The Ordinary Literary World of Lodge 49

Abstract

This article argues that Jim Gavin's short-lived series Lodge 49 (2018-2019) presents a vision of Long Beach, CA, which is highly distinctive in the diffuse yet deeply embedded, affective, and material roles reading and writing play in its inhabitants' lives. This is a world of local libraries, books on tape, prolific and eccentric genre writers, online poetry workshops, beat reporters who care about story, and celebrity CEO biographies — as well as mystical and alchemical texts. There are allusions to Joyce, Keats and Thoreau, but these appear amidst everyday acts of reading, writing, researching and storytelling that structure and connect characters' lives. These acts offer a refuge from unfulfilling and exploitative labor, the neoliberal culture of competition, and the near-constant threats of redundancy, job loss, and precarity the show's characters face