Pynchon's LA

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/calif-davis.html

Article about California booster attacks on the "one-time meat-cutter and
now full-time Marxist urbanologist" and Pynchon's MacArthur grant
colleague, Mike Davis, author of _Ecology of Fear_, who "has portrayed Los
Angeles as a false paradise ruled by malign elites who have stifled the
poor, built a fortress downtown surrounded by a growing ring of dying
suburbs, and courted environmental disaster by heedlessly encroaching on
canyons and cliffsides never meant for mass habitation" and who has "won an
unquestioned place on the short list of serious thinkers about a city whose
prevailing culture  has long been a blend of oligarchical boosterism and
noir self-loathing."

"he latest critique of Davis, for example, in the weekly New Times L.A.,
leaves little doubt that the portrait of suburban Pomona, as described in
"Ecology of Fear," as a deserted husk is at best outdated, ignoring a
decade of revival," writes Todd Purdum in the article.



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