author: John Lanchester
name: Steev
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2013/01/23
shelves: novels, own-it, fun, food
review:

author: John Lanchester

name: Steev

average rating: 3.80

book published: 1996

rating: 4

read at: 2013/01/23

date added: 2013/01/23

shelves: fun, food, own-it

review:
This novel really has an odd arc to it. It starts out as an almost plotless meditation on fancy food and cooking. Then it gradually, very gradually, becomes the story of a scary, diabolical sociopath. As someone recently more and more interested in fine cuisine and the culinary arts, it was challenging but not overly so to make it through the first 170 pages or so of the gourmet musings of the narrator. And then it starts getting really juicy, though still full of ever so erudite foodstuff trivia.

[spoilers removed]

I'm delving lately into boxes full of old cassette tapes I've been carefully storing. Some are over 20 years old.  So far they still sound okay.  These tapes contain some of my very early forays into making music as a self-identified "composer" and "fine art" or "experimental" musician.  Some of them I released to the public, under the aegis of a cassette label called Viral Communications, which I operated from approximately 1992 to 1996 (the name inspired by William S. Burroughs and his writings that "language is a virus from outer space"). With this label I produced seven albums, which included my work, recordings by some bands I was in, as well as a compilation of music by various fringe Ann Arbor artists and an album by an avant-jazz group some friends were in. With the founding of VirComm, I launched myself into a thriving, pre-internet long-distance community known as the zine and cassette underground.  I published a zine called Synergy (which I will be scanning and re-releasing soon), and sent that and my tapes out to dozens of other zines that reviewed them, and a handful of people ordered stuff and wrote me letters and sent me their stuff.  In this age of digital recording and instant mass distribution, those days seem like a bizarre and clunky primitive world, but there was a certain exciting, rewarding aura to those odd hand-packaged cassettes and booklets that in some ways for me has still never been matched. Read more>>>

The other day I realized I had over one hundred photos on my phone that I had never downloaded (sideloaded? whatever) from it. Periodically I do that, not that often because it's a little bit of a pain, but this time I hadn't done it last since May 2012.  After the process was complete and I was looking through them all I realized that it was interesting how the things I took photos of were in some ways different than what I shoot when I have a "real" camera with me.  In a way it's a story of the last seven months of my life, told with the only device I had available, that I have with me all the time.

Since the cameras on phones are pretty low quality compared to dedicated cameras, and my phone's cam is especially bad, that means I'm usually only snapping a photo when I'm going about my regular life - I don't go out on a project to shoot cell phone photos. It's only while I'm on my way to do something else and I run into something weird or notable, or, in a few cases, i want to take a photo of the camera that i'm using to shoot something else in a more high-quality way.

It's interesting, for me at least. Just to click through them and get a different angle on last year.  See the whole set here.

Any sort of "connoiseurship," which might be described as an extreme
knowledgeability and affection for a certain subject or practice, is a
potential "rabbit hole" down which one could descend quite far if one allows it. 

And the internet often makes that hole deeper and, shall we say,
smoother, all the time.   Easier to fall in, easier to fall down it, both further and faster.  It might be also possible that just as there are addictive personalities, there might also be personalities that tend to do this (is this the same as obsessive-compulsive?) - not about just a single interest, but that are more susceptible to getting geeky about any specialized area.  Because "geekiness" is another word for this, isn't it - either geekiness or its dark twin, hipsterism.  Hipsters differ from geeks in that they want to use Read more>>>

This is about a bad idea, and a set of other, good ideas, and an essay by Paul Kingsnorth called Dark Ecology in which he writes wonderfully about those ideas.  It's a long (17 page), somewhat slow, meditative, and often sad piece of writing, and you're no doubt extremely busy.  And so I will understand if you don't get to it. You may not even get to this here, as you peruse the title and first few lines of this blog post in your facebook feed.  But I'm writing, here, my summary of it, so maybe at least some folks I know might get the gist.  Still, there's no way I can really replace the original, so if you do feel interested, or inspired, you should click and read.

Who is this for? Is it for you? Well, first of all if you self-identify as an "environmentalist" or as "green" or as someone interested in "sustainability," then this, and Kingsnorth's piece, is for you.  It's also for you if you care about nature and where the natural world is headed and where our society and civilization is headed. Read more>>>

As the New Year slouches into being and beyond, one thing that is a goal I have is to write more, including writing more here on this blog.  Blogging has fallen by the wayside for me in the last few years, I think mostly because of Facebook. I think this has happened to a lot of good people with blogs.  On the other hand, lots of friends who could never have been bothered to have a blog are now very regularly posting the same sorts of things that they would have probably put on a blog if they had bothered, so I'm not saying Facebook has been a complete disaster, socially at least.

However, for me, to the degree that writing helps to center the thought
process and provide a map or template for life, Facebook has served to
fragment and defocus my thinking and leave me wandering a territory I'm a
little lost in.  And so, not a 'resolution', but a loose goal, to write
more here.  And if you start coming back here you will probably see it
first.

To start, here I'm going to simply provide a bit of textual accompaniment to some recent photos.  Because what our favorite social networking service has also done is fragment and defocus my photographic practice. Or rather, the practice of organizing and presenting the output of my photographic practice. Because I've continued to takes lots of photos, some of them even quite good.  But I used to be very diligent and prompt, for the most part, about posting the better ones on my Flickr account. I invite you to click through and peruse them more thoroughly at some point. Read more>>>

author: David Foster Wallace

name: Steev

average rating: 3.60

book published: 1987

rating: 5

read at: 2013/01/04

date added: 2013/01/04

shelves: fun, novels, own-it

review:
This is an excellent novel, especially considering that it's DFW's first novel, written when he was what, like 24 or something? It's interesting to see some of the same general features and issues that he put in Infinite Jest. A sort of comedic and surreal science fictionalism; a large wasteland off on the fringes of the narrative; a dysfunctional powerful family; a structure that allows for lots of asides and loosely connected but also sort of independent stories and ideas. It's just pretty goshdarned great.