The World Trade Center's Twin Towers and their destruction, from structural engineers' perspective. The Tower Builder, a fascinating John Seabrook article from The New Yorker, focuses on Leslie E. Robertson Associates, the engineering firm primarily responsible for the Twin Towers. (Note that this is not a permanent link.)
Sitting in Robertson's conference room, I said that his structures had saved a lot of people. He said, "A lot of things worked well—people got out. I suppose I'm proud of that." But he was looking toward that unavoidable view from the window. "It's a tremendous responsibility, being an engineer," he said, his voice breaking. "It's a very imperfect process. It's not so beautiful as science." He struggled to keep his composure. "I have a lot of tough nights. I'm still not sleeping. I go to sleep for a little bit, but I wake up thinking—I have so many thoughts."
Thomas Pynchon writes about the late Richard Farina, who died in a motorcycle accident the night of the publication party for his whacky, knowing account of postbeat prehippie academia, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. Pynchon was the best man at Farina's wedding (Farina married Mimi Baez, Joan's sister, a lifelong activist, founder of Bread and Roses ("Art Delivered Daily," recently deceased. Richard and Mimi made beautiful music together. Edge City University of Texas English professor Joe Kruppa once told me that Been Down was a fairly pedestrian, conventional piece of literature, from his perspective... but Pynchon got it:
Undergraduate consciousness rests in part on a set of careless assumptions about being immortal. The elitism and cruelty often found in college humor arises from this belief in one's own Exemption, not only from time and death, but somehow from the demands of life as well. It is Exemption --in a sense which Farina interestingly broadens here-- that so perplexes and haunts the novel's main character, Gnossos Pappadopoulis.
For Gnossos, Exemption is nothing he can either take for granted or have illusions about. His life is a day-to-day effort to keep earning and maintaining it. In the course of the book, Gnossos looks at a number of possibilities, including Eastern religion, road epiphanies, mescaline, love. All turn out to have a flaw of some kind. What he's left with to depend on is his own coherence, an extended version of 1950s Cool. "Immunity has been granted to me," thinks Gnossos, "for I do not lose my cool." Backed up by a range of street-wise skills like picking locks and scoring dope, Cool gets Gnossos through, and it lies at the heart of his style.
Been Down was filmed, too, but it was lame, a soap-opera shadow of the book. But you'll never see it... I don't think it's been shown, even televised, in the last twenty years. Your only choice is to read the book...!
