Paul Fussell (rhymes with Russell) died at the age of 88 this past weekend. His was hardly a household name, but he was a significant figure in American cultural criticism and literature.  His major work was The Great War and Modern Memory, a review of the ‘literariness’ of World War I. I think it was the pioneer book in the upsurge of interest in all aspects of that conflict, but that’s my opinion. Lots of people think that the war of 1914-18 was special in that it had a certain ‘literary’ quality that lifted it out of the mere blood and mud of all wars.  After all, The Oxford Book of Verse was issued in a special “soldier’s edition”, on thin paper with special printing, which could be tucked easily into a trooper’s knapsack or  tunic pocket. And there were all those War Poets…Sassoon, Owen, Blunden…who wrote so beautifully.  Well, it was and it wasn’t. Verse and poets there may have been, but it was still a frightful, bloody slog. Fussell’s book explored all that quite thoroughly; the high and lower ends, the poets who have entered the “Canon” and the musical hall side, the soldiers’s newspapers, the post-war recollections.  He also wrote a number of specialist, scholarly works in his discipline…18th Century  English Lit…  and he penned several impressive collections of essays. Some of these detailed his own experiences as a soldier in the second of the two great wars. His comments on the limitations of US ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ in the European theater were quite acerbic; there was little of either, except direct frontal assault. Tanks of the greatest industrial power on earth were so poorly armored that their crews piled sand bag…dirt, really, to help deflect   projectiles. And they came from direct and personal knowledge, as Fussell was wounded twice. After the war he completed college and went on to develop his gift for teaching, or rather, as he put it, for explaining. He got good degrees from good schools and worked hard. I don’t think he was an easy man to be near, too much the ‘pissed off rifleman’ in his phrase, still wary and caustic.  But he was a good scholar and great writer.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_dilettante/2012/05/paul_fussell_remembering_the_author_of_the_great_war_and_modern_memory.single.html

The Brooklyn Bridge was the symbol of American engineering mastery. There was simply nothing like it in the world, both at the time and for a long while thereafter. The USA was a big country and people in it learned to think big and then do big. We taught the rest of the world how to do this, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they learned the lessons very well. Brooklyn and New York were two separate cities then (and still are in the minds of many Brooklynites).  Getting to work in New York meant a ferry ride across the East river, then a trolly or subway or cab. Getting home meant the same thing, only in reverse order.  The obvious solution was a bridge, but the technical problems were very great. How all this was mastered, and how the bridge emerged as the pre-eminent masterpiece it was, have all been told with admirable thoroughness and verve in David McCullough’s fine book; The Great Bridge; the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. If you haven’t read it, you should, right away. The story is amazing and the people who made it all happen were wonderfully rich characters.  Once the bridge was built, it became indispensable as the way into and out of lower Manhattan. My father told this story, that he had heard from a fellow cop: One day a police officer was directing traffic on the approach to the Manhattan side of the bridge. He kept looking at it, for some reason. And then stopped all traffic onto it. Naturally, there was, shall we say, disagreement about this action’s prudence. But he kept insisting that there was something wrong with the bridge. Finally city engineers showed up and the cop was right. The BB was out of acton for several years for reconstruction. I don’t know if that story is true. I suppose I could look it up, as Casey Stengel said.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/05/0524brooklyn-bridge-opens/