Turn of the Screw: Rybczynski's history of the screwdriver

   Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn (2000) Rybczynski was asked to write an article about the most important tool of the millennium. Some research showed that pretty well all the tools expected in a good toolbox had been invented much more 1,000 years ago. Eventually, he settled on the screwdriver, and wrote the essay. But the research was incomplete. This book recounts the research.
The screw is quite old: the Greeks and Romans had it. But the screwdriver dates from some time in the 1300s. That discovery prompts Rybczynski to meditate on the nature of invention, and the effects of the machine tool. For the screw enabled the creation of the device that made it possible to mass-produce screws: the machine tool. There were lathes earlier than the screw-cutting lathe, but the quality of the work depended on the skills of their operators: they were basically devices for holding and turning the workpiece, but the operator had to control the cutting tool.
     Modern lathes simplify control of the cutting tool, but still require operator skill. The machine tool does it all. Mount the workpiece, apply power, and the tool shapes the pieces as desired. Above all, the machine tool allows us to make identical parts to almost any degree of precision. Without that, steam engines and other modern machines would be impossible to make.
     A book worth reading and rereading. Rybczynski writes with grace and economy. The book is short, but contains a lot of information and insight. ****

Jim Galloway, jazz musician

Jim Galloway On TVO Take a look and a listen. Also on Youtube.

HAL is Dead: Douglas Rain

Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died.

An Early Sackett tale: Ride the Dark Trail

Ride the Dark Trail (1972) Some time ago, I found a stash of about a dozen books by L’Amour at the food bank’s yard sale. I sorted out the Sackett series, and began reading them. This is the 2nd one.
  Logan Sackett drifts into Siwash, a town run by a greedy bully, John Flannan. Logan immediately makes enemies when he defends a young girl. He just doesn’t like the way the men in the saloon treat her. He takes her to the MT ranch, which Emily Talon is defending against Flannan’s attempts to run her off. Flannan has killed Em’s husband, and Em shot Flannan through the knees in retaliation. So it’s as much a feud as an attempted robbery.
     Turns out Em is a Sackett, so of course Logan has to stay to help her out. Eventually Em’s sons Barnabas and Milo join them, but the final showdown is between Logan, Em, and Flannan. Along the way, Logan is shot and beaten up, but he manages to survive, because he’s one of the meaner Sacketts.
     L’Amour shifts point of view a few times, but most of the story is told by Logan. Some loose ends aren’t tied up: will Logan settle down, or will he continue to drift? Read other stories in the Sackett saga to find out! The book is a page turner, despite the occasional asides into history and geography and such. There are also odd lapses in style, with Logan now and then using decidedly bookish phrasing to describe the landscape  and weather. I’m on a L’Amour binge, so my rating is probably a bit high. The title has no obvious relation to the plot, unless “dark” is taken to mean “dim, hard to see.” ***½

Canadian and US political attitudes

     Fire and Ice (2003) Michael Adams, founder of Environics, summarises the results of three Canadian and American surveys, which suggest that Canadian and American values are diverging. At the time (and still to some extent today), it was taken for granted that Canadians were becoming more American. This book makes a persuasive case for the contrary. In particular it shows that, measured with American scales of values, Canadians are more post-modern, more liberal, more community minded, more inner-directed, etc, than Americans. In general, Canadians lie outside the range of American attitudes and values, and are off some scales entirely.
     Two things struck me about Adams’s results:
     a) The drift into what we now call Trumpism was already well-established by the early 1990s. The main difference between then and now is that the disaffected Americans who occupy the “Exclusion and Intensity” quadrant of Adams’s “maps” have begun to vote. They’ve also, I think, become more numerous and more intense.
     b) The divisiveness that has characterised America from about Ronald Reagan onwards has become more prevalent in Canada.
     Fifteen years is a long time in cultural change these days. The Millennials, who tend towards liberal values in Canada and to libertarian values in the USA, will I think become more politically active and influential. Check the Environics website for updates in Adams’s project to track cultural change. ***

Commercial art from 30 years ago: Graphis Annual 83/84

  

  Walter Herdeg, ed.  Graphis Annual 83/84 (1983) Just what the title says. A survey of applied art as used in advertising, illustrations in books and periodicals, logo and trademark design, packaging, and so forth. Graphis was one of the premier magazines for commercial artists. I used to buy it from a shop across from OCAD back then, to inspire my students. What’s interesting is how dated these examples are. Commercial art is slave to fashion and fad. Which prompts the inference that fashion itself is just another form of commercial art.
     In any case, fashion and commercial art feed on each other. Both are always a step or two behind the current styles in entertainment, which in turn is behind the latest developments in the arts. There was a nicely done weekly fashion news show on TV  a few decades ago. Most of the news covered fashion shows in New York or Paris or wherever. The background music was relentlessly blandified disco. This at a time when the prevailing music styles were acid rock, reggae, and hiphop. The intended ambience was of up-to-the-minute awareness of how the cool life was lived, but the actual effect was to make fashion seem hopelessly naive and, er, old-fashioned.
     Nevertheless, the Graphis annual is worth looking through. Not only as a record of bygone visual styles and assumptions about marketing, but because commercial art surrounds us in a way that fine art does not. Commercial art has become our  habitat; fine art is confined to cathedral-like museums that we enter with hushed voices and unarticulated expectations. Yet our taste has, I think, been shaped by the commercial art that has become the seen but unnoticed visual environment. ***

Photos as Social History: New York, Sunshine and History

    Roger Whitehouse. New York: Sunshine and Shadow. (1974) New York from 1850 to 1915, in photographs. A splendid collection of photos, with informative captions, adding up to a social and economic history of the city. We forget that New York began as a scattered collection of villages and hamlets, which were absorbed into the city as it expanded northward from its beginning on Manhattan Island. The early photos show buildings surrounded by fields. The roads were surfaced with gravel and mud. The elegant streets of middle and upper middle class houses became slums when their former residents moved ever further away from the city centre.
     Study and contemplation of these photos shows, I think, why New York became the world class city that it now is: from the beginning, its residents focused not only on making money, but on using that money to invest in amenities. Modern accounting methods would not have justified ventures such as the building of the street railways, or of apartment and office blocks at a country crossroad. Some of the earliest mansions of the oligarchy were built in the middle of fields, but the streets were already laid out to accommodate the carriages and cabs and streetcars that followed the first builders.
     Reproduction of the photos is above average for the 1970s. Whitehouse has done his research. A secondhand-book sale find, given to me. A keeper. ****