James Purdon
Roaming Holiday
Walking to Hollywood
By Will Self
Bloomsbury 448pp £17.99
Nobody walks to Hollywood: not any more. The last westward pedestrian may have been the Ohio journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis, who set out in the summer of 1884 and arrived at the Pacific five months later, his feat having impressed Angelinos so much that they made him City Editor of the LA Times. There had never been a city editor before. There had hardly been a city: modern Los Angeles was made and broken by film. ‘She’s been betrayed by the movies,’ a detective tells Will Self in ‘Walking to Hollywood’, the first of three fictionalised accounts of the author’s wanderings that make up his new book. ‘They eyed her up, used her, then cut her up into so many pieces nobody can put her back together again – no one, that is, except you.’
Nobody walks in Hollywood, either: not in the studio lots, with their golf-buggy transit system, nor – as Self points out – on the screen. ‘Walking’, he writes, ‘is so much slower than film.’ Walking to Hollywood, or at least around it, will allow him to slip ‘outside
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm