Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.58.0405102343550.23584@panix1.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: Books I like and highly recommend!
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 23:44:05 -0400 (EDT)
Books I like and highly recommend! The following are books I've read or am currently reading, mostly the former. They're wonderful and I think are definitely worth your attention. Two books that bear comparison, both from Salt Catherine Daly, DaDaDa and Loss Pequeno Glazier, Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm These are first of all both beautiful books. And they work through technology and technologies in odd ways, ways that configure the integration of the technological into body and poetic discourse, as if spectral communications were phantom limbs or tendrils extending from desktops and PDAs , within and without. Glazier works out of an incredible, intense, Mexican and Cuban (for the most part) matrix, which becomes himself as well. His is an 'important' book within emerging discourses of real and virtual continents. And Daly's work as well, with its internal technologies, technologies as breathing, or as electric Marguerite, mythos, scaled histories. I really recommend these books highly; I found them inspiring and turning language towards infinities both electronic and intensely real. >From Raw Nerve Books Sue Thomas, Hello World, travels in virtuality This is an odd work, a mix of real and imaginary journeys, discoursing on psychogeography, Bachelard, and a broad-based view of the Net along the way. As a mix it's intense and entrancing, and it's demonstrates the ease with which computers, electronic communications, and lives all intertwine beyond the home. This isn't the typical mobile technology journey, but a journey of integration, and it's as such that I highly recommend it. My only concern - and I have no answer for this - how much, today, should one describe the Net and its communications systems? As Katherine Hayles points out on the back cover, the book is 'Highly recommended for first- time users and those who want to try dipping their toes into the cyberwaters.' But for those of us who are familiar with the technologies, the value is elsewhere - following this journey, and Thomas's lived and interpenetrated spaces, across the world. There is an associated website by the way, http://www.travelsinvirtuality.com . (This is by the way a work I wish I could have written, but my own journeys have seemed too monstrous and tangled, too compressed. There's a sense of space in Thomas's book that's both open and comforting.) >From Atelos Brian Kim Stefans, Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, which _is_ more or less digital poetics itself. I love dipping into this work. There's a huge gap between it and Richards' Practical Criticism, but I like them both for their caress of writing, and _fascination_ with their target texts, reproduced among themselves, authorships in question. The Scotch is there in Stefans' work, for example, both real and imaginary. There are numerous sidebars and footnotes as well; the text skitters. This is simply a wonderful book. >From Minnesota comes Anne Weinstone, Avatar Bodies, A Tantra for Posthumanism. I have diffi- culty at this point with theoretical posthumanist texts that discourse on desire; on the other hand, I'm fascinated by the relationships Weinstone draws or breathes with Tantra; it's this which holds me. I don't feel capable of commenting on the text itself at this point, except to note the pleasure it gives, as well as assumptions about multiple selves, virtualities, and our selves avatars. It reminds me of Lingis' work - and in general where is Lingis in cyber discourse? But then I'm ignorant. - I do want to stree that I am reading and rereading sections of this work, scurrying across it, another skittering, and I find the text amazing in this regard. >From O'Reilly One more technology book, which I immediately applied and have been using furiously - Preston Gralla, Windows XP Hacks, part of the Hacking series. This book is simply great - I've applied at least 20-30 of the hacks to my own (video/audio/blender/text) laptop system. I've used other WinXP books to good effect, but this one in particular has been extremely useful. I couldn't have done http://www.asondheim.org/node.mp3 without it. Some older books if you find them - Kossovo, Heroic Songs of the Serbs, translated by Helen Rootham (with the original texts), Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920. This volume focuses on the battle of Kossovo 1389, and the starkness and repetitiveness of the songs have parallels of course with Yugoslavian epics, Homer, etc. These are intense pieces, some of them fragments, and they've already entered my dreams. The only problem with the book is its shortness. Serge Gavronsky, Toward a new Poetics, Contemporary Writing in France, consists of interviews of texts; it's from 1994, and I should have known the work! Authors include Deguy, Gugliemi, Hocquard, even Pleynet. (The last's book on painting is incredible by the way.) Get it if you can. Enough said. In Bhargava's Dictionary, Anglo-Hindi, the definitions are in both English and Hindi, and this is one of the most wonderful sources of words I've come across; the definitions are often beautiful. My edition is the 12th from 1966, and I've been using it regularly. Extersion, act of wiping or rubbing. Tortive, twisted. Airmanship, the art of handling an airship. Gothamite, a great fool. Legge's I Ching - I like this for the endless notes and clarity of the appendices; it's not as poetic as the Wilhelm, but I'm not using the work for divination or poetry. Dover edition. There's a small paperback (Mentor, 1971) edition of the book rearranged with the hexagram names and other minor changes, edited by Raymond van Over; I recommend this as well, especially for clarity. Burton Watson, Records of the Historian, Chapters from the Shih Chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, California, and Sima Qian, Historical Records, translated by Dawson, Oxford World's Classic. I can't get enough of this work; the Dawson edition shows why. There are parallels between the Qin and Bush dynasties that are unnerving; hopefully both will last an equally short amount of time. Finally I'm reading the full version of The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated and edited by Ivan Morris in two volumes (one text, one notes), published in 1967. It's quite different, in fact, due in part to the sections of lists, and I much prefer it. I haven't seen this reissued, but if you have a chance at all, find and read it (i.e. in preference to the Penguin edition). _