Still another Mark replied to another Mark:
"He and other contemporary L.A. novelists may very well be
influenced by the master of the contemporary Los Angeles
environmental jeremiad, the brilliant non-fiction writer Mike
Davis, author of City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los
Angeles, and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination
of Disaster."
That's a definite when it comes to John Shannon. Whenever his
detective Jack Liffey needs background info on anything
having to do with LA he goes to his friend Mike Lewis,
teacher of Urban Theory. Lewis is introduced as:
"He was a little feisty restless guy, a former SDS leader
who'd been blackballed from the big schools for years so he'd
taught parttime in little art colleges. Then he wrote a
probing social history of LA, about who'd gored whose ox,
that came so hot the Times and the talk shows couldn't get
enough of him."
I don't know how well the personal background fits Davis, but
the book sure sounds like City of Quartz.
And Davis supplied a blurb for The Cracked Earth: "If Raymond
Chandler had wrtten The Day of the Locust, this is the book
he would have written."
Mark
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03 Sep 2001 EDT