Just finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It was amazing ... he jumps between genres so effortlessly and weaves them together like some kind of insane collapse of space/time. Has anyone read this? I think one of the characters/stories (a dystopian fantasy of a corporatocracy (sp?)) should be published separately, as a short story, because it's such a fantastic critique of mc-corporate culture.
critical mass by phillip ball, about the correlation between emergent patterns and recent tools for understanding group activities in modern societies, including urban planning. fairly good.
freedom evolves by dan dennett, a favorite writr who specialises in the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory. hsi other book "Darwin'd dangerous idea" changed my understanding of architecture and urbanism entirely.
and across the sea of suns, by greg benford, cuz i love sf for mind candy relaxation time.
part memoir, part history, part/architecture/urban criticism. it's great. Pamuk is a writer who studied architecture breifly before turning to words, and he puts most archi/art writers to shame with the clarity and passion with which he talks about his topics.
his fiction is pure nobel prize worthy genius too - any fans of kundera and marquez would take easily to his work. "snow" and "my name is red" would both be on my list of all time desert island books.
People of Paper
-Salvador Plascencia
-he falls in love with a girl made of paper, cautionary tale of sharp objects...and baby nostradamus. the new tom robbins maybe?
People of Paper
-Salvador Plascencia
-he falls in love with a girl made of paper, cautionary tale of sharp objects...and baby nostradamus. the new tom robbins maybe?
i just read neuromancer and was somewhat disappointed. i think gibson is more of a stylist than he is an intellectual. gibson is imaginative when it comes to exploring possibilities of technology, but stephesnon is more interested in understanding technology by way of its history, a method I find more intriguing in the long run. in that sense, i think gibson is more pulp than neal stephenson. and I'm not really impressed by the one gibson article for wired that i've read.
the last book i finished was "olivia" and it was only because my five-year-old sister-in-law abby decided skip to the end. otherwise, i dunno, it sure was a long haul.
Well obviously to anyone who recognizes my name i loved snow crash.
"The minotaur takes a cigarrette break" is my favorite book of all time, just so freaking depressing yet well worth the pain. Also if your a fan of graphic novels, check out Summer blonde or any other work by Adrian Tommine, amazing work, makes you relive all those painfully akward highschool memories in dolby digital surround sound.
ha ha.. actually a review of that book got me tempted to get the sex, drugs and cocoa puffs. i'm more than sure i'll be moving onto that one right after.
ps. anyone here get completely through atlas shrugged? i got bored after a few hundred pages.
just read 'rearranging the netherlands'. very quick, compelling photography, evidence of an entire country that is actively engaged in thinking/talking about their built environment.
also just finished a book of essays by delmore schwartz called 'the ego is always at the wheel'. favorite piece is called 'survey of our national phenomena, an analysis of the public infatuation with the famous/notable, written in the 50s - way before the michael jackson trial.
a few passages: "...the mere existence of a national phenomena indicates a degree of national homogeneity; despite our vast geography, we can all share an intense interest in a person or thing, although our individual reactions to it may vary." and "...a national phenomenon is often the most spontaneous manifestation of the democratic process, because it is an expression of the public's moods and aspirations, hopes and fears." and, finally, "each of us is part of the public in one or another way, but it is the emergence of a new national phenomena which makes the individual aware of the entire public, helps him to know he is part of that public, and shows him what he has in common with others and how he differs from them."
read 'atlas shrugged' in high school and found it inspiring until i realized how little it had to do with the way the world functions, i.e., we all function together and we need each other to function. somehow in her zeal to erase all symptoms of communism from her idealistic worldview, rand forgot this.
I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned on another book thread, but here again: Kobo Abe's "Woman in the Dunes" is a haunting book, it had a lot to do with how I approach architecture. It's a novel, and definitely not about architecture, although it has a skewed sense of space and built environment in it.
"Sand not only flows, the very flow is the sand" - that pretty much sums up my attitude towards materials.
saxrulz, my husband loooved Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, and recommended that I not read it as it would send me into a depression he didn't want to deal with! The bits he read/explained to me sounded pretty grueling, but good.
some sophocles
some film theory
and some yang lian
my hefty ted hughes is back home :o( but in a months time i can get back into crow mode yay
oh i want to buy more bataille, woolf and vernant. please give me money or vouchers or buy them for me :o))) (also there are a few cds and dvds if you want to...i can wait till xmas..maybe)
psteiner. what a coincidence. i wrote a poem on nostradamus as a child (then he grows up and dies of course) like a month ago. yesterday i wrote one on morning erections (as i imagine them to be) and, well bluntly, misery and guilt, and today on a talk i had with my doll on starving cats and HIM.
cummon, people. kundera sucks, especially the post-prague stuff. but essentially he's a 'wannabe euro-generic' diet coke camus (whose fiction i didnt like at all, but he has a very sweet temperament , unlike sartre..who's quite mean really)
this far and not one mention of "a confederacy of dunces" by john kennedy toole.
it has nothing to do with phenomenology, aesthetic theory, rhizomic agoraphobia, or puppies.
it does have to do with boethius, stoicism, the mediaeval mystic nun hroswitha, pornography, and pants.
it is set in new orleans, too.
and ignatius j. reilly is by far the most hilarious antagonist/protagonist in any book ever. i have spent the better part of five years trying to figure out which actor would play him best in a movie. right now my money is on john c. reilly in a fat suit. a really big fat suit.
Uhoh, you reminded me of Confederacy of Dunces, ochona, just as I felt like I had my top five books nailed down - now I may have to shuffle to add it to the list.
It's so far-reaching yet intimate. And the best characters.
agfa8x what do you think of socrates ancestor- picked it up used the other day and just started it- lovely map of anaximander's no?.
it's nice to revisit hte pre-socratic world. makes me want to learn greek.
also re:kundera last feb. or so , he came out w. le rideau ( the curtain) a collection of essays , which wanders around in litt. and art./aesthetics. excellent. was able to pick up a copy in europe, but don't know if it's been translated yet.
Houllebecq's new book the possibility of an island will also be worth keeping an eye out for.
you might also be interested in Tabucci if you like calvino. Am reading some of calvino's diaries at the moment - he was in nyc in the 50/60's
c: i liked Socrates' Ancestor. I find McEwen very persuasive, and she makes fairly familiar and well-trodden ground seem fresh again. I liked her descriptions of the winged temple (you may not have got to that yet).
Her more recent book 'Vitruvius' is also really good. It picks up on some of the ideas at the end of Socrates' Ancestor. Even when it has its dry patches, it is convincing. It changed the way I understand Vitruvius (it's my standard reference on him now).
sorry , misspelled, that's Antionio TABUCCHI.
Pereira Declares - is a short novel set in portugal during fascist spain. maybe 150 pgs. ? though written w. politics in mind, it seems to me also to be a lovely, poignant story about the individual and agency or action as an individual.
may want to try Dreams of Dreams . though i haven;t read it - below from a review:
Tabucchi imagines the dreams of twenty artists he has loved and admired: Daedalus, Ovid, Apuleius, Cecco Angiolieri, Francois Villon, Francois Rabelais, Caravaggio, Goya, Coleridge, Leopardi, Carlo Collodi, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Claude Debussy, Toulouse-Lautrec, Fernando Pessoa, Mayakovsky, GarcÃa Lorca, and Sigmund Freud
approps of dreams -
Dost.'s Dream of a Ridiculous Man is worth [re?]-reading.
tabucchi was/is? an authority on that schizoid portugese poet pessoa ( of the 70 identities...) who i haven't read much of yet.
Re: Ancestor: haven't gotten to the wigned temple yet- i would guess it goes along with the xoana, which is lovely, because that notion of representing the animate by "tying it down" really kicked up from the page, thought immidiately about the way that can be ( or in this case maybe was?) made manifest in architecture.
I'm afraid my reading might not do the book justice at the moment, i am not that well versed in the arguments pro or con. But am enjoying it even if i am missing some of it's thrust. i ran accross it by chance; liking the pre-socratics, and w. faith in the mitp ( which has yet to be shaken...) i picked it up for $2!
just finished 'america: one land, one people', ed. robert c. baron. a very nice collection of history vignettes by historians including winston churchill, alexis de tocqueville, frederick jackson turner, bruce catton, henry steele commager, etc.
an attempt to identify what's American about America and a refreshing change from all of the cynical political wrangling which typifies discussions of 'American' these days.
a couple favorite passages, from frederick jackson turner's 'the significance of the frontier in american history':
on traders'/farmers' trampling of the indian way of life: 'every river valley and indian trail became a fissure in indian society.' descriptions of the inroads of the frontier and sounding remarkably like the way freeways, new interchanges, and the subsequent commercial development affect rural communities.
on mobility and 'nationalism' (as opposed to 'sectionalism'): 'nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. mobility of population is death to localism.' describes a phenomena occurring in the states during the 19th c which is parallel to globalism today.
sorry for the slow response, i guess that i haven't checked this thread in a while.
anyhow, yes, the long emergency is about the oil crisis and its impact on the suburbs. actually the description is too narrow, it really covers the broader topic of the energy crisis and its impact on all of contemporary civilization, not just the suburbs.
i enjoyed the book, kunstler can be a pretty entertaining writer who isn't afraid to pull his punches. however, the subject matter can be pretty depressing...it scares the shit out of me if i think about it too much. kunstler seems to have done a good job of getting his facts straight and that's the scary part because i haven't found anybody credible that is disputing his assertions about global peak oil, for example. kunstler takes it further though by offering his conjecture as to what kind of chaos might emerge in a post-peak oil economy. to me, it seems excessively pessimistic, as though he were only playing out one possibility in a scenario-planning scheme (and the worst case one at that).
still, i feel there is validity in his assessment. as unlikely as it seems to us that america could become a financially humbled and politically fragmented remnant of it's glorious self, it is possible. just consider how quickly the social, political, and economic infrastructures of new orleans disintegrated in the aftermath of the recent storm. definitely stuff worth thinking about so if you haven't already done so, then yes, i suggest reading the book.
Perez-Gomez and Pelletier - Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Temptation and Fall and Creation
Austen - Pride and Prejudice
finishing:
julian - gore vidal: novel about a later roman emperor who tried to reintroduce worship of the gods after constantine's embrace of christianity.
starting:
architectures of time - sanford kwinter.
and before julian:
the culture of narcissism - christopher lasch: a book written in '79, identifying elements of our common cultural trajectory as stemming from narcissism, decline of personal responsibility, and diminished expectations. provocative and juicy reading, but the argument is kind of circular/insular (narcissistic?!) and draws a lot from psychoanalysis.
whatcha reading?
The Cider House Rules by John Irving
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Frank Miller's Complete Sin City Library by Frank Miller
Inferno - By Dante
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Its actually quite entertaining...
Just finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It was amazing ... he jumps between genres so effortlessly and weaves them together like some kind of insane collapse of space/time. Has anyone read this? I think one of the characters/stories (a dystopian fantasy of a corporatocracy (sp?)) should be published separately, as a short story, because it's such a fantastic critique of mc-corporate culture.
critical mass by phillip ball, about the correlation between emergent patterns and recent tools for understanding group activities in modern societies, including urban planning. fairly good.
freedom evolves by dan dennett, a favorite writr who specialises in the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory. hsi other book "Darwin'd dangerous idea" changed my understanding of architecture and urbanism entirely.
and across the sea of suns, by greg benford, cuz i love sf for mind candy relaxation time.
Bill Bryson - A brief history of (almost) everything
Mitchener - Iberia
"vision and visuality"
edited by hal foster
just finished catch-22.
catcher in the rye is it.
genesis.
Istanbul: memories and the city by orhan pamuk
part memoir, part history, part/architecture/urban criticism. it's great. Pamuk is a writer who studied architecture breifly before turning to words, and he puts most archi/art writers to shame with the clarity and passion with which he talks about his topics.
his fiction is pure nobel prize worthy genius too - any fans of kundera and marquez would take easily to his work. "snow" and "my name is red" would both be on my list of all time desert island books.
Lonnrott - Kalevala
Kierkegaard - Either/Or
Browne - Christian Morals
Tournikiotis - Adolf Loos (sorry, that's an architecture one)
my last book reading phase was Bukowski, poems and short stories...i am not sure if that's a good sign
just read isaiah berlin's 'the crooked timber of humanity' again (more essays than book) ....he was smart.
People of Paper
-Salvador Plascencia
-he falls in love with a girl made of paper, cautionary tale of sharp objects...and baby nostradamus. the new tom robbins maybe?
People of Paper
-Salvador Plascencia
-he falls in love with a girl made of paper, cautionary tale of sharp objects...and baby nostradamus. the new tom robbins maybe?
sex, drugs and cocoa puffs by chuck klosterman.
think seinfeld but rock culture focused. it's hilarious.
right now it's >>
innocent when you dream: the tom waits reader
the fortress of solitude by jonathan lethem
Rise & Fall of the Third Reich (massive, so on & off)
In Cold Blood-Capote
Anthem-Rand
Stranger than Fiction-Chuck P.
Next:
House of Leaves
The Art of Raising a Puppy
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
i just read neuromancer and was somewhat disappointed. i think gibson is more of a stylist than he is an intellectual. gibson is imaginative when it comes to exploring possibilities of technology, but stephesnon is more interested in understanding technology by way of its history, a method I find more intriguing in the long run. in that sense, i think gibson is more pulp than neal stephenson. and I'm not really impressed by the one gibson article for wired that i've read.
just sayin.
the last book i finished was "olivia" and it was only because my five-year-old sister-in-law abby decided skip to the end. otherwise, i dunno, it sure was a long haul.
of course, abby was reading it to ME.
Well obviously to anyone who recognizes my name i loved snow crash.
"The minotaur takes a cigarrette break" is my favorite book of all time, just so freaking depressing yet well worth the pain. Also if your a fan of graphic novels, check out Summer blonde or any other work by Adrian Tommine, amazing work, makes you relive all those painfully akward highschool memories in dolby digital surround sound.
pinstripe,
check out chuck's latest, killing yourself to live. it's amazing.
ha ha.. actually a review of that book got me tempted to get the sex, drugs and cocoa puffs. i'm more than sure i'll be moving onto that one right after.
ps. anyone here get completely through atlas shrugged? i got bored after a few hundred pages.
i started atlas shrugged at 14 and finished it when i was 22.
i wish i was joking but i'm not.
just read 'rearranging the netherlands'. very quick, compelling photography, evidence of an entire country that is actively engaged in thinking/talking about their built environment.
also just finished a book of essays by delmore schwartz called 'the ego is always at the wheel'. favorite piece is called 'survey of our national phenomena, an analysis of the public infatuation with the famous/notable, written in the 50s - way before the michael jackson trial.
a few passages: "...the mere existence of a national phenomena indicates a degree of national homogeneity; despite our vast geography, we can all share an intense interest in a person or thing, although our individual reactions to it may vary." and "...a national phenomenon is often the most spontaneous manifestation of the democratic process, because it is an expression of the public's moods and aspirations, hopes and fears." and, finally, "each of us is part of the public in one or another way, but it is the emergence of a new national phenomena which makes the individual aware of the entire public, helps him to know he is part of that public, and shows him what he has in common with others and how he differs from them."
read 'atlas shrugged' in high school and found it inspiring until i realized how little it had to do with the way the world functions, i.e., we all function together and we need each other to function. somehow in her zeal to erase all symptoms of communism from her idealistic worldview, rand forgot this.
now reading 'trinity' by leon uris.
I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned on another book thread, but here again: Kobo Abe's "Woman in the Dunes" is a haunting book, it had a lot to do with how I approach architecture. It's a novel, and definitely not about architecture, although it has a skewed sense of space and built environment in it.
"Sand not only flows, the very flow is the sand" - that pretty much sums up my attitude towards materials.
saxrulz, my husband loooved Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, and recommended that I not read it as it would send me into a depression he didn't want to deal with! The bits he read/explained to me sounded pretty grueling, but good.
some sophocles
some film theory
and some yang lian
my hefty ted hughes is back home :o( but in a months time i can get back into crow mode yay
oh i want to buy more bataille, woolf and vernant. please give me money or vouchers or buy them for me :o))) (also there are a few cds and dvds if you want to...i can wait till xmas..maybe)
psteiner. what a coincidence. i wrote a poem on nostradamus as a child (then he grows up and dies of course) like a month ago. yesterday i wrote one on morning erections (as i imagine them to be) and, well bluntly, misery and guilt, and today on a talk i had with my doll on starving cats and HIM.
cummon, people. kundera sucks, especially the post-prague stuff. but essentially he's a 'wannabe euro-generic' diet coke camus (whose fiction i didnt like at all, but he has a very sweet temperament , unlike sartre..who's quite mean really)
this far and not one mention of "a confederacy of dunces" by john kennedy toole.
it has nothing to do with phenomenology, aesthetic theory, rhizomic agoraphobia, or puppies.
it does have to do with boethius, stoicism, the mediaeval mystic nun hroswitha, pornography, and pants.
it is set in new orleans, too.
and ignatius j. reilly is by far the most hilarious antagonist/protagonist in any book ever. i have spent the better part of five years trying to figure out which actor would play him best in a movie. right now my money is on john c. reilly in a fat suit. a really big fat suit.
LA WEEKLY! couldnt help it!
puddles, long emergency is the book about the oil crisis threatening the suburban way of life, correct?
If so, I've been meaning to read it..how was it?
Uhoh, you reminded me of Confederacy of Dunces, ochona, just as I felt like I had my top five books nailed down - now I may have to shuffle to add it to the list.
It's so far-reaching yet intimate. And the best characters.
the debt to pleasure- currently
middlesex- best read in a while.
i wanted to bring this back because i'm bored and i need a new reading list....
i'm currently working on:
freakonomics
design and crime
you?
I finally finished William Boyd's Any Human Heart-- it really was amazing.
trying to re-start Mason Dixon... this would be the 5th attempt since it came out.
Will probably read Saturday next... my reading tends to be anglocentric.
Has anyone read that Benjamin Kunkel novel? isn't good?
everyone should check this out...
joseph campbell's 'The Power of Myth'
Sorry, only architecture books recently:
Indra Kagis McEwen - Socrates Ancestor
Rafael Moneo - Theoretical Anxieties and Design Procedures
careful...this is a slippery slope ;)
Derrida - Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry. An Introduction
(yawn)
the kite runner
the big sleep
Garcia Marquez - 100 Years of Solitude
Some of the most insightful writing I've ever read, and without the pretention.
agfa8x what do you think of socrates ancestor- picked it up used the other day and just started it- lovely map of anaximander's no?.
it's nice to revisit hte pre-socratic world. makes me want to learn greek.
also re:kundera last feb. or so , he came out w. le rideau ( the curtain) a collection of essays , which wanders around in litt. and art./aesthetics. excellent. was able to pick up a copy in europe, but don't know if it's been translated yet.
Houllebecq's new book the possibility of an island will also be worth keeping an eye out for.
you might also be interested in Tabucci if you like calvino. Am reading some of calvino's diaries at the moment - he was in nyc in the 50/60's
c: i liked Socrates' Ancestor. I find McEwen very persuasive, and she makes fairly familiar and well-trodden ground seem fresh again. I liked her descriptions of the winged temple (you may not have got to that yet).
Her more recent book 'Vitruvius' is also really good. It picks up on some of the ideas at the end of Socrates' Ancestor. Even when it has its dry patches, it is convincing. It changed the way I understand Vitruvius (it's my standard reference on him now).
What should I read of Tabucci's?
Kundera's 'Ignorance' and 'Immortality' are both fantastic, although i have yet to read the incredible....\
also excellent is Calvino's
'if on a winters night a traveller'
a really beatiful incredibly clever plot.
also
Journey by Moonlight - Antal Szerb
Vertigo by W.G. Sebald
and currently reading:
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
and
Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos-
Soon to read Maximum city- le bossman- it looks great
sorry , misspelled, that's Antionio TABUCCHI.
Pereira Declares - is a short novel set in portugal during fascist spain. maybe 150 pgs. ? though written w. politics in mind, it seems to me also to be a lovely, poignant story about the individual and agency or action as an individual.
may want to try Dreams of Dreams . though i haven;t read it - below from a review:
Tabucchi imagines the dreams of twenty artists he has loved and admired: Daedalus, Ovid, Apuleius, Cecco Angiolieri, Francois Villon, Francois Rabelais, Caravaggio, Goya, Coleridge, Leopardi, Carlo Collodi, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Claude Debussy, Toulouse-Lautrec, Fernando Pessoa, Mayakovsky, GarcÃa Lorca, and Sigmund Freud
approps of dreams -
Dost.'s Dream of a Ridiculous Man is worth [re?]-reading.
tabucchi was/is? an authority on that schizoid portugese poet pessoa ( of the 70 identities...) who i haven't read much of yet.
Re: Ancestor: haven't gotten to the wigned temple yet- i would guess it goes along with the xoana, which is lovely, because that notion of representing the animate by "tying it down" really kicked up from the page, thought immidiately about the way that can be ( or in this case maybe was?) made manifest in architecture.
I'm afraid my reading might not do the book justice at the moment, i am not that well versed in the arguments pro or con. But am enjoying it even if i am missing some of it's thrust. i ran accross it by chance; liking the pre-socratics, and w. faith in the mitp ( which has yet to be shaken...) i picked it up for $2!
just finished 'america: one land, one people', ed. robert c. baron. a very nice collection of history vignettes by historians including winston churchill, alexis de tocqueville, frederick jackson turner, bruce catton, henry steele commager, etc.
an attempt to identify what's American about America and a refreshing change from all of the cynical political wrangling which typifies discussions of 'American' these days.
a couple favorite passages, from frederick jackson turner's 'the significance of the frontier in american history':
on traders'/farmers' trampling of the indian way of life: 'every river valley and indian trail became a fissure in indian society.' descriptions of the inroads of the frontier and sounding remarkably like the way freeways, new interchanges, and the subsequent commercial development affect rural communities.
on mobility and 'nationalism' (as opposed to 'sectionalism'): 'nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. mobility of population is death to localism.' describes a phenomena occurring in the states during the 19th c which is parallel to globalism today.
re6el9uy10,
sorry for the slow response, i guess that i haven't checked this thread in a while.
anyhow, yes, the long emergency is about the oil crisis and its impact on the suburbs. actually the description is too narrow, it really covers the broader topic of the energy crisis and its impact on all of contemporary civilization, not just the suburbs.
i enjoyed the book, kunstler can be a pretty entertaining writer who isn't afraid to pull his punches. however, the subject matter can be pretty depressing...it scares the shit out of me if i think about it too much. kunstler seems to have done a good job of getting his facts straight and that's the scary part because i haven't found anybody credible that is disputing his assertions about global peak oil, for example. kunstler takes it further though by offering his conjecture as to what kind of chaos might emerge in a post-peak oil economy. to me, it seems excessively pessimistic, as though he were only playing out one possibility in a scenario-planning scheme (and the worst case one at that).
still, i feel there is validity in his assessment. as unlikely as it seems to us that america could become a financially humbled and politically fragmented remnant of it's glorious self, it is possible. just consider how quickly the social, political, and economic infrastructures of new orleans disintegrated in the aftermath of the recent storm. definitely stuff worth thinking about so if you haven't already done so, then yes, i suggest reading the book.
Perez-Gomez and Pelletier - Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Temptation and Fall and Creation
Austen - Pride and Prejudice
finishing:
julian - gore vidal: novel about a later roman emperor who tried to reintroduce worship of the gods after constantine's embrace of christianity.
starting:
architectures of time - sanford kwinter.
and before julian:
the culture of narcissism - christopher lasch: a book written in '79, identifying elements of our common cultural trajectory as stemming from narcissism, decline of personal responsibility, and diminished expectations. provocative and juicy reading, but the argument is kind of circular/insular (narcissistic?!) and draws a lot from psychoanalysis.
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