12 posts tagged “books”

i've been patiently waiting for geeta dayal's book -Brian Eno's Another Green World (33 1/3)  (part of the excellent Continuum 33 1/3 series of books) on brian eno's seminal album (Another Green World).

her intro has just been published on the 33 1/3 blog:

My own background is in the sciences, and I approached this book as a sort of scientific experiment. I came up with hypotheses and tested them by doing research... I did a lot of interviews, read a lot of books, and spent a lot of time thinking and listening. I spoke with dozens of people; one of the great gifts of writing a book on Eno is getting to interview some of the very interesting collaborators that he has worked with over the past thirty-odd years...

I read dozens of books on a number of different subjects -- from visual art to cybernetics to architecture to evolutionary biology to cooking to tape loops -- for inspiration. Of course, I read books about Eno as well. But many of the most helpful books for understanding Eno's methods are not explicitly about Eno at all. They are books like Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) A Pattern Language, Stafford Beer's The Brain of the Firm Brain of the Firm, and Michael Nyman's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) Experimental Music. What these books have in common -- besides being books that Eno rates highly -- are that they unite a variety of seemingly disparate things, and lay out general principles for thinking about these things. In this book, I look at how Eno devised his own sets of tools for thinking, such the "Oblique Strategies" cards he created with Peter Schmidt. (I used a deck of these cards myself while writing this book, whenever I reached an impasse)

more from suheir who has been keeping busy:

Book Launch for Suheir Hammad’s “breaking poems”
Thursday, October 30, 2008 6-8pm
Bowery Poetry Club, 310 Bowery, New York City $20 (with a copy of breaking poems) $10 w/out

Guests include Paul Beatty, Patricia Smith, Roger Bonair-Agard, Patrick Rosal, Aracelis Girmay, Danny Hoch and others

Suheir Hammad's break introduces English to an Arabic vernacular that startles into being an altogether new language, bridging the archipelago of a Palestine under siege to the diaspora and beyond, breaking through convention, breaking open locks on mind and heart, breaking into a music inspired by the Coltranes, Sun Ra and free jazz, Lee Scratch Perry and Ravi Shankar, a music that is at once a joyous celebration of survival and a poignant cri de Coeur that cannot be ignored and that Mahmoud Darwish should have lived to see.  This is a poetry written for people who have endured the winds of hurricanes and invasions  What wisdom, energy, joy and poignancy Hammad brings to the page-for all of this, and for teaching me a new speaking, I give her my thanks.  – Carolyn Forché

Founded in 2003, Cypher Books, a New York City-based, independent publisher is proud to present breaking poems, the second collection of poems from Tony award-winning poet, Suheir Hammad.  Consistent with Cypher's mission to publish innovative and necessary poetry, Hammad departs from her previous books with a bold and explosive style to do what the best poets have always done: create a new language.  Using “break” as a trigger for every poem, Hammad destructs, constructs, and reconstructs the English language for us to hear the sound of a breath, a woman's body, a land, a culture, falling apart, broken, and put back together again.

Cypher Books has recently transitioned from being an imprint of Rattapallax Press to a full-fledged press under the sponsorship of Bowery Arts & Sciences.   This celebration will also serve as a fundraiser to benefit future publications and programming.

i am reading the hard-work but rewarding A History of Western Philosophy by the amazingly learned lord bertrand russell. this passage struck a nerve (emphasis mine):

Our use of the phrase the "Dark Ages" to cover a period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe. In China, this period includes the time of the Tang Dynasty, the greatest age of Chinese poetry, and in may other ways a most remarkable epoch. From India to Spain, the brilliant civilization of Islam flourished... ...No one could have guessed that Western Europe would later become dominant, both in power and in culture...

Our superiority since the Renaissance is due partly to science and scientific technique, partly to political institutions slowly built up during the Middle Ages. There is no reason, in the nature of things, why this superiority should continue. In the present war, great military strength has been shown by Russia, China and Japan. All these combine Western technique with Eastern ideology- Byzantine, Confucian, or Shinto. India, if liberated, will contribute another Oriental element. It seems not unlikely that, during the next few centuries, civilization, if it survives, will have greater diversity than it has had since the Renaissance. There is an imperialism of culture which is harder to overcome than the imperialism of power. Long after the Western Empire fell- indeed until the Reformation- all European culture retained a tincture of Roman imperialism. It now has, for us, a West-European imperialistic flavour. I think that, if we are to feel at home in the world after the present war, we shall have to admit Asia to equality in our thoughts, not only politically, but culturally. What changes this will bring about, I do not know, but I am convinced that they will be profound and of the greatest importance.

napolean once said "let china sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world".

my personal china awakening (late to the party as usual) happened on my first trip to shanghai last year where I celebrated my thirtieth with some close friends. walking down the pedestrian section of nanjing road, i looked around and it suddenly seemed to me that if the rest of the world had perished in that instant, china might not even noticing. (it was a feeling rather than a thought). i have barely stopped thinking about china since.
i spent july living in beijing's haidian student district on an introductory mandarin course and then joined John Shoaf's pre-MBA Columbia World Tour in Shanghai. living in china for a few years is firmly on my life game plan map, in the meantime i am trying to learn more about the place.

james kynge, former china bureau chief of best newspaper in the world (The Financial Times), won the FT / Goldman Sachs business book of the year award in 1996 with 'china shakes the world' which is a superb, concise introduction to how and why china is shaping our world.
the first half tells the condensed history of china's post-cultural revolution rise and illuminates its leading position during much of the last six thousand years.
the book starts off recounting the mysterious disappearance of manhole covers all over the world (with plenty of reports of unsuspecting pedestrians falling into the suddenly-there holes from mongolia to montreal) as a signal of when the direction of the world - china relationship switched: the view of china flipped from how the outside world was changing china to how china was affecting the rest of the world. china's voracious appetite for almost every conceivable resource including the scrap metal that those manholes were destined to become was just one signal that the causal direction was switching.
james has plenty of engaging first-hand accounts from his two decades living in china through which it often seems we are witnessing china's economic transformation unfold through his eyes.

some of the major themes / ideas that run throughout include:

• businesses everywhere are finding it harder to compete (manufacturers in particular), the sustainability of europe's welfare state model is in question as the industrial base there is hollowed out.
• china out-competes and out-capitalizes everyone, especially america.
• chinese possess the impressive combo of intelligence and second-to-none work ethic.
• china through lowering the cost of goods and its insatiable appetite for us treasuries (in part to manage its currency) has fueled the low-iinterest rate driven housing boom and general drive for yield that has resulted in the current sub-prime, credit-crunch, free-fall dollar mess we're in. 
• 400 million people have been lifted above the poverty line over the last 28 years of above 9.5% economic growth.

a could be briefer! summary of some of the book's chapters:

rags to riches.
kynge recasts the economic revolution that started with deng xiapong's (who famously said "to be rich is glorious") reign (after the madness that was mao's cultural revolution) as one based on the creative disobedience of china's local governments rather than the top-down implementation of a genius xiapong vision (which is closer to the official line). deng's genius lay in his strategy of running with whatever seemed to be working (i.e. creating jobs). we follow china in the 80s and 90s as it takes the initial steps towards becoming the world's workshop. it's a time characterized by an impressively enterprising private sector scrambling through post-communist bureaucractic loopholes, aided by subsidized capital, power and water.
those who 'got rich first' were often the unemployed or unemployable (who had no choice but to become entrepreneurs) which made for some surprising characters filling china's rich list lists a few decades later (former convicts, peasants, etc).
 
the future is the past.
kynge attacks the historical determinism widely prevalent in today's china that its superpower status is inevitable; after all the country has laid claim to that mantle for much of the last few thousand years.
he questions whether china's status truly was as strong as is often claimed. he opines that the tang dynasty (800AD) was the country's peak (and not unrelated, also its most open period) and that china had been in a state of relative, per capita decline through the end of the cultural revolution.  

most of the chapter takes place in chongqing (once called chungking), the contemporary equivalent of chicago circa 19th century; twain wrote "...astonishing Chicago, a city where they are always rubbing a lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time". hg wells wrote of an "unwholesome reek", "a dark smear in the sky", he found it "one hoarse cry for discipline".

china is following the path trodden by america in the 19th century, or japan post-1950, but the sheer scale and speed of its trajectory puts it in a class of its own.
kynge talks about the 'compression of developmental time' when describing the unrivaled urbanization taking place. and with 700 million still living on less than 2$ a day, it can still count on pre-industrial revolution wages to maintain its competitive edge for the forseeable future.
linteresting, china studies much from america's own rise, and models its highways, railroads, infrastructure on the us (learning from its mistakes of course and leap-frogging straight to the 21st century).
this is the magic of china - it is replaying out the birth of a great american nation but on a scale that dwarfs it.

population paradox.

• kynge discusses how the lure of a billion person market often masks a highly fragmented and obliquely protected domestic market, but the foreign investments continue regardless.
  
• numbers hold a special, magical place in chinese culture (as we witnessed with 8.08pm opening ceremony on 080808).
• china takes a super-long-term approach to things: ZhouEnlai, Mao's premier, when asked whether the French Revolution had been a success, replied without irony that it was too early to tell..
• china may grow old before it grows rich (thanks to the draconian one-child policy).
• its famous lack of respect for intellectual property.
• many chinese ventures are unprofitable and propped up by state banks (the state prioritizes jobs over profits, and china's high savings means there's is plenty of liquidity).
  

china goes to europe.
james visits several cities in europe to see first hand the crippling changes that china's matchless competitiveness has wrought on the crumbling european industrial hinterland (steel mills in germany, clothing factories in italy etc).
if prato, a city that has been at the center of the global fashion textiles industry since the medici's, is unable to stand up to the chinese competition that starts with manufacturing and works its way up the value chain, in time buying brands, technology and skills, what does that say for the rest of europe and its welfare state so painstakingly put together after world war ii?

america bought and sold.
takes us to average america to show first-hand how the country's middle is being hollowed out (middle class, middle america, mid-sized businesses) and sets the scene for a possible future where the politically critical middle class turn against further globalization. the key idea here is that china started out at the bottom of the global value chain - manufacturing - but is moving higher and higher up much faster than a lot of people realize. although china is spending more and more on r&d, it still significantly lags the us on this front, but it is increasingly simply buying its way up the value chain (buying brands and the ip of companies bankrupted by china's competitiveness).

not enough to go around.
the mismatch of resources (in part due to china's inefficient, wasteful use of its geological assets) and the size of its population has meant the environment has been an incontestable loser of china's magnificent rise. but as kynge notes in the book's final pages when tempering the possibility of a military clash between the US and china, pragmatism usually wins over at least in the short-term in china and as the environmental costs to china continue to be felt, action will probably be taken. in deed the SEPA profile seems to have risen noticeably since the book was published.

we also learn about the CNOOC v congress battle, and that the commodities boom kicked off when China joined the WTO - probably not coincidentally. also, the yangtze river is running dry!

corruption and inefficiency are to blame for a lot of this (as well as a philosophical disrespect for nature).
 
collapse of social trust.
china has a rich philosophical history (we learn about the concept of ren- roughly benevolence) but as mencius said in his bull mounatin parable (on ren, human goodness):

"The Bull Mountain was once covered with lively trees.  But it is near the capital of a great State. People came with their axes and choppers; they cut the woods down, and the mountain has lost its beauty.  Yet even so, the day air and the night air came to it, rain and dew moistened it till here and there fresh sprouts began to grow.  But soon cattle and sheep came along and browsed on them, and in the end the mountain became gaunt and bare, as it is now.  And seeing it thus gaunt and bare, people imagine that it was woodless from the start."

social trust is being eroded at an alarming rate, evident in

• news with bonus (pr companies customarily bribe journalists to print stories).
• the emergence of 100,000s of private detectives a job that did not exist just over a decade ago.
• state corruption has lead to HIV infecting one million peasants and orphaned 100,000 children.
  

communism vs democracy.
kynge: "the main problem with china's political systen is that it does not permit the checks and balances necessary to supervise and regulate a capitalist society"

some personal thoughts: i believe in democratic in principle (checks and balances, efficiency, accountability, etc, legitimacy), but apart from police and military states that rule completely by fear and intimidation (saddam's iraq, iran, egypt, etc) there is an invisible social contract between party and people in non-democracries.
the lack of legitimacy conferred by elections if anything drives regimes like china, singapore and the uae to work especially hard to appease their populaces (and you can't help but be impressed with these systems' efficiency- beijing's pre-olympic transformation could only have happened in this context, india would fail given twice as long).
on balance, the loss of efficiency inherent in democracy is a worthwhile sacrifice in my opinion, but it needs renewal i think.

can we be friends?
'waishi' or foreign affairs in china often blurs the boundaries between friendship of individuals and that of states when it comes to achieving goals.
chinese schoolbooks teach that the 109 years leading up to the cultural revolution involved attackis and fireign meddling by the US, Japan, Russia, Britain and France without distinguishing between then and now (this will be unsurprising to anyone who grew up in the Middle East where the West, US, and Israel are given similar treatment) which is obviously unhelpful in building sincere fruitful relationships with foreigners.

the state uses nationalism and its ability in returning international respect and prestige to china to build its legitimacy amongst its people. but this brooding, sub-surface xenophobia is difficult to control (evidenced in the street's reactions to the US bombing of the chinese embassy in belgrade or the recurrent anti-Japanese demonstrations)

we are entering a new era of international politics defined by the geopolitics of scarcity, kynge outlines a very real possible scenario of heightened military showdowns between the US and China but ends the book on a more hopeful note extolling China's pragmatism (at least in the short-term) as a characteristic that could lead to the unprecedented peaceful rise of a superpower.

my (more worriesome) thoughts on this at the moment are that key differences between the japan and german post ww-ii rises including:

• the commitment to china's (played down) military build-up.
  
• size!
• sustained domestic pressure to grow (they need 24 million jobs a year, and must feed the increasingly rich and decreasingly agrarian population).

and china's is just as xenophobic as everyone else it unfortunately.

a must read for anyone remotely interested in what our future will look like.

a brief round-up of my summer reading bits:

the argumentative indian

amartya sen is an intellectual giant and this a collection of his essays that ostensibly prove india’s generous argumentative heritage. the book is in fact much more than an orientalism-like rebuttal of western perceptions (appropriated by the indian far-right- the original butt of the book’s rebuttal it would seem) of the indian other. it’s a delightful journey alongside an incredibly learned mind through india’s deep pluralist, rationalist, humanist, agnostic, scientific, artistic roots (and some). and a much more enjoyable read than ed said’s orientalism which set out to do something similar for the middle east. sen starts with:

"Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length. Krishna Menon's record of the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations (nine hours non-stop), established half a century ago (when Menon was leading the Indian delegation), has not been equalled by anyone from anywhere. Other peaks of loquaciousness have been scaled by other Indians. We do like to speak. This is not a new habit. The ancient Sanskrit epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are frequently compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, are colossally longer than the works that the modest Homer could manage. Indeed, the Mahabharata alone is about seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are certainly great epics: I recall with much joy how my own life was vastly enriched when I encountered them first as a restless youngster looking for intellectual stimulation as well as sheer entertainment. But they proceed from stories to stories woven around their principal tales, and are engagingly full of dialogues, dilemmas and alternative perspectives. And we encounter masses of arguments and counterarguments spread over incessant debates and disputations."

a few key recurring figures star in sen’s history: rabindranath tagore (whose school sen studied at), emperor akbar (a figure that should be made a hero in the islamic world based on this reading) and emperor ashoka all of whom require more reading on. along the way, sen finds time to illuminate the ancient china - india relationship (timely), introduce film maker satyajit ray and show the skeptical side of the ramayana (indeed, sen’s accounts of hinduism where atheism is simply one extreme of the scale are striking).
tagore in particular demands further digging, a wise, universalist, humanist with much to say on nationalism, education, politics spirituality.
riveting. required reading for anyone with even a cursory interest in mother india.

fooled by randomness
nassim nicholas taleb, the improbable best selling author of the black swan believes that success is illusionary (at times it seems he believes everything is illusionary - it’s all random, all luck!). his main thesis is that luck is often behind what we normally perceive to be success and that humans are hard-wired to under-estimate the role that randomness plays via various biases:
 

sample bias. (over-generalizing or generalizing based on unsuitable data sets, winners only for instance). hindsight bias. (given an infinite set of monkeys randomly typing away at a computer, one of them will produce an exact version of homer’s iliad, but that doesn’t mean it would be wise to invest in the monkey’s next work. i.e. past performance doesn’t tell us as much as we think about future performance). confirmation bias (erroneously fitting data to preconceived theories). etc.
our brains are programmed to find patterns in the world around us which is great in that a man having seen his friend eaten by a tiger will assume a pattern and run as fast as he can at the next tiger encounter. but it also means we often see patterns where they do not exist. not only that but we also tend to get caught in the comfort of the ‘status quo bias’.

along the way, taleb debunks traditional economics on the basis that homo economicus is an idealized fiction with little relevance to the real world. in an aside (that helped me see a super-indecisive cousin in a new light), he says that the truly rational can’t make decisions.taking decisions requires the emotional non-rational part of the brain to takeover. the truly rational mind enters an infinite loop attempting to assess the myriad alternatives aiming for perfect knowledge leading in the real world to debilitating indecisiveness.

there are also some amusing stories of characters from taleb’s wall st past often showing how ‘perceived’ success leads to misplaced confidence in traders that translates into real cockiness or charisma as it is known on the street. until that is the inevitable blowup.

the book is terribly written, but the noticeably unedited style - he calls it personable writing, is endearing. it’s also ultimately humbling (putting human success in perspective) and scary - momentarily opening your mind to the usually hidden potential for catastrophe. look forward to his religion book.

i had a great moment in beijing while i was reading the book - first, my ipod shuffles up thom yorke’s black swan and then my rss reader serves up an old link to taleb’s econtalk podcast. almost enough to make you think of hidden strings being pulled behind the scenes. i believe taleb’s next book is on religion. can’t wait.   

samarkand
amin maalouf, a new to me lebanese author and winner of the prix goncourt provided lovely accompaniment to many a beijing afternoon getting lost in hutongs, stumbling across rooftop bars and disappearing into samarkand for a few hours with some cheap white wine. it tells a semi-fictionalized tale of the famed rubaiyaat of omar khayyam that joyously blends history and and fantasy. the book is split into four parts the first three of which are superb. it’s the prose and narrative of omar khayyam writing his opus while trying to get through life doing as little else as possible so as not to interfere with his questioning, thinking and writing time, that is the book’s highlight. some of my favorites:

'The blessed time of my youth passed by,
I pour out the wine of my oblivion.
Bitter it is, and thus it please me
For this bitterness is the zest of my life.'

'A drop of water fell into the sea.
A speck of dust came floating down to earth.
What signifies your passage through this world?
A tine gnat appears - and disappears.'

"You ask what is this life so frail, so vain
`Tis long to tell, yet will I make it plain
`Tis but a breath blown from the vastly deeps,
And then blown back to those same deeps again."

we then spend time searching for the manuscript hundreds of years later during the iranian constitutional revolution and i have to say it thoroughly depressed me to read the hopes and dreams for the revolution and compare them with the bleak political realities of today’s middle east.
 
the unnecessary, contemporary, pedestrian final chapter (preposterously starring the titanic) stole much of the book’s magic for me, but it’s fortunately also the shortest.

meaning of it all

reread feynman’s posthumously published lectures on some of the meta-questions which took me back to my childhood. feynman has a very contagious (and very american to me) positivity which i love and he effuses about the joys and beauty of uncertainty. it’s hard to square (but encouraging for the rest of us) the positivity with his post-hiroshima depression during which he questions the point of doing anything having felt the devastating potential for destruction that he contributed to.
accepting uncertainty which every believer in science should without fear and with unending curiosity is the glorious ambition the book leaves you with. feynman’s recollections of how his father instilled his deep curiosity in him got me thinking about the tremendous power of parenthood and how it’s so often abused.

rhythm science
the illbient thing happened around the peak of my clubbing / 12” collecting phase and new york’s soundlab (beth coleman and howard goldkrand) were a massive influence on 9714 / mis’ early days.

spooky blew up in the early 90’s, one of the few artists to cross over to the majors and has been doing the cut’n’paste multi-media art + sound thing since and from the beginning one of the few practitioners of electronic music with intelligent thoughts on the art form. i’m always debating which he’s best at (the practicing or the thinking). part of the MIT press’ mediaworks pamphlets  rhythm science is part theory, part self-review, part paean to the mix (or the dj for whom: "All it takes is ... two turntables to create a universe"). miller puts djing in its art history cut’n’paste context. duchamp, grandmaster flash, nietzsche, wu-tang, collage, deleuze all feature in hisstory of the mix. coma) designed the gimmicky but apt (overly wrought design for an overly wrought work) book. miller’s writing style owes everything to kodwo eschun (where the hell is kodwo?) which is an obvious influence (and far superior book). a fun, quick, easy read with an excellent spooky mix-cd. there’s much to be said for reflexive artist reviews. paul d. miller reviewing dj spooky’s confuses and furthers the creative continuum.  
 

i dug up an old book (and an old jacket that i'm guessing inspired helmut lang's thumbloop phase) i bought in new york back in 1998 at maybe the hippest store i've ever shopped: 'hotel of the rising star' at 13 prince st (probably the original five green inspiration), run by a bunch of architects who sold their ORFI label (organization for returning fashion interest) and a wonderfully carefully curated collection of things including event horizon, edited by michael tarantino and inspired by a michelangelo antonioni essay (event horizon was a series of exhibitions organized by the irish museum of modern art exploring the european identity). the fifth artist page is an essay on 'calendar' by atom egoyan:

"The idea of a nation is something which fascinates me. If we are to presume that a nation is the result of a collective projection, then it is clear that the idea of national territory is more of a pyschological concept than it is a definition set by physical borders."

...

"In conceiving 'Calendar', I wanted to find a story that would deal with these three levels of Armenian consciousness: Nationalist, Diasporan and Assimilationist."

...

"The metaphor of seperation in the film ... is intended to emphasize the precarious nature of national identity."

...

"Taken outside of its source, national identity can become contrived and absurd. Yet what is the 'source' of something so complex and profound? Is it limited to a physical dimension? Can it be defined by other means? These are questions which I am still asking, and I'm excited that 'Calendar' has helped me to begin to answer."

A. Egoyan