not these editions... i only read what's free on kindle these days, there's so much! even things i didn't know existed! a.b. mitford lord resedale was, among other things, the first english speaking person to witness a ceremonial seppuku. at a time when almost no westerners knew what they were talking about as regards japan... he did. the best parts of the book are introductions and afterwords to each story. griffis i wasn't sure i would read through, especially since in his preface he says he has "carefully avoided" the bloody,revengeful or licentious elements, with which Japanese popular, and juvenile literature is saturated. but he did a good job on the tales he relates - some of them were also in mitford but more fleshed out here. as for the licentious bits, a lot of them i knew from having read dry and studious versions of japanese myths. madame chrysantheme i've just started but am already captivated, as i knew i would be. ah, loti!
Giving this a whirl; I heard about it in a couple of classes from way back in grad school and then bumped into it at the library. A classic about environmental activism/ecoterrorism.
Also this: Interesting little book of history, starting with the Penny Black in 1840 and going on from there. In case the image disappears, it's A History of Britain in Thirty-Six Postage Stamps by Chris West, who has another about America that came out a month or so ago.
using a vector like that to explain history is intriguing; how does he do it exactly? the iconographie of the stamps themselves? using the evolution of the postal system as a mirror? tracing particular letters?
The first two are texts I have to familiarize myself with for the spring semester as I'm teaching my first undergraduate course. It's a communication course based on social informatics and technological determinism. The last one is because it's nearly December and this is the time of year to read this particular work of Dickens.
Marc Auge, Non Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. A non-place is basically a built space that looks the same whether one is in Scranton, PA or, say, Austin, TX. What's interesting is that Auge is a French anthropologist, and I've yet to see a non-French source being cited, which suggests to me that theory is, metaphorically speaking, a literary form of non-space.
Is the idea he's hinting at something akin to the millions of strip malls anchored by a supermarket that are indistinguishable from one another?
There's that, but there's also airports, "modernized" train stations (a bigger deal in Europe than here), public spaces as generated by urban planning, as well as the media environment created by advertising. There's even a paragraph or two about refugee camps, but I'm not sure what to do about that one. I found the pdf of the Verso translation online and I'm reading it in iBooks on the iPad. If you're interested (and let me repeat the obligatory "it's a PDF" warning) here it is... http://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Aug...tion_to_an_Anthropology_of_Supermodernity.pdf It's 130 pages.
[QUOTE="TheJoeGreene, post: 31468085, member: 211589] The last one is because it's nearly December and this is the time of year to read this particular work of Dickens.[/QUOTE] Geeze, talk about your Christmas creep...
Geeze, talk about your Christmas creep...[/QUOTE] What are you talking about? I knocked that one off in the middle of October.
Sounds interesting. The environmental psychologist in me can't help but wonder about the commonality in these spaces easing cognitive load for shoppers and travelers. They can focus on the task as hand (if travelers) or be focused upon for marketing purposes for the shoppers. You want shoppers to easily get into the shops, to want to go into them and spend money and not be distracted by interesting other features of the environment. For the traveler, they need simplicity of navigation layout and aids because they often have baggage, maybe kids, and time pressures. All of that pushes designers of the spaces towards similar solutions, forces a 'jargon of space.' Oh, dear... now I think I have to read it...
I should point out Auge is an anthropologist and a big chunk of his text is devoted to answering questions of why an "ethnologist" should be examining these issues. Then again, you're a big boy and can probably figure out how to skim or skip a book to find what, if anything, is useful to you.
I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary: the Notebooks, Letters and Diaries of Daniil Kharms, edited by Anthony Anenome and Peter Svotto. Interesting in spots, skimmable in others. Kharms was a writer of children's books and absurdist stories who died in prison, sent there by one of Stalin's purges. Kharms is also quite possibly one of the most intense-looking dudes in twentieth century letters...
a phenomenon quite out of the ordinary... damn straight! the entire russian "avant-garde" of the 20's and 30's, a convenient blanket term for a number of movements - suprematism, constructivism, futurism... iss wildly fascinating, and was fascinatingly wild! the romanticists, the surrealists, the beat generation... all very tame in comparison. kharms is always very dramatic in his photos... as were so many of the other artists of the period. there's actually another person in the photo shown above, alissa poret, who did the illustrations for his books, and by the unconventional mores of their coterie, his companion. the assumed theatricality of the portrait is more evident when you see them both.
Giving this Ender's Game prequel a whirl. I was not enthusiastic about it but I have been pleasantly surprised. It is part of a trilogy that looks at the alien war that ultimately produced the society in which Ender was born and then fought the war with the formics.
Lucy Gayheart - Willa Cather "Family life in a little town is pretty deadly. It’s being planted in the earth, like one of your carrots there. I’d rather be pulled up and thrown away."
Load uh Da Flahs I got a gig subbing in an Honors English class tomorrow and the students were reading the Golding classic. I cannot specifically recall whether I had read this before, but I decided to plow thru it plus the Sparknotes stuff, in case I could add something to their broader understanding of the book. Found out today that they finished it, but I'm going to finish it, also. Wow, what a well-crafted work!
Arvo Part in Conversation, an interview with the Estonian composer (and his wife) by Italian musicologist Enzo Resyagno, with articles by the other two guys, one of which is entirely to technical for me to follow. Had no idea this book existed, stumbled on it in the library of the college where my wife works, and had her check it out.
Stephen King -- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft One of the more quoted books on writing, I found this second hand. Only about half way through, but I'm already counting the number of times that King urges brevity/fewer words/increased conciseness. It's like he's totally oblivious to his own writing...
that's also about as un-original as advice about writing gets. i've never read anything by him so can't judge his style but the train from brevity to conciseness doesn't go many places. when you're just trying to get to work that's very good, but the voyage will rarely be memorable. for business e-mails, journalism, economic reports and medical research papers, simpler is better and simplest is best, but novels and such truck demand more inspired treatment. they're a great deal more difficult to do well, that's why novelists and poets are considered the aristocracy of the craft and why each century only sees a couple of dozen great ones. a cowshed needs no gargoyles, steeples or stained glass. a gothic cathedral neither i suppose. but without them, a cathedral is just an oversized cowshed.