Category Archives: books

(more than) A couple links

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Signor Poletti puts up a kaiju Fickrset. Worth a look or two or three (also – check out COOP’s vinyls in comments).

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Bookride runs down prices on one of my top ‘want it, but can’t afford it’ books – Ricky Jay’s Cards as Weapons. Sigh.

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Peacay, at the always excellent BibliOdyssey, posts one that’s right up my alley:

The book’s [Topographische und naturwissenschaftliche Reisen durch Java] author was an enigmatic character by the name of Franz Junghuhn (1809-1864). He overcame depression and a suicide attempt as a medical student, a prison sentence following a pistol duel (he escaped), and a stint in the French Foreign Legion on his path to becoming one of the foremost naturalists in 19th century Indonesia.

This  plate reminds me a bit of a much later artist – O’Keefe:

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Click over and read – beautiful illustrations and a fascinating character.

Local color

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A bookstore down the road a ways gets a notice in Bookride:

A bookseller on Route 1 in Porstmouth NH recently got in the papers yet again – he makes Bernard look like John Inman (‘Are you Being Served?’)–he charges a $5 browsing fee and has been known to knock out customers who venture in his shop without permission. I had heard of him over the years as an example of a dealer who had seriously lost the plot and have always been amazed that he stays in business.

Go and RTWT – the man is nuts. I was warned away from there 15 years ago by a friend who told me about the browsing fee and the generally threatening (“Why should I sell you my books, you POS?”) vibe. Portsmouth Herald article here.

Conspiracy, mashups and correlation

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This weird yet well-researched book by a former science advisor to Walter Cronkite argues that NASA is an occult control system, created by Nazi SS officers and high-ranking U.S. Free Masons, that discovered alien technological artifacts on the moon. Hoagland believes the “secret government” has been reverse-engineering alien technology for decades.

  • One of the folks tapped for summer reading materials in the link above is Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky :: That Subliminal Kid. I heard an interview with him a few days ago – I especially like his notion of “artist as search engine”. I think there’s a sense where this has always been true – part of the artist’s job is pattern recognition – pulling something (at best, something unexpected) out of the ground. An MP3 of the interview is here and you can click here to get to Miller’s Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus mix (Buddhist  hip hop).
  • Another dispatch from the digital edge – The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Not sure how I feel about tossing theory over the side…  Update – an example of scientific petabyte computing – the Large Hadron Collider – 2Gb of data every 10 seconds.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a picture of Barbie finials on a miniature trebuchet.

Life-changing books

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I’m going to take up Kevin Kelly’s challenge and list some things I read that changed my life. The list is short – my feeling is that if the book does not immediately come to mind, it’s probably disqualified (I do reserve the right to add, though – “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds” and all).

  • My Side of the Mountain – I read this when I was 10 or so – I already loved the outdoors; this book gave me a hunter-gatherer ideal to aspire to.
  • Stranger in a Strange Land/The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – I’m cheating and combining two of Heinlein’s best into one entry.  I know there’s a lot to argue about in these books, but at thirteen they were a pretty heady mix of libertarianism, sex, and confirmation of suspicions that everything you know is wrong. Got me ready for the anti-authoritarian streak (persists to this day) reinforced by:
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – I read it in high school – a time when questioning authority needs to happen. It did – never wore off. It also gave me a taste for signs, symbols and layers; thank you, Noni Randolph (HS English teacher). Ms. Randolph asked me once to count the number of fishermen that go with McMurphy on the party boat trip, smiled, and walked off. Obviously, I still remember the moment, and the moments afterward.
  • The Whole Earth Catalogs – you are not alone – in fact, there are a ton of people way ahead of you.
  • A Rage for Falcons – relit the fire that My Side of the Mountain kindled. “This [falconry] is do-able – it’s something you [I] can pursue!”

Good omen

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I’m starting to get ready for a weekend trip the Designer and I are taking to the North American Amphibian Conference. As if to spur me on, peakay posted plates from the ‘Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensium’.

Here’s a detail (the canonical birdeater) from a handcolored plate in an edition he links to – click to see the whole thing.

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I’m going to try a little moblogging from the road, but having fun at the conference is the first priority, so it may be Sunday or Monday before things start to appear here or on my Flickrsteam.

Purple hair and other attributes

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Continuing with our Drake theme- this time, emphasizing UFO hair – color, if not length: Charlie Stross (who’s heard of J. G. Ballard) writes a post explaining how much control an author has over the way their book is published (especially, in this case, influence over cover art).

Unless we’re talking about the small press or self-publishing, the answer is “zip”. The author is responsible for writing and delivering the contents of the book and, optionally, additional material such as a dedication and acknowledgements. But the way their manuscript — a typescript, typically prepared in accordance with the ancient and established Rules — is turned into a book is entirely up to the publisher.

Why would he feel that it was important to say this? Behold the US cover for his latest – due for a July release:

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As an aside – what better place for the immobile enhanced breast meme than in a CGI portrait…

Connectedness, part eleventy-trillion

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I’ve been getting a lot of hits on searches for Gabrielle Drake – something I find myself taking a perverse pleasure in. I thought I’d use the google and see what was coming up; before I got anywhere near DoaMNH, I encountered this essay, Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon, on the Ballardian. Yes, Ms. Drake appeared in a 1971 short titled Crash!, opposite some guy named J.G. Ballard. Click through and read the essay – meanwhile, I’ll just continue to shake my head in amazement.

Indeed, the egocentric popular culture of today, the all-invasive media landscape in which the private becomes public — the Myspace glossolalia of intimate, private space projected onto a global screen — can perhaps be understood in these terms, a result of what Ballard sees as ‘the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape’.

Mild warning – the film is titled Crash! after all…

Bibliomane's paradise

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On the way home yesterday, I was able to swing into one of the most dangerous places north of New York: the New England Mobile Book Fair. It is a near-perfect book store. Things it does not have:

  • endcap displays
  • DVDs
  • a coffee stand/counter (actually, not the worst thing that ever happened to a bookstore, but something that definitely distinguishes NEMBF from a chain)
  • glossy formica – except perhaps at the registers
  • wheels (it hasn’t been mobile since basically forever)

It does have:

  • books, books and more books
  • funkadelic shelves
  • labyrinthine floor plan (in the remainders area – where I do most of my browsing)
  • great clippings, pictures and signs on the walls

A slide show to give you a taste…


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Mixed media

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  • Observations on books as display items (yes, I’m thinking bowerbirds again) and on the fact that romance novels are not appropriate for this purpose – here. A hat tip to two writers of romances and a personal observation: unread books on my shelves are the result of a collision between bibliomania and the work week.
  • Netvibes have just rolled out a new release (review here). One of the things the new version allows me to do is publish a public version of my portal – a ‘universe’ in netvibes-speak. I’m putting up a new category on the right margin; Alt Tentacles (yay DKs) will collect pointers to other debris I’m cluttering the web with. Flickr and Twitter get their own widgets – because they can.
  • A musical interlude:

Book Meme

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I’ve been tagged!

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

This really is the book that’s been near to hand for the past few days. I have it as an interlibrary loan, so if I snooze, I lose.

The Andronovo cultural zone covers an enormous portion of western Asia. Its western flank constitutes a contact zone with the Srubnaya culture in the Volga-Ural interfluvial and extending eastward to the Minusinsk depression (Fig. 3.5). Sites are found as far south as the foothills of the Koppetdag, the Pamir, and Tien-Shan mountains, whereas the northern boundary is unclear when it reaches the taiga zone. *

I tag HGP, M and/or D, Whimsy, Lex10 and Xtin (let’s see if this will cause her to emit signal).