Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work (Susanne Lange, 2006)

Years ago I would leaf through Choice cards for ideas of what books to buy for my library. It was an old-timey library as you might have guessed from seeing me use the term "Choice cards". Anyway, that's what I did at the reference desk between helping patrons until my boss thought I was secretly undermining her authority and asked me to leave, but that's another story (but I will say that she quit the library world altogether a few years back, and there was much rejoicing - may she never return!). Ahem, so these cards guided what books would be good for the library, but I kept notes on books that seemed interesting to me, but would serve no good purpose for the library. These would be tracked down later and enjoyed on my own time. Time passed and the selections worked their way up my reading queue, and the next thing you know I needed to find a copy of Bernd and Hilla Becher: Life and Work...stat! Thankfully it was the Berkeley Public Library to the rescue, but this title, in the few places it is held, more often than not does not circulate.

Now what in the world possessed me to want to read this book? Needless to say, art/photography titles are pretty rare on my to-read list. I think the last one was Art For All, a collection of posters and essays about the London Underground. As for this book specifically, I think it's because I've had a weird relationship with industrial architecture. I remember being terrified of big factories as a kid. I have no idea why. Maybe they seemed dirty, or perhaps they made me feel insignificant. It didn't help that I had books like The Lorax and The Wump World telling me they were destroying our environment (and yet automobiles did not have this effect?). So perhaps it was a "fear your fears" moment, to sit down with a book filled with images of blast furnaces, gasometers, and other beastly contraptions. I didn't know a thing about the Bechers, so the essays were insightful, though complicated, as to what motivated one to take pictures of buildings most people find ugly. It turns out that if nothing else, I felt kind of sad about these buildings. Many of them no longer exist, and in some cases they were demolished immediate after (or even before!) the Bechers went to document them. The buildings are considered "anonymous architecture", meaning nobody really seemed to know or care who designed or built them. In fact, many people, especially in the United States, had no idea why the Bechers would want to take pictures of these god-awful things, and were more invested in keeping an eye of them like they were masters of industrial espionage.

All in all, the book was fine. However, if you just want to look at pictures of water towers and mine shafts, you may not find the essays all that interesting. While I'm glad I spent the time learning about two German photographers and their methodology, it is relatively academic-slanted writing which at times may only make sense to hardcore photographers. A lot of it deals with old-school film-based photography, so I would be curious about what the Bechers thought of digital photography, which has all but rebuilt the landscape of professional photography. While both were probably aware of these changes (Bernd died in 2007 and Hilla in 2015), you won't learn anything about that here.

Here's a pro-tip for locating a hard-to-find book: Unleash the power of interlibrary loan! Many public libraries will acquire out-of-print and hard-to-find books for you to borrow, typically for free or just a small fee to cover shipping. If you are not fixated on ownership, this is a great way to read deeper into authors and subjects. Keep in mind if you are prone to returning books late or losing them, the fees for your misbehavior can be staggering, but otherwise, give it a shot! As was my case, many California libraries use Link Plus to handle these loans, and it worked like a champ for me both times. If it's not available through Link Plus, I usually exploit my own library's interlibrary loan system, but that is fairly rare (and generally the privilege of being a librarian!).

Carrie (Stephen King, 1974)

This is a repost from Under the Tome, my insane noble Stephen King reading project. Please feel free to follow along and I work my way from Carrie to End of Watch (or whatever the last thing King has published when I get there).


Appropriately enough I finished the first book of this insane project just a few minutes before midnight.

The moral of Carrie is that should not be a bully because you can never be sure if the kid you're picking on has insane telekinetic powers capable of killing you, most of your friends, and burning your school to the ground. And effectively sucking the life from your hometown. In Maine. Although it's a relatively short book, it demonstrates Stephen King pouring on the fear factor right out the gates. Although King would explore other genres of popular fiction, his success with Carrie established horror as his wheelhouse, the genre he would quickly become the "master" of within a few years.

First books (and albums, too, but not so much movies) can be tricky. Often a lot of work to "get noticed", not to mention the inevitable rejects that came before, impact the delivery of a debut work. This results in the debut being substantially different than the rest of the author's oeuvre. Especially in music this can end up being a disastrous trap where no future album can ever live up to the debut, usually resulting in a very short lifespan for the band or artist's career. In other cases, usually more common with books, the debut is strong but uncharacteristic of anything else the author will write. The second book may be weaker, but it establishes the tone for most or all future works. In this particular case I think of popular mystery authors who usually write in series, like Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, and so forth.

To apply this to Stephen King is a little dicey in that this is not the first book in the adventures of Carrie White. I don't think anybody finished the book thinking "when's the sequel coming out?" On the other hand, from the little I know that lies ahead, I'm pretty sure King wasn't planning on using the structure or tone of Carrie in his future books. Carrie had a unique challenge in that King had no fan base or name recognition at this point in his career. If he had written a lame book, assuming it even made it past the publisher, this probably would have been it for his writing career. Thankfully, this was not the case, and the book opened the door for King to go more in-depth. Just for comparison, 'Salem's Lot is twice the length, and It is something like five times longer.

The book isn't perfect. In most lists attempting to rank all of Stephen King's books it usually lands in the upper part of the middle, and rarely/never makes a top 10 or 20 list. The length makes the book feel a bit lightweight, but again this goes back to "first book" issues. A lot of publishers aren't going to clear cut a forest to produce a book written by an unknown. Also, toward the end the suspension of disbelief gets harder to maintain. People somehow seem to just "know" about Carrie, even those that have never met her before. It feels like a punt, but who knows what the reasons were for some of the shortcuts. We'll explore this further with the screen adaptations yet to come, but the inclusion of fake book segments and articles may not be to everybody's taste. I thought it was particularly interesting that King would effectively insert spoilers into these bits. Anyone genuinely shocked by Carrie's rampage at the prom obviously did not read these.

Overall, I was pleased with the book and I can see why a movie would be released so quickly as well as understand how this essentially made the rest of Stephen King's career possible. I am looking forward to reading the novels ahead, many of which, unlike this one, rank very highly with the diehard fans.

Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock, 2015)

It was more than a little surreal to read a book called Work Rules! at the same time as "Leisure the Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper. Needless to say, these guys don't roll in the same circles, never mind the fact one died just before the professional life of the other began. It was hard not to see these books as opposed to one another, but with a little discipline I was able to put each one in its place. Nevertheless, the two books have such wildly different assumptions of what constitutes a culture that they are never going to dovetail.

Whereas Pieper fears the culture of "total work", Bock lives it. He isn't writing a book about work/life balance, so it's not as if the message of the book is to "shut up and work", but rather to make your work enjoyable, which is assumed by Bock (and most members of Western culture) to define ourselves and give us meaning. Pieper would disagree here, but I'm going to have to set my favorite German philosopher aside at this point and examine Bock's work directly.

In case it isn't clear from the subtitle, Laszlo Bock is a Google guy. Google fascinates just about everyone, so it is only natural that a book about Google's "people operations" (don't you dare say "human resources", you cro magnon) is going to garner a lot of interest. While the cover and title are radiant and designed to attract from the bookshelf, I discovered the book through a reference from How Google Works, which was citing this book a year before its publication. Each chapter discusses different aspects of working environments, with ample examples of how Google does it. Then you get a set of "rules" at the end of the chapter that summarize the key points. The tone is encouraging, but it can also be overwhelming. For example, I'm just a middle manager type in a very small division of a small operation. I can't do what Google does. To his credit, Bock acknowledges that most readers aren't going to have the same resources, but he scales his suggestions to fit a variety of settings.

Finally, read all the footnotes. Oddly enough, the thing about this book that stuck with me the most was a pancake recipe in the footnotes. I can't resist a good stack of flapjacks, so I intend to try it soon. There are also endnotes, but most of these are just references, so you aren't depriving yourself of the full Google experience if you skip them.

Leisure the Basis of Culture, Including The Philosophical Act (Josef Pieper, 1948)

First off, NO, I did not omit the colon or comma from the title. It all runs together, just like you see above. Second, "The Philosophical Act" is almost always bound together with the "main" essay. In fact, it is actually slightly longer, but I think "Leisure" is a more provocative essay. However, both should be read together, which is what I did.

As many reviews of this book say, this is a small book with big ideas. I know one post here (nor a 5-page paper) will do it justice. Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and a big fan of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, and more likely to quote from them than the Bible in his work. The "Leisure" essay was written in scenic postwar Germany and can be seen as his attempt to address the victorious Allies in what kind of society they were to impose on their vanquished foe. Pieper saw the rise of a "total work" culture in the twentieth century, devoid of leisure, and ultimately reducing the individual human being to a cog in a machine. Now leisure, in Pieper's thought, was not the same as idle time or a break from work. That kind of stuff was more the result of work, sort of the "space between", and not genuine leisure. Actual leisure was the time spent in contemplating one's place and role in the world. For Pieper, the most readily found way of doing this was through divine worship. The other essay, "The Philosophical Act", goes more in depth on this.

I'm reading the above and shaking my head. It just isn't easy to encapsulate it all in a paragraph. I think this was about the slowest 150 pages I've ever read, but that's not meant as a bad thing. It's just that the concepts are quite dense, and Pieper has struck a particular rich vein of thought. Ironically, the effort required to read it (and Pieper does not dismiss all work - for example the effort to learn a skill contributes to the joy of acquiring it), may mean those who could learn so much from this aren't going to invest in what is required to comprehend it.

Yes, this was "required reading" for my class and the final book of the year. However, I'm glad for the opportunity to have read it and I think about it frequently in what I do in my life. As you will see in the next post, fate had it that my required reading and free reading put mixed messages into my brain. More on that in just a tic...

Go check out my new blog!

It's been a little quiet here since I've been putting most of my creative writing energy into my new blog Under The Tome. Here you can follow my mad quest to read the entire Stephen King bibliography, as well as watch all of the associated movies. As of this writing, I've read only the first book, Carrie, and seen the first movie, Carrie. So go over there and get in on the ground floor! Read along, comment, lurk, or whatever you like!

Don't worry, Under The Tome does not replace this blog. For the books that apply to both blogs, I will post in both places. Because you care. And so do I.