Tuesday, 06 September 2005

My Arcane Enological Chops; or, My Lies and Love of Industry

Tribble Redux could've been the title of this post.  But his bland "restatement" of points he didn't make the first time through has already been deflowered of its strained innocence by Miram, Collin Brooke, and gzombie.  (No doubt others too, but since I'm working from a WiFi that can barely handle the graphics-heavy sites of the Wordherders, I'll leave the link-whoring to those better outfitted.)

In its stead Coppola_and_sterling_037I offer this confession: I'm officially a "wine enthusiast."  Like Paul Giamatti in Sideways, only without the arcane enological chops and impressive command of all things adjectival (after today, however, I may be able to fake it).  So while I could litter this entry with rows and rows of pictuces of rows and rows of grapes (whose roots, interestingly enough, are at this very moment straining to reach the water table, a process known as "I don't remember."  Coppola_and_sterling_038 Or I could continue yesterday's discussion about my fascination with the results of haphazard building practices.  But I'll spare you the first and continue the second only when I have something more interesting to say about it (as opposed to the numerous other examples I thought up today).  Instead I'll talk about my frankly toddler-esque infatuation with machinery and pipes.  It leads me to take pictures like the one you see up there on your left and right.  There's something about the evidence of shiny process that assures me that the world isn't the unwieldy mess it appears to be.  No!  It's an orderly place populated by men in hardhats who work for its betterment.  It is not the world described by Michael Lewis in Liar's Poker, in which traders

spend far more time plotting strategy than...wondering whether the should do the deals.  They basically assume that anything that enables them to get rich must also be good for the world.  The embodiment of the take-over market is a high-strung, hyperambitious twenty-six-year-old, employed by a large American investment bank, smiling and dialing for companies. (222)

That is not the world I live in.  My world's connected by pipes.  These pipes contain goods manufactured by honest men in hardhats.  These goods are delivered to these pipes by means of ladders and walkways which reverberate under the feet of the heavy work-boots of honest hardhatted men.  This is how my world works.  This is how my world works.  I photograph objects which evidence my illusions.  I only thought through this theory today, and it's undoubtedly the product of coincidence: reading Liar's Poker while touring manufacturing plants indulging in my predilection for photographing industrial apparatuses. 

Evidence supporting this theory is thin on the ground.  Thin in the trees.  Thin in the air.  Thin in the world.  But all over this post. 

Sep 6, 2005 11:21:15 PM | Academia, Books, Literary Journalism, Shameless Self-Promotion, Weblogs

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Dreamy Architecture & Communion With the Dead (Suspected, Never Verified) On the way to San Francisco we stopped to visit The Winchester Mystery House. What intrigued me about this place is how much it resembles, in house-form, the architectural mode that makes Urbino the most interesting city on the planet. Characterized by more local decisions with global consequences than the world's witnessed prior to the current adminstration's "management" of domestic, international and interpersonal politics, Urbino was built in fits and starts over a couple of hundred years, resulting in a scene-scape which resembles a dream-scape more than a city-scape. Building upon building ascending endlessly (until reaching the birthplace of Raffaello) and then with burning calves and tightened thighs you turn and realize that not only can you ascend further but that the two available routes appear suddenly, as if the walls on your right rift for you alone. To your left is a path hardly discernable from the walls which border it and seems to consist of three ramps, seven of steps, then a stairway of such unreal steepness you reach for the ropes you'll undoubtedly need to descend it. The Winchester Mystery House, while not quite as counterintuitive as Urbino, is as haphazardly constructed (only not nearly so substantial). Its owner, the widowed heiress of the Winchester Rifle fortune, invested her inheritance in a lucrative scheme to ameliorate the souls (mostly Native American) wounded and killed by Winchester rifles. So she built stairs ascending into ceilings, doors which open onto fifteen foot falls or bricked-up walls, &c. I'll post more pictures whenever I figure out how to exploit Flickr's more than ample bandwith. I realize how "bloggy" this entry is. I may well deserve banishment to livejournal. At least I'm not whinging about things I'm incapable of changing.
PREVIOUS POST
Good Grief: Peanuts and Post-WWII Ennui I'm back from San Francisco with a backlog of ready-to-read posts that need only be written. The first is inspired by the afternoon I spent at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California. As I wandered its halls and read its walls, I remembered Catherine Jurca's article on Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. (A version of this article appears as the fifth chapter of her excellent White Diaspora.) According to Jurca, Sloan's novel about the money problems plaguing a recently returned WWII veteran "legitimates a contradictory truth for the [professional-managerial class]: its anxiety and unhappiness are inevitable components of its professional and economic well-being" (90). This anxiety, Jurca argues, "is crucial to the achievement and preservation of middle-class economic and social privileges" (92). While she convincingly argues her point, she shortchanges what I take to be Sloan's: namely, that the constellation of symptoms Jurca believes the "the sanctimonious suburbanite" in the 1950s exhibits is the product of the protagonist, Tom Rath, being a veteran of the Second World War. Rath's hostility to the empty conventions of suburban life manifests most saliently during those moments in which he compares (often unwittingly) the vividness of his time as a soldier with the routine of time as a cog. He resists the Great Machine only because his wartime experiences have tempered his soul; commonplace life becomes unbearable because there was a time when life was not commonplace but meaningful. (Jurca is certainly correct in her contention that there's more happening in the novel than what I've sketched out here. Contrary to popular opinion, I often openly admire the work of other scholars. Consider this one of those occasions.) What does this have to do with the afternoon I spent wandering the halls and reading the walls of the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center? Schulz, like Rath, was also a veteran of WWII. (Were I allowed to take pictures inside the museum I'd festoon this paragraph with the sketches which accompanied his letters from the front. Brilliant satires of military life encapsulated in the space of an envelope.) He returned from war and created a world-famous comic strip about a boy who suffered from clinical depression not necessarily because of his constitution but because of the forces militating against him. Lucy pulls the football. Snoopy torments him. The entire world, in fact, works to make Charlie Brown's life more difficult than it needs to be. Unlike the eponymous Everett True, whose outbursts are the guff of legend, Charlie Brown never throttles Lucy for pulling for the football or throws Snoopy from a train for tormenting him. He yells "Good Grief!" with the resignation of a war veteran who long ago acquiesced to the unfair demands of the world. In short, my argument-by-suggestion is that Sloan's portrayal of a man whose wartime experience emptied civilian life of meaning applies equally to Charlie Brown (and perhaps Charles Schulz, although that would be a far more...

Scott Eric Kaufman

The Typepad Team

Search

Become a Fan

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments