Mike Davis looks back

July 27, 2022 7:37 PM

Sam Dean interviews Mike Davis for the LA Times , (and much more that didn't make it in to the published piece).
posted by latkes (10 comments total)

Without double-checking, I clicked on the much more link, read a bunch about Teamsters and trucking, and was like, Miles Davis was a truck driver in the '60s? Like, in between albums?
Anyway, now I'm off to learn about who MIKE Davis is.
posted by rp at 8:04 PM on July 27, 2022 [12 favorites]

Imagine Miles Davis but for US Communism... (and minus the misogyny)
posted by latkes at 8:07 PM on July 27, 2022

In an alternative, better timeline, Mike Davis became a huge left-wing thought leader in the US and Chomsky would've been just a moderately well known academic with a handful of respected books.
posted by tclark at 9:06 PM on July 27, 2022 [12 favorites]

I came to Mike Davis' work pretty late--I only saw someone mention Late Victorian Holocausts a couple of years ago (maybe here?), and read it last year--but it was the sort of big-idea book that changes things in your head, it rearranges how you understand the world, understand history. Having read it, I was surprised I'd never heard of Davis before, but once I knew who he was, I found him popping up everywhere, especially with these two final books being recently published. It feels a little weird to come to a writer at the end of his career, but getting to read these last interviews is a gift.
posted by mittens at 4:55 AM on July 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

City of Quartz
A fantastic writer, thanks for this
posted by From Bklyn at 5:36 AM on July 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

Mike Davis is the better kind of revisionist, who pulls and pokes at just-so-stories to overturn rote knowledge. I regularly recommend Late Victorian Holocausts, but his work in the early aughts is more narrowly focused and critical reading for anyone interested in the intersections of human and physical geography.
posted by aspersioncast at 6:26 AM on July 28, 2022

I was gonna do a Mike Davis megapost in the next few months and maybe I still will. In the meantime check out the epic Lingua Franca piece:

Davis's confrontational pose made for an unusually anxious workplace. At one NLR meeting, he stunned his audience into silence with the letter he had sent to Eugene Genovese, who had complained of being spurned by the journal: "Dear Professor Genovese, Fuck you." Then there was Davis's terrifying collection of pets. The centerpiece of the office was his atrarium, filled with a garter snake, an axolotl, and a carnivorous African toad. At an explosive moment toward the end of his tenure, recalled by everyone who witnessed it, Davis spilled his reptiles onto the office's lush carpet.

posted by derrinyet at 6:36 AM on July 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

...yes the mighty, immortal axolotl to say nothing of the rapacious Garter only a savage, violent man could deign to attempt to contain such beasts... I never knew of this side of his nature and am, now, afraid.
posted by From Bklyn at 7:01 AM on July 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

I was gonna do a Mike Davis megapost

Yes, please!
posted by latkes at 7:10 AM on July 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

All ought to read City of Quartz. Truly a remarkable thinker.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 9:40 AM on July 28, 2022 [2 favorites]