Author: Bob Benz

I finished Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, last week. This was one of those books that stayed with me. Its post-apocalyptic imagery haunted my dreams and thoughts while I was reading it, and I kept returning to it when I was in the midst of other things. Very distrubing, but unlike most of McCarthy’s work, it ends with something that can only be described as optimism, though that word is a stretch in a tale of a man and a boy making their way south through a withered husk of civilization that’s fraught with cannibals, ash and sunless vistas.

I’ve also become addicted to HBO’s The Wire, a bleak chronicle of inner city Baltimore. There’s a character named Bubbles who pushes a shopping cart packed with junk through the bleak streets. I couldn’t help but make the comparison to McCarthy’s novel, where the nameless protagonist and his son also push a shopping cart through a landscape that is frighteningly similar …

I stumbled across this great description of Pittsburgh in Richard Parker’s review of new biographies on Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon in the New York Times Book review:

“… the violent, exploitative and dankly polluted world of coal-and-steel Pittsburgh, the Silicon Valley of its day.”

Never thought of it that way, but Pittsburgh was in many ways the cutting edge of the Industrial Age in much the same way Silicon Valley has blazed the path into the technical age.