To the editor: Gustavo Arellano’s adulatory column on “prophet” Mike Davis is precisely what you’d count on from somebody assured to purchase into probably the most dystopian takes on our benighted metropolis.
So I doubt that Arellano ever learn the blistering takedown of Davis’ magnum opus, “Metropolis of Quartz,” by former Occasions columnist and critic Christopher Hawthorne again in 2011.
Hawthorne derided the e-book as, amongst different shortcomings, “overwritten and shamelessly hyperbolic,” “in determined want of … fact-checking,” “bitter the place it’s not curdled” and “densely full of self-regard.”
To be truthful, it’s not a wholly damaging evaluation. Nevertheless it not less than has the advantage of steadiness, one thing Arellano can’t muster.
Jeff Schultz, Los Angeles
