Los Angeles Notebook Summary

Didion personifies the wind as almost an unknown epidemic. Similar to when an unknown disease goes viral, all walks of life are affected. Didion clearly states how teachers, students, doctors, to physicists, to generally everyone becomes unhappy and uncomfortable during the winds. She does not write of how the wind caused fire to ravage the shrublands, but she writes of the symptoms it inflicts on the people. Didion mentions all the after effects of the wind and the harm it can do like inflict paranoia. She mentions how the fear-stricken victims of southern California are paranoid like her neighbor that refuses to leave the house and her husband who roams with a machete. Didion’s personification of the wind focuses on a fearful and distant light.

With the use of emotion, Didion is able to describe the horrifying causes the Santa Ana has on human behavior through murders and horrible wind conditions. “On the first day

Malmar McKnight’s frightening story, “The Storm”, weaves a violent storm and murder together to heighten the horrific fears that engulf Janet Willsom. “The Storm” is a combination of Mother Nature, Janet’s emotions, and her heartbreaking dilemmas. The eerie mood is revealed throughout the story. Figurative language helps the reader bring the story to life in his/ her mind. The author’s use of irony is devolved through Janet’s changed perception of the storm.

She allows the wind to assault, grab, and pry on people on the streets. Exclaiming that the wind was the cause of the newspaper “Fingering its way along the curb, the wind set the bits of paper to dancing high in the air, so that a barrage of paper swirled into the faces of the people on the street,” helping identify it as if it was a real person. As the wind continues to antagonize Lutie Johnson “as the cold fingers of the wind touched the back of her neck, explored the sides of her head. ,” helping her to establishes her bitterness towards the wind. Throughout the poem Petry inaugurates Lutie’s stress and bitterness towards the wind through selection of detail as the wind “violently assaults”, “rushed deep in their throats”, and “caused the metal to make a dark red stain like blood” all concluding to her

Mary Shelley utilizes figurative language in this excerpt to describe the surroundings of Frankenstein on his journey home and set the tone of gloomy, because of his brother’s death. Shelley uses personification to express the pattern of the raindrops as “violence quickly increasing” as if the raindrops were a person becoming very violent. This figurative language device develops the tone by tying into the violent actions of whoever murdered William, Frankenstein’s brother. Shelley uses the figurative language device of simile to compare the weather of nature such as, “vivid flashes of lightning dazzled my eyes, illuminating the lake, making it appear like a vast sheet of fire”. Shelley begins the sentence with a cheerful tone then takes a

Didion’s tone was serious, ominous, and dark, and was very different from Thomas’s tone which was more positive. Although acknowledging the destructive nature of the fires caused by the Santa Ana winds, Thomas generally talked about positive results of the fires. She describes the “amazing sight” of the fire as she watches “the flames lick up a hillside” and ends the essay by reminding the reader that the “chaparral will return.” By this, she means that many of the plants in chaparral country need the heat of the flames to reproduce, so within a few weeks, new plants will rise from the ashes. The fire also helps get rid of the dead plants that need to be burnt so they can get out of the way for new plants to come in. Didion has a very different tone regarding the winds. She describes the various hints of change with dark words. To her, there is an “eerie absence of surf” and the “heat was surreal,” instead of it simply being hot with no waves in the water. The author particularly chooses words with creepy connotations to make the reader feel a similar feeling to the uneasiness that the Southern California natives feel. These contrasting tones make the authors' opposing views on the winds very evident.

Such examples of this include the pathetic fallacy of ‘lightning playing on the summit of Mont Blanc’ with lightning being a recurring motif in the novel expressing how nature, whilst having to power of destruction, also has the power to illuminate and make clear. Nature also acts as a savoir to Victor in a time of sickness ‘bestowing’ on him the ‘most delightful sensation’ therefore conveying once more his connection and dependence with nature.

“On November 24 six people were killed in automobile accidents...On November 26 a prominent Pasadena attorney, depressed about money, shot and killed his wife, their two sons and himself.” Didion uses vivid imagery and description to portray saddening deaths around the time of the winds, therefore increasing the fear that both the reader and the outsider feel toward the Santa Ana winds without ever experiencing them. Since Didion uses second hand accounts, the writing is given a distant and almost fearful tone. This is because the writing is no longer personal, therefore it impacts the way that the reader perceives the message that the writing is trying to

The author wrote this essay based on her experience of living in Los Angeles and dealing with these horrific winds. The focus of this essay was all on the dangers that the Santa Ana winds has brought to the state of California, specifically the southern parts. The message of this essay was that the Santa Ana winds were able to drive the citizens to the edge. This message was shaped throughout this essay, using rhetorical devices and moves in the text. The rhetorical devices this text uses are tone and syntax. The tone of this essay was serious and devastating. In the beginning, the author was serious in her tone about a topic that is very grim. “I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it.” This quote explains the author describing how no one has heard that the Santa Ana winds are coming, but everyone knows it’s coming because they can feel it. This quote is poised in such a serious matter that the reader can sense the tone in this very sentence. The syntax that is represented in this essay is when the author is foreshadowing the rest of her essay in the first sentence. “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension.” This quote explains how something doesn’t feel right, which the reader can infer that the author is talking about a Santa Ana rolling in sometime soon in the

When I was attending my ninth grade, we had an assembly speaker who told us about how a tornado ripped through his town. The day that his school returned to session, his English teacher choose specific romanticism texts that involved tornadoes and weather. He stood before us as “In my own neighborhood, I had something that those writers described as beautiful and pure. The way they described it, I started to enjoy nature’s purest forms. I became so interested. I think I took the writers too literally by their ‘following nature’ talk that I ended up becoming a storm chaser.”

The author of Brush Fire establishes a soothing and poetic tone. Thomas’s choice of words and the diction of the essay reveals this. Throughout Thomas’s essay, she views the wildfires in Santa Ana as “an amazing sight” and “gorgeously beautiful.” “On this evening, neighbors have arrived, too, their dogs and children in tow. Some have brought soft drinks. Most have cameras...” (Thomas). Thomas describes her neighbors admiring the wildfires to show how others also glamorize something destructive. On the other hand, The Santa Ana has more serious and dramatic tone. Instead of viewing the wildfires as beauty, Didion shares her experience as “uneasy” and “makes people unhappy.” In Didion’s essay, she mentions how the Santa Ana wildfires are destructive and creates a depressing atmosphere to the area. She also includes statistics of where and when the wildfires struck the southern parts of California. Both Didion and Thomas’s choices of words are used in order to demonstrate the tone they are attempting to convey, whether the Santa Ana winds were sinister or graceful

In Adrienne Rich’s “Storm Warnings,” the progressive structure details the storm’s advancement, the imagery illustrates the surrounding environment, and the calm diction presents the speaker’s state of mind, depicting an actual storm as it nears and the metaphorical turmoil the speaker is experiencing. People hear storm warnings, however, as the storm unfolds, one can merely brace themselves since the storm is inevitable and light hope within them.

Los Angeles was the first product off the assembly line of American urban planning. Turned on in the late 19th century, the city-making machine was fueled by an immense immigration of people who sought to create a new type of city out of the previously quaint pueblo. They also strove to craft the first major city developed primarily by Americans and outside of European archetypes. As a result, Los Angles is not only incredibly diverse, but also nearly impossible to define. Since it is a product of the American machine, understanding the community of Los Angeles becomes vital to understanding the United States. But to fully comprehend the present Los Angeles, one must look at the process that created it. Specifically, Los Angeles was

that it is fear, but we miss it when we read the title. We find also

No storm is experienced the same. Seeing a storm on the horizon has the power to stir up gripping memories, introspective thoughts, and convoluted emotions. The poem “Storm Warnings”, by Adrienne Rich, applies a predictable structure paired with flowing syntax, and ambiguous diction- speaking both of weather and emotions- to illustrate that one cannot avoid the tribulations of life, embodied as the approaching storm, but instead prepare for their arrival.