Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 50

the frontier comers. The octopus image is a central part of the California myth. Joan Didion’s Maria in Play it as it Lays spends her days driving the freeways: to the end and back, to another end and back to another end of the octopus tentacles. Think of the distant places Hollywood has reached. Steinbeck has created a large part of the California landscape in our minds. It is a male landscape. His stories are told by males to males. Few of the questions a woman might ask are answered. Robinson Jeffers, writing in nearby Carmel, is a useful antidote to Steinbeck. Jeffers’ landscape is not maternal, his women are no more objects than his men are. W hen I taught Nabokov’s Lolita this fall I had trouble con vincing my class Nabokov didn’t invent (and enjoy) nymphets. Only when I passed around copies of LA Style magazine— with its underaged females, its women surrounded by leather motifs, their shoes being kissed by subservient males, the women being de voured males—did I convince them that Nabakov found Lolita in our California-formed culture. He did not invent Lolita; he found her, and her home is in California, where aging and death are kicked out o f paradise. Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is the sharpest satire yet on the denial of death that California has taught us. California has given us the knowing illusion, by which we live. Where would we be if we didn’t have the illusion of California to live in? Douglas Fairbanks made suntans chic to hide his Jewishlooking complexion. Ronald Reagan mairied Jane Wyman in Forest Lawn Memorial Park. For $119, you could buy a bondage starter kit in Anaheim in 1983. The real-life model for Gidget was a Jewish girl who now likes to make matzo-ball soup. A widow left $7 million to care for the needy in Marin County, but they have not been able to End any. One-fifth of all American bank robberies occur in Los Angeles branch banks because o f the easy access to the octopus o f freeways for escape. “High School Honor Student by 44