BE icon from AtD era

[Monte Davis]

JB>Not against most of
 ​
these things but fascinated by the way they have crept into our lives
​.

​Me too -- thanks for the podcast link. My summer and year-off employment
during college was at a civil engineering firm working on highways and
interchanges, so I became familiar with the voluminous federal and state
design manuals, which incorporate a lot of accumulated knowledge (some of
it quite counterintuitive) about drivers' perception and behavior.

More broadly, in the context of Pynchon's concerns with systems and control
-- e.g. the carving-up of urban space in AtD and BE, interwoven with the
carving-up of market/imperial spaces in AtD and virtual spaces in BE --
it's useful to dig deeper than the standard Edenic, Romantic, and
countercultural tropes. Are many of the forms of control that have "crept
into our lives" in the service of power, greed and fear? Absolutely. But
it's useful to parse out how many are also simple, inevitable concomitants
of scale, scope and speed -- of more of us living closer together.
"Magnificent chaos" is often more fun to contemplate than to live with.



On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 5:51 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Look at the magnificent chaos of all of those cars and pedestrians! So
> many ways of singling up all lines that hadn't yet been imagined. No
> dividing stripes or crossings, pedestrian signals, traffic cops,
> median strips, keep left signs (probably keep right over there),
> two-dimensional zebras, speed cameras, sharply defined sidewalks,
> internalised fear of traffic, commercials reminding us of the
> pedestrian's responsibility for their own life. Not against most of
> these things but fascinated by the way they have crept into our lives.
> The photo reminded me of a recently heard episode of 99% Invisible (a
> podcast devoted to the hidden logics behind our built environment).
>
> http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-68-built-for-speed/
>
> "Long dividing lines and clear vistas give the illusion that you're
> going at a reasonable speed..."
>
> On Fri, Jul 25, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > http://www.shorpy.com/node/18231
>
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