18 posts tagged “books”

I'm reading the voyages of Sinbad as part of the Arabian Nights, and I'm struck by how closely it resembles modern science fiction.  In his second journey he is stranded on an unknown island, populated only by a giant bird who blots out the sun.  He escapes by tying himself to the birds leg, before landing on a second island filled with giant snakes and valleys full of diamonds.  He eventually makes his escape with some merchants come in search of the diamonds, and makes his way home.

The connection with sci fi comes in the unknown, the sense of undiscovered worlds and fantastic creatures.  One of the things I've liked about Arabian Nights is the sense of wonder about our own world.  It's written in a time when much of the world was still unknown, and the storytellers imagine fantastic, wonderful possibilities.  As scientific explorers charted the known world in the 19th and early 20th centuries, our storytelling imaginations shifted from undiscovered parts of the planet to the stars, and space carried that sense of menace, wonder, and limitless possibility that our formerly uncharted planet used to carry.

Dreams and imagination lives on in our uncharted areas...wherever that may be.

The latest book of the month for Fountain's Book Group.  It looks to be a great companion to November's Omnivore's Dilemma.  This book is a fascinating look at the perfume industry, and the sense of smell in general.  Nonfiction, it has an interesting aesthate and scientist at its center, Luca Turin.  I'm enjoying the opening 20 pages...   :)

Random quotes:

"Odor...contains all the mysteries" (ix), Smell as something both "unlimited and instantaneous" (7.9), "Real men don't [wont] smell things.  It's a female thing" (12.2), "You just cannot believe that a single molecule (of scent) has so many features" (13.4), Protagonist's mother: "what thrilled and impressed me was his interest in absolutely everything" (16.5), "You have just used the last bottle of L'Origen in the known universe" (21.6).

I'm racing my way up to page 43 so far (it's been 5 months).  It's funny, his poems are so image intensive, I never really know how to read, say, 20 at one sitting.  That said, here's one of the three I read this morning--its images have some real gems:

Spanish Dancer

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:
with the audience around her, quickened, hot,
her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight
around her body, she takes and flings it out
haughtily, with an imperious gesture,
and watches: it lies raging on the floor,
still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die--.
Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet
exultant smile, she looks up finally
and stamps it out with powerful small feet.

----

Lovely!  The image of her arms as startled rattlesnakes, aroused and clicking, is very nice.

I just picked this up from World of Mirth in Richmond. I've been interested in streetwear ever since I went to the University of Richmond without having money for an expensive wardrobe. It was a great way to express myself without resorting to fourth rate imitations of proper styles.

It might surprise present friends, since I've worn pretty muted clothes since then, but I've always loved the stubborn independence, ingenuity and visual flair of streetwear.

I read the first 50 pages tonight, and already enjoy the angle Vogel is taking. Hope it will continue to be a fascinating glimpse at a creative, touchy, volatile, and rich subculture.

I started into this worried it was going to force me into vegetarianism, that I was going to read some passage about calves born into rancid waste, and a blue light somewhere in my brain would turn green and a gag reflex would accompany the thought of meat moving forward.

...Which speaks either to my penchant for pessimism, or the ominous relationship we have to our food chain, where we _don't_ really want to know how food got there, we just want to eat it.

But read the book I did, fearful to encounter that meat-snatching passage within the book. Thankfully, Pollan is not an alarmist, but rather a quite methodical inquisitor about the roots of our food. It sounds kind of..esoteric, but he makes it fascinating, like a great humanities teacher he tells the larger story of food: of why we grow so much fricking corn in America, and how it's bad for almost everyone involved: ourselves, our diet, farmers in other countries.

The good thing is that the book never descends into a polemic, unlike Michael Moore's work, Pollan's evenhandedness keeps the reader open to what he is saying. Nothing is extreme or revolutionary or incendiary.

I feel like this book will, in the long term, shape the way I think about food by giving me a vocabulary for considering my personal and our cultural relationship to food. He discusses how America as a nation of immigrants never developed a stable national cuisine (unlike France or Italy), and the absence of that makes us vulnerable to an endless array of fad diets (coughAdkinscough) and an overall menu that is out of balance.

There is a fascinating chapter on mushrooms and fungi, which details how they are utterly different from plants, and grow from this crazy underground symbiosis with decomposing nutrients and tree roots, taking a single drop of sugar from the tree root in exchange for processed minerals from the soil.

There is an extended look at a farm outside Charlottesville--Polyface Farm--which models itself after natural ecosystems and creates this method of rotating cattle and chickens with grass growth cycles to create this wonderful whirlwind of spreadsheets, efficiency, and microdata on growth patterns of grass.

To wit: it's better to have grass pasture surrounded by trees, because a blade of grass will burn X calories turning the face of it's blade toward the sun to receive solar energy. Planting forests around removes wind, allowing the grass to grow higher. Brilliant.

In the end, it's about food, but it's also about systems in general. It begins to feel like a universal look at the interrelationship of history and commerce, and how everything is this big interconnected fabric, but that you can begin to see some of those connections, and kind of surf those links to great personal and collective gain.

Via BoingBoing, artist Brian Dettmer is creating three dimensional sculptures by cutting away the pages of books, leaving strategic illustrations behind to created this topographical affect, and capture the cumulative visual impact of a book in a single view.  This seems very cool on several levels!  Wow.   Link

Also see Georgia Russell's beautiful work, eviscerating books.   Link

I have a set of 1974 Compton's encyclopedias I'm preparing to part with.  I paid $3 for them, and have no sentimental connection to them (found them at a book sale).  I've wanted to do some creative destruction with them.  Nothing this sophisticated, but I find this inspiring all the same.  I will perhaps do some collaging with my own sets.  Certainly a fun way to think about books for someone who has grown up with them.

    He did not realize until a couple of years later that this question was, in effect, the cornerstone of their relationship.  Did Juanita think that Hiro was an asshole?  He always had some reason to think that the answer was yes, but nine times out of ten she insisted the answer was no.  It made for some great arguments and some great sex, some dramatic fallings out and some passionate reconciliations, but in the end the wildness was just too much for them--they were exhausted by work--and they backed away from each other.  He was emotionally worn out from wondering what she really thought of him, and confused by the fact that he cared so deeply about her opinion.  And she, maybe, was beginning to think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind the he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.

    Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her parents lived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made more money than many college professors.  But the class idea still held sway in his mind, because class is more than income--it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships.  Juanita and her folks knew where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia.  Hiro never knew.  His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky.  He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere.  In the end, it was probably his general disorientation that did him in.

Snow Crash, p. 61

Insight of a different kind from Stephenson, into relationships and selfhood.  The sense of needing to come from somewhere while entering a relationship.  To know who you are, in order to really know someone else.

The confusion about class identity resonates as well.  Do you go by your parents' salary or table manners?  The life they had, gave or wanted? 

    Since then, they've gone very different ways.  In the early years of The Black Sun project, the only way the hackers ever got paid was by issuing stock to themselves.  Hiro tended to sell his off almost as quickly as he got it.  Juanita didn't.  Now she's rich, and he isn't.  It would be easy to say that Hiro is a stupid investor and Juanita a smart one, but the facts are a little more complicated than that: Juanita put her eggs in one basket, keeping all her money in Black Sun stock; as it turns out, she made a lot of money that way, but she could have gone broke, too.  And Hiro didn't have a lot of choice in some ways.  When his father got sick, the Army and the V.A. took care of most of his medical bills, but they ran into a lot of expenses anyway, and Hiro's mother--who could barely speak English--wasn't equipped to make or handle money on her own.  When Hiro's father died, he cashed in all of this Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea.  She loves it there.  Goes golfing every day.  He could have kept his money in The Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went public, but his mother would have been a street person.  So when his mother visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro views that as his personal fortune.  It won't pay the rent, but that's okay--when you live in a sh-thole, there's always the Metaverse, and in the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.

Snowcrash, p. 63

Great illustration of the perceived hacker value of anti materialism.  Individuals seen as slackers, unmotivated, while actually deeply committed to certain, very personal, things.

Reading this again after finding it on BookMooch.  Enjoy its wit and accessibility.  ;)

So, I've been reading this collection of essays, The Show I'll Never Forget, about memorable concert experiences.  It's been an interesting process, working my way forward through the book.  The 50 essays are organized chronologically by the date of the concert.

I have to say I went through most of the book pretty disappointed, namely because for a book titled ...Never Forget, authors had forgotten a lot of the actual details from concerts from the 60's and 70's!  I'm a detail person, I want people to share these telling observations from the show that will give me a sense of having been there.  Most of the first 36 essays didn't really achieve that for me, and I would incredulously come to the last page of another essay, and realize the author had expended most of their capital just describing the drive to the show, or what their friends were like in '73, etc.  Seemed frustrating, myopic, poorly planned.  What's more, the emotional environment seemed totally remote.  I had no connection point to the time period, or even really the music of the eras in question, but thought the power of language could establish a connection.

Right around essay #37 (the Lounge Lizards, NYC, 1992), I started to click with the essays.  For one, the author of essay 37, Rick Moody, brought a more detatched analytical structure, a welcome change to the scattered chronological accounts.  Something else, too, that 1992 was around the time that I started paying more attention to popular music.  I was still a few years away from buying REM's "Monster" album in 1995, but it started passing into my neighborhood of experience, which made the essays more interesting, like entering the moving picture era of the 1910's.  That sense of a generation gap of experience surprises me.  I thought I would have more of a connection with the progression of popular music before my time, but those essays are written in such an "in-group" mentality, that not having been there, I find them difficult to engage with.

Looking again at essays 37-47, these aren't even artists I recognize: Katell Keinig, Joe Maneri, The Mekons, but there is a sense of situational familiarity that intrinsically connects me with the social context in which the music is taking place.  I find myself sympathetically linking with the author's backstories, whereas the authors from the 60's-80's seem wildly disaffected, drugged out, or nihilistic.  (Getting thrown out of a Bon Jovi concert, and smashing all the windows in the parking lot, Essay #32).

Another fun thing about the book is the cross-genre idea of using one art form to describe another.  These aren't essays about National Geographic subjects, or political campaigns, etc.  This is creative writing about creative music, one genre describing another, which leads to a slight hall of mirrors affect, of one person aesthetically describing another persons aesthetic musical decisions.  Kind of a fun mash up, like watching the television, muted, while listening to a cd, you get interesting cross-moginations.

Another piece that catches me is the spiritual vacuum most of the writers live within.  Music seems their only form of transcendence, and these concerts come like gasps of air in an otherwise airless existence.  It's hard not to be judgemental of a connection so heavily weighted with personal need, but music has never been as significant as literature, movies, or for that matter, church, in my own soul care superstructure.  Still, the feeling I have in essays 1-36 is not unlike the strange discomfort and fascination I feel watching Hungarians weep in ecstacy at a 1980's Michael Jackson concert.  Something disturbingly intimate about the level of their need, and the transparence of their self-care through music.

Interesting glimpse at the ferocious, shared alienation of early punk rock culture.  The way that the larger culture seemed maliciously corrupted, and conversely, the fierce loyalty felt toward one another within the subculture.

The later essays have seemed better at this, but capturing the communal sense of live music, the pleasure of the shared experience, and the way in which this intimate bond with strangers is formed in the shared fixation on the performers.  Many authors write from this perspective of "You remember this, right?"  knowing that even a small fraction of their audience saw similar concerts, or perhaps even attended the same show.  Literature, for one, does not have that same sense of shared experience, the moments of appreciation are more personal than communal, regrettably.

The last impression is the sense that alienation was much more genuine back in the day, that kids these days don't have the same things to be angsty about, so that the music I hear doesn't have the same raw urgency I feel communicated through these essays, particularly Patti Smith (#19), the Horselips (#25) and the Pogues (#29).  All struck me with the rawness of the authors' experience of the music.  Of course, I may be well out of touch with the vital bands of today that people will be writing about 25 years from now.