All He Needs Is a Telescope

Southern Californians are accustomed to being portrayed, perused, poked, parodied, mocked, modeled, envied and stereotyped. People come here and see what they want to see and go away to tell stories about this place, its people, climate and culture, some of which are true. That’s fine, as long as they don’t all stay here.

Now California will be examined by a new correspondent for the New Yorker, for whom staying won’t be an issue. The fabled, elitist publication has assigned staff writer Tad Friend to a regular feature called Letter From California. One small detail got overlooked in the invisible excitement over the announcement. The California correspondent will be based in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y. So the New Yorker feature will really be a Letter About California From Brooklyn Heights, N.Y.

That may be fine. It certainly saves relocation expenses and the trouble of convincing subway riders to forsake the electrified stuffiness of those tunnels to learn how to drive. Writers often parachute into other places and produce insightful sentences. They see things with fresh eyes. Not always fair eyes or well-educated eyes in the eyes of the locals, but fresh eyes nonetheless.

Friend is an experienced staff writer. His first letter about California from Brooklyn Heights will appear in the April 21 issue. The story concerns, we’re told, a California bounty hunter, which is fine as long as we’re not all portrayed as sun-crazed, road-raging, celebrity-hounding bounty hunters. Maybe it will be the same bounty hunter this newspaper wrote about Sunday -- you know, the one who’s chasing celebrity fugitive Andrew Luster.

The New Yorker does have a staff writer based in Los Angeles, Connie Bruck, who already knows how to wear sunglasses with the proper studied casualness. However, a New Yorker spokeswoman explains that the publication often covers people far from New York with correspondents who cannot bear to live much outside Gotham.

“It’s difficult to find good writers,” she said, citing New York-based New Yorker writers who went as far away as Washington, D.C., to cover politics. Friend’s 4,000-to-10,000-word letters from Brooklyn about California for New Yorker readers will appear every seven or eight weeks and encompass the state from the sunny south to the beautiful, boring north.

“We’ll treat California as a small country,” the spokeswoman said. The magazine does, however, accept California currency for subscriptions.