Word: manuals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book, which analyzes the successful management styles of such pacesetting companies as IBM, Procter & Gamble and McDonald's, has become a how-to manual for executives eager to put their firms on the fast track. It is Topic A in seminars, skull sessions and water-cooler chitchat. Excellence themes have suddenly turned up in the advertising campaigns of businesses as diverse as the U.S. Postal Service and Bloomingdale's, the chic department-store chain. On the lecture circuit, Peters and Waterman each command up to $15,000 an appearance...
...from the University of Michigan at the end of our last interesting decade-have come to the funeral of a friend who has slashed his wrists. Alex was a charismatic prodigy of science and friendship and progressive hell raising who opted out of academe to try social work, then manual labor, then suicide. He is presented as a victim of terminal decompression from the orbital flight of his college years: a worst-case scenario his friends must ponder, probing themselves for symptoms of the disease...
...reader beware; the canny old master of Italian fiction has once again pulled a fast one. Of Alberto Moravia's five covertly political novels of the past three decades, 1934 is the most disguised. His previous novel, Time of Desecration (1980), was tricky enough; masquerading as a manual of kinky sex, it was, in fact, a riveting case history of the psychopathology of terrorism. In 1934, Moravia has obscured his true intentions by adopting the histrionic manner and high-flown diction of German romanticism. The effect is bizarre and not always convincing...
...cares, really, if the manual typewriter goes the way of the manual orange-juice squeezer or the crank phone? Progress is progress. It isn't as if the invention itself is dropping from existence; there are new electronic microchip jobs that automatically produce a thousand individually addressed love letters while the author snorkels in Cancún. Nor is there a great heaving nostalgia attached to the old machine. The history of its growth reads as excitingly as politics in Ottawa. Besides, people these days show far too much reflex yearning for the snows of yesteryear. Let the thing...
Pleasant as all this may be to record, it does not add up to much. Mainly one will miss the manual machine simply because it has been around so long. We take unexpressed comfort from the sight of familiar objects, superannuated or not, tending to regret their absence even when we no longer require their presence. Then, too, we will miss the sound, the clackbop from the house next door that signaled the Great American Novel in progress, or the Great American Last-Minute Term Paper. Writers will miss their old machines greatly, even as they now flirt pantingly with...