A work in progress on Work in Progress

Geoffrey Blainey in crumpled suit and Gideon Haigh in torn jeans, 59 books between them—

On the elevators and steel skeleton constructions
coinciding with the growth of a city.
White collars.

Fogged windows and chocolate biscuits: a comfortable routine.

Both Chicago and Melbourne had height limits, for a time, on office buildings. ‘Some of the earlier skyscrapers [in Chicago] sat like a petrified forest’, said Haigh, until the ’20s and ’30s when more skyscrapers were built.

In Melbourne, the six story limit related to the length of fire ladders. ‘People wouldn’t go into the lifts’, said Blainey. They were afraid.

The Manchester Unity building on Swanston Street is the ‘little brother’ (as Haigh put it) of the Chicago Tribune building, which was built from Raymond Hood’s competition-winning design for the most beautiful office building in the world. (Aside: glorious art deco.)

You used to be able to tell, said Blainey, what line of work people were in, by the way they dressed. Office workers were clean. Positions in some professions were determined by uniform, now we have titles. And many titles don’t tell us anything.

How do we judge the output of office workers?

‘We come up with means to judge an office worker’s productivity.
9-5 or 8-6
there’s an expectation of
minimal diligence by presence,’
said Haigh.
It’s hard to judge productivity, in an office, any other way.

In the early mixed-gender office men were worried they’d be distracted by ‘female frivolity’, or perhaps the women would become coarse. They were still segregated: telephone operators, secretaries; in the basement. Typing was ‘feminine’ but relied upon. Lorena Weeks fought for the shiftman’s job and, eventually, she won.

Blainey remembered a boy writing his school essays on a typewriter. At the time, they didn’t know what to think of him.

Haigh was ahead of the technology in the early ’90s, taking a giant computer home from the office each night to do his writing.
Now we can easily work from our homes/on the move. ‘Perpetual contactibility,’ Haigh called it.
The office is inescapable (she types, working from home).

At least as long as the physical office exists, we can leave it behind—Haigh (paraphrased).

One can be seduced by corporate culture. One can belong.

Or there are those subtle acts of subversion: stealing stationery, satirical emails.

But, as an audience member pointed out, we’re not so assured of ‘careers’ now. Contract work, downsizing, takeovers, discrepancies between the salaries at the lowest and highest levels. Decisions are made a long way from where they’re implemented (but maybe, the panel says, that’s not new).

But work itself. Blainey and Haigh embody it, because they enjoy what they do:
‘It gives me enormous pleasure,’ said Blainey, who remembers the joy of working with the fruiterer as a boy.
For Haigh there is the satisfaction of self-sufficiency, there’s a desire to improve and to be productive. Blainey is an inspiration to him.

Gideon Haigh’s latest book is The Office: A Hardworking History and Geoffrey Blainey’s latest book is A Short History of Christianity.

A Classical Education?

As the clouds came out again over Melbourne, Peter Rose, Eliot Weinberger, Barry Hill and Ian Morris gathered to discuss the influence of the classics on contemporary writing.

What is a classic, anyway? When I was at school, classical societies and cultures were those of ancient Greece and Rome. Morris, who is Willard Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University, described a redefinition of ‘classic’ that was taking place in scholarly and educational circles: ‘It would be silly to carry on acting like they did in the 19^th century, when there was a real focus on Western culture.’ Where Western civilisation courses used to be ubiquitous, they have now have been replaced by world history courses. Of course, this means that ‘there’s going to be less of a focus on Greek and Roman literature – but that’s not such a bad thing’.

Classics do still play a part in modern literature, poet and historian (among other things) Hill reminded us, as he had been reminded last week at a series of events featuring philosopher Raimond Gaita. Plato features in Gaita’s work, as does Socrates – Gaita clearly has a passion for ‘the examined life’. As the attendees discussed Gaita’s Romulus, My Father and Gaita’s new book, Hill realised they were engaging in the ritual of rendering a new book as a classic – by recalling the classics that helped shape it, and lauding it in terms of the classics we admire. A paradox of the ‘classic’ occurred to him: the classic is there to be used and reused (and abused), but is also sacred, unique.

It’s universal that every culture venerates its ancestors, said a jetlagged Weinberger (‘One is stupid, but when jetlagged, one has an excuse for one’s stupidity.’) ‘It’s hard to think of any culture that doesn’t’; perhaps we’re at a moment where the poets have lost the past and the classics have dropped out, in a nod to postmodernism.

An audience question suggested that history is being poorly covered in schools; did the panellists find this depressing? Morris didn’t, and said he didn’t worry about it because history is being covered abundantly on television and being watched like never before, although the coverage was perhaps not what a historian would choose to watch.

The Cameron government has made huge cuts to university funding, too, Rose said, raising the question of what sort of education should be produced under financial constraints. Morris agreed there was a push towards career-oriented disciplines, such as finance, and that the lack of funds prompted reflection: is there any point to a humanist education? But reflection needn’t be so defeatist, Morris said – perhaps humanists aren’t making an attempt to teach relevant content that interests people.

At session’s end, Weinberger revisited the idea of what defines a classic, pointing again to the expansion of this idea of what is classic: not just Greece and Rome, but also artefacts from Asia, and Aboriginal culture, closer to home. ‘The ancient is always lurking under the parking lot and it has an unpredictable way of resurfacing.’