The Flutter Of An Eyelid
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Material Dreams
In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.
The Flutter of an Eyelid
A vicious, and often quite funny, satire of Southern California's bohemian community in the 1920s by Jewish-American novelist Myron Brinig (1896-1991). Illustrated by Lynd Ward (1905-1985)
The Flutter of an Eyelid
Author: Myron Brinig
language: en
Publisher: New York, Farrar & Rinehart, incorporated [c1933]
Release Date: 1933
"Here a fine novelist turns the circus of California life inside out in a novel which is brilliant, incisive, distinguished -- and perverse. His people are so exotic, so extraordinary, that at first they seem unreal -- yet they can be recognized as the natural outgrowth of the abnormal conditions under which they live. A new Messiah walks on the waters for the news reels; nudists dance in the moonlight for the Mayor of the city; a woman with a fondness for murdering her men experiments on her latest lover with a delightful new poison; a man kills himself because he has had every other thrill; a Bostonian forgets Boston for a mad moment."--Flyleaf.