Dystopian but terrific writing
One of the people I read each week is James Kunstler. Firstly, because of the writing, and secondly, because his ideas and ‘take’ on things is so interesting.
Dystopean, yes. Boring, no.
His books have a more measured and very well researched richness to them.
There’s a link on his blog (www.kunstler.com…) to a recent article in Orion Magazine,
Back to the Future
A road map for tomorrow’s cities
and you can read it, here:
And this is an example of what you’ll get if you go there:
“The infatuation with technomagic in our visions of the future city has paradoxically produced places with no magic, no power to enchant the human spirit. The city of slick glass skyscrapers may inspire a certain crude awe, as anything gigantic might. But go to the tower districts of Houston, Minneapolis, Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, and I guarantee you will not find anything like enchantment. What you’ll find is sterility, a vacuum, a fiasco of unintended consequences. It turns out that the human spirit needs texture, not sleekness in its dwelling place, and it needs things human-sized to feel truly human, and despite all the striving to escape that, it is exactly what we’re going to get.”
I know that feeling, don’t you?
M
