[-empyre-] Renate Ferro: What's on your Bookshelf 2021

[Alan Sondheim]

Scattered response, and fascinating reading so far - scattershot reading/ 
listening/watching -

Some of the books/authors I've been reading, things that have been keeping 
me going --

Science - weekly (this has been critical for me in terms of science 
policy, advances, discussions, technical articles) - online

Science News - covers a broader ranger than Science, good for reviewing - 
online

Spectrum Monitor - monthly magazine covering radio communications 
including radio astronomy, some television, emphasis on technical and 
cultural information - online

2600 The Hacker Quarterly - just what it says, articles on hacking and 
hacking communities (I've had two things appear in this, a third 
forthcoming) - print

Harpers and The Nation - both of these are really useful

Some authors / books -

Aristophanes (rereading in yet another version)

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Wide variety of books on electronic literature, including anthologies

John Lyly, Euphues - 1579 "novel" with emphasis on euphuism - language 
bending

Early books on net and cyberspace, for example, volume 1 of the TCP/IP
presentation, Comer; Hacking Cyberspace, Gunkel, and so forth

Nicano Parra, Poems and Antipoems (again), same with Ginsberg, di Prima,

John Bercow (ex-Speaker of the House of Commons), Unspeakable - remarkable 
description of Britain at the end

Writings by Bruce Barber on Art

Various foundations of mathematics texts while I try to figure out the 
propositional calculus

Philip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern formation in nature, which 
relates to everything from cellular automata to catastrophe theory

Attas/Lichtman/Pillai, Cellular and Molecular Immunology, 6th ed. (all I 
could afford) which I tried to read in relation to the MIT free course 
(sitting-in) on Covid

Skimming/returning to books re: The Flower Ornament Sutra, Huy-Yen 
Buddhism, Dogen, the Therigatha (Elders' Verses, Testimonies of Female 
Followers of the Buddha), Noh Plays, Han Shan too many others to mention -

Wittgenstein always useful, occasional Derrida, Emily Dickinson, Alphonso 
Lingis, uselessly trying to understand Hegel and Whitehead and their 
populariy, various Biblical texts in English, occasionally glancing at the 
Hebrew

Various books on the phenomenology of music - organology (instruments) and 
playing

Nonnos, Dionysiaca for fun (longest Greek classical epic, written around 
the fifth century A.D.) - reads like pomo insanity

Online - a lot of texts related to electronic literature; people I follow 
on Facebook including John Bennett and Karen Finley, writing that occurs 
on the Wryting-L list and Netbehaviour, and of course Empyre - and so 
forth

TV - recently narrowboat canal videographers in England on BBC and YouTube 
- musically - lot of current free jazz as well as the Traditional Chinese 
Music page on Fb -

Finally, accounts of massacres and their histories and phenomenology - for 
example Jean Amery, The Buchenwald Report, and so forth, and plague 
materials including of course Defoe's Plague Year, Camus, etc. -

One thing missing - current scholarly books - I haven't the money nor 
access to them. I do trade on occasion, cds for example for books, or 
books for books, but the prices, even the pdfs or online, are far too 
expensive for people on a budget; I've written about this before, the 
division of intellectual access and discussion occasioned almost literally 
by college degrees and memberships

-

Thank you for the opportunity!

Best, Alan