Technology eulogies

[fivemack]

I've just listened to Woody Guthrie's Grand Coulee Dam three times, because there's nothing in my collection quite like it.

Among my readers are some vastly better-listened than I. Can you suggest similar eulogies to reinforced concrete and thirty-foot turbines? I suppose Leslie Fish's Hope Eyrie is something of the same kind of thing.

Comments

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

He wrote several similar paeans to the joys of massive state-funded engineering projects as part of the same string of songs. "Roll On, Columbia" is the one that springs to mind, but there's two or three others I won't remember until I listen to them.

"The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done" always gets filed in much the same niche, for me, but is more about the people than the structures.

[diffrentcolours]

I'm a fan of Frank Black and the Catholics' "St. Francis Dam Disaster", though that's less a eulogy to reinforced concrete than to its catastrophic failure...

"Hymn to breaking strain"

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

...is perhaps related.

Re: "Hymn to breaking strain"

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's Kipling in all his variants: McAndrew's hymn, the Bridge-Builders (http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/2/1/6/2163/2163.htm), the Deep-Sea Cables, 'After me comes a builder'. But that's seventy years back at the newest; surely someone has enthused about the greater works of Man, at the highest lyric level and in ways which aren't State-funded propaganda or Libertarian raving, since then?

Or maybe Kipling said all there was to say; he has his Nobel prize, and his works stand as enough of a wondrous obstacle to deter anyone competent of their competence from writing in his forms or on his topics, what you get is writing by people who don't realise that their work is an embarrassment in comparison (see Libertarian raving, passim).

And the european empires are gone; so it's a long time since anyone built a Calcutta or a Bombay for another peoples' use.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

"Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real

"All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebodys head"
--Peter Gabriel, "Mercy Street"

But the song is a memorial to Anne Sexton, who suicided.

It does strike me that after Kipling, this has been the domain of science fiction. But then, I don't know much modern poetry, and the joy in human works has gone out of culture, since so much has come a-cropper. But they, so much post-1950 architecture and large-scale engineering is so ugly; a hard and ambiguous subject for verse.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Guthrie is strongly on the side of people against nature - the dam means that ships can get up past the rapids, means that farmers can irrigate their fields. This seems nowadays an unpopular perspective, people who care not for ship-borne commerce or for farmers pointing out that they preferred the rapids and the canyons.

Maybe the place to look is Chongqing and the Three Gorges Dam, but there's the fear that anything coming out of there is pure propaganda, and moreover it will be in Mandarin.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Oh, the triumph of labor over nature is a fine old socialist theme, and I wonder how much Guthrie was influenced by Soviet propaganda in this. A lot of those Western water projects were built to...sell real estate. It's pretty widely acknowleged that they are going to fail for technical reasons--accumulation of mineral salts and such. The were built in unusually wet years and don't gather enough water for the farmers in dry years. The fishers hate them, since they destroy salmon runs. Beyond preferring rapids and canyons, it's pretty clear that we overdid the dam-building.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Duh. Death by typos.

"...gone out of the culture..." "But then, so much..."

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

Talking Heads "Nothing but flowers" , slightly obliquely.