What's a noise dude reading?

mispelled that. Monica Youn.

also that Alex Ross book which is OKAY

still picking through that stress book from upthread. thickest skinny book I ever read. and steve friedman's the agony of victory which is a collection of features he did from a bunch of magazines and was okay but nothing I'd get for myself. and the omnivore's dilemma which seems like it might be a little below my weight but I'm just starting out and maybe I can skim all the shit I know already

I am a quietude dude but I just stocked up:

Wapshot Chronicle - Cheever
The Half Brother - Christensen
Lover's Discourse - Barthes
two 33 1/3 books
new collected Grace Paley cause I lost it in a bar

xxpost

the alex ross is probably better for classical noobs like me rather than people who actually know the music

just finished:

Mohammed Hafez "Suicide Bombers in Iraq: the Strategy and Ideology of Martyrdom"
Aristotle "De Anima" (On the Soul)

still working my way through:
Parker's enormous bio of Milton
William Empson "Milton's God"

re-reading:
Frances Ferguson "Pornography, The Theory"

just starting:
Alex Ross "The Rest Is Noise"
Daniel Boyarin "Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism"
Marshall Grossman ed. anthology "Reading Renaissance Ethics"

thomas hine: the rise and fall of the american teenager
boris vian: heartsnatcher (too cute, i think)
maeve brennan: the visitor (a bit flat, but i really like her voice and pacing)

rendezvous with rama

the alex ross is probably better for classical noobs like me rather than people who actually know the music

I think that's otm .... in any case that's why I'm reading it, to try to find a starting point on music I don't know much about but am interested in .... I'm not that far yet (still reading Tree of Smoke at the same time) but I thought the Schoenberg/Webern/Berg chapter was pretty good

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

Post-Pop Cinema tipsy mothra
Oil! Upton Sinclair

(personal)
green man - kingsley amis (alfred didn't dissuade me)
last evenings on earth - robert bolaño
laika - nick abadzis
what happens next: a history of american screenwriting

(work)
interstellar pig - william sleator
benjamin dove - fridrik erlings

Drew Daniels' 20 Jazz Funk Greats book

thanks sexyDancer!

you should write one too!

omnivore's dilemma sucks guys. I don't think I'm going to bother finishing it. this guy basically nails it (also, just like fast food nation and freakonomics which I also couldn't read, he replaces intellectual rigor with the tone of a discovery channel voice-over factoid show - it's not about ideas, it's about trivia).

which is cool because by giving pollan the brushoff I can now move on to Dorner's Logic Of Failure and Reason's Human Error

i thought it was an entertaining read, but i wasn't taking it very seriously.

reading: the essential gilbert white of selborne, american short story masterpieces, and animal vegetable miracle by barbara kingsolver (a gift i am reading out of obligation)

I'm about sixty pages from the end of the omnivore's dilemma, and have found it very enjoyable so far. precisely what is lacking, TOMBOT? sure, there's a lot of trivia, but it's journalism meant for a popular audience; "factoids" are sorta part of the deal. and as far as intellectual rigor: is it that he doesn't, as that amazon dude pointed out, proffer some sort of solution? "sucks" just seems like too strong a word, hardman.

at the end of the day, i'm all in favor of more books that shed light on our weirdly dysfunctional food system, especially when they're written by writers as good as pollan.

like amazon guy, i also enjoyed the bit on vegetarianism and singer, but that's probably because i've spending a lot of time around vegans lately and they're getting on my nerves

no that's all well and good but I think the masters' program ruined me for pop science books. magazines ok, in that format I don't expect more than what pollan has to offer - but it is kind of like a big magazine piece, and yeah, his theses seemed pretty weak right off the bat to me, plus there are several things he states as "factoids" that aren't as cut-and-dried as he makes them out to be

it is kind of like a big magazine piece

otm there. i guess that's what i expected, though

I should go looking for some big hardscience book about america's agronomy system from a systems engineering or institutional psychology or agricultural econ perspective

something with lots of ENDNOTES

tom have a 15-page draft of a paper about americans agronomy system from a pseudo-heideggerian perspective, its really inaccurate and super-pretentious and if you call me when im drunk ill read it to you in an angry tone of voice

there's a bibliography in the back; check there?

oh right!
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meals/dp/book-citations/1594200823/ref=sid_dp_av?ie=UTF8&citeType=citing#citing

max, i have a suggestion

* get drunk
* record yrself reading yr paper
* package as an "album" and bundle it with ned's discography

* ...
* profit!

or just make an mp3 and post it on leonardo

also: i didn't know amazon could do that!

tempted to buy this

The End of Agriculture in the American Portfolio
"American agricultural production is destined to end, argues Steven Blank, but this should be no cause for alarm. In this work, he shows that the changes leading to the end of American agricultural production are part of a natural process that is making us all better off. "

joel salatin does seem like interesting guy, but i am one of those vegans so i haven't bothered w/his books. the unsettling of america by wendell berry is pretty classic (written in the 70s in response to the nixon administration's "get big or get ou tpolicies"), but hes not a scientist.

the prob w/a hard science book about american agriculture is the hard science folks are always on the wrong side of the argument.

i wrote a paper on the unsettling of america in about half and hour and got a b-!

i tried to find wendell berry at the used bookstore yesterday and got stuffed

the steven blank book seems like a bad bet despite the nerd boner of being a $115 university press hardback with no dustcover thing

"planet earth" has temporarily sated my need for actual books

yeah i posted that for sheer wtfness though i would like to leaf through it at a library (xpost)

its kind of a reductio ad absurdum of free market principles in agriculture

have you been watching the vsn with attenborough's narration?

yeah, is there another one?

compelling television: bat struggling against a horde of cockroaches, thrashing in an enormous pile of its own shit

sigorney weaver did the narration for the first american screening

dead certain: the presidency of geo w bush - robert draper (just finished, pretty good)
the path to power - robert a caro (taking forever to read but a damn bloody masterpiece - reads like a political horror novel)

wittgenstein's mistress but it's pretty boring. hoping 'science in action' by bruno latour is up next.

Lordy, hard science too HARD for me...

maybe I'll read the Caro LBJ trilogy for his centennial, if only I could get an F train seat on which to read it.

the collector by fowles
canery row by steinbeck

I know it's the antithesis of noise but I love B Kingsolver's essays. They work on me.

morbs, i don't try to carry around books that big anymore, and have a shorter book for the train and longer one for home. carrying around the power broker two years ago put me in physical therapy

lol that's why I'm reading 2 books right now, Tree of Smoke is like a dictionary