Quipu by Damien Broderick

again when finally she gives up the attempt to communicate these profoundly important, agonizing thoughts and feelings, and bustles instead with a practiced smile chattering banalities? I’ve watched this performance often enough, and it makes my skin crawl.
    Can’t you see the superhuman effort she has made to talk about these dreadful things, to try to come to terms with them, which you—with the best will in the world, I don’t deny it—neutralize with ‘optimism’? Do you fail to see the gray metal gates slam into place at the very instant she becomes once more, to your relief and delight, your ‘dutiful, happy, recovering daughter’?
    You have never seen Caroline numb and staring blankly in the room she’s renting, or weeping in a kind of hopeless loneliness at what she says is the bitter futility of it all: as she wonders yet again why to go on living.
    Do my words seem nothing more than macabre fantastic rhetoric? Can you really believe that?
    I suppose I’ve just destroyed any fragment of empathy that might have survived my earlier pages. I can only hope this is not entirely true. Perhaps you might wish to show this letter to Caroline’s psychiatrist, or the Ward doctor, and get their reactions. Please do so, if you think it appropriate. Whatever happens, I hope you will give some consideration to what I’ve said here. This letter has not been undertaken lightly. I feel exhausted.
    My love to you all,
    Joseph Williams
    one small step for [a] (man)
    CONVEYOR BELT
     
    Perhaps no single invention has so revolutionized humanity’s war habits and methods of production, and been so thoroughly loathed, as the conveyor belt.
    It has taken much of the hard physical labor out of work and replaced it with tension and ruthless monotony.
    The design concept is simple. Instead of loading materials into motor-driven vehicles and taking them from place to place, the motor stays put and drives a rotating pulley. A long belt is attached, supported at intervals by rollers, and the materials are carried on the moving belt. In 1868 such a conveyor was used in Liverpool, England, to transport grain on the docks. The revolutionary impact came, however, when small machine parts were rolled past a line of workers who assembled them into larger machine components.
    The method had been pioneered in 1798 by Eli Whitney, an American gun maker. A century later, in 1908, Henry Ford coupled small-part manufacture and assembly with the conveyor belt to mass-produce the Model T motor car.
    The benefit depends on careful analysis of the best way to put the parts together, with the least wasted effort. Since each individual task is simple, semi-skilled workers can replace all-round craftsmen, at lower wages. With fewer skills, and therefore less industrial leverage, these workers are less likely to strike for improved money or conditions.
    ----
    Citrus sauce: A lemon tree, my dear Watson
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    The end of the line of this technique is automation—the total replacement of human workers by machines controlled with computers. With the rise of the micro-chip, this result can be expected increasingly throughout society in the 1980s and 1990s.
    1969: joseph and dzhugashvili
    brunswick Sunday
    7/12/69
    Caroline honey
    I’m sorry to hear Antony is screwing you up, but it was fairly predictable. I hope you can get everything settled without too much anguish and boredom.
    Of course, by now (I assume) you’ve surely been seduced away all flushed with sonnets and bubbly into the penthouse apt of some lustful Assistant Professor.
    At present I labor through Bertram Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution …Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. At 400 pages (much of it read standing up in the tram, poor proletarian swine that I am) I’m only at the halfway mark. It’s as stirring as last year’s telephone directory. Still, I now feel competent to begin talking to our better informed comrades.
    Tuesday afternoon I finally screwed together the courage to see your