Eclectiana
Hey, sorry to be so absent, and absent-minded. I have been doing everything in a rather relaxed and random fashion this quarter, so it doesn't feel like I have been greatly focused on any one thing in particular. Also, somehow, it seems more respectable to proclaim your (and my) love for Chiwetel Ejiofor, since I don't have any new, bookish, objects of my affection. (And, as far as I know, Laura Cantrell is still married -- you'll have to click -- one of the things that I must learn to do is how to post pictures here.)
Anyway, what I've been reading, besides economics papers that I don't understand:
1. Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, by Timothy Garton Ash. I know this sounds like another dorky foreign policy book, but it was lucid, commonsensical, and lucid about foreign policy, relations between countries and people, perception of countries and competition, and the folly of all that depending upon "stubborn, middle-aged men".
2. The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, but I just can't get into it.
3. Martin Heidegger, by Timothy Clark, and What is Called Thinking? by MH himself. I'm in a new Heidegger reading group in my department, which I really like, but I am struggling to understand his work. I read the first five pages of his first essay five times last night -- what I need to do is just to push beyond the beginning and go on.
4. The Vanity Fair Green Issue, which sucked. Julia Roberts and George Clooney have a weird green cast to their pictures on the cover, Robert Kennedy is a hypocrite, and Al Gore's essay was too dull to get into. I just hope that the new Al Gore documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" is as funny and rehabilitating for as his reputation as reported. I'm not sure if global warming is either just big in Seattle, or a hot topic (pun intended), or both, but there are two global warming talks on tonight, and today, even I'm over-loaded by global warming information.
5. And I have been buying a lot more books, but I'm not reading them. Sigh.
posted by David @ 6:42 PM
2 Comments:
Seriously, I go away, and the book club starts hibernating or something!
Anyway, I need to comment on the Heidegger reading group. Why can't I get away with titling my essays things like that?
Isn't the prospect of hearing Al Gore say anything else about global warming horrible enough for people? Didn't anyone else see that episode of Futurama where they destroy the universe and are left with nothing to do but play D&D for the rest of eternity? And Al Gore has a +1 Mace?
OK, OK, you are both right to call me out. I have been too busy, yet still spending a lot of the time on the computer, so I have no excuses.
Also, my book choices -- how are they? I don't feel like we have a whole lot of overlap between your two choices and mine.
Part of my problem is now that I am free of statistics, I am joining or starting up reading groups left and right. I'm in a Chinese cities reading group, I'm in a Heidegger reading group, and I am thinking about starting an urban literature reading group -- maybe that will give me better fodder to work with.
So, part of me wants Al Gore to become more relevant, funny and interesting, all of the things that... the other part of me knows that he is not.
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