 |
|
|
![[links]](/it/src/1998/fea_links.gif) ![[Ivory Tower]](/it/src/1998/it_flag.gif)
|
What advice would you give to an incoming college freshman? Share your wealth of wisdom in the Education area of Table Talk
Getting the boot In the Bad Line Ask Camille Hell no! We won't grade! Debunking the myths of the Puritans BROWSE THE |
 |
IS MIKE DAVIS' LOS ANGELES ALL IN HIS HEAD? | PAGE 1, 2, 3
Starr does praise Davis for creating a new way of thinking about Los Angeles: "He makes us look at the environment of Southern California in a different way. Mike slows down the clock and says we've only been here for 200 years -- we don't know the sequence of events yet." But he adds an ominous warning. "There is something in Mike that might have made him, 50 years ago, a good priest -- helping the poor, outrage that the poor could be neglected -- but he doesn't have an adequate theology or ideology with which to deal with these things," Starr said. "He can't find any symbols of redemption -- he has no modes of atonement. All sorts of people around him are not seeing what he's seeing, and if he doesn't watch it, he'll become a crank. It's a fine line. I have compassion and concern for him, but what's the difference between a prophet and a crank?" The difference could be unbiased scholarship. Author Carolyn See, whose novel "Golden Days" takes a drubbing in "Ecology's" chapter about Los Angeles fiction, says she has never seen anyone work as hard as Davis. "I was at the Getty with him," she said of their time together on a fellowship. "In researching books on disaster in L.A., he turned up things I had never heard of. I thought I had seen it all, and he found stuff no one else has ever found. On the one hand, he is capable of really hard work, but his research is flawed because he has come to his conclusions ahead of time, and if the facts don't fit what he wants to see, he doesn't mess with them." Seismologist Wayne Thatcher was surprised to hear what Davis had concluded about California earthquakes from Thatcher's own work. Davis refers to Thatcher's "chaos theory of earthquake frequency," and declares that future quakes cannot be predicted from previous quakes. The problem is, Thatcher's writings refer to much larger quakes, such as the great Alaska earthquake of 1964, which was 1,000 times larger than the 1971 Sylmar quake Davis cites in the book. "Well, even scientists have been known to exaggerate a bit," Thatcher said, laughing. "I suspect that's what this gentleman has indulged in." There's no question that Davis' work is in the long tradition of doomsday predictions and fictions -- not a few of them involving L.A. Certainly the popularity of "Ecology of Fear" may be due, in part, to a kind of haunted-mansion appeal. But not everyone views Davis' apocalyptic bent kindly. Some worry Davis robs ordinary people of the ability to judge the risk in their lives accurately: Should they forget about counting fat grams if a killer tornado is on the way? Others find it suspicious that Davis' bleak view dooms the city just as Los Angeles' traditional minorities are taking power. "I object to the way he treats Latinos -- they have been fodder for his Marxist fantasies," says Gregory Rodriguez, associate editor for the Pacific News Service. "I think it's condescending. I tend to tie Mike Davis into a whole Anglo-apocalyptic school. There's a generation of whites who are growing older, and they have a sense that the end is near. The era in which their preeminence was unique is over, and Mike Davis feeds into that. At the same time, this is the moment other groups are going to get a piece of the pie, so Davis is dooming our world at the very moment we are taking our place in it." It would be easy to dismiss Westwater's critique as the harpings of a crank -- although even eccentrics can raise valid questions. But Davis has more formidable adversaries. Perhaps his harshest serious critic is Philip Ethington, a professor of history at the University of Southern California. A Getty scholar at the same time as Davis and See, Ethington recalls Davis' ability to grasp and memorize information -- but questions his objectivity. "He retains everything he's ever read," Ethington said. "He has a photographic memory. But he has one way of seeing the world, and he filters what he learns through that view. It's always a classic Marxist analysis." In an upcoming piece for Southern California Quarterly, Ethington takes a particularly tough look at Davis' research technique, focusing on a pair of footnotes Davis uses to support his claim that one-third of the Los Angeles area has been paved over. One footnote refers to an author who himself cites only a 1973 Time magazine article; the other is based on information provided by Davis himself. "There's a pattern of poor scholarship bordering on deception," Ethington says. "He uses secondary and tertiary sources, which can mislead the reader. They don't falsify the larger thesis, yet they make it difficult to either build on his work or engage him in a meaningful debate." The facts of Davis' own life have also become a matter of speculation. Stewart's New Times essay, following Westwater, looks askance at Davis' fudging of his birthplace: Although his publisher places it in L.A., he was actually born in Fontana, 60 miles distant. She also makes much of the fact that he's been married five times -- a fact that his second wife, Jan Breidenbach, explains in MacAdams' L.A. Weekly piece as "the triumph of hope over experience." Davis' defenders argue that his critics don't understand his achievement. According to David Reid, editor of several California anthologies (his most recent, "Sex, Death and God in L.A.," includes two Davis essays), Davis has always angered a certain group of Los Angeles academics. "They like to think of Mike as the unwitting Marxist tool of a cabal of L.A.-hating New Yorkers," Reid said. "The fact is, Mike just dramatizes things. That's what journalists do. It's a way to get your point across." Michael Dear, director of the Southern California Studies Center at USC, lauds Davis for a new way of thinking about the region. "His greatest achievement is to focus attention on Southern California and to show what out problems are -- that's a very important achievement," Dear said. "Given that Southern California is traditionally regarded as an aberrant exception, Mike's model for the future has acted as a catalyst for a conversation about the region, and that conversation is long overdue." What does Davis himself say? In a long interview, Davis denied that he was biased, defended his research and wondered about critics who bring in his personal life. "Serious criticism, however difficult it may be to accept, is the best thing a writer can hope to attract," Davis said. "The stuff about political differences makes sense -- I'm a Marxist, and as such I have to have thick skin. But why is it now expected that authors' personalities become a part of the book? It makes no sense, and that is the most difficult part for me." What about the piped 1989 interview with MacAdams? "You've got to understand, that was 1989, it was the first independent story I had done for the Weekly, and I was trying to figure out how to write journalism," Davis says. "I had been studying other journalists, who always seemed to start their stories with these colorful scenes. So I went to Lewis and said, 'What if we had this conversation?' That's true, no denial. I did that. But you get the impression from Lewis that that's my modus operandi, and it's not." Davis willingly discusses points of contention in his book, and while you can't change his mind, he doesn't seem bent on changing yours, either. He's surprised to hear that his book reveals little of his love for Los Angeles, and he's wounded by the thought. "I love Los Angeles," he says. "How can you not see that? I suppose the book is, in the end, a failure if it betrays none of the sense of deep feeling I have about the city. But that's where being a radical comes in -- you also have to rain on the parade." As for Westwater's objections, Davis calls them a misunderstanding of his work. "It's fair to say, 'Hey wait, how did you calculate these costs?' That's fair. But (Westwater's) objections seem to be largely made up of misrepresentations of what I'm saying. The idea that I'm engaged in some kind of deception is ridiculous." Davis said his third book, the completion of his L.A. trilogy, will focus more on the people of Los Angeles, on the waves of immigrants shaping the city. Many of his readers, detractors and admirers alike, are looking forward to that "Los Angeles is not only the city as Mike presents it, otherwise it wouldn't be working as well as it is," Kevin Starr said. "He never talks about an evening at the Hollywood Bowl, an evening at the L.A. Opera -- which is marvelous -- or about the Lakers or the L.A. Marathon. He hasn't told us about the millions of people who are finding a second, third and fourth start in L.A. and making it a distinctive city, and he needs to do that. Perhaps when he does, he can find balance."
Veronique de Turenne has been a staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News, Pasadena Star News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Ventura County Star and Orange County Register. She is now a contributor to the Los Angeles Times.
Pornography of despair Mike Davis' bestselling book, "Ecology of Fear," depicts Los Angeles as a new Sodom, awaiting cataclysmic destruction. A Catholic Angeleno wonders why he's getting so medieval.
|
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
