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OK in my two days (and what are two days?) I did not see Disneyland or Homes of the Stars. And of course I am hip enough to know that these are the real Los Angeles. But no, I won't be amused by these things on any crappy postmodern or ironic pretext). Especially, fuck Disneyland; a "cultural Chernobyl" as one French critic called it. (Is that rude enough? Let me try myself: I hate Disney because it takes rich, potent European myths and turns them into cultural slurry.)

I'm a European and I have to be allowed to seek my own archaic idea of authenticity, of the properly metropolitan, of the Dickensian in this city that is quite otherwise. But I have lost Dickens; somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles my copy of Great Expectations has gone adrift. I am Dickensless and in a state of acute liber interruptus.

I imagine Dickens in LAX airport in 1998, barely escaping notice with his lopsided beard and his fusty dark clothes and bad teeth (and yet he'd look like any elderly beat on Venice Beach) imagine him lurking at the foot of one of the pilotis of this great gleaming air terminal, open mouthed as he searched the soaring arches of this palace, the acres of glossy flooring and the slithering pixels of the departures board and the great stratocruisers destined for exotic cities rearing off the tarmac.

But his eye, as always, would have settled finally on the thing he loved best: the Crowd. And he might have picked me out. What would he have thought if he knew that this anxious little figure scuttling between the three bookstores, glancing worriedly at his watch, was desperately in search of Great Expectations, Chapter thirtynine, tormented at the prospect of being without this old, old book in the sunlit and hallucinatory City of the Angels in the late, the very late twentieth century.

At the muffled 'ping' I undo my seatbelt, order up my Bloody Marys and crack open my crisp new Great Expectations, right in the middle. As we mount into the empyrean I go nose down into the plight of Pip about to discover the true origin of his expectations. Outside, there is the dazzle of the stratosphere, the silvery vapour-waves chasing the airleons, the exalted, celestial perspectives, the glittering ocean a mile below, as we climb as if towards the sun. All to no avail; for I am in Lincoln's Inn in winter in 1860:

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