D. J. Waldie

D. J. Waldie
Born September 15, 1948
Lakewood, California, U.S.
Occupation Writer, translator, city administrator
Education California State University, Long Beach; University of California, Irvine
Notable works Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir
Where We Are Now
California Romantica

D. J. Waldie (Donald J. Waldie) is an American essayist, memoirist, translator, and editor who is the former Deputy City Manager of Lakewood, California.

Although best known for his memoir Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1995, W. W. Norton), Waldie also is regarded as a thoughtful observer of Los Angeles' history, politics, and culture. "Nobody 'sees' L.A. with more eloquence than D.J. Waldie," noted Susan Brenneman, Los Angeles Times Deputy Op-Ed Editor, in May 2014. And "Waldie … is one of the writers responsible for developing a Southern California aesthetic in which what’s most vivid about the place is everything we might take for granted somewhere else," said David Ulin, book critic of the Los Angeles Times in April 2014.

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

Waldie's Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1995, W. W. Norton) is his account of growing up in the 1950s in Lakewood, then California's largest planned suburb. Lakewood was the first of its kind on the west coast and was regraded as a parallel to Levittown, New York, the original, post-World War II, mass-produced, tract-house development in America.

Waldie breaks the text into 316 sections, some no longer than a sentence or two. Some deal with the author’s experiences, both in first and third person narration. These memories concentrate on his Catholic upbringing and the deaths of his parents. The majority of the sections detail the historical, geographical, and political factors both preceding the development of Lakewood and following its completion and incorporation as a city in 1954. Waldie focuses particularly on the three developers who built Lakewood in the early 1950s, devoting long passages to the intricacies of the development process. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir ultimately becomes a memoir of both a person and a place.

Critical Reception of Holy Land

Novelist and memorist Joan Didon described Holy Land in 1995 as “Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.” “I have read hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, memoirs of California.

Holy Land ranks with the best of them. With spare fact, Waldie has managed to present the rise of suburban Southern California in its full complexity.” said Dr. Kevin Starr, historian and author of the series Americans and the California Dream.

Holy Land was called one of the 25 most significant books on Southern California architecture and urbanism by Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, in 2012.

“If Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo had collaborated on a study of an archetypal American postwar suburb, the result would be D. J. Waldie's visionary history and memoir of Lakewood, California,” said Robert Fishman, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, in 2013.

“The aesthetic appeal of D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir may be attributed to the many surprises its hybrid form delivers. What sets off this little book from so many other narratives about the American post-war history of suburbanization is the complexity of its literary shape. … Holy Land presents a series of fragmented observations formally modeled upon the grid pattern that structures the author’s built environment. Roaming across this grid is a walking participant observer: the narrator, who decentres the Cartesian eye of the cartographer. This laconic narrator plays around in a metonymical manner with an endlessly extendable chain of links, disturbing all attempts at reducing and synthesizing his suburban narrative. In the end, however, neither the act of gridding the text nor the insertion of a walking perspective lend themselves to straightforward allegorical interpretations. We are left with an unpredictable stage for the circulation and mutual transformation of information and affect, which in the final analysis appears to be a textual enactment of the workings of desire." (From "Making the Visible a Little Hard to See: D. J. Waldie’s Aesthetic Challenge to American Urban Studies in Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir," Bart Eeckhout and Lesley Janssen, Universiteit Antwerpen, Anglia, 2014)

"Waldie challenges representations of suburbia as a type of region unworthy of serious, close attention, proving that regionalist study can be critical too, interrogating the local and proximate precisely in order to demonstrate its universality, its connectedness and its differences with the wider world." (From "Cultural poesis, critical regionalism and suburbia," Neil Campbell, Europeam Journal of American Studies, 2012)

Life

D. J. Waldie lives in Lakewood, California, in the house his parents bought in 1946. He was born in 1948.

In the mid-1970s, he taught at California State University Long Beach in the Department of Comparative Literature and the University Honors Program.

Waldie began his career in public administration in Lakewood in December 1977. He served as the city's Public Information Officer between 1981 and 2010. He retired as Deputy City Manager of Lakewood in September 2010.[1]

He has written for the Los Angeles Times,[2] where he is a contributing editor. He also is contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine.

His work as a translator of the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé was included in exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Langson Library at the University of California Irvine, the Clark Humanities Museum at Scripps College and at the Mallarmé centenary symposium held at the City University of New York.

His translation of Mallarmé’s book-length poem Un coup de dés/A Throw of the Dice is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet (Paris), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as the special collections of the Princeton, Brown, UCLA, USC, Yale, and Harvard libraries.

In 2004, his essay collection Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The anthology Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2006 by National Public Radio, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Kansas City Star. California Romantica (for which he wrote the descriptive text) became a Los Angeles Times bestseller in 2007. Blue Sky Metropolis : The Aerospace Century in Southern California (to which he contributed) was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2012 by the Los Angeles Public Library.

He was a member of the delegation of Los Angeles writers and filmmakers invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to participate in the Guadalajara International Book Festival in 2009.

In 2010, his memoir of growing up in suburban Los Angeles County in the 1950s was optioned by James Franco [3] for a film project, which was in post-production in early 2015.

Awards

Works

Translations

Poetry

Contributor To

Film Archival Research

Exhibitions

References

  1. ↑ http://www.presstelegram.com/cars/ci_13344128
  2. ↑ "Featured Articles From the Los Angeles Times". The Los Angeles Times.
  3. ↑ "D. J. Waldie" (Press release). Hotchkiss and Associates.

External links