KCET “Departures” Features Lionel Rolfe
KCET web columnist Mike Sonksen devotes his January 27, 2012, column to two longtime chroniclers of Los Angeles life: “Lionel Rolfe and Johnny Otis: Literary Icons of L.A.” KCET TV is the former LA PBS affiliate, now an independent broadcaster. It also maintains a lively commentary website. Sonksen tells his readers in opening:
“Lionel Rolfe is an author and journalist who’s written about L.A. writers longer than just about anyone. His best-known book, “Literary L.A.,” first published in 1981 and now in its 3rd edition, is a pioneering work that melds literary criticism, biography, and narrative journalism. Rolfe’s catalog of work foreshadowed the current explosion of studies on Los Angeles authors. Week after week in his Sunday column for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner he wrote profiles of writers like Henry Miller, Robinson Jeffers, Malcolm Lowry, Charles Fletcher Lummis, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Oscar Zeta Acosta and many others. His essay collection Fat Man On the Left is a compendium of his best writings, often about his darkest hours living and working in California.”
The full article is available HERE.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
