Session 9

The passages this week are from this big book, USA by John Dos Passos. Each are short biographical chapters 'Tin Lizzie' (Henry Ford) 'The Bitter Drink' (Torsten Veblen) 'Architect' (Frank Lloyd Wright)  and 'Adagio Dancer' (Rudolf Valantino). The book itself is an intensely modern attempt to express the vibrancy of the new world via biography and scraps of newsreel as well as traditional storytelling. If you would like to indulge yourself in the qualities of Dos Passos's storytelling, you would do well to read the central section around pages 1010 on entitled the 'The Big Money' charting boom prior to the wall street crash, the death of the man who had it made and the rise of a Hollywood starlet. It's a story grippingly told.
It is not unusual to find this period of dramatic transformation in the USA characterized by considerable human tragedy. Think Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby for a portrait of the high end. The low end is  a wretched struggle for rights of one kind or another, even a living wage, within the context of the american dream.
You might want to take a look at my own blog 'Architecture and Other Habits' (pauldaviesarchitecture.blogspot.com) where I discuss unofficially some of the texts in this course as they strike me this time around.

Session 8

We shall we watching the film The Fountainhead for this session, you are not required to watch it in advance. However it would be useful for you to get some background on the author of the book and the screenplay, Ayn Rand, beforehand. She has been hugely influential to contemporary American politics.
As I outlined in the last session, we now change emphasis a little. Having provided you with plenty of samples of critical method in the first part of the course, it is time for you to flex your own critical muscles. Don't worry, there's no change of format at all, I simply require you to blog as you have been doing, but instead of description coupled by bemusement, I'm hoping that you can show capabilities in comprehension and evaluation which might even be a bit more fun, as if you were writing for a critical magazine for instance. So from here on, I will not be looking for you to simply describe the story, but for you to demonstrate an overall critical viewpoint. Of course you can borrow one, but you still have to make it your own (as they say on X Factor) utilizing your contextual understanding of what Rand and Hollywood stood for, stand for, and maybe even the ongoing consequences of this particular cultural product. And do not think for a second that your discussion has to be one sided, the most entertaining blogs are those clouded in ambiguity, yet where shafts of illumination fabulously appear.

Advice on blogging

Invited to look at some of your blogs, here's some advice:

• Try to define how you are going to start, what is roughly the middle, and what your parting shot is before you start.  
• Try not, therefore, to see the blog as a chance to ramble on, instead rather to be succinct.
• Most of your entries seem too long simply as a consequence of the two points above. If you try and master your ramblings into style, the content flows effortlessly along. Hence, if you've got a basic starting point, middle and end, and you are likely to be more confident and the words will flow more easily and overall the piece will become more stylish. 
• Don't be afraid to chop stuff which is looking tedious (this is a kind of golden rule, if you sense it doesn't fit, chop it out.

Session 7

Your text for this week os Evelyn Waugh's short novel Decline and Fall, a parody of life in England in the inter war years where many archaic traditions live on while new thoughts drift in the wind. The architect figure of Prof Silenus is of particular interest, he seems to have quite a taste for deco rather than strictly modern, but we shouldn't worry about the style too much, it's attitudes that we should enjoy, that and Waugh's barbed wit. The cartoon below by Karl Arnold is of the same period.

Session 6

This next reading is the section on Goethe's Faust from this book. It enables us to get a handle on one of our most troublesome problems, that of development. As we have already established, man produces, we do not just flower, we take actions with consequences, we develop. Goethe wrote the story of Faust over the whole of his life, and whilst we may not know it in the original, his message is as profound as when it was written and presented well for us here by Berman. Faust's story essentially takes us from the certainties and superstitions of the medieval world, via science, in to the tumult of the modern, where all that was stable now 'melts in to air'. Faust's story is of course tragic, just as when you first leave home for the big city and leave your first lover behind, people get hurt as you progress. Faust's end is also tragic, but we learn much along the way, enough to make us most circumspect over our definition of technological progress, whilst at the same time understanding it's necessity. There is much subtlety in Goethe, but if you want it tweet sized, it must go something like 'you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs'.