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So writes Thomas Steinbeck in "Montalvo, Myths and Dreams of Home," one of twenty-seven stories featured in MY CALIFORNIA, an extraordinary creative outpouring from the state’s literary community in support of the California Arts Council. MY CALIFORNIA is a collaboration between Angel City Press in Santa Monica and CaliforniaAuthors.com.
To those of us who came to California from far away — as so many of us do — the place we imagine (and so find) seems located somewhere around the day after tomorrow. Ever since Hernando Cortez named this stretch of land, by some accounts, after a fictional island of the Amazons (fashioned in a fifteenth-century Spanish novel), California, more than anywhere, has been a province of the imagination that confounds most of us who confront it in reality. A state of consciousness, you could say, on which outsiders, who soon become honorary Californians, famously project their hopes and frustrations. It has always seemed apt to me that the home of physical and metaphysical gold rushes — the "Great Western Paradise," as the Chinese called it — is also the place, some say, where the fortune cookie was invented. Fortunes, futures, gimcrack versions of futures: They’re all mixed together here, drawing us from afar, potential consumers, potential producers of a dream that — we come to see too late — can best be appreciated from afar.
"It’s a state of mind," Robert Redford once said of California’s fictional capital, Hollywood, passing on the conventional wisdom, and it’s an actual location. The location is scarred, scary and full of those who’ve lost their way; but as a state of mind, in Redford’s words, "it’s transporting and unique: the end of the rainbow, the melting pot, the edge of the continent." Or, to put it another way, Hollywood Boulevard has long been a slum, but the Hollywood sign shines in the world’s imagination.
This all has become part of the received wisdom of the place, the first cliché for the newcomer to see through; but what the Californian veteran often loses sight of is that the place really has managed to remain one step, one thought, ahead of the rest of us.
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