| LOS ANGELES WRITER-ACTIVIST GOES SOUTH
For decades, Barding Dahl was a minor but respected voice in the Los Angeles literary scene. Like his contemporary, Charles Bukowski (and Nathanael West before him, and Matt Groening after him), Dahl skewered Los Angeles and American society with biting humor, social anger, and compassion for the working-class down-trodden. And like Bukowski, Dahl was and is discussed more in coffee houses than in university literary courses. He owned and operated a left-wing theater and cultural center in Los Angeles in the 1970s, where he staged drama (his and others') of social significance. Dahl also spent 28 years investing in and operating ghetto properties, as described in his 1966 article in Esquire ("Confessions of a Watts Landlord") and his novel Pat's Whores, which the Los Angeles Times called an "offbeat novel centered on South Los Angeles' jungle of patched-together, roach-crawling tenements,a curiously disturbing work where greed and racial exploitation are the name of the game." Dahl was also fiction editor of Coastlines in the 1960s and the editor, publisher, writer, and cartoonist for Pangloss Papers in the 1980s. In all of his writing he has championed the outcast. In most of his writing he has focused on the social and political problems of Los Angeles, California. Avoiding political cliches, he has written about a Los Angeles that Los Angeles doesn't brag about.
For those who wonder whatever happened to Los Angeles writer Barding Dahl and why we haven't heard from him in almost ten years, that's because he is out of town. Dahl has spent the 1990s on a five-acre rancho in western Mexico, in the state of Nayarit, and has put together a cabaret theater in the nearby town of Compostela. He still makes occasional trips to El Norte, but he is no longer a Los Angeles writer.
Barding Dahl now writes in and about Mexico. His new novel, Marching to Zaragoza, is set in a village in western Mexico, not unlike Compostela. In it an American expatriate adjusts to small-town life, having fled a land of social injustice. His current existence is balanced by flashbacks to the life he left behind: the wars of Europe and the struggles of living in big American cities (including Los Angeles). But lest we expect a romantic vision of happy peons and smiling señoritas, rest assured that Barding Dahl is still a social critic. It will not surprise Dahl's readers to learn that this new novel is about the human condition and social injustice, with compassion for victims and scorn for bullies. The scenery has changed, but the voice has not. Nor has the need for a writer to tell honest stories of how things really are.
Barding Dahl is alive and well, doing good work, living and writing south of the Border. |
