Dumb Riffs

Student activism
An article I wrote for Trinity News here.

Prophet in age of the car bomb
Los Angeles scholar of doom, Mike Davis, has shifted his critical gaze from the threat of urban chaos to the terrorist’s latest weapon of choice – the car bomb, writes Karl Whitney.

Mike Davis, best known for his writings on the American city, is talking about his new book, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb: “I’ve been terrified by car bombs for a long time. When I was in Belfast in the 1970s I saw a car bomb go off. In 1993 after the World Trade Center was blown up for the first time, by a van bomb, I wrote a couple of articles about how critically vulnerable Los Angeles and the US were to this weapon, and like a virus, once implanted in the system, it never entirely goes away.”

To be published in April, Buda’s Wagon traces, through historical examples and grimly visceral descriptions, the development of the car bomb as a weapon in the 20th century and its persistence on into the 21st century. On Monday, February 26th, he will visit UCD’s Clinton Institute of American Studies to give a lecture on the subject.

“The car bomb is the kind of weapon that anarchists dreamed of at the end of the 19th century: it can be used by groups with real social bases and the support of nationalist movements, but it can also give power to extraordinarily marginal groups of people: for example Timothy McVeigh and his friend. So I set out to try and understand historically where the car bomb had come from and its uses, but also something of how it’s evolved, particularly how it has been linked with other technologies for self-publicity, self-advertising – like the internet. I was actually quite surprised to discover how frequently car bombs had been used: in Israel and Palestine, but also in Vietnam and Algeria.”

BUDA’S WAGON TAKES its name from a bomb left by anarchist Mario Buda on September 16th, 1920 outside JP Morgan and Co’s offices on Wall Street, New York. Parking his horse-drawn cart, packed with dynamite and shards of metal, on the corner of the street, Buda returned unnoticed to his native Italy, leaving beind him the destruction his wagon-bomb had wrought: 40 dead and 200 wounded. Buda’s wagon, Davis argues, is, in essence, the prototypical car bomb.

The problems of the car bomb, Davis says, are its relative cheapness and its simplicity; added to this, it is virtually unidentifiable.

“It’s an almost indefensible weapon: while it’s possible to create rings of steel around the city centre in Belfast or green zones, all that tends to do is displace the target. So how do you defeat a weapon that looks like ordinary traffic, that could not be more anonymous? A weapon which can be compounded out of commercial ingredients, but can deliver the payload of a second World War bomber within a very accurate range of any target that you want.”

Born and raised in California, Davis is the son of a member of the meat cutter’s union, and has long been spurred into action by social injustices. In the mid-1960s he worked as an organiser for Students for a Democratic Society, a nationwide political action group that had grown out of the civil rights movement. In the early 1970s he was awarded a scholarship by his father’s union and chose to study in Edinburgh, carrying out research under the Irish-born historian Owen Dudley Edwards. His research brought him to libraries and archives in the Belfast of the 1970s.

“Owen Dudley Edwards immediately kicked me out into the field and told me to do something, so I spent most of the year I should have been in Edinburgh actually in Belfast working on research into the 1932 outdoor relief riots, going up to the Shankill Road public library to do research. It was obviously an insane but very interesting time to be there.”

If a close call with a car bomb in Belfast planted the seed for his forthcoming book, it was also in Belfast that Davis’s interests in the city began to take shape, a process that eventually led him to write City of Quartz (1990) a gripping study of the history of Los Angeles, covering land grabs and illegal water appropriation, set against the background of the mythologies of LA as portrayed in film and fiction.

“Obviously the city that I struggled to know the most sentimentally was Los Angeles, but there have also been other cities. I did nothing for a year but try to understand Belfast, which is a very interesting place to think about Los Angeles and the United States, less because of the Troubles and more because Belfast, when I lived there, was like the last 19th- century city in the western world. The gas lights were still operating down by the markets, and much of Belfast, to all intents and purposes, was an Edwardian city.”

City of Quartz was the book that made Davis’s name. It became a bestseller and is much acknowledged as the key text about that city.

His subsequent essays on LA served to heighten the identification between Davis and the city, so much so that he has been acclaimed as “LA’s sole public intellectual”.

He followed City of Quartz with books such as Magical Urbanism and Ecology of Fear – the latter examined the way LA imagined its own environmental destruction.

SO LONG IDENTIFIED with LA, Davis now lives with his wife and children in San Diego. He’s also a professor in the history department of the University of California, Irvine. In 1998, he was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur fellowship, a highly lucrative award nicknamed the “genius grant”.

In 2006, Davis published Planet of Slums, a study of the global expansion of urban slums. This global tendency, Davis points out, could, and indeed does, have implications for the West, as the slums often lie outside any societal control and frequently become breeding grounds for violent extremism and disease. Planet of Slums ends with this chilling conclusion: “If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their sides.”

This led Davis on to subsequent books, including the forthcoming Buda’s Wagon.

“Planet of Slums has two direct outgrowths: one was the book I wrote on avian flu [The Monster at Our Door], which is much to do with the ecologies of pandemic emergence and whether or not we haven’t recreated on an even larger scale all the Dickensian conditions of disease and of poor cities as disease incubators. After Planet of Slums, I tried to figure out concretely what the gods of chaos really were: one was the significance of the avian flu, the other was the car bomb.”

On his return to California in the late 1980s, after a spell as an editor at the New Left Review in London, Davis got a job as a long distance truck driver and remains fascinated with that life. He once pitched an idea to the BBC for a television series: a programme in which he would travel the world by truck.

“When I got back to California, I’d had it up to the gills with intellectuals and I went back on the road for most of the year. What I proposed to do was an 18-wheel Magellan and go around the world on heavy-duty trucks.

“It struck me that long-distance trucking opens up this spectacular window on the world. I remember meeting a Russian truck driver in Paris once who had driven all the way from Ukraine, and that just impressed the hell out of me. Later, my friend Tariq Ali described to me almost unbelievable magical realist scenes of people making gravel, sitting in the back of flatbed Indian trucks, driving at night under coloured lights, breaking rocks with hammers. It would have been a truck driver’s view of the universe.”

FOR A WRITER so engrossed in investigating the darker aspects of contemporary reality, Davis’s books have always been lit up by a storyteller’s sense of drama. And he has channelled that narrative talent into two books of children’s fiction he’s written for actor Viggo Mortensen’
s small press, featuring Davis’s son, who lives in Ireland, as one of the main characters. The books combine Davis’s fascination for environmental science with his love of a rollicking yarn.

“They’re adventure stories in which I try to make the science as real as possible. The first one takes place in Greenland – I had got this MacArthur grant some years ago and I wasted all the money taking my kids to every corner of the earth, and took my son Jack to east Greenland.”

The third part has yet to be written, Davis says, but, inevitably, both books have political and social messages: they emphasise the importance of “a consistent principle of kindness”. And also, for Davis, the children’s books act as a sort of wish-fulfilment: in the second book, the heroic children defeat the Bush administration.

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb will be published in April by Verso Books

Mike Davis will give a lecture as part of the UCD Clinton Institute of American Studies conference “Terrorism, the City and the State” on Feb 26. Phone: 01-7161560 e-mail: catherine.carey@ucd.ie

Karl Whitney is a doctoral scholar in the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland

(c) 2007 The Irish Times

You will know us by our brief comments
Just saw …And you will know us by the Trail of Dead in the Temple Bar Music Centre in Dublin. Again, one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen – their gig I saw in Glasgow is one I’ll never forget (time for Jack to join in with ‘memories’ type comment). Tonight was, yet again, really incendiary stuff.

Word is that my Mike Davis interview will be printed in next Tuesday’s Irish Times. Will keep youse all informed.

Urban ramblings
Just interviewed Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear. Had been planning it for a while, and the whole thing was hugely interesting. Considering my last experience of doing an interview was sitting in a dark hotel lounge in 2001, trying to get surly members of Ash to talk, I think it went quite well.

When Mailer met Hitler
One of history’s greatest monsters has written a novel about Adolf Hitler.

These cold, cold mornings
These are cold, unforgiving, mornings, but they seemed all the colder on reading this on Ernesto’s blog.

Roads
I’m reading, in short spasmodic bursts, Roads by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry is known for his westerns, like Lonesome Dove, but I have to confess I’ve never read them. My interest in him is as a result of the script he co-wrote for Peter Bogdanovich’s version of his novel, The Last Picture Show. The script is a great work in itself, but the film is superb, evoking, as it does, the kind of dusty emptiness of small town America in a vivid and horrifying way – a view of the past that’s in the main not nostalgic.

As a coming of age movie, it’s interesting to compare to Barry Levinson’s Diner, which, although emotionally involving, has a tendency to get wrapped up in a misty-eyed view of what growing up in late 50s Baltimore (of course, not necessarily a bad thing – there’s a real ‘we’re in this together’ quality to Diner that Last Picture Show, necessarily, lacks).

But, anyway, I bought McMurtry’s Roads on Saturday, along with Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mr Heartbreak – another travel book set in America. I sat and read McMurtry for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and was struck the methodical way he went about his project: essentially to drive the highways and freeways of America. This he does incredibly quickly, musing while at the wheel (I’m guessing he had a dictaphone with him in the car). For example, he travels over a thousand miles in just over a day, and always returns to the bookshop he owns in Texas to carry out business (I suppose the trips were mostly conducted over the weekend). This means that the travel is remarkably uninvolved with any sense of locality, and the trip becomes a structure on which to hang interesting facts and pieces of literary knowledge connected to the part of America he’s travelling through.

It took me a little while to get used to this – having travelled a little in America, I found the local variations and peculiarities to be the most interesting thing about the place. For me, the most flea-bitten motel will have something to offer, if only a story you can relate about a possible brush with malaria. And what about the diners that pop up everywhere along your route? McMurtry foregoes many of these diversions, and, on recalling a friend who lives on his route, he’s more likely to drive on than stop and chat, citing pressures of time.

So what you get is a travel book that could, in a way, have been written without McMurtry ever leaving his bookshop. This is only a slight criticism, though, as his style is sharp and his knowledge of local literatures is as comprehensive as you’d expect from an expert on antiquarian books.

Remind me again why I do this?
In the middle of working on an application for funding next year. Have suffered compound nervous breakdowns and multiple crises of faith so far, and there are probably more on the way before it’s over on Friday. One question: why?

A Summing up
Happy Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy everything else that goes with it, including ‘Happy sitting around wondering when the shops are going to open’ and ‘Happy finding out that the shops are open, but they still have the same rubbish you paid over the odds for in the couple of days when you panicked and ran around buying just before Christmas’.

Um, but on a cheerier note, I got some interesting books: like George Monbiot’s Heat, which shows that it’s not too late for the world, if we reduce carbon emissions drastically and quickly. It was funny to see how some of the speculative conversations I’ve had with people in the last couple of years are now seen as possible solutions: like the time I discussed with Ed about putting loads of solar panels in Nevada, or the time some of us discussed localised power sources – essentially generators in a neighbourhood, or something like that. A hugely engaging, very depressing read.

Also read some of PJ O’Rourke’s Peace Kills, which is like a neocon Hunter S. Thompson, where the humour is by rote and you find yourself thinking ‘I don’t know if I can laugh knowingly at the policies of George Bush et al’. O’Rourke, who once claimed that Reagan was a good president because he and Nancy ‘were nice people’ is clearly not the most acute judge of character. Dude fell on his head when he was a Free Press hippie and when the smoke cleared, he was a Republican. I reckon. That’s not a smile you see on my face, but a grimace. I’m not laughing anymore.

Thomas Frank’s ‘The Conquest of Cool’ was so good that I went out and bought his critique of that craziness across the water ‘What’s the Matter With America?’.

A few pages of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, but nothing to boast about really.

Some assorted left-wing diatribes were purchased and perused.

The Christmas Private Eye was good and all. Sharp, sharp journalism.

And what about TV? Well, Spike Lee’s ‘When the Levees Broke’ was a definite highlight, and, a couple of nights ago, Armando Iannucci’s ‘The Thick of It’ Christmas special blew me away. Powerful stuff – I’ve never seen it before, but its portrayal of a bunch of power hungry spin doctors bullying politicians into not wearing ties at press conferences seemed both very funny and highly accurate to me.

Tom Waits ‘Orphans’, Joanna Newsom ‘Ys’ and the superhits of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

On creativity
Why do we bother trying to make new things, when everything’s already been done? Well, first of all, I’m not convinced that everything’s already been done, and secondly, I’m not so sure that the dominant conception of creativity that we currently subscribe to is the right one. The concept of originality is one that I’m suspicious of: thinking in these terms too much can act as a creative deterrent. But enough from me about this – what does Lucretius have to say?

While atoms move by their own weight straight down
Through the empty void, at quite uncertain times
And uncertain places they swerve slightly from their course.
You might call it no more than a mere change of motion.
If this did not occur, then all of them
Would fall like drops of rain down through the void.
There would be no collisions, no impacts
Of atoms upon atom, so that nature would never have created anything.

[...]

Again, if movement always is connected,
New motions coming from old order fixed,
If atoms never swerve and make beginning
Of motions that can break the bonds of fate,
And foil the infinite chain of cause and effect,
What is the origin of this free will
Possessed by living creatures throughout the earth?
Whence comes, I say, this will-power wrested from the fates
Whereby we each proceed where pleasure leads,
Swerving our course at no fixed time or place
But where the bidding of our hearts directs?
For beyond doubt the power of the will
Originates these things and gives them birth
And from the will movements flow through the limb.

[...]
‘within the mind there’s no necessity
Controlling all its actions, all its movements,
Enslaving it and forcing it to suffer -
That the minute swerving of atoms causes
In neither place nor time determinate.’

Lucretius On the Nature of the Universe Book 2