“I'd be safe and warm If I was in L.A.” The Mamas and the Papas, “California Dreamin'” (1965) / Driving over a hill into San Narciso, the LA suburb where she will begin her quest to execute the will of Pierce Inverarity, Oedipa Maas, the heroine of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), views the scene spread out before her: “she looked down a slope. . .onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.” / The “circuit” of the suburban sprawl that Oedipa observes is remarkably similar to the “grids” of D. J. Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996), the seemingly endless proliferation of tract home developments in Southern California laid out in mathematically precise matrices that contain “an indefinite number of beginnings and endings” and are built “outward without limits . . . the antithesis of a ghetto.” San Narciso's punning name is indicative of the voyeuristic narcissism to be found in the Southland's suburbs: mapped onto the real Southern California, Oedipa is conceivably coming over the Newhall Pass into the San Fernando Valley, home to Los Angeles' major television and movie studios and, since the 1970s, center of the US porn industry.

Surely no single city has such a close relationship with motion pictures as Los Angeles, which has appeared on screen in myriad guises for over a century since a film crew employed by Thomas Edison's Edison Manufacturing Company arrived in December 1897. South Spring Street, Los Angeles, California (1898), a twenty-five-second “actuality” film shot by Frederick Blechynden, captured a sense of Los Angeles as a metropolis-in-the-making by presenting a view of pedestrian and horse-drawn traffic on that busy downtown commercial thoroughfare. Painters and photographers had long flocked to Southern California for its climate, sunlight, Mediterranean landscapes, and the romantic appeal of its Spanish and Mexican heritage. D. W. Griffith first captured these ingredients on celluloid in Ramona (1910), a fifteen-minute adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel. Offering a utopian image of the region as a combination of flower-filled garden and expansive wilderness waiting to be exploited, Ramona assisted the civic boosters in marketing Los Angeles as an ideal place in which to live and work. Ramona was remade in 1916, 1928, and 1936, while another romantic Mexican legend, that of Zorro, was adapted for the screen in 1920, 1925, 1937, 1946, and 1949.

Bede was the greatest biblical scholar of his age. Over forty works, all bound up in some way with understanding Christian Scripture, fill the catalogue at the end of the Ecclesiastical History (V. 24). But it is not merely that Bede was a prolific writer. It is also that his hermeneutic engagement with the Bible was so varied. Throughout his lifelong attempt to grasp its sacred meanings, he inhabited many authorial roles. As other chapters in this volume emphasize, he was a textual critic and linguist, a preacher and liturgist, a geographer and computist, an educator, a poet and a hagiographer in addition to being an exegete and a historian, the two roles for which he is best known today. It is common to contrast Bede's fame as historian, which began in the twelfth century (see Chapter 16), with his renown as exegete, which began in his own lifetime and continued for centuries thereafter. But equally germane is the contrast between the accessibility of the Ecclesiastical History, long available in translation and easy enough to comprehend, and the inaccessibility of the biblical commentaries, which hide in costly Latin editions, and whose theological content presents real interpretive challenges. Compared to the Ecclesiastical History, with its array of colourful personages and engaging narrative pace, the commentaries are bound to appear esoteric and isolated from the social world of their author.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People is, to a large extent, the story of the conversion of England, brought about by a series of preachers, most of them monks, some coming from Rome, others from Ireland. Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine and his monastic companions 'to preach the word of God to the English race' (I. 23, p. 69), and when Bede summarizes the accomplishments of Gregory's life, he says 'he snatched our race from the teeth of the ancient foe and made them partakers of everlasting freedom by sending us preachers' (II. 1, p. 131). Bede incorporates a letter from Pope Honorius to King Edwin of Northumbria which refers to Gregory himself as 'your preacher' (II. 17, p. 195). Paulinus is sent to Northumbria 'not only, with the Lord's help, to prevent those who had come with him from lapsing from the faith, but also to convert some of the heathen, if he could, to grace and faith by his preaching' (II. 9, p. 165). Aidan and other Irish monks came to Lindisfarne 'preaching the word of faith with great devotion' (III. 3, p. 221), and Columba, also an Irishman, 'came to Britain to preach the word of God to the kingdoms of the northern Picts', while the southern Picts 'received the true faith through the preaching of the Word' by Ninian (III. 4, p. 223). Bede speaks of the preaching work of many others who had a role in the conversion of various regions of Britain, such as Birinus (III. 7), Fursa (III. 19), Cedd (III. 21-3), and Wilfrid (IV. 13).

The growth of Hollywood attracted writers from around the world, soon joined by the wave of refugees fleeing Hitler. The cosmopolitan colonies of British expatriates and German (and Austrian) exiles made noteworthy contributions to the literary representation of Los Angeles, often placing the urban space of their new home in relation to the memory of their cultures of origin. Prominent British novelist Aldous Huxley's first impression of Los Angeles in 1926 was negative: “thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.” Yet returning in 1937 on a speaking tour with the historian and philosopher Gerald Heard, he responded well enough to settle in Hollywood, before moving to Llano in 1940. The anxieties set out earlier in his famous dystopia, Brave New World (1932), evolved in his later writing, combining biology and science with Indian spirituality, meditation, and drug use. In Los Angeles, European culture found Asian religion: Huxley met proponents of expanded spiritual consciousness such as Jiddu Krishnamurti (who had moved to Ojai in 1922) as well as Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California (1930). After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), the first of Huxley's five novels from his LA years, opens with an abrupt encounter between Europe and America, as Jeremy Pordage, an Englishman carrying a volume of Wordsworth, arrives to be greeted by “a coloured chauffeur in a grey uniform with a carnation in his button-hole.”

The prototypical Los Angeles detective was invented in San Francisco by Dashiell Hammett. Whether his name was the Continental Op or Sam Spade, he was hard-boiled, with a blue-collar attitude, edgy repartee, and a close connection to his setting. Hammett used him to portray the city, its political corruption, its fog and docks and hills, its cab drivers and efficiency apartments. By 1925 the Op was already a working stiff who suffered for his drinking bouts. With a few changes, he became Sam Spade, the iconic hero of The Maltese Falcon (1930). In this novel and The Glass Key (1931), Hammett showed that the detective novel could be political allegory, cynical love story, or tale of tragic friendship. “Once a detective story can be as good as this,” wrote Raymond Chandler in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944), “only the pedants will deny that it could be even better.” Los Angeles crime writers also drew inspiration from Raoul Whitfield, who moved to Los Angeles in 1929, drawn by the aviation and film industries. He developed Mel Ourney, an ex-con and sometime detective whose search for stolen emeralds combines geographic sweep and dubious morality in Green Ice (1930), and Ben Jardinn, who tracks the killer of a conductor murdered while leading a concert in the Hollywood Bowl in Death in a Bowl (1932). Using the pen name Ramon Decolta, Whitfield also created Filipino detective Jo Gar, one of the first ethnic detectives. Another important precursor was Paul Cain, whose Fast One (1932) featured Gerry Kells, a minimalist version of Sam Spade so terse, so tough that one critic wrote he seemed to have been created with a scalpel.

Arguably the two most famous products of the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow are the massive Bible known as the Codex Amiatinus and Bede himself. The one we still have as a tangible monument to the cultural aspirations of that community, while the other remains more elusive, but present to us as the mind behind the many thousands of words that make up his prodigious output of Latin writings. Amiatinus is powerfully symbolic of the world of Latin learning to which Bede was both heir and prolific contributor, and it reminds us of two things: the Scriptures lay at the heart of that world, and secondly, most of what Bede knew about it he had gleaned from a long, fruitful immersion in books. To understand why Bede wrote what he did, and how he fits into the bigger picture of Latin learning in Anglo-Saxon England and indeed in Western Christendom, it is instructive to begin with some comparisons between the man and the book, which will then lead us to an exploration of his library.

Los Angeles is the home of the world's oldest science fiction association, founded in the mid-1930s by Forrest Ackerman. The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society quickly became an important forum for writers. Ray Bradbury joined the society in 1937 and has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to figures like Leigh Brackett, the filmmaker Ray Harryhausen, Robert Heinlein, and Henry Kuttner, who all offered advice on his fiction. Once established, Bradbury advised younger figures. Although Bradbury has stated that this environment of writers' mutual aid has been lost, the society continues to serve as an important focus for science fiction activities in the city. Los Angeles also has been the site of collaborations like that between Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and individual contacts like Octavia Butler attending Theodore Sturgeon's writing classes at UCLA. Los Angeles has been virtually synonymous with the film business since the 1920s, and LA science fiction novelists like Steve Erickson acknowledge the influence of Hollywood. Aldous Huxley deploys cinematic techniques to explore the future of what he saw as film city in Ape and Essence (1949). Bradbury came to Los Angeles in 1934 and consistently celebrates the creative energy of Hollywood cinema; he received a star on the Walk of Fame in 2002. In his Hollywood novel, A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990), Bradbury describes Los Angeles as a surreal city where anything can happen. The popular culture historian Ron Goulart's satire The Tin Angel (1973) takes a different tack in ridiculing the media publicity machine. Set in 1999, the novel focuses on the animal talent section of Metro-Italian-American Talent, in particular on Bowser, a cocker spaniel who can play the piano and who has been fitted with a voice box.

Critical accounts of American poetry all too frequently privilege San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, overlapping sites that evoke West Coast poetry's most memorable events and movements: the Berkeley Renaissance, the San Francisco Beat scene, and most recently, Language writing. Yet the outsider impetus behind William Everson's observation that the West Coast canon prizes creativity, and the East Coast canon judgment, applies equally to Los Angeles, although the fractal energy of the city's poetry scenes is less easily mapped out. While surveys of fiction probably work best by focusing on individual authors, the development of American poetry for much of the past half century is intimately linked to communities of writers and publishers. The viability of the network of workshops, public readings, magazines, and presses in 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles, for instance, depended on the availability of production facilities such as New Comp Graphics at Beyond Baroque, in the beachfront city of Venice, to help poets demarcate their communities in a self-reflective, organic manner. Fervently embracing the antinomian tendency in American poetry first enunciated by Roy Harvey Pearce, these intersecting communities and coteries produced poetry far exceeding in quantity and quality the writing produced about Los Angeles in the form of occasional poems by temporary residents or those living at a bemused distance. This survey will therefore focus on the scenes and communities that have flourished and intermingled in Los Angeles since World War II.

In ad 731, in the fifty-ninth year of his life, Bede concluded his Ecclesiastical History of the English People with an autobiographical note in which he stated that 'it has always been my delight to learn or to teach or to write' (v. 24, p. 567). The Ecclesiastical History gives us our primary route into the early Anglo-Saxon world, yet the sources for our knowledge of the famous scholar-monk's life are sparse: his brief autobiographical note, which includes a list of his own writings; an account of his death by one of his pupils, Cuthbert; his correspondence, notably the letters he wrote to Egbert and Plegwin; his prefaces to his prose Life of Saint Cuthbert and to Book IV of his On First Samuel. These can be contextualized somewhat by other written sources, such as the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith and passages in the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle which are based upon earlier annals, and by archaeological excavations and the remains of the material culture of the age. But for deeper insight into Bede's personality and philosophy of life we are reliant upon close reading and analysis of the nuances of his own works, in various areas of study, and upon examination of those things most familiar to him: his home, the twin monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, its buildings, fittings and artefacts and, most importantly, the books he so loved - those he consulted and those that he helped to produce in his roles as author, editor and scribe.

“The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (1901) / No generalization about the African-American writers of Los Angeles can do justice to the rich variety of their perspectives upon their city, but they do tend to focus on two interrelated themes: its utopian promise of beauty, ease, riches, even fame, and the possibility of racial violence whose eruption is as unpredictable as the region's earthquakes. Los Angeles is “full of surprises,” as Bebe Moore Campbell said. The racial past that ruptures without warning the delicate world of “settled things” is a recurrent theme. The African-American aphorism “quiet as it's kept,” used by detective fiction writer Paula Woods in Stormy Weather (2001), implies that a secret not kept is no longer quiet. The promise of safety is carried in images of community like Gary Phillips's “three B's” - “beauty shops, barber shops, and barbecues” - or it is claimed as the fundamental rights to liberty and justice in a city that for most of its history has given blacks little of either. The struggle to turn urban space into livable places produces a condition diagnosed by Wanda Coleman in the title of her 1996 collection of essays; the black Angeleno is a Native in a Strange Land. The most dramatic example of this condition may occur in Octavia Butler's science fiction novel Kindred (1979). Butler's protagonist, Dana, is repeatedly thrust from the present into the historical past of 1815-30 Maryland and back, so that the familiar becomes strange, the strange familiar.

Near the beginning of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede notes the use of five languages in Britain: English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin (I. 1). Latin was the language of the Church. For the rest, Bede's wording skilfully circumvents the problem that political frontiers did not necessarily march with linguistic frontiers. Broadly speaking, Bede presented Britain as inhabited by four major peoples: north of the Forth, on the east side of what is now Scotland, were the Picts. To their west were the Irish of the kingdom of Dál Riada, relatively recent colonists from Ireland. (We may note here that Bede's term for the Irish, Scotti, does not distinguish between those living in Ireland and those in western Scotland.) South of the Forth-Clyde isthmus was the land of the Britons, the original inhabitants of Britain. But after the Romans had withdrawn their soldiers, the Britons had invited in the 'English or Saxons' from across the North Sea to help defend their land (I. 15). Settled in the east of Britain, these had soon seized control of land from the Britons. This trend continued, so that in the period covered by Bede's history the area under British control contracted towards the west, ultimately leaving them with just rump kingdoms: Dumnonia in the southwest, shrinking westwards to become Cornwall; Gwynedd, Powys and other kingdoms in what came to be Wales; and Strathclyde in what is now southwest Scotland.

“Here in California what you've got is an instant megalopolis superimposed on a background which could almost be described as raw nature. What we've got here is the twentieth century right up against the primitive.” Ross Macdonald, “Ross Macdonald in Raw California” (1972) / The terms urban and nature have been set up in our cultural imagination as opposites that necessarily deny each other. The average person has probably never heard them joined in the phrase urban nature, even though examples of it - New York's Central Park, Chicago's Lakefront, a Houston bayou - spring to mind easily enough. People may be especially unlikely to think of concrete-laden and smog-burdened Los Angeles in relation to a dynamic and thriving natural world. This, despite the region's well-known beaches, mountains, arroyos, gardens, and even natural disasters. Angelenos would quickly add to this list wild parrots haunting Pasadena, deer meandering through the lawns of Brentwood mansions, wild coyotes preying on pets in various gated communities, and even farm animals grazing, braying, and neighing in backyards all across different regions of the city. As I write this chapter, it's been raining for the last few days, and I just returned from hiking with my young sons in Eaton Canyon, where they learned about the sting of a yucca plant, found their feet stuck in a boglike mud pile, and crossed a rushing stream by “climbing” a downed sycamore that had fallen across the water. Clearly, it's not stretching credulity to speak of a flourishing urban nature in Los Angeles where, as Gary Snyder has written, the “Los Angeles basin and hill slopes” are “checkered with streetways.”

The Pueblo of la Reina de Los Angeles was founded on what the Spanish named the Porciúncula, or Los Angeles River, by eleven families in September 1781, ten years after the establishment of the San Gabriel Mission. A village composed of about forty-four individuals, mostly mulatto, mestizo, and Indian settlers from northwestern Mexico (Sonora and Sinaloa), Los Angeles was established in an area inhabited by several hundred Shoshana Indians, who after Spanish colonization were known as the Gabrielinos and Fernandinos, according to whether they served at the San Gabriel or San Fernando Mission. The total population of the pueblo varied according to the comings and goings of presidio soldiers and their families, some of whom had come with the earlier colonists in 1769. By 1790 there were 140 Spanish-speaking settlers, the Californios, or gente de razón (rational people), as they called themselves, who, with this term, distinguished themselves from the local Indians. The growth of the pueblo of Los Angeles, like that of Alta California, was limited during the second period of settlement under Mexican rule (1822-46); it attracted a few colonists from Mexico, and some foreigners, especially traders, sailors, and trappers. The US invasion of Alta California in 1846 brought hundreds of soldiers to the area, some of whom remained after the war's end.

By his own account, Bede inhabited a world of limited horizons. In the oft-quoted autobiographical statement with which he concluded his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he claimed to have lived all his life from the age of seven in the monastery of St Peter and St Paul which is at Wearmouth and Jarrow (V. 24). He thus viewed the Church in Northumbria not just through the lens of a monastery located on the eastern coast of the northern Northumbrian kingdom of Bernicia, but from a distinctive perspective within an exceptional religious community, one that arguably did not typify other monasteries of his day. When previously surveying the state of the whole English Church at the time of writing the Ecclesiastical History (c. 731), Bede had explained the wider institutional framework in which his own monastery lay: 'At the present time there are four bishops in the kingdom of Northumbria, over which Ceolwulf rules: Wilfrid in the church of York, Æthelwold at Lindisfarne, Acca at Hexham, Pehthelm in the place called Whithorn . . .' (V. 23, p. 559). Of those bishops, Bede was, not surprisingly, closest to his own diocesan, Acca, the dedicatee of several of his commentaries with whom he maintained a regular correspondence. Yet it is clear from the preface to the Ecclesiastical History that Bede had connections elsewhere within the English ecclesiastical hierarchy, in other Anglo-Saxon monasteries and beyond.