Inventing America

I've been reading the history of inventions first in the book Strange and Fascinating Facts about Famous Brands by Charles Reichblum. Then the latest issue of Time magazine commemorates Thomas Edison, who invented among other things the lightbulb, phonograph and motion pictures. It's interesting to note how these inventions were named and how they came about. Many of them were later used for other purposes, such as the phonograph being adapted for used as an answering machine. Inventing is a creative act, as are art and writing, though they evolve over time.

San Francisco Library Selection: Then We Came to the End

The San Francisco Public Library has a cool program in which they choose a book for the city to read, and make it more widely accessible to people to check out. Many of the books are contemporary literature, that have been critically acclaimed and on a wide variety of interesting subjects. The May/June 2008 selection is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, which is a 2007 novel about employees in a Chicago advertising agency and the contrast between the prosperity of the dotcom boom and the economic downturn around 2000. Ferris shows the personal and common experiences that the workers have.

Other stories like Douglas Coupland's novels JPod and The Gum Thief as well as the British and American versions of The Office have also examined this theme of contemporary life in the workplace and its moments of humor and tragedy. Then We Came to the End introduces an ensemble of characters and makes them distinct and interesting all the way through the story, using the first person plural narrative device that creates a sense of community with the reader and the protagonists. In the downturn, the workers find there are fewer contracts and redundancies are unavoidable. There is suspense in who will be made redundant and how they will react to the loss of their job, and also the effect on the workplace as a whole. Ferris creates a literary tone that is also funny and touching, connecting with contemporary life and the younger generation who is used to communicating by email and using computers as a part of everyday life. The novel also engages with how people support and occupy themselves with a job and also how they look ahead to realizing their future dreams.

Anthropological Perspectives

I've been taking anthropology courses at college this year, which covered all of human history from the earliest days of the species to the present day. In cultural anthropology we learned about cross-cultural traits. The classic study Family and Kinship in East London by Michael Young and Peter Willmott I also read was originally published in 1957 and looked at how people lived in the Bethnal Green community, as well as a housing estate in Essex that had been newly built. The authors found that people had many close relationships in the East End, but were disconnected from their family and friends when they moved to the council estate. In the new way of living, they didn't socialize as much with their neighbors. This book confirmed a lot of impressions I got of life in Britain from watching television and movies and reading books set there, as well as two trips in 1993 and 2000.

In comparison with a similar study done of 1970s working class life in Northern California, Worlds of Pain by Lillian Rubin, the communities in California and the council estate in Essex share many traits like trying to get ahead in life and using consumer acquisitions as a marker of status. While Rubin concentrates more on the difficulties of economics and the family, Young and Willmott give a more complete picture of what life was like in East London. The voices of the people interviewed come through and this book may have started the interest by the storytellers on television in chronicling working-class life. These shows have come over to America on PBS with shows like EastEnders and Doctor Who, where the new series in 2005 started out on a housing estate and the show followed the life of Rose Tyler and her family in London as much as the Doctor's time traveling adventures with Rose. These shows increase interest in other cultures, and may lead more people to look into the real stories of people around the world.