What Are You Reading

[Harp]

This summer I've promised myself to read a number of books I've always wanted to but never have. First up, I'm starting with Moby Dick.[/QUOTEA

An excellent choice. Melville's earlier work is uneven but his mature cast arguably was Moby Dick. Billy Budd crowns his vocation.
Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame is equally haunting and introspective, a voyage across the sea of the human heart.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Design This Day: The Technique of Order In The Machine Age," by Walter Dorwin Teague.

This is an elegant volume published in 1940 by one of the most important industrial designers of the prewar Era. Teague is best-remembered today as the man who revolutionized the design of the American gas station with his 1930s porcelain-box Texaco stations, but as this book reveals, he was far more than that. He was a philosopher as much as he was a designer -- and his philosophy was that the Machine Age was leading humanity to an era in which all that was unnecessary and superfluous would be stripped away in favor of a simple, form-follows-function life built around dignity, serenity -- and Order. "Unity in variety and variety in unity" is his slogan.

If this all sounds a bit Albert Speer, well, those ideas crossed all ideological boundaries during the 1930s. Teague envisioned a world in which all the rococo embellishments of the pre-Machine Age would be demolished in favor of sleek, harmonious, orderly design. He didn't simply favor throwing porcelain enamel over the Old Order, he advocated its wholesale demolition in the interests of the advancement of humanity. Teague's greatest weakness in all this, as with other 1930s futurists like Norman Bel Geddes, is that he fails to take into account exactly what would happen to the working class, with all their economic vulnerability, in the midst of all this theoretical advancement. Like those who experienced Bel Geddes' "Futurama" exhibit at the New York World's Fair, one is left to wonder "where do people like me fit into all this?"

Bel Geddes tried to reassure fairgoers not to worry, that General Motors had it all under control -- but the question doesn't even seem to have occured to Teague. One suspects that a few years earlier he might have had some sympathies with Technocracy, and its vision of Dictatorship Of The Engineeriat, but I doubt he would accepted pay in ergs and joules. It seems most likely that Teague's vision of the world, brought to its logical conclusion, would have ended up much like that of Joh Frederson in "Metropolis," with, of course, Teague himself as Frederson.

 

[tropicalbob]

Reading the above, I couldn't help thinking of Winston Smith's rose paperweight, that token of a better, more humane time. I also thought of the drumbeat of the technocrat of the last twenty years or so, telling us all that the future belongs to them and, well, too bad for everyone else. How really depressing to hear presidents, one after the next, speaking of education only in terms of technology and never a word about the humanities. Does it matter? Look at what's happening in this on-going presidential mess.

 

[Fading Fast]

"Form follow functions" is a wonderful sounding idea that can result in elegant designs aligning perfectly to a items use or, taken to its extreme, can result in brutalist Soviet architecture and impersonal designs that dispirit humanity.

There needs to be an aesthetic sensitivity brought to the form-follow-function concept. The Hell's Gate bridge in NYC is / was considered by many to be one of the most beautiful bridges of its day for its sweeping arch and well proportions towers, etc. And it looks very form-follow-function in its stripped-of-most-design-ebelishments end state. But the irony is the top arch is all for show to give the bridge balance to the human eye.

The architect added it realizing that otherwise his bridge would look awkward and out of proportion. Form-follow-function is a great design guideline as long as it is one of several.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Teague is very much a fundamentalist about such things -- he is so convinced of the rationality of his arguments that he uses mathematical equations to prove them correct. He was also, I think, a bit of a mystic, which is odd for somebody who believes he's motivated by pure logic and reason -- he sets great store by the significance of the five-pointed star, which is a motif that occurs often in his work. He considers it a perfect demonstration of unversal proportion.

A lot of Soviet architecture would have horrifed Bro. Teague -- most Stalin-era architecture actually wasn't too different from the sort of traditional-looking stuff that was going up here in the 1910s. It's mostly the later, postwar construction thrown up in a hurry to replace what the Nazis ravaged that has the stereotypical "faceless concrete block" style.

 

[Fading Fast]

It is amazing how a wonderful idea can morph into an idea fixe in brilliant, obsessive minds that, then, disconnect the idea from all sense of balance, proportion or control. What results is usually fanaticism, tears, terror and/or worse.

You might be surprised to hear this as I definitely lean very Libertarian (I know you know that), but I think pure Libertarians who think markets will simply sort out all issues / externalities / evil intent in some sort of invisible hand perfection live in the same universe of reality disconnect as pure socialist do.

IMHO, Aristotle was on the right path with his Golden Mean approach. The reason I think beautiful ideas - form follows function, Invisible Hand, from each according to his ability to each... - are so appealing is that they are both intellectually complete (if you so believe) and eliminate all the hand-to-hand combat and grueling work that compromise takes. True belief in a perfect and complete philosophy is incredibly comforting.

 

[Harp]

It is amazing how a wonderful idea can morph into an idea fixe in brilliant, obsessive minds that, then, disconnect the idea from all sense of balance, proportion or control. What results is usually fanaticism, tears, terror and/or worse.
... True belief in a perfect and complete philosophy is incredibly comforting.

This is exactly what happened last season when the Cubs faced the Mets in the playoffs after beating the Cards.
Harvey led the NY bullpen and deliberately walked the man in front of Cubs pitcher Lester-who cannot hit and is easily stolen-
and struck him out with three deadeye fastball strikes. It was all over in a flash.
As Aristotle opined in his Posterior Analitica, "circular wounds heal more slowly."

 

[tropicalbob]

I lived for a time in an apartment in Astoria, Queens, whose bedroom window looked out on the Hellgate. You should have seen it the night a fog slowly rolled in.

 

[AmateisGal]

Finished Front Lines and enjoyed it, though not as much as I had hoped to.

Started a new novel, Midnight in Berlin by James MacManus, and also reading Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester.

 

[miket5r]

Chris Carter Band 2 Der Vollstrecker (German)

 

[Harp]

Finished Front Lines and enjoyed it, though not as much as I had hoped to.

... and also reading Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester.

Manchester's Churchill opus is a herculean effort, and the story behind the third posthumous volume extraordinary in American letters.
As a veteran, I could not read his Goodbye Darkness, but perhaps will give it a look.

 

[AmateisGal]

Manchester's Churchill opus is a herculean effort, and the story behind the third posthumous volume extraordinary in American letters.
As a veteran, I could not read his Goodbye Darkness, but perhaps will give it a look.

Mostly reading Goodbye Darkness for research purposes as my character in my current WIP is a Pacific Theater veteran.

 

[DNO]

Mostly reading Goodbye Darkness for research purposes as my character in my current WIP is a Pacific Theater veteran.

Goodbye Darkness is one of the best memoirs I've read regarding the war in the Pacific...actually just war in general. It's one of the books I re-read every couple of years.

 

[52Styleline]

Just started "Omar Bradley, General at War" by Jim DeFelice

 

[tropicalbob]

I just finished G.K. Chesterton's "The Ball and the Cross" and "Manalive." Next up is "The Flying Inn." Chesterton is just wonderful.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"The Kansas City A's and the Wrong Side of the Yankees," by Jeff Katz.

A fascinating book which exposes -- and thoroughly documents -- the most outrageous instance of corrupt ownership in the history of Major League baseball, in which Dan Topping and Del Webb, the ruthless owners of the New York Yankees, in collusion with a shady real estate promoter named Arnold Johnson, manipulated the American League into shifting the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City in 1955, and then into allowing the Yankees to operate the Athletics as a de facto "major league" farm club. Although rumors flew thruout the 1950s about this collusion, Katz offers convincing proof that Topping and Webb directed their power into intimidating do-nothing Commissioner Ford Frick and wet-wash American League president Will Harridge into "overlooking" the arrangement.

For those who consider the 1950s to be a time when professional sports were a noble pastime unsullied by cynical greed and manipulation, this book is a cold towel across the face. For those of us who always knew there was something fishy about the 1950's Yankees, it's a whole arsenal full of smoking guns.

 

[Harp]

Chesterton is just wonderful.

Orthodoxy is superb.

 

[Benzadmiral]

I ran across Watcher in the Shadows, a novel by Geoffrey Household, famous for Rogue Male (many of you have seen the film adaptation with Walter Pidgeon). This is a 1960 work, set in 1955 England. An Austrian who can pass as English, and who spied for the English during the war (he was a member of the Gestapo while working as a double agent!), is now being hunted by someone from the war years. As in Rogue Male, we watch a game of deadly chess between the hunter and the hunted. I had thought it was a collection of 5 novelettes, as each part is titled on the contents page, but they are chapter titles.

Entertaining so far. I keep picturing Pidgeon as the lead character/narrator.

 

[martinsantos]

"The Typewriter Revolution" by Richard Polt.

Of course there are much in the book about old typewriters. But catched my attention the way Mr Polt thinks about social media and its effects over people. His criticism make me remember Umberto Eco's. And how the return to old-fashioned, analogic ways of expression (without the pressures of eficience) can be highly positive.

 

[Benzadmiral]

I'm not reading this, but I need to find it: I'd forgotten this, but the Nicole Kidman film To Die For is based on a novel of the same name. The author was Joyce Maynard. My university library doesn't have it, and I suspect my local public library, which nowadays gives short shrift to anything published before 2000, won't either. Off to AbeBooks.

Has anybody read it? It's not one of those self-conscious novels told in present tense, is it?