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

[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..."