Pacific Palisades

Abstract

Pacific Palisades Erin O'Luanaigh (bio) It's California: we've reached the end of taste.We're strolling on the Getty Villa's bluff,its merit weighed against the megalithic wasteof historic reproduction. (What's Egyptianabout the Egyptian Revival; Parisianin the Vegas Strip's Arc de Triomphe?) A super-sized riff on the Villa dei Papyri("The original, at least, was blown to ash,"we console ourselves beneath a marqueehawking lattes) with a lobby built to recallan excavation, its galleries house the haulof the thinking man's robber baron: a cache of Herakleses, kouri, hydra'd hydrias,a replica of a Pompeii fountain mappedwith West-Coast shells, the coinage of Illyria,Cycladic figures, the alleged "Mazarin" Venus,gardens with herbs of ancient Roman genus,a satyr reclining as in a Kardashian snap… Visitors pose so thickly in the peristyles,we struggle to escape another's selfie;still, in an atrium frisbeed with sundials,I admit equal beguilement by counterfeitand bona fide alike: "Who's to say what's legit?A Roman original is a Greek man's copy." [End Page 111] ________ Called back from antiquity to the trafficrumbling below, where mention of Inceville'sstudio passes for ancient history (its epics:Civilization—widely deemed low brow—and The Italian, whose hero nosed the prowof a gondola down Venice Beach's rills), or further up, where once lived Brecht,Adorno, Schoenberg, and the magic Mann(all told: the Weimar by the Sea) in glass-deckedhouses out of David Hockney, we list,verklempt, out of the Villa's gate. The novelist,when not apprising Hesse of his wanton lawn (the Eden in which he'd torment Leverkühn),partied with Cagney, Jack Warner, Berlin,and handed tassen to a young Sontag, soonto take the devil's bargain for her own art.We quote her missive on allusion, that no partof any work is new, that all is reproduction… Across the highway, we sink through coastal sageto watch the sunset on the "proper" shoreagainst outcrops dated to the Miocene Age.Like good Easterners, we shield our eyesfrom the vulgarity of pleasure, the paradiseunearned, the honest falsehood, the easily-adored. [End Page 112] Erin O'Luanaigh erin o'luanaigh is a poet whose work has appeared in The Southern Review, Subtropics, AGNI, 32 Poems, The Hopkins Review, and The New Criterion, among other journals. She is co-host of the film and literature podcast (sub)Text. Copyright © 2022 Yale University