Word: mumford
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...been teaching the same courses for years and the curriculum has drifted from what it used to be," Department Chairman David Mumford said last week, explaining the decision to initiate the review...
NONFICTION: Going to the Dance, Arlene Croce ∙The Killing of Bonnie Garland, Willard Gaylin Love, Eleanor, Joseph P. Lash Midnights, Alec Wilkinson ∙The Red Smith Reader, edited by Dave Anderson ∙Sketches from Life, Lewis Mumford...
Perhaps because he never knew his father, Mumford collected a number of tempestuous mentors, including Economist Thorstein Veblen ("a strange combination of the austere, seemingly superobjective scholar and a passionate, willful human being"), Critic Van Wyck Brooks and, above all, Patrick Geddes, the Scottish social theorist recognized as the father of town planning. Geddes later drove his student away by insisting that Mumford turn his teacher's brilliant but chaotic mental processes into limpid prose. But Mumford never repudiated what Geddes stood for: "The regional outlook, the urban focus, the unification of all the dispersed and dissociated aspects...
Fifty-five years later, Mumford still displays the same hatred of the mechanistic and the totalitarian, whether promulgated by a ruling junta or a local zoning board. He swears by "the fusion of the emotional and the intellectual, the equal awareness of past and future . . . the unwillingness to put any part of life in a separate compartment detached from the whole...
...long, exemplary life, Mumford has resisted such tendencies, writing with equal facility about art, technology, politics, social theory. Throughout, the old observer has remained a child of the city, disappointed that grownups have made such a mess of his world, but intoxicated with life and its possibilities. He recalls a transcendent moment when, as a young man, he gazed at an evening sky over Newport, R.I., and decided "that the world had meaning: and life itself even at its worst was more wonderful than anyone had been able to say in words." In recalling his own career, Mumford has found...