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…
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Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Mike Davis Forever
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Lydia Davis
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…