Sunday, January 29, 2006

Glendale Now A Working Class Suburb According to New York Times!

Anyone who has recently tried to rent an apartment or buy a house in Glendale will be surprised to discover that the community is not only not an upper-middle income city, it is not a middle-class or even a lower middle class suburb. It is now a... working class suburb - right along with Pico Rivera, Maywood and El Monte.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/books/30sher.html

Memoir Becomes Novel, Secret Remains Secret

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 28 - Martha Sherrill was ready to write a memoir. She had the subject: her father, Peter, a well-known polling expert and software company founder; she had the book contract, with Random House, which paid her a healthy advance.

Then, the truth intervened.

"Within four or five months of getting the money and beginning to spend it, a massive skeleton popped right out of the closet," Ms. Sherrill said in an interview here. "It was not anything that reflected really badly on my father," she said of the secret, which she has steadfastly refused to reveal. "Actually it reflected really well on him. But it was something that just couldn't ever be put in a book. It colored everything. It just changed the way I saw him."

Ms. Sherrill has written a book about her father, "The Ruins of California," published this month by the Penguin Press. But it is not a memoir. It is a novel, a heavily researched but fictional portrait that has left many of her father's ex-girlfriends - eight of whom posed for a group portrait at his memorial service - as well as friends and family members wondering what exactly is true and what is fiction.

And...

Ms. Sherrill is a daughter of Southern California. She grew up in Glendale, a working-class suburb here, and often visited her grandmother in San Marino. Those places appear in fictional form in "The Ruins of California," as Van Dale and San Benito.

The wonderful irony here, of course, is that in an article about the 'truth' - the New York Times ... can't get its facts correct. Now while there are a number of ways to separate the working class from the middle and lower middle class, no matter which one you choose - Glendale is at the very least - very solidly... middle class.

Which reminds me - did the New York Times even gets its facts right in that now infamous Watts article in which they got practically every 'fact' wrong?

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7182022&postID=113071343793963090

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