Mumford & Our Own Devices

[Mark Kohut]

Re mumford....I'd bet yes.....all I know about him is that he criticized "civilization" from
  a humanistic perception.
   
  And didn't he write The Brown Decades? about the late 1800s in America?...Surely TRP read that for AtD.............

David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
  
>From a NY Times review, critical of "Our Own Devices" (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/05/12/080512crbo_books_lepore?currentPage=all):

"Nikola Tesla, who developed the first motor for alternating current, had to do everything in multiples of three: twenty-seven laps in the pool, twelve hundred electric lamps for the city of Strasbourg. He was also afraid of earrings, peaches, touching people’s hair, dropping tiny square slips of paper into bowls of liquid, and eating food whose cubic footage he had not been able to estimate at a glance."

This review introduced me to Lewis Mumford--a key influence on Pynchon? 

A quick search of the Pynchon-l archives shows that I haven't been paying attention as Mumford was specifically mentioned in at least 60 posts -- but Mumford's only been mentioned once (briefly by Glen) since ATD was released? Does "Technics and Civilation" deserves more attention as we read ATD? I haven't read Mumford, so just asking anyone who has.

See: http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/soc/technics.html



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