Daniel is currently reading Private Interests - Public Spending: Bounce-Budget Conservatism and the Fiscal Crisis by Sidney Plotkin and William E. Scheuerman. He came across this book because another text he othreading referenced this. He calls his reading style "following it all down the rabbit hole".Event though the book was published in 1994 the issues are still highly relevant in today's times - especially now! The book is about the fiscal squeeze in the U.S over the last 20-25 years and asks "how the political squeeze is ideologically represented in the political sphere." The author argues that although our deficit crisis is seen as on a government level, we have a disconnect because the government balances the budgets but these problems all stem back to corporations. It is the corporations who are the cause. There is a conflict between public spending and private economic powers.
Daniel explains that this is all connected to Proposition 13 which was started in 1978 with the property tax revolt. People didn't want to pay a majority of property taxes. And then all this budget crisis leads to money getting cut from essential local programs like schools, libraries, other educational programs, etc. Danny says that coalitions should be formed betwixt labourers and consumer groups in order to work towards getting funding to programs that need it.
All this is pleasure-reading for him even though it still supplements his paper. Everything he is reading deals with Los Angeles suburbia and its political subjectivity. He started out by studying the gardeners and how government wanted to ban the leaf blower (his father and uncles all happen to be gardeners and he's been telling me about all these movements over decades - so fascinating!) Daniel calls his work "historical genealogy" where he traces everything back to find out how things led to our current problems and issues.
If I held all his academic books hostage he would love to read some Edgar Allan Poe. Daniel has been reading alot of Los Angeles Noir so he feels like Poe would hit the spot for him in that respect.
Danny would also love to read more LA Noir. "It's organic to historical L.A! It's the literary form that touches on social problems of the day and getting to the root of it all with all the investigating. It's literary fiction but also social diagnosis - going down the rabbit hole to solve the mystery of who killed who but it goes deeper than a murder!" Daniel totally has a literary crush on Arthur Mosley whose noir depicts the white capitalist elite and its affects on inequality of the LA minorities.
When Daniel writes his book someday he would love to continue his pursuit on the ban on the leaf blower and taco trucks and get to the root of "why" this is happening. I asked what type of tone he would take - stuffy academic talk or something similar to his noir reading. He would LOVE to be able to write his non-fiction book with a noir tone when it comes to the investigation of the banning so that his book isn't so cut and dry. "I want to converge the two so that the ordinary person can still pick up my book and enjoy it. I want it to be part of the popular purchase. So now I gotta practice my literary writing techniques and break away from my tendency towards sounding social-sciencey. That's why I'm reading more fiction to hopefully soak up and mimic that style and incorporate into my non-fiction."What noir fiction book have you enjoyed? What is it about?
Have you read books pertaining to social issues in your city/town and researched its beginnings?
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