Living in Lotus Land

As ludicrous as it might sound to those who haven’t lived in L.A. long enough to feel, like Phillips, that they are somehow genetically attached to the city, it would nevertheless be fair to say that Los Angeles is Phillips’ Alexandria. That is not to say that Phillips is L.A.‘s Cavafy, though certainly he has embraced his city, loved it, hated it, struggled with it, absorbed it as much as Cavafy did his. In the section of Living in Lotus Land where Phillips speaks eloquently of that great L.A. institution, the dive bar, I can even sense the presence of Cavafy in the shadows sipping not ouzo but a cool gin and tonic, and seeing the floating slice of lime as a bikini-wrapped body in a Bel-Air swimming pool. Living in Lotus Land is not a modern epic; on the other hand, it is not simply a memoir in verse. But it is the city-as-poem. In fact, if L.A. could write a poem about itself, extending over the past sixty years and filtered through a single consciousness, I think this might be it.B H FAIRCHILD