California Today: A Chronicler of the State, in His Own Words
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Kevin Starr, the celebrated California historian, died over the weekend at 76.
Writing in The Times, William Grimes said Mr. Starr chronicled the state “with a novelist’s sense of narrative and character and a filmmaker’s eye for colorful detail.”
Mr. Starr likened writing to breathing, publishing more than a dozen books and numerous articles.
“If I don’t write, I get anxiety-ridden,” he once said in an interview with U.S.C. College Magazine.
Here are just a few highlights from Mr. Starr’s prose and interviews:
On recurring natural disasters (Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 1993)
Southern California has used technology to materialize an imagined society of garden cities and suburbs. Now and then, it must pay a price for its reordering of the environment.
On diversity (San Diego Union-Tribune, Sept. 10, 2000):
Is there any people on the planet, any language, any religion not represented in California this very morning? ... This diversity, then, is the persistent DNA code of California.
On California’s rising Latino population (New York Times, March 31, 2001):
The Anglo hegemony was only an intermittent phase in California’s arc of identity, extending from the arrival of the Spanish.
On the Central Valley (“Coast of Dreams,” 2004):
Mesopotamia, the rice fields of China, the Po Valley: the Central Valley stood in a long line of irrigation cultures which had, in turn, given birth to civilization itself.
On California at the millennium (“California: A History,” 2005):
California had long since become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better and for worse, could glimpse their future.
On the drought (The New York Times, April 4, 2005):
Mother Nature didn’t intend for 40 million people to live here.
On the Golden Gate Bridge (“Golden Gate,” 2010):
Like the Parthenon, the Golden Gate Bridge seems Platonic in its perfection, as if the harmonies and resolutions of creation as understood by mathematics and abstract thought have been effortlessly materialized through engineering design.
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• The Aliso Canyon gas leak forced a utility to fast-track a risky idea — using rechargeable cells to stand in for power plants. [The New York Times]
• Some workers at Andrew Puzder’s fast food chains in California are worried about him becoming labor secretary. [The New York Times]
• The wife of the Orlando nightclub gunman was arrested outside San Francisco. [The New York Times]
• American Apparel began laying off about 2,400 workers in Southern California. [Reuters]
• Sacramento was ranked among the top 10 hottest housing markets for 2017. [Sacramento Bee]
• Nearly one in five Americans now lives in a state, like California, where terminally ill patients may legally choose to end their lives. [The New York Times]
• More rain and snow is expected across the state beginning midweek. [AccuWeather]
• Dick Gautier, best known for his performance as a vain rock ’n’ roll star in “Bye Bye Birdie,” died in Arcadia. He was 85. [The New York Times]
• The movie musical looked to be dead and buried only a year ago. Then came “La La Land.” [The New York Times]
• Donald J. Trump “lives for vengeance,” Bill Maher said. “No one’s been meaner to him than me.” [The New York Times]
• Endangered bighorn sheep share a lush life on the greens at La Quinta’s desert golf courses. [Los Angeles Times]
And Finally ...
Tim Woolery, a Times reader in Fremont, shared this close-up of jellyfish at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The aquarium is home to more than 35,000 creatures, including octopuses, otters and hammerhead sharks.
The otherworldly jellyfish exhibits are a crowd favorite.
Mr. Woolery, 39, snapped his picture of the purple-striped jellies a few weeks ago while visiting the aquarium with his 10-year-old son.
The trip was inspired in part, Mr. Woolery said, because he had just read John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” which fictionalized life during the Great Depression among Monterey’s sardine canneries.
The bustling, smelly, gritty fishing community that inspired Steinbeck began to recede in the late 1940s, when the industry collapsed thanks in part to overfishing.
In time, the waterfront assumed the feel of a ghost town. Then, in the 1970s, it was revived as a tourist destination.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium was created in 1984 on the site of a former cannery with a mission to inspire people to care about ocean life. Today, it draws roughly two million visitors yearly as a leading center of conservation and research.
The bay itself has also been revived. Protected as part of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, it is one of the world’s most diverse marine ecosystems.
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The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter.
California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/california-today-kevin-starr.html
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