Architecture Without Architects, by Bernard Rudofsky
completed 6/00
What's Its Deal?
Architecture Without Architects is the exhibition catalogue for an exhibition that ran at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964-5. The books consists largely of photographs of ćprimitiveä architecture, structures and cities generated by cultures that fall outside the scope of ćofficialä (read: Eurocentric) architectural history, with some brief commentary and an introductory essay.
How Is It?
Say what you will about the 1960s: any culture that could have produced a book as interesting and moving as this one is a culture thatās lamented in my book. Nearly every page introduces me to something new, and thus broadens my conception of what it means to be a human being. Flipping through the book at random reveals photos of gigantic Syrian water wheels, Dogon granaries, Spanish arcades, desert fortresses in Morocco, Italian hill towns, and hollowed-out baobab trees used as homes. The book is far more than a mere collection of curiosities, though: it is a challenge to our narrow conceptions of what makes a building or a city ćlegitimate.ä The book goes on to challenge us on even more fundamental levels: it radically expands oneās exposure to alternate forms of living/urbanism/social networks, and exposure to the different social forms of the past always causes me to think heavily upon the ways in which the ones of our own time might be deficient (The incredible diversity of building styles depicted in this book are jeopardized and in some cases destroyed by the rise of tourism and the global marketplace; a trend that has already done irreperable damage to some of these cultures at the time the text was written.) A slim but important book, a celebration of human diversity, and a call for increased attention towards both our own lifestyles and the ones we endanger. (* * * * *)
Representative Quote:
ć[These pictures of covered streets] may strike terror into the heart of the urbanite because he automatically associates them with unspeakable crimes. In underdeveloped countries, however, such streets are usually as safe as a church at high mass. Still, although they are taken for granted by the natives, to us they seem unreal, devoid as they are of sidewalks, traffic lights, parked cars, and batteries of garbage cans, all of which we have come to accept as the attributes of higher civilization.ä
Connects To:
Re-Search #12 : Modern Primitives
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The Global Soul : Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, by Pico Iyer
abandoned 6/00
What's Its Deal?
Pico Iyer, a frequent contributor to magazines like Harperās and TIME, here explores the developing effects of globalism on our world. In particular, he is interested in the growing number of people whoare no longer able to identify with a particular race, nation, or heritage, finding instead that they belong to a new class of individuals with hybridized identities, formed by the major forces of the twentieth-century: transcontinental travel, multinational media, global commerce. Iyer designates these individuals ćGlobal Souls,ä and this book is primarily an investigation of their experiences (and largely an investigation of Iyerās own experiences as well, since he counts himself among the Global Soulsā number).
How Is It?
I found this book to be a bit of a disappointment, all the more disappointing for its promise. I share Iyerās conviction that the Global Soul phenomenon is real and important ÷ who among us can say that our personalities do not have some component of Global Soul? ÷ and yet I found Iyerās meditations on it to be frustratingly unfocused. I had read a chapter from this book when it appeared, in a different form, in Harperās a few years back: in it Iyer spends a week in Los Angeles Airport, treating it as a kind of city inhabited entirely by Global Souls. It was sharp, cogent, witty, interesting, well-observed, and memorable. But freed from the editorial constraints that come with writing for Harperās, the material seems to gain flab; it loses its direction. The book reads something like a few yearsā worth of notes shaped into memoir form ÷ the notes are interesting, but the subject, at least to my mind, demands something more. Itās worthy of note here, perhaps, that Iām suspicious of the memoir form in general, as it often allows a writer to elide an argument or a salient conclusion. And by page 66 I was desperate for something in that vein to emerge: an argument, a conclusion, a point, anything beyond just impressions. Iyer comes off as neither a critic of globalism nor a proponent of it ÷ strange, regarding a phenomenon like globalism, which should inspire strong opinions. (He does seem to be working with the idea that the Global Souls are a type of dispossessed class, which rings untrue given the amount of frequent flyer miles they manage to ring up.) Iād even settle for ambiguity ÷ Iām a big fan of messy human ambiguity in response to complex topics, and a strong shot of it would do wonders for this book. Instead, Iyer is content to observe and remark in a mannered fashion, dropping the names of the many countries and cultures he crosses paths with as though they were celebrities: exactly the last thing that discourse on this topic needs more of.
(* *)
Representative Quote:
ćAs a permanent alien, Iāve never been in a position to vote, and, in fact, Iāve never held a job in the country where I more or less live; I thought relatively little (though my parents were middle-class academics, far from rich) of going to school over the North Pole, and have never had a partner who belongs to the same race. (ćMiscegenation is the great hope and future of mankind,ä an optimistic soul in San Francisco tells me. ćItās not possible to hate your grandson.ä) The son of Hindu-born Theosophists, I was educated entirely in Christian schools and spend most of my time now in Buddhist lands (the Carribean islanders would call me a ćNowherianä); and, though I spend most of my year in rural Japan or in a Catholic monastery, Iāve nonetheless accumulated 1.5 million miles on one American airline alone.ä
Connects To:
Capitalism In The Information Age (McChesney, Wood, Foster, eds.) ; Benjamin Barber's Jihad Vs. McWorld
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The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West
completed 6/00
What's Its Deal?
Day of the Locust, written in 1939, tells the story of Tod Hackett, who moves to Hollywood and falls in love with a second-rate (but aspiring) actress, Faye Greener. Two things become apparent, pretty fast: 1) Faye has no chance of succeeding in Hollywood, and 2) Tod stands no chance of ever, um, consummating his desire for her. Tod is reasonably aware of both of these things, but thanks to the now-classic disorientation that LA exerts upon its residents, Tod continues to clutch desperately after her, joining the ring of her suitors, a growing circle of failures and California misfits (including a dwarf and a guy named Homer Simpson).
How Is It?
Although some of the depravities of Hollywood and LA depicted here seem slightly quaint today (now that the area has had sixty years to surpass Westās vision), this book still hits the mark with a remarkable frequency. When West is writing at his best he functions as a baleful documentor of what would grow into the LA we all know and love. Cults, pseudoreligions, celebrity-worship, crowds, riots, child actors, hodgepodge architecture, and an industry dedicated to the falsification of reality: all of them are here, and Westās writing on these afflictions still retains force today. Ultimately, West sees LA as an environment in which no human goodness can survive÷a kind of moral black hole÷and this is certainly reflected in the novelās array of characters, who are largely a batch of self-centered xenophobes. Even Tod, ostensibly the novelās ćhero,ä tries (more than once) to summon up the courage to simply rape Faye. In other words, this book wonāt be a big hit with people who use ćI didnāt like any of the charactersä as a criticism: a shame, because thereās a reasonably good study of human desperation to be found here, and Westās focus on how certain environments and cultures exacerbate that desperation is still profoundly relevant to our own day. A quick read, not very difficult, dense, or lyrical, but a fine addition to the ćliteratureä on LA. (* * *)
Representative Quote:
ćScattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from mail-order houses. While the others moved rapidly, darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred. At this time Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die.ä
Connects To:
Joan Didionās Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Mike Davisā City of Quartz, Bret Easton Ellisā Less Than Zero.
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Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
completed 5/00
What's Its Deal?
One of the preeminent novels documenting the black experience in America, Invisible Man relates twenty years in the life of a nameless black protagonist. His story, told as an extended flashback, begins as he is graduating from a Southern high school, and moves briskly up to the characterās move to Harlem. About halfway through the book, the false starts in Harlem give way to the narratorās involvement with a Communist activist group (referred to here as ćThe Brotherhoodä): the remainder of the book covers the arc of his experiences with them, and his eventual encounter with radical black nationalist leader Ras the Destroyer.
How Is It?
This is a novel that is both fairly long (581 pp.) and full of thorny moral complexity: I was surprised to find that it is also a quick and pleasureable read. The book is not without flaws, however. Ellison is clearly familiar with (and influenced by) conventions of the nineteenth-century novel, which would often cover a personās entire life: in the early parts of the book, when it seems like he wants to adhere to these conventions, the book is episodic to a fault, and each of the early episodes rushes full-tilt to a dramatic climax, almost surreally over-the-top in some cases. But once our narrator is established in the Brotherhood, the story seems to find its pace, and the exploration of the bookās themes begin to emerge more fully.
The primary theme explored here is identity, and the particular difficulties that American blacks have establishing a stable personal identity (someting that white Americans frequently take quite for granted). The problem comes from a combination of complex factors: Whites have preconceptions about blacks and treat them as though those preconceptions were facts, and, in response, blacks (at least the blacks in Ellisonās world) base their own identities in response to those conceptions: either trying to counter those conceptions or happily working to reinforce them. Identities established in this fashion are all echo, however, and throughout the story the protagonist gradually comes to realize the insufficiency of those echo-identities. (Samuel Delaneyās Dhalgren, which also deals with the instability of American racial identity, serves surprisingly well as a companion volume to Ellisonās novel.) This is morally ambiguous stuff, and the book is primarily committed to documenting and exploring that ambiguity: the novelās stance on racial or identity issues never quite gels into anything like a consistent viewpoint. While this is most probably an accurate representation of the mind of our (frequently confused) protagonist, it may frustrate any readers who hoped to come away from this book with something like an answer or an argument.
(* * * *)
Representative Quote:
ćBut to hell with this Booker T. Washington business. I would do the work but I would be no one except myself÷whoever I was. I would pattern my life on that of the Founder. They might think I was acting like Booker T.Washington; let them. But what I thought of myself I would keep to myself. Yes, and Iād have to hide the fact that I had actually felt afraid when I made my speech. Suddenly I felt laughter bubbling up inside me. Iād have to catch up with this science of history business.ä
Connects To:
Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney
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The Ticket That Exploded, by William S. Burroughs
completed 5/00
What's Its Deal?
The Ticket That Exploded is the final part of Burroughsā ćcut-up trilogy,ä which begins with The Soft Machine and continues with Nova Express. This book offers no serious departures from the earlier books in either plot or style (it goes so far as to include an entire chapter from Nova Express, almost verbatim, into its mix). The plot: nefarious Nova Mob leads Earth towards destruction, while the heroic Nova Police attempt to thwart their plans. This plot, however, is only a background layer: the surface of the book is a plotless postmodern free-for-all, a collage of fragments gleaned from numerous different sources. This begins to make sense when we heed Burroughs' explanation that the Nova criminals are not ćthree-dimensional entitiesä at all, but rather complexes of information that spread in viral form ÷ the total disruption of linear meaning that the book performs (ćprose abstracted to a point where no image track occursä) is a stand-in for the battle between the Mob and the Police. The Ticket That Exploded lays off a little bit on the corporation/media critique that Nova Express contains and turns its attention instead towards deconstructing representations of sexual acts ÷ many of the cut-up pieces incorporated into this book are apparently drawn from pornographic stories.
How Is It?
I havenāt yet read the first part in this trilogy, The Soft Machine, but Nova Express is a hard act to follow: itās a book I really enjoyed. The fact that this book only deviates slightly from its predecessor is both a strength and a weakness: everything that I liked about Nova Express is still here except for the pleasure of being startled by its freshness. Iād reluctantly say that Nova Express makes its points just a bit more deftly and compellingly, and thus succeeds a little bit better as a text: anyone who was going to read only one of these books should probably read that one, but anyone interested in Burroughsā ideas should read both. Itās worth nothing that The Ticket That Exploded closes with Brion Gysinās fascinating essay ćThe Invisible Generation,ä which contains a great number of interesting avenues for further investigation. (* * * *)
Representative Quote:
ćThe sex area of the amusement park can only be reached through channels ÷ Anybody applying for entry must submit to naked photographic processing for ten days during which the applicant is photographed in all stages of erection, orgasm, defecation, urinating, eating ÷ The pictures are cut down the divide line of the body and fitted to other pictures of prospective partners ÷ The photos vibrated and welded together in orgone accumulators ÷ sex lines crossed and chartered so that memory tracks merge and the area is already seen when the applicant comes in ÷ All sex acts that take place in the cubicles, Turkish baths, scenic railways, ferris wheels and pools where the subjects circulate in aqualungs are photographed and screens permutate partners divided down the middle line until there is no way to distinguish film from flesh and the flesh melts ÷ä
Connects To:
William S. Burroughs' The Soft Machine and Nova Express
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Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace
completed 5/00
What's Its Deal?
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is the second collection of short stories by the author of meganovel Infinite Jest. Forming the core of the collection are a series of pieces consisting solely of transcribed responses to questions ÷ the ćbrief interviewsä of the bookās title. These pieces are interspersed with others which share similar thematic material. Among these themes are some of Wallaceās perennial favorites, including the problematic relationship between artist and audience, the failure of language to adequately convey experience, and the way that the worst banalities ÷ cliches, sentimental truisms, psychobabble catchwords ÷ often conceal deep truths which can only be perceived once oneās set of ironic responses has been stripped away. Some new themes are introduced as well: attention is paid, most notably, to the complexities of gender and sexual relationships in millennial America.
How Is It?
This is an excellent collection. Iāve been a Wallace supporter for some time, but I might recommend this one as his single best text. The interrelation of the thematic material unifies the book into a coherency that none of his previous books have quite pulled off ÷ each new piece in the book reveals another facet of Wallaceās project.
This project can perhaps be best summed up thusly: Wallace desires to open up a dialogue about the difficulties of human existence in a way that establishes genuine communication between the reader and the writer. Much has been made of Wallaceās hyperdetailed prose ÷ I think this is less postmodern showmanship and more an attempt to truly convey something complex (in this book itās usually states of tortured consciousness).
Furthermore, in order to genuinely communicate, both the writer and the reader need to enter a kind of vulnerable state ÷ this requires the throwing away of certain defenses. The characters that populate these stories frequently abandon their own psychic defenses and speak out honestly (despite the fact that their stated views might be seen as unpopular or even repellent) and yet Wallace refuses to ironize these characters (much), which strips away his defenses as an author. He also spends quite a bit of time countering the automatic negative responses that the "listening" characters might have towards the "speaking" characters, which has the somewhat unsettling effect of stripping away our own automatic responses (and thus our defenses as readers). If weāre receptive to this process we end up identifying with the bookās ćhideousä characters ÷ characters who are, by-and-large, simply struggling to make themselves understood, to have a connection with another person ÷ and, through this, we identify with Wallace himself, who is, after all, the man behind their voices. Quite an impressive trick.
(Need convincing? Look at the piece ćOctet,ä where we are asked to put ourselves in the shoes of a fiction writer working on a piece called ćOctetä, and also the final ćInterview,ä which tells the story of a woman identifying (on a very deep level) with that most hideous of all men ÷ her own rapist.)
All of this can make the book pretty uncomfortable for the reader, which causes it to stand in direct opposition to the notion of fiction-as-entertainment (Infinite Jest also stands in opposition to this notion, although in a different way), but which establishes Wallace as one of the few writers in the contemporary scene who utilizes the moral dimension of fiction. To lump him in (as some do) with contemporary arch-ironists like D. Eggers feels to me like something of a disservice.
(* * * * *)
Representative Quote:
ćNo but hereās your classic symptom to tell if itās one of these Great Lover fellows is theyāll spend whole major blocks of time in bed going down on a ladyās yingyang over and over and making her come seventeen straight times and such, but afterward just watch and see if thereās any way on Godās good green earth heās going to let her turn around and go down on his precious little pizzle for him. How heāll go Oh no baby no let me do you I want to see you come again baby oh baby you just lie there and let me work my love magic and such like that right there. Or heāll know all his special Korean massage shit and give her deep-tissue backrubs or haul out the special black-cherry oil and massage her feet and hands ÷ which darlinā I got to admit if you never had a quality hand massage you have not heretofore even really lived, trust me ÷ but will he let the lady reciplacate and give him just even one backrub? Nosir he will not. Because this-type fellowās whole trip is heās got to be the one giving the pleasure here thank you maāam."
Connects To:
David Foster Wallaceās Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing Iāll Never Do Again.
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Nova Express, by William S. Burroughs
completed 5/00
What's Its Deal?
If you were to read Nova Express looking for a plot, you would come up with something like this: humanity is in danger of destroying itself ÷ going ćnova.ä The instigators of the nova process are the members of the Nova Mob; the only thing that stands in their way are the heroic (and extraterrestrial) Nova Police. Essentially, the book documents the skirmishes between the Mob and the Police. This plot, though, is the least part of the book ÷ although it lends some energy to the book when it emerges, it is mostly ćtoldä in a nonlinear, frequently incomprehensible style ÷ Burroughs is only interested in it as a jumping-off point ÷ his actual topic is something much more complex. The book informs us that the Nova criminals are not three-dimensional entities but are rather complexes of ideas that travel from person to person, viruslike (Burroughs here scoops Richard Dawkinsā meme theory by at least ten years). In battling these memes, the Nova Police must target the primary information-generating institutions of the twentieth century ÷ which Burroughs correctly identifies as various electronic media and the corporations that produce them.
How Is It?
Superb; thrilling. Burroughsā critique of media/information culture has never been more relevant (he even predicts, in 1964, the emergence of something that sounds very much like the Web ÷ ćmore and more images in less space pounded down under the cyclotron to crystal image meal . . . Now I got all the images of sex acts and torture ever took place anywhereä). Great chunks of the book function practically as a Machiavellian instruction manual on how those in power might use a stream of words and images to generate fear, passivity, and conflict in a human population. Some of Burroughsā incisiveness may derive from his usage of the famous cut-up and fold-in techniques (using passages plagiarized / ćsampledä from other texts, including psychology journals, newspapers, pulp science fiction and true crime texts, and literary sources like T. S. Eliot and Rimbaud) ÷ when he uses these, he gets at a radical (if illogical) analysis of the source texts. The illogical / nonlinear structure that results might throw some, but to my mind, this fits in perfectly with the bookās overall critique ÷ if you believe that certain forms of language (and thought) are politically corrupted, as Burroughs does, then the answer may be to compose a text that exists outside of those structures. The result feels vital and exciting ÷ it is practically a new way of thinking on the page ÷ and Burroughsā ideas on how to resist and defeat ćthe machineä and the nova process are similarly thought-provoking and unexpected (they bring to light a spiritual (monastic) side of Burroughs that I wasnāt previously familiar with). (* * * * *)
Representative Quote:
"He set up screens on the walls of his bars opposite mirrors and took and projected at arbitrary intervals shifted from one bar to the other mixing Western Gangster films of all time and places with word and image of the people in the cafes and on the streets his agents with movie camera and telescope lens poured images of the city back into his projector and camera array and nobody knew whether he was in a Western movie in Hongkong or The Aztec Empire in Ancient Rome or Suburban America whether he was a bandit a commuter or a chariot driver whether he was firing a "real" gun ot watching a gangster movie and the city moved in swirls and eddies and tornadoes of image explosive bio-advance out of space to neon÷"
Connects To:
William S. Burroughs' The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded; Machiavelli's The Prince
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Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga
completed 5/4/00
What's Its Deal?
Johan Huizinga analyzes the ćplay-instinctä in humanity. He sees it as an instinct that emerged very early in human prehistory ÷ in fact, he sees it as one of humanityās primary instincts, one which provides the fundament for other elements of society, such as religious ritual, war, and poetry. (The bookās title comes from Huizingaās suggestion that we change from Homo Sapiens ÷ human thinker ÷ to Homo Ludens ÷ human player.)
How Is It?
There is a bit of the one-theory-to-explain-everything about this book (a symptom that Matt Groening identifies astutely when he has one of the college professors from School Is Hell exclaim ćThe nation that controls magnesium controls the universe!ä). Huizinga believes his theory, and he could care less about convincing you: in many spots he just says ćIt is obvious that... [insert unfounded theory here]ä and then he continues on. In a way, though, this is welcome ÷ heās more interested in working with implications and extensions of his theory, and those are quite interesting. Other bad news: Huizingaās writing in the early 1960s, and it shows: his sweeping generalizations about human culture are sure to annoy poststructuralist readers, and his sometimes-disdainful references to ćsavageä cultures are sure to annoy multiculturalists. All of this kept tempting me to put the book down for good ÷ but every time I read a few more pages in Iād happen upon another interesting idea or strange fact. Huizingaās knowledge of the games and play-rituals of archaic cultures from all over the globe is genuinely encyclopedic ÷ one minute heās talking about the root words for ćplayä in the Blackfoot Indian cultures, the next heās analyzing the way dice games manifest in the Mahabharata ÷and its all fascinating. He may refer to other cultures as ćsavage,ä but his depictions of these cultures and how play fulfills an important role makes our own age appear sterile and joyless by contrast, a point picked up on and run with by the Situationist Internationale, members of which loved this book. (* * *)
Representative Quote:
"It has not been difficult to show that a certain play-factor was extremely active all through the cultural process and that it produces many of the fundamental forms of social life. The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing are pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the conventions of noble living were built up on play patterns. We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earlies phases, played."
Connects To:
Simon Sadler's The Situationist City; Re-Search #11: Pranks!
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Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney
completed 5/2/00
What's Its Deal?
Published in 1974, and set in a time that seems vaguely like the contemporary day, this heavy novel follows a nameless protagonist around the city of Bellona, a major US metropolitan center which has suffered an ambiguous disaster. Mostly abandoned, and somehow forgotten by the rest of the United States, Bellona has become a haven for drifters, thrillseekers, and social outcasts. (It also becomes a magnet for unexplained phenomena: the geography sometimes shifts; dramatic meteorlogical occurences rip the sky and then vanish). Much of the novel is plotless (or almost so): the novel follows the protagonist around but what happens to him does not follow any sort of conventional arc.
How Is It?
Dhalgren bears some superficial resemblance to science fiction, but it's after something much more ambitious than most SF. Delaney constructs a bisexual protagonist, of mixed race, who suffers patches of amnesia (he cannot recall his own name) and who lives in an unstable, shifting city-- through this character Delaney questions all the ways identity normally is built. Race, sexual identity, memories, place -- Delaney seeks to call attention to these things as liquid, not fixed. In turn, this calls the stories we tell about ourselves into question, and the book frequently challenges the very premise of narrative structure as a way to represent the world accurately. (This has the potent effect of using what initially appear to be flaws in the novel as points in the book's overall argument.) Things start off slow, but by the book's final section the book's elegant construction becomes plain: everything begins to resonate with everything else, leaving you slack-jawed and wowed. A major work, erotic, nuanced, and brilliant: as thorough an exploration of the human condition as any I've ever read. (* * * * *)
Representative Quote:
"'Now did you ever think of what a specialized city Bellona is?' Tak was saying. He had come in front of the bed, fists in his scuffed pockets, holding the leather off of his hairy stomach. The red quilt lining was torn in two places. 'I mean Bellona's got a lot of some things and none of a lot of others. I used to know a guy who could not go to sleep unless he had a radio playing. He can't live in Bellona. There are people who have to have movies to go to; or they get twitchy. They can't live in Bellona. Some people must have chewing gum to survive. I've found stale candy bars, Life-Savers, Tums; but all the chewing gum is gone from all the candy-stores' racks. ... Oh, we have a pretty complicated social structure: aristocrats, beggars--"
'Bourgeoisie,' I said.
'--and Bohemians. But we have no economy. The illusion of an ordered social matrix is complete, but it's spitted through on all these cross-cultural attelets. It is a vulnerable city. It is a saphrophytic city -- It's about the pleasantest place I have ever lived.'"
The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore
completed 4/00
What's Its Deal?
Susan Blackmore takes Richard Dawkins' theory of the meme and runs with it. She sums up the debate on the theory so far, counters the critics, distances herself from some of the sloppier proponents, and expands the theory into nothing less than a new model of human behavior.
How Is It?
Pretty good. Her layman-oriented recaps of meme theory (and Darwin's theory of evolution) are good for people not familiar with those topics. Some of her arguments are pretty compelling (the idea of meme-gene co-evolution fills in a lot of gaps quite nicely). Her reliance on genetic determinism is somewhat problematic for me; I'm not much of a sociobiology adherent. Her argument towards the end of the book -- that our personalities are wholly based on memes and the drive to spread them -- is over the top, but, on the other hand, it provides one with an interesting new lens through which to look at the world. (* * *)
Representative Quote:
"Once imitation arose three new processes could begin. First, memetic selection (that is the survival of some memes at the expense of others). Second, genetic selection for the ability to imitate the new memes (the best imitators of the best imitators have higher reproductive success). Third, genetic selection for mating with the best imitators."
Connects To:
Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene; Daniel Dennett's Understanding Consciousness.
The Electronic Disturbance, by Critical Art Ensemble
completed 4/00
What's Its Deal?
The Critical Art Ensemble proposes that traditional models of protest and dissent (sit-ins, marches, "taking the streets," etc.) have been rendered obsolete by the computer age: power has become more diffuse and can be routed around physical obstacles. The solution, as CAE sees it, is to attack the information network directly; much of the book is focused on the idea of politicizing hackers.
How Is It?
I think CAE risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater -- I don't agree that the old models are as useless as CAE suggests. Additionally, they refer frequently to "power" or "power structures" but fail to provide a clear vision of exactly who the enemy is, bringing this text uncomfortably close to conspiracy-theory territory at times. But they redeem themselves: almost every page has good insights, and I think their overall point -- that macropolitical action needs to reconsider how to use electronic tools --is a crucial one. (* * * *)
Representative Quote:
"While the current situation is partly defined by information overload, it is also defined by insufficient access to information. How can it be both ways? This is a problem of absence and presence -- the presence of an overload of information in the form of the spectacle (presence) that steals sovereignty, and an absence of information that returns sovereignty to the individual. To be sure, information on good consumerism and good government ideology is abundant. Data banks are filled with useless facts, but how can access be gained to information that directly affects everyday life?"
Connects To:
Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh Machine, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas; Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Information Graphics, Peter Wildbur and Michael Burke
completed 4/00
What's Its Deal?
Subtitle: Innovative Solutions in Contemporary Design. Looks at signage systems in airports and on highways, medical diagrams, cockpit design, kiosk systems, maps, assembly manuals, etc. Lots of illustrations.
How Is It?
Helpful, interesting, although not a classic in the same way that Tufte's Envisioning Information is. For every piece of good design in this book, there's another piece which strikes me as quite bad (the Internet map sites in particular suffer from jumbled, cluttered, confusing interfaces). But a valuable resource for people interested in this kind of stuff. (Note: this book influenced the redesign of the current design of this site quite heavily, so take that for what its worth). (* * *)
Representative Quote:
"The use of pictograms ... is widely seen as a more satisfactory alternative to using words because pictograms do not require translation into other languages. Unfortunately, they are not a universal solution for cultural and other reasons. Pictograms are most successful when they are used to represent an easily recognized object and this meaning can be extended to convey a larger idea, depending on the context. The vocabulary of pictograms includes a negative symbol (a diagonal bar placed over the symbol), but in general pictograms are not practical for expressing abstract concepts."
Connects To:
Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
Designing for Children, Steven Heller and Steven Guarnaccia
completed 4/00
What's Its Deal?
What you'd imagine from the title. A book featuring designs of childrens' toys, museums, magazines, books, etc.
How Is It?
Okay. The book itself is not designed in a way that I find particularly handsome (can a graphic design book be judged by its cover?). Similarly, some of what's inside is not very impressive, but the things that strike me (maybe a quarter of the things in the book) are really great. (* * *)
Representative Quote:
"The modern dictum 'form follows function' led to a belief in the rightness of simplified form, which in theory should apply to everyone regardless of age. Yet mature adults have different aesthetics than children do, and children have different preferences even among themselves. The problem with designing for children in the 1960s and early 70s was that many innovative designers were reacting to chaos and imposing a sense of order that was not instinctively in tune with children. Despite efforts to mold children into our own image, the most effective design is based not on sophisticated avant-gardeisms but on qualities that somehow respond to the child within and without."
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