archive.Joe Lamantia.com

The other day, over a hot corned beef sandwich from the 2nd Avenue Deli, someone asked what I’m reading now. As usual, I ended up mumbling a few half complete book titles (not sure why, but I always have difficulty remembering on the spot – probably because I’ve got four or five things going at once…).

To help fill out the list, and because I’m still doing most of my writing via other outlets, here’s a snapshot of the books scattered around my house. It’s divided into helpful categories, including ‘Books I’d Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn’t, Because I’m Still Reading Other Stuff’, and ‘Books I’ve Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won’t Won’t Get To In The Near Future.’

Books I’m Reading Now

• This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Daniel Levitin
• Critical Mass: How One Things Leads To Another. Philip Ball
• Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Adam Greenfield
• Pulse. The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things. Robert Fresnay
• The River Cottage Meat Book. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
• In Praise Of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire. Mike Davis

Books I’d Like To Start Reading Soon, But Shouldn’t, Because I’m Still Reading Other Stuff

• Maximum City. Suketu Mehta
• Atlas of Novel Tectonics. Reiser + Umemoto
• Failure: Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. Various
• Istanbul: Memories of A City. Orhan Pamuk
• Uncany Networks. Geert Lovink
• The Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein

Books Recently Finished

• Sailing to Byzantium. Robert Silverberg
• A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisine. Anthony Bourdain
• The Laws of Simplicity. John Maeda
• Buda’s Wagon. Mike Davis
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Michael Pollan
• The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. Sasha Issenberg
• The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Mark Roberts, Jeff Vandermeer

Books I’ve Been Meaning to Read Sometime Soon, But Probably Won’t Get To In The Near Future

• A Thousand Plateaus. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari
• Hackers and Painters. Paul Graham
• Leonardo’s Laptop. Ben Schneiderman
• Emergence. Stephen Johnson
• In The Bubble. John Thackarra
• The Direction of Cities. John Guinther
• Home: A Short History of an Idea. Witold Rybczynsk

Bonus: Things I’m probably Never Going to Start / Finish Reading

• Women Fire and Dangerous Things. George Lakoff
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

From the good peo­ple of the EFF:
Sen­a­tor Orrin Hatch’s new Induc­ing Infringe­ment of Copy­right Act (S.2560, Induce Act) would make it a crime to aid, abet, or induce copy­right infringe­ment. He wants us all to think that the Induce Act is no big deal and that it only tar­gets “the bad guys” while leav­ing “the good guys” alone. He says that it doesn’t change the law; it just clar­i­fies it.
He’s wrong.
Right now, under the Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Sony Corp. v. Uni­ver­sal City Stu­dios, Inc. (the Beta­max VCR case), devices like the iPod and CD burn­ers are 100% legal — not because they aren’t some­times used for infringe­ment, but because they also have legit­i­mate uses. The Court in Sony called these “sub­stan­tial non-infringing uses.” This has been the rule in the tech­nol­ogy sec­tor for the last 20 years. Bil­lions of dol­lars and thou­sands of jobs have depended on it. Indus­tries have blos­somed under it. But the Induce Act would end that era of inno­va­tion. Don’t let this hap­pen on your watch — tell your Sen­a­tors to fight the Induce Act!

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C404 — an art/media group — brings you music icons includ­ing The Sex Pis­tols, Hen­drix, AC/DC, and Van Halen per­form­ing live in videos ren­dered in Wachowski-style cas­cades of glow­ing ASCII text.

I cre­ate cat­e­gories pro­fes­sion­ally, which means it’s almost inevitable that I’m inter­ested in things that chal­lenge and escape cat­e­gories (the “mind forg’d man­a­cles” Blake labelled so well) by their nature.

Though I’m sure this will appear in an over-miked com­mer­cial for tooth­paste or pick-up trucks soon, at the moment it’s a new way of look­ing at sev­eral very famil­iar cul­tural prop­er­ties that ques­tions the thresh­olds of recog­ni­tion, per­cpetion, and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion we rely on every day.