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Oct. 31st, 2017 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI read a third or so of Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." The writing is fantastic; I stopped because the future as depicted disturbed me. Maybe I'll come back to it another time.
I'm half way through Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It's interesting, but a little dense and dry. I'll probably read it in bits.
I'm around half way through Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I saw the title when I was little and asked my parents what it was about. I don't really remember what they told me, but the memorable title stayed with me. When I saw it at a going-out-of-business Borders, I bought it. I'm finally reading it now.
It's a very interesting, difficult to explain, difficult for me to understand immediately, book about form vs function, classicism vs. romanticism, and maybe (I'm not quite sure) about mental illness and interpersonal relationships. I'm enjoying it. The narrator's explanation of how a motorcycle is really a collection of concepts wrought in steel made me happy. And this is the end of a sort of monologue by the narrator about the failings of a manual for assembling a rotisserie:
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"Well it *is* art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.
They're not sure whether I'm kidding or not.
"You mean," DeWeese [an artist and sculptor] asks, "that when I was putting this rotisserie together, I was actually sculpting it?"
"Sure."
He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. "I wish I'd known that," he says. Laughter follows.
-----------------
I'd barely even tried reading something for pleasure after Syracuse, and until now. I'm more me again.
I'm half way through Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." It's interesting, but a little dense and dry. I'll probably read it in bits.
I'm around half way through Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." I saw the title when I was little and asked my parents what it was about. I don't really remember what they told me, but the memorable title stayed with me. When I saw it at a going-out-of-business Borders, I bought it. I'm finally reading it now.
It's a very interesting, difficult to explain, difficult for me to understand immediately, book about form vs function, classicism vs. romanticism, and maybe (I'm not quite sure) about mental illness and interpersonal relationships. I'm enjoying it. The narrator's explanation of how a motorcycle is really a collection of concepts wrought in steel made me happy. And this is the end of a sort of monologue by the narrator about the failings of a manual for assembling a rotisserie:
----------
"Well it *is* art," I say. "This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.
They're not sure whether I'm kidding or not.
"You mean," DeWeese [an artist and sculptor] asks, "that when I was putting this rotisserie together, I was actually sculpting it?"
"Sure."
He goes over this in his mind, smiling more and more. "I wish I'd known that," he says. Laughter follows.
-----------------
I'd barely even tried reading something for pleasure after Syracuse, and until now. I'm more me again.
