Scratchpad

Susan Sontag: Reborn

academia, books, solitude, truth —

19 Feb 2009

Just finished up the first set of Sontag's journals (1947-1963, age 15-30).

journal is narcissistic + speech is social + erotic + has more incentive in the feared

Also, interaction has more opportunity to alter thought? Public vs. private decision making. Similar to C. Sunstein or JS Mill ideas on the public commons, social as a corrective, truth will out, etc. This, of course, assumes the Platonic view that there is some sort of absolute truth that can be attained, no?

One must distinguish "the truth" from "the truth about." It is true that 1) it was snowing and 2) Aaron Nolan put milk in the coffee he brought me. But the truth about, e.g., I.'s and my relationship is not an inventory of what has happened, what was said, done. It is an interpretation, an insight.

...There are degrees of "truth about."

and

The Platonic view of Kant is right. I saw this in my Descartes lecture at SLC this morning.

Truth as correspondence to the facts means that the model of truth is conceived of as information.

+ these statements are true statements because it is, Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan. Introspection will never get you these results. [emp. mine]

So truth is physical and cannot be known through thinking...only experiencing (ie - you would not discover the thing that is Kabul through thought). Everything else is idea/abstraction. Logic, therefore, cannot discover truth. Philosophy cannot discover truth.

Also, her fluctuations on doing academia or doing human interaction were heartbreaking. I've already been struggling with this. If she could not figure out how to balance doing those two things at once, I do not possibly see how I can.

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To read

books, to do —

7 Feb 2009

G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World (1910)

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Order from Chaos

books, design, internet, reading, writing —

19 Jun 2008

I'm absolutely fascinated by the structure of older books. Books written before typewriters and computers. I'm looking at my copy of Democracy in America right now, for instance. The table of contents for Chapter 15 looks like this:

254 _ Unlimited Power of the Majority in the United States, and Its Consequences
257 _ How the omnipotence of the majority increases, in America, the instability of legislation and administration inherent in democracy
258 _ Tyranny of the majority
262 _ Effects of the omnipotence of the majority upon the arbitrary authority of American public officers
263 _ Power exercised by the majority in America upon opinion
265 _ Effects of the tyranny of the majority upon the national character of the Americans. - The courtier spirit in the United States
268 _ The greatest dangers of the American republics proceed from the omnipotence of the majority

The amount of information contained in each headline here is boggling to me, used, as I am, to terse and non-helpful subsections (if they exist at all) in modern book-length works. In essence, the table of contents here is what we now consider an outline - something to be done in prewriting stages but never actually shown to the reader in the completed work. And yet as shown here it makes the structure of the document, its theses and points and major themes, immediately obvious to the reader. As a designer...as a reader...as an impatient bitch...I fucking love this with every fiber of my tiny being.

It also breaks the text up into tiny, digestible chunks (notice how none of these subsections is more than a few pages at most...some not even a full page) - if I turn to any of these pages in the book, each subsection actually begins with the headline given above and is set so as to obviously indicate the start of a new section. And this makes me think of a recent discussion on the AoIR listserv in which several participants cited an Atlantic Monthly article lamenting the death of reading (yes, yet another of those goddamned 'reading is dead' articles). The gist of the article this time was that the Internet has changed reading for the worse - instead of digging into a long, windy, excessive book with loving OCD, the author now finds himself impatient with verbose crap and just wants to get to the heart of things already.*

Now - assuming for a moment that people are, in fact, expressing more impatience with what they read - could it not be because what people read is being more poorly written? Not that people are becoming more impatient or changing "how" they read? I look at the outline form used above, and it seems to me that it actually makes reading longer works of nonfiction seem significantly speedier. The design of the work means that you are getting slapped upside the head with the point. There's no hunting, wondering, head scratching, or going back to re-read. It's written linearly (something rare in modern works), the main points are immediately obvious and accessible (again - rare in modern works), and it's broken into smaller chunks that are more easily digestible.

In other words....older books are an awful lot like what is supposedly so terrible about reading on the web.

* Note: I adore reading and yet I have never enjoyed reading long winded bitches who fail to get to the point. It's one thing to read a novel that circumnavigates the globe ten times, but I have never, ever had the patience to read a work of nonfiction that does that. Has this author actually enjoyed reading long nonfiction in the past? Or are they confusing reading novels for pleasure with reading reference for pleasure? Seriously. I've just gotta ask. Did this dude really enjoy that once upon a time when he walked uphill to school in the snow both ways? 'Cause that would be really....'interesting.'

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Cometbus Guide to Used Bookstores in NYC

books, nyc, to do —

20 Jan 2008

I've been pestering S. for this list of cool used bookstores in NY ever since I left Portland. It is from the special 2006 25th anniversary issue of Cometbus (issue #50), and I haven't been able to track down a copy of my own, or even another copy of the list online. Thankfully, she finally found her copy buried under thousands of books of her own.

My goal is to visit everyone of these as a start to compiling my own list of used bookstores here in NYC. Please e-mail me ('holla,' at this domain) if you have any personal favorites to recommend).

Skyline Books

13 W. 18th St

Bookoff

14 E 41st St (near NYPL)

Community Books

143 7th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn

Uncertain if this is the same one referred to in Cometbus, but looks promising either way.

Clovis Press

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Closed. One story says it's been turned into a wine bar by local gentrification efforts.

Spoonbill and Sugartown

218 Bedford Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

7th Ave Books

Park Slope, Brooklyn - Closed

Brooklyn seems to be hard hit in the book realm.

Park Slope Books

Park Slope, Brooklyn - Closed

Another gentrification fatality.

Junk

197 North 9th St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Alabaster Bookshop

122 4th Ave

Westsider Rare and Used Books

Broadway between 80th and 81st, Upper West Side

Unoppressive, Non-imperialist Bargain Books

34 Carmine below Bleeker

Accidental CDs

location unknown, probably defunct

This used to be on Avenue A but then moved around the corner to St. Marks to squat in "the Cave." The landlord evicted the entire building with a sledgehammer about 5 months later. Unclear what happened to Accidental after that, but their original location is supposedly now a bakery that makes dog treats.

Gotham Book Mart

Closed!

After roughly 87 years in business, this one closed in summer 2007.

The Two in One Shop

52nd near 9th Ave, Times Square - closed?

I can't find any reference to this online or in the Yellow Pages, so I'm thinking it might be gone.

Mercer Street Books

206 Mercer St, NYU

12th Street Books

11 E. 12th St., Greenwich Village

UPDATE: Moved to 179 Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn in July 2008

86 Books

276 12th St, Park Slope, Brooklyn

Unclear if this is the same store mentioned in Cometbus.

Housing Works

126 Crosby St near Houston

Always a winner. Beautiful, delicious, charity.

Heights Books

109 Montague St, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn

The Strand

I should not have to tell you how to get here

Ah, a classic. Probably the first used bookstore I visited in NYC, all the way back in college. Because of its size, The Strand is great if you are looking for something specific, but it can be claustrophobic with all of the traffic and definitely isn't the place to go if you are looking to get lost in quiet stacks of books.

East Village Books

99 St Mark's Place

The Thing

1001 Manhattan Ave, Greenpoint, Brooklyn

The Vortex

222 Montrose Ave, Bushwick, Brooklyn

This used to be around the corner from The Thing and was (is?) run by the Thing's wife

List additions:

Adam's Books/Unnameable Books

Vanderbilt btwn St. Marks & Prospect, Park Slope, Brooklyn
(moved to new location in April 2009)

Tiny but enjoyable selection of art, history, philosophy, and lit books. They also have a nice rack of what look like artists' self published zines? I went here looking for an obscure title by Jenny Perlin that they carry. Very cool.

Book Culture

536 West 112th Street, Manhattan

Once upon a time this was Labyrinth Books, but they gussied themselves up and changed the name to Book Culture. Near Columbia. Lots of academic titles, and they carry course books for the uni.

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Psych

books, google, metadata —

6 Sep 2007

Err...okay, well, it would appear that literally as I was typing in the last post, Google updated book search to use subject headings! I searched for something, and then 5 minutes later searched for the exact same term again and poof! there was the option to use subjects. Now if you try a search for "fiction" it'll ask if you want American or German fiction. Yowza. Didn't exist at 4.16pm, does exist at 4.30pm.

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More on Google Book Spider

books, google, metadata, search, spider —

5 Sep 2007

Poking around Google Books a little more, discovered the following path from which metadata can be snagged to compile full details of item:

On results page, click on "about this book." Yeah. That's it. Duh. Of course, you still can't actually search on metadata, but at least it's there...you could automate a search and retrieve everything for certain keywords, then use the metadata to do a secondary "weeding."

Or, you could do this:
Google Books, search only "full view" to find complete e-books ->
On results page follow "Find this book in a library" for OCLC results ->
OCLC site, retrieve metadata for object.

Oops, is my face red. Sort of. At the same time, really, if the metadata is there, if each record is already tied to an OCLC record, is it really necessary to prevent users from searching the fields directly? Still, at least there seem to be workarounds.

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Google Book Search Blows

books, google, metadata, search —

29 Aug 2007

All I wanted to do was write a spider to steal all of the public domain books off of Google. But I can't. You know why?

You can't specifically search the metadata on Google Books.

That's right - no metadata. For you non-library/non-tech geeks out there who have no idea what I'm talking about, that means you can't do complex searches on the "aboutness" of a book. The text of a book is just text, but the metadata includes keywords on who wrote it, where it was written, when it was written, what it is about. Since a bazillion words appear in a book, it is often useful to search strictly on human-created, trusted metadata....it takes out the extra cruft and minimizes false positive results. But without that ability, you can't go "oh, Google Books, show me just the fiction," because the word "fiction" might appear in the title of an academic paper about fiction, but which itself is non-fiction. Google, as a machine, doesn't handle the difference between those two concepts very adeptly. It also doesn't appear to appreciate the difference between a book and a journal, and you can't search for items published in a particular country.

God, I hate Google more and more with each passing day.

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The Book of Disquietude....Hypertext Prose

books, form, hypertext —

14 Aug 2007

Even as I am trying to save money for moving to NY, I couldn't help but peep into Daedalus on Saturday (seriously, this is one of 5 things I will actually miss about Portland - I don't think there is a better bookstore anywhere). I ended up carting off 3 books, including Pessoa and Zenith's The Book of Disquietude, Picard's Affective Computing, and Ullman's Close the the Machine.

I've started in simultaneously on all three. At this particular moment, though, I'm thinking of Pessoa's (of course, in another two hours, it'll probably be Picard). It's an interesting form - throughout his life he worked on this semi-autobiographical prose piece...almost like a diary, random thoughts, text snippets, and scribblings on envelopes, ledgers, papers, journals, or whatever was handy, and which he would then throw into a trunk, rearrange periodically, put some bits together in an envelope, others languishing in the trunk, others elsewhere. The book was never completed in his lifetime, and so he basically left behind these....pieces. Snippets. Thoughts.

Then the editors found them and had a field day, putting them together this way and that, rearranging, choosing, sifting. Every version of the book now published is a little different. Different order, different message, different focus. Given this, there's no reason that the reader has to go in this order - you can read it however you want and get a different story, but still the same history, every time. It's 1920's hypertext.

Normally I find hypertext fails to live up to the hype in the name. It's poorly written, the story itself doesn't gain anything by being non-linear. It's just a tired gimmick stretched thin. But in this case, I'm intrigued by the form. Given some of what I was discussing earlier on how the mind makes connections between different events and bits of information, I think such a form of prose offers interesting possibilities. As just one example, I think it'd be awesome to design a system where each of the snippets is exploded out in a database and the user can actually rearrange the story into the form that makes the most sense to them, save it, and order a print on demand book from the results.

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