Reading for August, 2005

You know how sometimes you just try to read too many clumsy books in a row and lose all reading momentum? I think I’ll call this “reader’s block”, and here’s hoping I’m not the only person in the world who has had this experience.
It is hard to say when it started. I’ve been working on Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which is… very long. After four hundred pages, Clyde still hasn’t killed Roberta.
Then there was the disaster of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. For statistical purposes, Florida considers medicine and law as creative practices. They aren’t part of the “super creative core”, however. Whatever. I don’t need a fake book to affirm my creative impulses. But to be fair, you can ignore my opinion, I didn’t come close to reading the whole book.

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The Rise of the Something Somthing

I tried to read The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. Florida is a statistician who noticed some “interesting” correlations when looking at urban data mixed with social and occupational data. So he wrote a book. A very repetitive and anecdotal book about the rise of a “creative class”, a class which completely defies any statistical or sensible definition, as its members do not have any particular economic status, geographic history, social characteristics, or occupational grouping other than being professional and [mostly] not in the service industry. Search and replace “creative” with any other adjective and you’d have an equally weighty argument for your own rising (and nonexistent) class.
I hear Florida is making a career on the lecture circuit. He must have a dynamic personality.