Mail came in late afternoon yesterday with Gary Sullivan's latest Elsewhere. Having finished it an hour later, frustrated that it wasn't the collected New Life. Wanted more.

Then found this in Grand Piano 3, which also came in mail, from Kit Robinson section (reading it at 2 am feeding):

Resistors, condensers, transformers, contact leads, dashpots, timing devices, insulators, solenoids, resistance grids, governor tension sheave assemblies, bearings, car and counterweight buffers, car and counterweight guide rails, top and bottom limit switches, activating cams, compensating equipment, hoistway door interlocks, top trucks, hanger rollers, operating linkages, leveling and encoding systems, lobby fixtures, emergency lighting, communication devices, remote operating and signal equipment. Bing: "Going down." It was the beginning of the end of the industrial age.

The Vietnam War bequeathed to Silicon Valley a boatload of radical characteristics: the sense of continuous emergency, the sense of no higher authority, the dependence on improvisation, the endless hours of engagement, the exhaustion and fatigue, the intensely combative mentality, the sacrifice, the camaraderie.

Between the twin fevers of 60s radicalism and 80s Reaganism, the 70s was a catastrophic time of heightened contradictions permitting of no satisfactory release.
(p. 116-177)