Spreading my Memetic Blueprint
Since Dick felt it necessary to hit me with the meme au courant, I’ll oblige, but only because you don’t ever want to piss off a Petrolian, especially one who’s had it up to here with big city types and their ugly big city faces.
How many books do I own?
I was never an avid purchaser of books until at least young adulthood, so at most a few hundred, many of them heavy, scattered across various towns and tucked into bookbags from here to the Penetang.
Last book I bought?
Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita, an exploration of the plastic blob of artifice that consumes every fragment of our existence right down to the neurological level, making our emotional and intellectual lives a screaming, superfluous cesspool of despair, depression, angst, anxiety, and existential dread. One where, incidentally, you die alone. So very alone.
Last book I read?
Reflections of a Siamese Twin, John Ralston Saul, where he explores the Canadian anti-mythology throughout history, just in time for the present-day patriots of mimicry to come and take it all away. I am also working on Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo and 1967: The Last Good Year by the late Pierre Berton.
What you really came here for, in no particular order:
- Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
There is not much to say about Henry Miller’s follow-up to his classic Tropic of Cancer, except that it contains page after page of gouging, lucid, neural loggorhea about the mania of a writer becoming a man, and that it affected me even more than did its predecessor, which itself drew daggers from my heart and spat on them. I haven’t the gall to attempt a cogent analysis, as this book affected me almost on a cellular level at times. Loads of smut, also.
- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – Abelson, Sussmann, and Sussmann
There’s a saying that goes “computer science is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes.” I’ll let you in on a secret about computer science: a lot of it is about changing your focus away from the computer and towards the nature of the problems they are meant to solve. Problem and data: your programs should take both as input, defined in a harmonious or unharmonious way, however they should choose to arrive, in order to be charmed into acquiescence by your nimble code balletry, while preserving their own material essence. Most academic computer science programs nowadays focus on preparing you mind, body, and soul for the computer industry, but for many of us, what we need is a more peaceful relationship with that which we are appointed to solve. I put forth that a careful reading of this CompSci classic, as well as an earnest attempt at the problem set, will teach you almost nothing about computers, but plenty about clarity of thought, elegant design, and how to take the data as it comes. And it’s available for free.
- A Pattern Language – Christopher Alexander
This book is not so much a narrative as a methodology, or a system of methodologies to describe, in exhausting and self-validating detail, a field, architecture, which exists at a junction of sciences and arts. A very fuckable concept indeed, this book. You see, there exists the possibility—the probability—that pure wisdom of any imaginable topic can be distilled into a few choice axioms, the kind of which could be rung off in say, a chopped-up sentence or two. My writing style, for example, is an exemplar of the maxims type before thoughts have time to form and treat language like a tray of ill-fitting screws, each of which are corollaries of the umbrella maxim sophisticated jabberwocky overcomes talent dearth. It’s simple and it works, and I could write an email or an encyclopaedia this way, and though it might not end up any good, the task would be nothing if not procedural. What Mr. Alexander and Co. have done is to take the fuzzier edges of architecture—what seems to work, and what doesn’t, down to the finest minutae—and turn it into a sort of dialect, comprising verbs, objects, and clauses, with which one can create the smallest cigar box or the grandest airport. Then, they have cross-referenced and combined and folded all the rules into themselves, and come out with a sort of airtight system of questions and answers, into which you can pour just about anything, and pick up an answer at the other end. I think it is quite brilliant, the idea of remembering, say, Light on Both Sides of the Room, or Sleeping in Public, instead of the refractory properties of light, or a police factsheet on the illicit usage of city park benches. I wonder, sometimes, if other disciplines could benefit greatly from this treatment. Some already have, like computer science, and others exist only in the realm of possibility, like a language to describe the entirety of human behaviour, and used to prove axiomatically, Peano-style, the existence of a perfect system of human society, to give an example off the top of my head. This book made me dream, is all I can say.
- Voltaire’s Bastards – John Ralston Saul
If you’ve ever been suspicious, pissed off, distrustful, irate, despairing, or wary about our distressing tendency to worship false Heroes, the corporatization of all aspects of modern society, the use of economics as a cause rather than as a tool, the erosion of the citizen’s role in public life, the devolution of capitalism into a game of market speculation, the equation of war strategy and bureaucracy, the idolatry of leaders who play roles rather than make decisions, and the tyrrany of the managerial class, don’t bother picking away at the edges at your bookstore’s trendy Cultural Studies section…this relentless book savages one and all.
- Mythologies – Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes at his cheekiest. Whether showing how the ugliest French wrestlers are the most emblematic of the genre, taking aim at the slumbery mystique of “the writer on holiday”, or drawing a line between French oenophilia and its ugly colonial past, Barthes has a keen eye for the driving myths of postwar French media. This punchy collection of short essays, covering every topic ranging from the redness of steak to the lavishness of laundry suds, made me shiver with minutea-ic glee when I read it for a class in university, and I turn to it every time I need a postmodern shot in the arm. The fundamental tome of overanalysis that feels just right.
Favourite Michael Jackson songs:
Blame it on the Boogie, Startin’ Somethin’, Billie Jean, The Girl is Mine, Remember the Time, and oh hell, why not…Bad.
(Since everyone has already been tagged by this meme already, I’ll let it die here, unless you feel impelled to breathe new life into this wet, dying puppy, in which case have at ‘er my friend and reader.)
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The budding literati are at it again!
1967: The Last Good Year is a good follow-up to Reflections of a Siamese Twin. I will be in town next week.
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