The Octopus Frank Norris Analysis

In The Octopus Frank Norris writes of the clash between the California wheat growers and the monopolistic corruption of the expanding railroad. Six months before Judge Roy Bean’s death at age 78 after a drinking binge, came Norris’s death, not by drink but unexpected appendicitis at age 32. Based on the Mussel Slough affair, The Octopus is concerned with the destructive and underhanded ways of both parties, the farmers and the railroad, as they each seek to undermine the other in a dishonest property exchange. The rivalry ended in a fatal shootout, where both sides, as well as the peacekeepers themselves, lost lives.
Having left Chicago as a youth to study painting in Paris, Norris went on to attend Berkeley before moving to San Francisco and

Why machines? Because they are composites, and it is impossible to break down the production of its total sum into just one element. It is the collective force. A central subject in Butler’s satire states how the people of Erewhon live without machines because of their mistrust that the machines could, in a natural, Darwinian evolutionary step, develop consciousness and take over. Is it a founded fear? Deleuze and Guattari explain, it seems, that machines, are limbs and organs that are subsumed by bodies-without-organs. What is a body-without-organs? Individuals are not static, lacking things but are les corps-sans-organs, bodies-without-organs: they are, we are, open horizons for fulfillment, undifferentiated realms below our appearances, a proto-world without definition or core. In presenting the fear of machines in the Erewhonians, Deleuze and Guattari believe that Butler is denouncing an underlying sense of unity to the machine, rejecting the archaic concept of vitalism and asserting that all beings are actually components to be taken, used, joined and connected, modified, one from another, here to there, all across the collective plan d’immanence, plane of