There’s a lot of intellectual overlap between the other books I read in February so I’ll bounce between ideas but to launch I’ll stick to my usual format as best I can.
Work – James Suzman
A deep history from the stone age to the age of robots. Indeed. This book starts off even before the stone age though and has a brilliant physics explanation about what work really means. I struggle with understanding physics and it got through to me so that’s rad. And then it spends the vast majority of the book in the stone age concepts, the per-agricultural stuff. The narrative structure of the book such as it is centers around a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Jo who had existed unchanged for over 20 000 years. They were first contacted and studied in the 60s and it continued til now when agriculture finally pushed them off their land and turned them into drifting laborers. There’s a scene the author witnesses where a missionary dispenses some aid in exchange for the Jo listening to a sermon and he talks about The Garden and The Fall and the Jo are like that’s us, we had a fantastic life where our needs were met by nature all around us and now we toil and suffer.
What’s interesting and has the overlap with the Colours book is that Work reminded me that early humans made useless things. Colours mentions prehistoric man dyed their clothes when they could for no reason and Work talks about even before we find traces of stone tools we find seashell necklaces. And Ricky Gervais on the last Sam Harris podcast added to this train of thought when he pointed out cavemen held their hands against the wall and blew red dust on them to leave an imprint to say I was here.
I’d fallen into the trap of thinking modern marketing was just exploiting silly psychological bugs (and it is, let’s be clear) rather than feeding a truly ingrained need to differentiate and individualize. The impractical need to create and fantasize is something wonderful and human.
Back to the book though, it’s mind-opening to see the story of humanity presented as something other than agriculture = civilization and everything before and besides is just waiting around.
Eventually the book does get to the modern age and The Great Decoupling, when progress stopped working for the workers. When Ford developed the assembly line the time it took to make Model Ts went down. The company charged less for the product and made more money and they passed that on to the workers. Hours worked started going down, accidents went down, and wages went up. Good job automation and capitalism for doing the job intellectuals of the time thought you would. But jump forward to another factory, this time a Kellog company, and something terrible is set in motion. This factory goes to a six hour work day and is still getting 8 hours of productivity with higher happiness and fewer accidents so they increase wages to match that of the 8 hour day. So to be clear, workers are making in a six hour day what they used to make in an 8 and everyone is safer. And they respond by asking to work 8 hour days. For more money. Because, as was a revelation at the time, people went to work not to do what they did but to make money to buy things. All the needs were met and money was now about consumer products and status and workers just wanted as much as they could get. Hours worked went up and wages stayed the same. Workers produced more and more but since the value of what was produced and the amount they were paid had were no longer connected the profits inflated the wealth of the owner class exclusively.
In fact, as the book wraps up, we know have a situation where people and machines are actually extremely productive and cheap that the struggle is keep inventing totally bullshit jobs middle management do-nothing jobs to keep the economy going. The example he uses is universities. The work is done by professors and janitors. Those are the people who exert effort and turn one thing into something better. And the number of professors and janitors has stayed the same or gone down everywhere and so have their wages. Meanwhile the number of administrators and administrative committees has gone up hundreds of percents and so have their wages.
Soon every job with be machines making widgets for basically free while an infinite army of managers watch them for nearly infinite salaries yet with none of the former working class able to buy anything there won’t be enough of a widget market to support the factory anyway and it’ll just run on a never-ending series of too-big-to-fail government bailouts. Hurray.
The Secret Lives Of Colour – Kassia St Clair
Back to talking about the enjoyment of reading books… A lot of the enjoyment of reading Work is in the anecdotes and data and just neat stuff about the history of sugar markets and consumption. Which is also what’s neat about The Secret Lives Of Colour. It’s just a list of specific colours like ultramarine and their history and neat things about them. Like how Nero once had a woman dragged from the room and stripped for wearing the same colour purple as him. The two most used phrases in this book are reserved for royalty and worth more than gold. Also how much disgusting science had to be done by getting ammonia from urine. People died by the hundreds making and/or transporting pigments when they were discovered and swept the world; whole species of plants and insects are wiped out because their juices can be used to make stains that don’t wash out.
More harmlessly there’s also cultural stuff like Oscar Wilde mentioning a yellow book in a poem and how that actually means that since white paper was more expensive cheap smut was printed on yellow paper and to say someone was holding a yellow book meant you’d caught them leaving the 18th century porn store.
And another synchronicity with Work is this book also starts with a physics lesson that was brilliantly accessible about how we see and perceive colour and light.
As a final note though this isn’t a book you read straight through. Each colour occupies a page or two and is truly fascinating but if you read more than that you just start scanning the words and the joy fades. It is after all trivia.
And that sort of note leads well into the final book:
Seven Keys To Modern Art – Simon Morley
Now I wrote about this book a bit before so I’ll link to that and not re-write that whole point…
Except to say fuck Marcel Duchamp. Fucking jagoff piece of shit.
So this book is really exciting at first for things like that but it gets hella redundant.
The seven keys are (let’s see if I can do this from memory) Theoretical, Market, Skeptical, Experiential, Historical, Biographical, …fuck, so close. Anyway these are the lenses through which a work of art is discussed. And (again) at first it’s really interesting to not take in the work as a whole and just declare it important or not but to break down it’s importance or lack their of in key areas. But what happens is eventually the skeptical key is the only one that matters. We know that any work that made into this book will have made it into several and any work that has made it into several books will have have artistic theory we’re already familiar with and a high market value. Whereas the skeptical key is the other side of the story and just rags on the artist and the work for a minute and it’s so damn pleasant. When art just goes to shit after Duchamp it’s nice for a book to take some time, after all the typical cliche and praise, to note that these works also objectively suck and here’s why.
Even that runs thin though when we get after the ‘modern’ era and into the current where there are artists I’m not sick of because I’ve never heard of them – this is a terrible way to be introduced to their work.
While this sounds negative the book is actually a 50/50 split for me and I won’t be surprised if I pick it up again frequently. There are some artists I discovered and now really like, I feel more equipped to talk about art which is something most people suck complete ass at doing, and it did open my mind and challenge my thinking as a fledgling painter.
And that’s what I Read This Month. Next month… the second goddamn Resistance novel by the same fucking guy. Because engaging with escapism in the modern era is about judging it more than enjoying it.
Author/Athlete, Thinker/Doer
Alastair's Ego 