notion's extremely liberating, especially when infused with gushers of speculative cash and one sunny day after another. This is not to say that the people who live in LA don't have souls, each one of them does of course, but that more and more of them seem to be living as if they're born unaware of the soul's opportunity to create in a human being something more than a surface.

Unawareness inspires a certain architecture. Downtown LA has a real skyline now, copied pretty much from the templates of New York and Chicago, so imposing that City Hall looks greatly shrunken, appropriate for the age of smaller government and every-soul-for-his-or-her-own-self.

The same poet, a Norwegian who lived through two world wars, said, 'it's not as evil as you think.'

It sounds like something my grandmother,who moved to LA from Thomasville, Georgia in 1938, a widow with two young daughters, might have said.