Joan Didion and Mike Davis understood LA through its fires. Even they couldn’t predict this week | Adrian Daub | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/11/joan-didion-mike-davis-los-angeles-fires
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Adrian Daub sur les incendies de Los Angeles au travers de la relecture de deux livres importants sur la régularité des incendies lors des épisodes Santa Anna.
Fire is an inextricable part of the region’s identity, as the writers knew. But the way this divided city burns has been transformed
Sat 11 Jan 2025 19.00 CET
Talking about fire and Los Angeles is an exercise in repetition. Southern California does have seasons, Joan Didion once noted in Blue Nights, among them “the season when the fire comes”.
Fire in Los Angeles has a singular ability to shock, with its destruction that takes “grimly familiar pathways” down the canyons and into the subdivisions. The phrase comes from the writer and activist Mike Davis’s 1995 essay The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, and it is as true for the fires as for our talk of the fires. Even our reflections take on that grim familiarity: we cite Didion citing Nathanael West. We fall in with the great writers of this great city who are always so ready to judge it.
LA’s fires are usually interpreted as a verdict on LA. Eve Babitz tells the story of the silent film star Alla Nazimova, who had to save her possessions from a fire and decided to rescue none of them: “It’s a morality tale,” Babitz says, “of the unimportance of material things, though there are those who will say it’s about how awful LA is.” Davis was different: in books such as City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear and Dead Cities: And Other Tales, he defended the city and its people, reserving his indictments for the forces of untrammeled capitalism and white supremacy that had molded it into near-uninhabitability. He read the city as a sign of what was to come, leery of a world that had assigned this complex, maddening, beguiling place “the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism”.
Davis wrote The Case for Letting Malibu Burn under the impression of the conflagrations of the late fall of 1993 – including one in Topanga Canyon that dived down the hillsides towards Malibu, and one in Eaton Canyon that ripped through Altadena. Two places, that is, that are aflame this week again.
Didion smokes on porch overlooking beach next to man and girl
Joan Didion, right, with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in Malibu in 1976. Photograph: John Bryson/Getty Images
And yet, without much changing, much has changed.
