Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
Incredible book, that I loved, about the history of UbuWeb, its raison d'etre, legal framework, and a section and description of picks from the collection. Deeply inspiring. Best book I have read in a long time.
After the Revolution
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
You know, on the one hand I got dropped into the action and enjoyed the speculative post-USA civil war narrative. I also liked the burner-ish body-mod cyborg people. On the other hand, I do not enjoy reading about death and war and continual battle descriptions. It's a little like The Matrix or something, so yes, it'll probably turn into a TV miniseries at some point. B-
Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
Though this is a 'pleasure topic' this was not at all a pleasure read for me. Despite its 'novella' size it too was something of a slog, though not on the scale of the Dawn of Everything. These academic anarchists certainly match their academic kin for heaviness of their texts. Not a conversational book. The point is that pirates, themselves largely non-authoritarian despite the appearance of fierce leadership in stories or during times of battle, settled and married in to local Malagasy culture. Their wives, themselves political intentional political actors seeking influence by being insider-outsiders, their offspring, and the communities that formed favored conversation and various forms of relatively non-authoritarian rule. That about sums it up. The book goes through the details, largely through speculation. It posits this period as being an important but less-acknowledged part of the project of 'The Enlightenment' and then sends us on our way. Okay. Somewhat interesting. I wish it had been 20 pages instead of 150, but there you go.
The Drowned World
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
I found this one on a walk in Red Hook on my birthday with Amelia. It turns out this is Ballard's first novel, and I really enjoyed it. It tells the story of a future Earth where global warming has caused the ice caps to melt (so it seems) and most of Earth is plunged under water. The main character Robert Kerans is a biologist with a small team who has been studying the plants and animals that have flourished as the human population has fled or died. It's unclear if most humans have left for another planet (I believe so). Earth is continuing to get too hot, and most days the temperature is in the 130s to 150s, and at night it's a barely tolerable 90 degrees, usually with air conditioning able to get it down to 80. The main character, his lover and much of the crew appears to be affected by the conditions, and they seem to regress into more primitive brainspace, almost a psychedelic or muted affect. They resist leaving when the crew is ordered to evacuate. Soon an evil captain, almost a pirate really, arrives with his picaresque crew, looting the place, and alternately intrigued by and resentful of Kerans and his compatriots. I was glued to the page as I wanted to learn what would happen, all the twists and turns. A unique post-climate-collapse apocalyptic story, highly recommended.
Bike Lanes Are White Lanes
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
An important indictment of mainstream urban bicycle advocacy as practiced favors upwardly mobile white lifestyle riders while excluding POC and/or poorer riders. The author does a good job explaining her values, and walks through three case studies of bicycle advocay or programs and how they intersect with racial and class dynamics. It shows why communities of color experiencing gentrification could tie bicycle advocacy work to those same forces. The chapter on solutions and possibilities at the end is by far the shortest, and hopefully other books and projects could take off where this one ends. I am thankful the TSNR ride is such a diverse ride, and thinking through what I've learned from this book and how it is reflected in the makeup and leadership of that group.
The Abolition of Work
finished: 2024-05-17 04:41:20.698528
Against the Written Word: Toward a Universal Illiteracy
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
I love the tone and little funny colophon type stuff like the refusal to have an author description and there's a warning instead of an intro. It's a collection of shorter essays and public talks and even a play of sorts, or two. OVerall this was not nearly as fun as the first Psychic Soviet book. But a few shorter chapters were great. I definitely laughed a few times while reading on the subway.
How to Build a Low-Tech Internet?
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
A paper version of the inspirational web-blog/'journal.' I've really enjoyed reading it online, and I get some of the flavor of that, and have been able to read on the train and outdoors in the park for example, but the design other than the cover is really bland. In fact, I thought it was a template export, maybe with Latex or somesuch, but hee hee hee, I looked at the colophon just to verify and it was actually 'designed!' by several folks. They should have let the cover design person design the internals, or just used a template! I'm going on and on, but I did enjoy this, even if I've prevously read some of the material online before. It's a useful reference. The title is a question mark, and true to form, they don't answer it but just pose questions.
Graffiti on No or Low Dollars
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
Surely a most bizarre pseudonym for one of the most bizarre road diaries I've ever read. Disjointed, hitchihiking and driving, non-linear I mean. Salty, told by a drug user ne'ver-do-well. A better version of On The Road. Some of the short chapters are just divine. Inspired writing. I can't believe it's so minimally self-published. Incredible stuff. One of the best books I've ever lucked into reading. I'll re-visit this one every few years.
The Stranger in the Woods
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
A fascinating book that I'm glad I read, though I also felt bad for Chris Knight. This person persisted, even when it was clear Chris wanted to be left alone. He's never quite able to penetrate Chris's mind, though he tries. I felt particularly incensed by the court decision forcing him to show up weekly, do drug/alcohol tests, and think they should have accepted a fine and let him go and maybe he could have gone back into the woods rather than live depressed in the society he had tried to escape. This is the story of the forced socialization of a man that wanted to live outside of society, and that is truly sad.
Every Man For Himself and God Against All
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
I picked this up a few weeks ago, got it signed by Werner Herzog himself! I was the last in the line when he spoke at Pioneerworks. The book is a bit all over the place, and Werner is pompous, but it does cover his entire life, his ideas, values, how he works, and is inspiring. He's one of my favorite creators. He's really a poet, as he says. What I took away from this is his "hard work" is just continually putting in the time. Like a lot of my other favorites, he has just made an extraordinary amount of material: films, operas mostly. And some books. An inspiring book about living a creative life.
Pink Noises
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
Great collection of short stories by Dick. Some only mild interesting but others contain whole worlds, ecosystems, movie plots, series and much larger narratives. Favorites include the horror story The Father-Thing about a child that realizes his dad has been eaten and replaced by an alien; The Last of the Masters, about a roving band in an anarchist society looking for old machinery to destroy lest it leads to warring with the robots again; Pay for the Printer, about a society with living almost-3d-printers that keep a reliant society going through recreating past objects and technology even as its members have lost the knowledge of the basics of constructing anything by hand. There are other favorites here like We will Remember it for you Wholesale (Total Recall) and The Minority Report. Recommended.
Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
A large anthology of science fiction, speculative fiction and farcical stories of the near future. The ones that were too farcical grated on me, insulted my intelligence, but many others were quite good, conveying whole complex worlds in short stories only a couple pages long. Because the stories are so short, they are packed in, and when I loved a short story I quickly moved on to another that might be bland or humorless and found myself forgetting earlier ones. I felt like I should take more detailed notes of the whole book. Overall, some real gems here and I'd definitely recommend it especially for someone that reads in lots of spurts, before bed, while traveling, etc. The other thing I liked is that it's almost all writers I didn't know previously.
The Philip K. Dick Reader
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
Moby Dick
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
I loved the queer storyline with Queequeg. I found the language exciting, strange, compelling - especially in the beginning of the book. The LibriVox reader made th e language more exciting as well. I loved his pronunciation of "harponeers" and his voicing of Captain Ahab inspired. But I found the book dragging in places, especially in the middle. And the end is so sudden! Right when we finally meet the whale. The story of the white whale's pursuit by Ahab is not nearly as interesting without the specific language and experimentation of the book. "The first modern novel." I want to read a tale from Queequeg's experience.
Dungeon Hacks
finished: 2024-05-17 04:00:00
I've read this before but I'm working on a roguelike again myself, this time trying to complete a medium size one, and I'm reading this for inspiration the last week of school. I enjoy the tales of the languages, approaches and early "open source" university computing culture.