4 posts tagged “books”

In light of the sequential nature of my final art project, my friend Pidge gave me an epic-sized graphic narrative work by an artist named Zak Smith.  The title, *ahem* Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (phew!), well enough explains the project.  The 760 illustrate pages of the book are rendered in parallel to each of the 760 pages of Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, a fascinating project on its own account. 

I briefly fingered through the first 40 out of 760 pages of illustrations, all strange and wonderful and at times so effortlessly fluctuating between the familiar and the abstract.  I had to, unfortunately, restrain myself.  I have not yet read Gravity's Rainbow,  and I sensed that it was important that I should read it  before I became to attached to the images in the book.  Before I put Smith's work to rest, I showed  the first 40 illustrations to Chico.  He marveled at them, and  immediately  thought of incorporating  them into some sort of  piece he could  hang in his house.  He determined he would buy a copy of Smith's work himself, and  this afternoon we headed to Barnes and Noble to  each pick up a copy of  Thomas Pynchon's work.

So now we are on a mission.  We're reading Gravity's Rainbow and then exploring Zach Smith's illustrations.  I think it'll change the pace of things around here.  More page flipping, less button pushing, or something to that extent.  But I'm looking forward to it.  Reading Adventures!  Horray!

      After waking up unintentionally at 6 AM yesterday, I was finally able to finish all of my work by about 9. (*joy*)  I zipped my papers up, sent them to my professor, took a shower and made quick plans to head out and go christmas shopping.  Seeing as I had been locked up in my room for the past three days with academic journals and Text Edit as my only compadres, I expected that I would steer clear of all things school related.  
      But to my surprise, I had a sudden jolt of energy to steer over to my local library and grapple some books to read over my holiday in preparation of my thesis projects.  Ever since last summer when I discovered I didn't have many books to display in my Vox, going to the library and digging up books to read has become a new thrill for me.  My favorite sections of course are the Sociology/Media Studies shelves and some of the fiction.  This time, in search for pieces about digital identity, I came up with these books:

• Cyberethics
• Nobrow : The Culture of Marketing - The Marketing of Culture
• High Tech High Touch
• New Essays on New Media
• The Search for Being : Essays from Kierkegaard to Satre on the Problem of Existence
• The Philisophical Works of Descartes (Book 1)
• Derrida in 90 minutes
• Foucault in 90 minutes

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami and 69 by Ryu Murakami. Also, when I really need to knock myself out before bed, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide by O'Reilly

I woke up this morning to find an average-sized buck outside of my window.  He was just meandering around and was relatively close to my window, so I snapped a photo of him before he jumped away.  He showed up four separate times later on in the afternoon.  Chico and I decided that its name was Bort the Buck, and it may be a peeping-tom Deer-bot out to spy on me.  Tricky stuff.

Today was all around family fun.  It's nice to have a family that has matured quite a bit over the years (as have I, naturally).  We all get along a lot better, and whenever we have the free time to share meals or do things

together we have a lot of fun.  Today was the first time I had a full-fledged family meal.  My brother has constantly been out working on his senior film, so we all headed over to a tiny cafe and had lunch, followed by many photos (my dad is quite the shutterbug too).  I went lap swimming for the first time in ages with my Dad, and had pizza on the patio with my grandparents.  Finally, Harrison and Stephanie and I all went to Safeway and picked up ye good ol' Funfetti cake mix and frosting.  Funfetti is the best insta-cake ever, hands down.

I also managed to get out Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and start to read it again.  Sedaris visited us at my college and was as wonderfully entertaining as a speaker as he is a writer.  He is going to release a twisted children's book later this year I believe, and it sounds like its going to be fantastic. 

After I put it down for the afternoon, I got really excited as I thought 'Hey!  Now I can put a book on my blog!  This is great!'.  Et voila, it is here.  I began to think of more fun books that I should read, and found some literature at my local library on Japanese Pop Culture that I'm going to dive into, plus a few more novels by the incredible Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. 

I started to think, maybe VOX will not only offer the interface that engages users to excitedly write and share, but with the additional media features, it could also engage users to listen to more music and read more books (something, that i'm almost sure most blog or cmc sites don't even begin to consider to attempt).  Its effect has tightly grasped hold of me, that's for certain.

Time for cake and a massive review of video game trailers (aka wii and ps3 sneak peeks with the lil sis and bro)! Cheers!