If you want the defining story of a place, there’s no better way to get it than from the mouths of the common folk. The patrons of a local pub; the bouncers on the doors of the grungiest nightclubs; the taxi drivers who’ve learned, if they know what’s good for them, to turn a blind eye. Joan Didion realised this, and in her 1967 essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she drew on the voices of San Francisco drug dealers, hippies and starving artists to craft some of the most insightful prose ever written about a locale.
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