ELADATL
A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines
SESSHU FOSTER & ARTURO ERNESTO ROMO
© 2020 by Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design: Jeff Clark
Book Design: Isa Knafo / mosastudio.work
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Foster, Sesshu, author. | Romo, Arturo Ernesto, 1980- author.
Title: ELADATL : a short history of the East Los Angeles dirigible air transport lines / by Sesshu Foster & Arturo Ernesto Romo.
Description: San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019058872 | ISBN 9780872867703 (trade paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Imaginary organizations—Fiction. | Airships—Fiction | Air travel—Fiction
Classification: LCC PS3556.O7719 E53 2020 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058872
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Kraken Attacks and Destroys L.A. Zeppelins
Following Years Without Communications from Downtown, This Was What Our Agents Reported
So Our Best Efforts Were Undone
Ball Lightning and the General Hospital
Appendix A: What Is the Purpose of Mystery: Interview with Oscar Zeta Acosta
Appendix B: Interview with Juan Fish
Appendix C: Interview with the Virgin Defacer
Appendix D: Fly the East L.A. Dirigible Transport Lines
PRAISE FOR ELADATL
“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. It has everything you could wish for, academic satire, crazy sculpture in the desert, sex, violence, falafel, graffiti, and zeppelin chase scenes.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
“Hold this infra-surreal, no-surreal, under-realm account (in gyroscopic fashion and thru various sightings redacted and questionable dialogues, voice pepperings) of our fast-approaching Kaliyuga. Multiple reincarnated figures appear (Lee Harvey Oswald, Tina Lerma, and Elmer Fudd, CIA Agent). Not to mention truish photos of things. Live things! Be mindful of the encyclopedic plethoras aimed at your pineal glands. Woe are those that are not privy to the East LA Dirigible Air Transport Lines (buzzing over you at this very critical moment in our wild lives)—here is the evidence in your febrile hands. Power, Culture, Text, Bhaktin, are in a clash Hip-Hop—in a Marvin Gaye ‘What’s going on?’. As stated in these investigations: ‘The Poet of the Universe will stand on her or his balcony as night falls and consider her or his options.’ Mind-crushing consciousness-blasting artefactos of our dissolving propellers. Viva Sesshu Foster! I bow to you!”
—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the USA, 2015–2017
“Plunge upward into ELADATL’s phantasmagoric skies, where Los Angeles outsiders fly pirate dirigibles to legendary cities built of trash. This hip, avant, alternate history wriggles into and out of all ordinariness, transforming oppression into adventure and you, oh fortunate reader, into a witness of the glorious exploits of Swirling Alhambra and his rebel cohort. Get ready to leave the status quo behind and soar beyond the probable to the possible, your brain buoyed by this book’s heady mix of fear and joy and outraged delight.”
—Nisi Shawl, author of Everfair: 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 … Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo float high above the the landlubbing bulk of American fiction.”
—Mark Doten, author of Trump Sky Alpha
“Forget the zombie apocalypse, forget priapic gun-crazy Hollywood dystopias—all these troubled times require is an economy ticket on the East LA Dirigible Air Transport Lines. Enter the isotherm with Foster and Romo and cruise high over the trashed and blasted landscapes of imperial decay. ELADATL is more than a novel—it’s the secret history of the secret history, the map they always kept hidden, a dream inside a dream of a dream. 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
“Sesshu Foster’s second novel ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is not some preciously honed theoretical tale scripted as an abstracted warriors’ syllabus, but instead, it gives a powerful account of a curious quotidian revolt that accompanied