Current reading etc. - http://www.alansondheim.org/Asian.jpg Renate Ferro asked on empyre, "What's on your Bookshelf 2021" and I wrote back the following, thought it might be of interest to others (or of course maybe not) - Scattered response, and fascinating reading so far - scattershot reading/ listening/watching - Some of the books/authors I've been reading, things that have been keeping me going -- Science - weekly (this has been critical for me in terms of science policy, advances, discussions, technical articles) - online Science News - covers a broader ranger than Science, good for reviewing - online Spectrum Monitor - monthly magazine covering radio communications including radio astronomy, some television, emphasis on technical and cultural information - online 2600 The Hacker Quarterly - just what it says, articles on hacking and hacking communities (I've had two things appear in this, a third forthcoming) - print Harpers and The Nation - both of these are really useful Some authors / books - Aristophanes (rereading in yet another version) Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat Wide variety of books on electronic literature, including anthologies John Lyly, Euphues - 1579 "novel" with emphasis on euphuism - language bending Early books on net and cyberspace, for example, volume 1 of the TCP/IP presentation, Comer; Hacking Cyberspace, Gunkel, and so forth Nicano Parra, Poems and Antipoems (again), same with Ginsberg, di Prima John Bercow (ex-Speaker of the House of Commons), Unspeakable - remarkable description of Britain at the end Writings by Bruce Barber on Art Various foundations of mathematics texts while I try to figure out the propositional calculus Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern formation in nature, which relates to everything from cellular automata to catastrophe theory Attas/Lichtman/Pillai, Cellular and Molecular Immunology, 6th ed. (all I could afford) which I tried to read in relation to the MIT free course (sitting-in) on Covid Skimming/returning to books re: The Flower Ornament Sutra, Huy-Yen Buddhism, Dogen, the Therigatha (Elders' Verses, Testimonies of Female Followers of the Buddha), Noh Plays, Han Shan too many others to mention - Wittgenstein always useful, occasional Derrida, Emily Dickinson, Alphonso Lingis, uselessly trying to understand Hegel and Whitehead and their populariy, various Biblical texts in English, occasionally glancing at the Hebrew Various books on the phenomenology of music - organology (instruments) and playing Nonnos, Dionysiaca for fun (longest Greek classical epic, written around the fifth century A.D.) - reads like pomo insanity Online - a lot of texts related to electronic literature; people I follow on Facebook including John Bennett and Karen Finley, writing that occurs on the Wryting-L list and Netbehaviour, and of course Empyre - and so forth TV - recently narrowboat canal videographers in England on BBC and YouTube - musically - lot of current free jazz as well as the Traditional Chinese Music page on Fb - Finally, accounts of massacres and their histories and phenomenology - for example Jean Amery, The Buchenwald Report, and so forth, and plague materials including of course Defoe's Plague Year, Camus, etc. - One thing missing - current scholarly books - I haven't the money nor access to them. I do trade on occasion, cds for example for books, or books for books, but the prices, even the pdfs or online, are far too expensive for people on a budget; I've written about this before, the division of intellectual access and discussion occasioned almost literally by college degrees and memberships - Thank you for the opportunity! Best, Alan (posted to empyre originally) _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
