Thank You LAVA Attendees!

LAVA's September Sunday Salon was yesterday. I was absolutely thrilled to give my talk and participate in the walking tour (and with a sold-out audience!).

THANK YOU for coming.

Pictures from the Salon can be seen here, and when the video is available, I will update this with a link.

If you haven't yet heard my special guest appearance on You Can't Eat the Sunshine, you can find the episode here.

I had some questions regarding why certain details were left out of my talk. I gave a longer version of the same talk at a different event in May and the original draft was well over two hours long! I had to cut a LOT of content to get it to one hour, and had to trim it down again (omitting details like Damien Marchesseault's suicide note) to make it a 50-minute talk (and I was aiming for 40).

There is SO much information that if I could include everything, I'd probably still be talking.

That's the beauty of blogging: I can go into as much detail as I want with each entry instead of giving the Cliff's Notes version. (And I promise I'll pitch a book to publishers soon!)

On the subject of books, there were a few questions about one of my resources. Le Guide Francais de Los Angeles et du Sud de la Californie (aka The French in Southern California History and the Southland Today) was published just once, in 1932, in English and in French. It's not easy to find (I spent years looking for a copy), but Central Library has two English-language copies of the book (if I remember correctly, it's in the rare books collection).

I have had multiple requests for a transcript of my talk. If you would like a copy of my notes, you can email me at losfrangeles (at) gmail (dot) com.

However, I must make one request from everyone who requests a copy of my notes.

I have had someone take my blog's content, alter it, and pass it off as their own work (and still manage to make a horrifying number of factual errors...). This person has faced no consequences, and when I complained to the editor, I received no response.

If you wish to share my notes with someone else for any reason, I ask that you link to this blog and credit me.

Time, effort, and money go into this blog. I have limited spare time and spend much of it doing research. I do a lot of driving around (with the exception of the historical photographs, I take my own pictures). I don't make a lot of money, but I've spent a good amount on books (the old, rare ones aren't cheap) and gas.

All I want is to be credited for doing the actual work.

With that out of the way...

Thank you all for coming, and I'm looking forward to returning in the spring (we'll tour a different part of downtown).