ELADATL
A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines
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1.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel, as told by its death-defying, aero-acrobatic heroes.
"Foster and Romo's 'real fake dream' of the future-past history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a superb and loving phantasmagoria that gobbles up real histories for breakfast and spits out the seeds."—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
In the early years of the twentieth-century, the use of airships known as dirigibles—some as large as one thousand feet long—was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty.
ELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history, replete with heroes, villains, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster.
Written and presented as an “actual history of a fictional company,” this surrealist, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations, community interventions, and staged performances, ELADATL is a furiously hilarious send-up of academic histories, mainstream narratives, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum.
"Poet Foster (Atomik Aztex) and artist Romo deliver a maddeningly accomplished inquiry into the secret history of East Los Angeles. . . . This is as much fun to read as it must have been to make."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"One of the wildest, most creative and deeply-cutting novels I’ve read in years, a genuine piece of newness in both content and form. To wade through this surreal narrative archeology is to experience, in the finest sense, literature as fever dream."—Omar El Akkad, author of American War: A Novel
"Visionary, hilarious, anarchic, this assemblage of breakneck dialog, blisteringly brilliant film criticism, bureaucratic documents, revolutionary chatter, mass transit, and fake dreams of the secret police, is the counterfactual novel to beat all counterfactual novels."—Mark Doten, author of Trump Sky Alpha
"Hilarious and prophetic and profound, truer than truth, and realer than all realities currently available for purchase, ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come. This book combats despair."—Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Foster (Atomik Aztex) and artist Romo deliver a maddeningly accomplished inquiry into the secret history of East Los Angeles. Conceived as an investigation of the now-defunct airships that once ruled the skies of southern California, the novel begins with a broadcast from an airborne pirate radio station that's in search of the elusive Sky City and gets stranger from there. A fried-chicken enthusiast researches a mysterious ranch in the hills of El Sereno; a paranoid telephone operator wanders through a "post-industrial wasteland"; an aerialist rappels up the city's skyscrapers to witness a war between a zeppelin and an enormous papier-mâché kraken; and a team of agents—with unlikely monikers like Enrique Pico and Swirling Alhambra, the latter of whom is awarded Poet of the Universe, "an illusory Dream job for dreamers"—reports from an apocalyptic downtown. In other sections (illuminated by Romo's wondrous collages, doctored photographs, etchings, and mixed-media prints), Lee Harvey Oswald recites a dirty limerick, Ulysses S. Grant shares a recipe for pancakes, and Los Angeles is destroyed by "Death Rays from Hair Balls from Outer Space." And that's before the appendices, some 70 pages of evocative eyewitness interviews, adverts, and manifestoes. This is as much fun to read as it must have been to make.
