In 2013 I drove across Los Angeles to watch South African-Canadian director Neil Blomkamp’s Elysium at the Cinerama Dome. A devastated Earth! An impoverished population without health care or reliable…
Contemporaries Essays
Ecology of Hope
If this sounds like a sentimental call to the barricades, an echo from the classrooms, streets, and studios of forty years ago, then so be it; on the basis of…
Noir Politics in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz
“(Social) space is a (social) product,” Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre writes in The Production of Space, but this “fact” is “concealed” under global capitalism because space reduces the “real’…to a…
Against Confusion: Mike Davis’s Storytelling as Political Clarity
To the disappointment of my closest companions, I never tire of the opening lines of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums. In fact, I try casting bardic inspiration on my students…
Writing Under the Influence
In my library, I have what I call ‘the premier bookshelf.’ There I keep the books that I credit for providing the inspiration to earn a Ph.D. in History and…
Dark Shadow: on Mike Davis and The Exiles
Angel’s Flight, the 1901 funicular that still graces Bunker Hill, serves as a visual touchstone for a certain version of Los Angeles, one characterized by both noir aesthetics and working-class…
Calypso Mike: A Caribbean Tribute to the California Kid
My first encounters with Mike Davis occurred while scouring online forums and generously pirated PDFs for choice excerpts of his monographs as an adolescent socialist in the Catskill Mountains. My political…
Utopia Was Never the Point: Some Thoughts About Mike Davis and Dread
As we face another summer of record-breaking wildfires, more floods and earthquakes, a never-ending plague, and presumed global financial collapse, it’s hard not to feel that we’re living out a…
Introduction
This is a Mike Davis appreciation cluster. After the great urban theorist announced his decision earlier this summer to enter into palliative care and live out his remaining months at…
A reworking of the Preface of Essays 2 and a response to “Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)” featured in Essays 2 by Lydia Davis
(a completely non-collaborative collaboration, written with great admiration) A note on the below pieces: When I was invited to participate in this cluster dedicated to Lydia Davis, my first instinct…