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…
Contemporaries Essays
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…
Lydia Davis / Maurice Blanchot, invisible
But the invisible remains nevertheless. If we were to engage in an act of indirect translation of this phrase (trying to imagine the French of a source text which is…
Lydia Davis in France in the 1970s
From April 1971 to mid-July 1974, with the exception of a five-month stay in Sligo, Ireland and a shorter trip to Dubrovnik, Croatia, Lydia Davis lived in France. The spring following…
Flâneuse of the Quotidian
If I say that I’m writing from home, where is my writing directed to? If I say that I’m writing at home, it would seem that I also write when I’m not at home…
Maternal Grammar
If you are, as I am, in the reductive mental habit of categorising things into mothers and fathers, Lydia Davis is a trap into which it is easy to fall:…