Guest of the ilb 2005
D.J. Waldie was born in 1948 in Lakewood, a suburb
of Los Angeles. Lakewood is also the centre of his life and work.
Waldie still lives in the house which his parents bought in 1946 and
works as city spokesman. »I’m a professional storyteller. My job is to
tell Lakewood’s story to Lakewood.« Using his profound knowledge of the
local history and his intimate insight, which he gains as an employee
of the town, Waldie puts down observations and impressions of the
Californian metropolis and its suburb. His essays are published
regularly in magazines such as »Los Angeles Times« and »Los Angeles
Magazine«, as well as » L.A. Weekly«, »Buzz« and »Massachusetts Review«
among others.
At the age of 48, Waldie had his first book published: »Holy Land: A
Surburban Memoir« (1996). In a minimalist and matter of fact prose he
carefully combines a plethora of facts with autobiographical
impressions and anecdotal events. He tells of the very accurately
planned Lakewood building project, which involved the construction of
17,000 almost identical detached houses arranged on a grid in less than
three years. He also describes a childhood in which it was possible to
go into a strange house, play there, and eat something from the kitchen
without a care. A paradoxical image develops out of this – the alarming
uniformity of suburbia counteracted by the constant feeling of
security, allowing the astonishing eccentricity of banality to become
apparent. The book was therefore often misunderstood as ironic or
cynical. However, as the author says, »it’s an argument about
disregarding places, and it’s an argument about why a disregarded
place, an ordinary place, an everyday place, why it can in fact harbor
qualities of life that are profound.« Waldie’s sophisticated homage,
just like his settledness, acts as a challenge to the American myth of
the promise of unconditional happiness.
In his second book, »Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles«
(2004), Waldie continues with his poetic sociology of the place in the
style of the Benjamin flâneur. In it, »the bard of suburbia« (as he is
named in the foreword) widens his circle of observations to include the
capital, as he also does in »Real City: Downtown Los Angeles
Inside/Out«, a photo collection from Marissa Roth, for which Waldie
contributed the texts. He has received the National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship, a William Allen White Memorial Medal and the The
Commowealth Club of California’s Book Prize in the category
non-fiction. Alongside his topological studies, he is interested in
creating a new translation of Mallarmé.
Translator: Rainer G. Schmidt
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