Author James Ellroy is an arrogantly proud Luddite who exults in his disengagement with contemporary culture. “I live in a vacuum,” he told a rapt crowd who attended his Saturday-morning Auditorium Speaker Series appearance. “I ignore pop culture, I don’t read a newspaper.”
Ellroy, known for L.A. Confidential and other unrelentingly gritty crime novels, saved his highest disdain for technology. He sought to enlist his audience of librarians—whom he called “lions of literacy, reptiles of reading, and beautiful beasts of books—”in the fight between digital dystopia and the book.” Extolling the printed word over on-screen information, Ellroy maintained that “computers shrink consciousness to peanut size,” while books burn images into your brain forever.
Born in Los Angeles, the “film noir epicenter” at the height of the genre—”Geography is destiny,” he observed—Ellroy related the story of his harrowing early years as the product of “a fractious childhood and an early escape into the printed word.” Already a voracious reader, when his mother was brutally murdered, Ellroy shifted his reading to crime books, laying the course for his literary career. Around that time, he discovered the city’s Wilshire Branch library. “I read books, books, and more books,” he declared, “and I usually read them in public libraries.” At age 30, when he took up writing, “I instinctively knew how to do it because I had read.”
Ellroy called his new book, Blood’s a Rover—the final volume of his American Underworld trilogy—”library-born and library-bred,” adding that it “rebuffs the digital age.” He joked that the job of his audience, as guardians of literature, “is to launch this fucker into the hands of readers nationwide.” Concluding his remarks—frequently delivered at the top of his voice and with animated gestures—Ellroy said, “Let us exalt books at every opportunity. . . and work to reestablish the book as the dominant cultural medium of our times.”