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.
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