John Leonard

The middle section of the B side of King Crimson's Three of a Perfect Pair, consisting of the songs "Industry", "Dig Me", and "No Warning", is fantastic, the first especially (though it has a lesser share than I remembered of the queasy, slightly disgusting guitar tone, which has always made me think of the shine of oil slicks on pavement, that dominates the latter two).  All three have always seemed to me to be extremely evocative of grey, disused, deserted factories—industrial music for failed industries.  (Not like the optimistic pounding of KMFDM.)  I mention this because of this paragraph

"Smog" was published in 1958, a long time before the current preoccupation with man's systematic destruction of the environment. The narrator comes to a large city to take over a small magazine called Purification. The owner of the magazine, Commendatore Corda, is an important manufacturer who produces the sort of air pollution that his magazine would like to eliminate Corda has it both ways and his new editor settles in nicely. The prevailing image of the story is smog: gray dust covers everything; nothing is ever clean. The city is very like the valley of the Argentine ants but on a larger scale, for now a vast population is slowly strangling in the fumes of its industry, of the combustion engine.

I would like to read this story.  In my fourth-year english class in high school we were required, towards the end, to write a four-page beginning to a notional longer work, something I resisted doing for a long time, eventually turning in a two-page description of a purposeless factory whose workings did nothing but fill up the entire town in which it is situated with toxic metallic grey dust, the result of its gears grinding against each other.  This was deemed sufficient.