A novel is a web of gathering insinuations, said novelist Doris Lessing, and I see the web of insinuations making a clear pattern in the brilliant USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. The beginnings of the labor movement in the U.S., the conflict between ideas and behaviour. "The woikin man gits f'rooked whatever way you look at it," said Gus, "and I don't know whether it's his friends or his enemies does the worst 'rooking." ( USA Trilogy, Part 3, The Big Money) Didn't I just read something about millionaires in the cabinet of the socialist, so-called, Hollande government in France? Are we doomed to such gaps between talking the talk and walking the walk?
I was telling my Artchat Podcast buddies ACP 78, Curation as a Social Act about the prescience of Dos Passos, who uses mini biographies as one of his narrative modes. The subjects are men and women who defined the 20th century in my view, both the well known, such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and the lesser known but influential such as Eugene Debs, whose story was crucial in forming my political views when I was a teenager, and Robert La Follette, and Minor Kieth, whom I had not heard of until I read this book and learned through his mini bio how the United Fruit Company came to be and how it created the conditions that fostered the Latin America of today. Andrew Carnegie, Luther Burbank, Isadora Duncan, JP Morgan, The Wright Brothers and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Who are the people of our time that our descendants will be talking and writing about, and under whose influence they will be living, 75 years from now?
I was telling my Artchat Podcast buddies ACP 78, Curation as a Social Act about the prescience of Dos Passos, who uses mini biographies as one of his narrative modes. The subjects are men and women who defined the 20th century in my view, both the well known, such as Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and the lesser known but influential such as Eugene Debs, whose story was crucial in forming my political views when I was a teenager, and Robert La Follette, and Minor Kieth, whom I had not heard of until I read this book and learned through his mini bio how the United Fruit Company came to be and how it created the conditions that fostered the Latin America of today. Andrew Carnegie, Luther Burbank, Isadora Duncan, JP Morgan, The Wright Brothers and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Who are the people of our time that our descendants will be talking and writing about, and under whose influence they will be living, 75 years from now?
