So Little Time/Outboard Brain

Being in France gives one lots of ideas for reading — after going to “Versailles”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0521599598/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link to realizing how “French Theory”:http://www.amazon.com/French-Theory-Foucault-Transformed-Intellectual/dp/0816647321/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product spread “in the United States”:http://www.amazon.com/French-Theory-America-S-Lotringer/dp/0415925371/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product. At the same time one of the recent scandals here about “students prostituting themselves”:http://www.amazon.fr/prostitution-%C3%A9tudiante-nouvelles-technologies-communication/dp/2353410294/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214249456&sr=8-1 in order to pay their way through college which of course would never happen in the United States… uh… or “would it”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/23/stripper?

At the same time, there are the usual projects that continue to follow me around: “Early Kinship”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1405179015/ref=pe_5050_9414170_pe_snp_015 edited by Wendy James looks interesting, as does the new edition of “Identity and Control”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8672.html. Over at Savage Minds I’ve been turned on to “Malcolm McCullough”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mmmc/ and I have to admit I’m curious to see what Habermas has to say about “religion and science”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0745638252/ref=s9sims_c2_img1-rfc_g1-2991_g1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0E52FKZ118AKSTTM5QHA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=320448701&pf_rd_i=507846 — apparently this is a topic he’s taken up with the “Pope”:http://www.amazon.com/Dialectics-Secularization-Reason-Religion/dp/1586171666/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b. There are other things, further afield. I am not sure how successful this book on “taxidermy and colonialism”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/W/wakeham_taxidermic.html will be, although this “collection on consumption in the 17th and 18th century”:http://www.amazon.com/Consumption-World-Goods-Culture-Centuries/dp/0415114780/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product fields a lot of winners.

Ok that came out wrong.

What I meant to say is: damn, if you had to own only one book by Philip K. Dick, “this would be the one”:http://www.amazon.com/Philip-K-Dick-Stigmata-Eldritch/dp/1598530097/ref=sr_11_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1205824664&sr=11-1 — the price is right (US$24) and the selection is superb. I imagine the intro from Lethem would be pretty good as well. If you’ve never read PKD before, go out and get this volume and put it under your pillow.

Or what would be your pillow if you didn’t exist solely as a paranoid fantasy of my own mind.

Two journals that are new for me at least:

“Networking Knowledge”:http://journalhosting.org/meccsa-pgn/index.php/netknow/issue/view/1/showToc

and

“Cultural Sociology”:http://cus.sagepub.com/

“Selective Remembrance”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/241516.ctl — a new edited volume on archaeology and national pasts.

“Psychedelic White”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/saldanha_psychedelic.html — sounds interesting but I’m already too far in to the semester to think I’ll have time to read something so off-topic. Ah well, to file away for later I suppose.

Article of the day: “Friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock”:http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/4/438?etoc

…right after I post this link:

“Selected Essays by Nicholas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0754653307&id=BP-WezDMkDQC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&ots=ye68UnkZQf&dq=myths+of+power+ugaritic&sig=gJxPq97iGCwnbXKlAf4fiB-3KXA#PPP1,M1

I’d love to read this book, but when I see the word “Ashgate” on the spine of a book I know that means “we printed three of them and each one costs US$300″. I could just go back to the original fora where these essays were published, but they’re obscure and not available online. This kind of specialized literature is exactly the sort of thing where an open access approach would work. Ah well…

And here’s another book I’d like to get to in my Copious Free Time: “Gold Rush Capitalists”:http://www.amazon.com/Gold-Rush-Capitalists-Growth-Sacramento/dp/0826328229/sr=8-1/qid=1162428785/ref=sr_1_1/002-0199581-3412860?ie=UTF8&s=books — not only is it about Sacramento, there are also cheap used copies.

I recently read — in, like, a day — _I Am Alive And You Are Dead_ by Emmanuel Carrere. It’s a biography (sort of) of Philip K Dick. I’ve always loved read PDK and I knew that they were all more or less true. That is to say, that he struggled with mental illness, died believing God was beaming information into his head, that he transcribed his own exegisis of the bible/science fiction novel that would eventually be articulated through him and so forth. But I had no idea just how bizarre Dick’s life was, which is to say, crazy beyond belief. He is the archetypical person who is too smart to go crazy but does so anyway — definitely a type I’ve encountered more than once in my life.

Carrere’s prose is racy and streamlined and clearly very French, although it never suffers from appearing to have been thought in one language and then written in another. Apparently there is now an extensive literature on PDK, none of which I’ve read. So while I have no idea how Carrere compares to the others, I must say that as far as I am concerned if you are looking for just one book to read on PDK this is it. It is a biography, but it is written as a novel in the third person but with long passages explaining the various mental worlds and dilemmas that PDK was living through. However it is also a guide to the content of his most important novels. This treatment of the subject, ignoring as it does the line between documented events, what the author merely imagines his subject to have felt, and the description of the actions in various novels, is quite fast and loose with the facts. This would only be a problem, of course, if your subject was anyone but PDK, who really didn’t see any difference between all of these worlds.

Given the ultimate tragedy of PDK’s life, the book is more than a little depressing. But the audacity with which PDK lives means that it is also very funny. And most importantly, it’s a fantastic read about a fantastic author. I highly reccomend it.

I’ve mentioned “Liberty Fund”:http://libertyfund.org/ in the past as a good source of classic social thought. When I visited their site recently again today I was flabberghasted to see that they now also have the “Online Library of Liberty”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/index.php featuring an absolutely sick collection of open access full text. This includes not only important but difficult find pieces like “Millar’s”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Author.php?recordID=0660 The Origin and Distinction of Ranks but also works that are not from their print catalog — public domain pieces which they have reproduced as HTML. So now not only can you read “Origin and Distinction of Ranks”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Author.php?recordID=0660 (warning: 2 meg PDF) but also the HTML of “Letters of Sidney, on Inequality of Property. To which is added, a Treatise of the Effects of War on Commercial Prosperity”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Book.php?recordID=1318. Their catalog is very deep and includes many important thinkers and is a superb resource for teaching. Thanks Liberty Fund!

Via a few links via Leuschke, the superb poem “The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered”:http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v10/0368.html

Enven though it’s been a long time since Martha Nussbaum supervised my MA and I lost contact with a college friend who went on to study with Josh Cohen, I’ve still kept in touch with the “Boston Review”:http://www.bostonreview.net/. It’s a politics and literature rag done in a popular style by academics. They’ve always been particularly good about putting their stuff online, even though their website has not been nearly as fancy as that of some journals. But just recently I visited and noticed they now have an RSS feed and have gotten around to putting there “Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR22.5/toc.html debate online as full text. I use this debate in my intro anthro class all the time and highly reccomend it.

So congratulation and thanks to the Boston Review for opening up their content and providing an RSS feed for their site!

Amazon has lots of great ‘listomania lists’ but my curremt favorite is “Mothra — Secret Message of ‘Mothra’ — Why Can She be Over Godzilla?”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/2EAAG2EQEYD86/102-8716047-1531308?%5Fencoding=UTF8. Not only does it have an extensive discography of Mothra films, but it drifts off in all sorts of other wonderful directions, including books on nuclear testing in Micronesia, histories of post-war Japanese reconstruction, to Holocaust revisionism. The comments are as random as the items on the list. About “Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right” the author of the list remarks “The rhythm of ‘Mothra’s Song’ is adopted from common one among Indonesian and Japanese traditionals. Now, you know what is symbolized by captured little twin fairies.” EXACTLY.

Other listomania lists by the author include “Books by Edgar Cayce Himself,” “Yes, I still love Edgar Cayce,” “Books About Auto-Urine Therapy,” “Manchuko You May Not Have Known,” and “Best Economical Beethoven Complete Symphony Box Sets.”

EXACTLY.

A colleague of mine finally got sick and tired of lousy anthropology textbooks and did a sweeping review of the available options. She finally decided that Oxford’s “Anthropology: A Very Short Introduction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0192853465/qid=1130009100/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&s=books was the way to go and, having checked out the book, I must concur. It’s a marvel of concision, readability, and thoroughness — perfect to assign short chapter of while moving through ethnography with your students. In fact, the “entire series”:http://www.oup.co.uk/general/vsi/ seems to be absolutely splendid. I mean, they have a very short introduction to _Clausewitz_. The opening paragraph of the very short introduction to Judaism is:

Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? To the botanist it is undoubtably a fruit, to the chef a vegetable, but what would the tomato itself say? if it thought about the matter at all, it would probably have the same sort of identity crisis Jews are apt to get when people try to strait-jacket them as a race, an ethnic group, or a religion. Neither tomatoes nor Jews are particularly complicated or obscure when left to themselves, but they also don’t fit neatly into the handy categories such as fruit or vegetable or nation or religion which are so useful for pigeonholing other fods and people.

What a wonderful little paragraph — exemplary of the concision and verve I urge on my own students. I think there are more of these pocket-sized volumes in my future.

My wish to read new things outside of my speciality refuses to face the truth of the futility of keeping up with so many areas of study outside of my speciality despite the ever growing piles of things I Still Haven’t Read. Although I on CV I describe this weakness as a ‘research focus’ called ’social theory’ the fact of the matter is that I am a hopelessly addicted amateur intellectual historian (i.e. a Reedie). As a result two relatively new journals caught my eye recently. This first, “Modern Intellectual History”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=MIH, has a recent issue with articles on the history of Ann Raynd and the conservative movement in America as well as an excellent — and for me, very informative — article by Susan “Down From Olympus” Marchand on Orientalism in nineteenth century Germany. The editorial board of the journal is also very impressive, featuring names that even non-specialists like I recognize: David Armitage, Prasenjit Duara, Malachi “the Cohen” Hacohen, Thomas Haskell, Martin Jay, Bruce Kuklick, Anthony Pagden, and Fritz Ringer, to name just a few.

The other journal I stumbled across is the “Journal of Classical Sociology”:http://jcs.sagepub.com/. Don’t let the title fool you — it appears to be dedicated entirely to Max Weber, with occasional excursions into Durkheim and Sombart. For those of us who still thrill to the tables of contents of late 70s/early 80s issues of Economy and Society, the JCS is kind of like Angel — same characters, same writing, but a smaller cast. Plus it has articles with titles like “If Goffman had read Levinas”:http://jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/179. How can you go wrong with that?

The book I’m really waiting for — but won’t be out for some time — is “E.T. Cultures: Anthropology in Outer Spaces”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=929162117653&Bmain.Btitle_option=1&Bmain.Btitle_=&Bmain.Btitle_option=1&Bmain.Btitle=E%2ET%2E+Culture&Bmain.Subtitle_option=1&Bmain.Subtitle_=&Bmain.Subtitle_option=1&Bmain.Subtitle=%3A+Anthropology+in+Outerspaces&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP1&Bmain.subject_BIP1=&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP2&Bmain.subject_BIP2=&distinct=Bmain.subject_BIP3&Bmain.subject_BIP3=. My dreams of doing a ‘First Contact’ course that isn’t just about Papua New Guinea continue to percolate…

After a month of traveling literally from Beijing to Bangor I’ve managed to wrap up a very nice trip to China as well as to my Scarily Erudite Beloved’s parents and future affines). Most of my time was spent knocking around rural China looking for ancient temples and visiting millennia-old graves. This sounds cool, and it was. But trust me — “looking for ancient temples and visiting millennia-old graves” really means “hours and hours taking the bus around rural china.” Nevertheless, I had a wonderful time and have many insights into modern and ancient China, Buddhism, and the human condition more generally. However, since over educated white guys musing on their encounter with East Asian culture is one of the internet’s most overdone cliches, I’ll spare you the details and tell you instead what I thought about the reading I took along.

_The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir_
I got about two pages into this and realized why I disliked existentialism — the endless dreary tone. Also the book is quite challenging and I had little concentration or time to read with a pencil (which I alays do for ‘real’ books I read) so: I didn’t read it.

_The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald_
I’m strangely triangulated to the classics through my time at Reed and Chicago. Picking this up once again is like meeting an old flame and remembering why you first fell in love — and why it couldn’t last. Just comparing the book in my hands — the same one I read my freshman year of college — with my memory of it was interesting. For instance: I forgot Diomedes existed. I was more attuned to the poetry of Fitzgerald’s translation, which was indeed remarkable. But after a while it drops away in front of a narrative which, as my scarily erudite beloved points out, reads like console text of Worlds of Warcraft: “Diomedes attempts mighty cleave against Agithor. Hit (13+12=25 vs 18 AC). Damage: 32 -5 soak. Darkness covers Agithor’s eyes.” The events described resonate more with me now as an anthropologist — I was struck by the irony of people being obsessed with honor and achievement while living in a world where everyone (the gods included) are incredibly permeable to the influence of others. Overall, I was glad I read it. Good to come home. I look forward to reading it again in 2015.

_Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, M.I. Finley_
This is Finley’s contribution to the whole 1970s slavery thing that produced books like _Roll Jordan Roll_. It is very _very_ short and also very technical and very Finley and very well-done. If you’re interested in the topic as a specialist than go for it, but if you’re only going to read one book by Finley (or even one book of essays) this shouldn’t be it.

_We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Philip Gourevitch_
I haven’t seen the film, but the book deserves all the kudos it gets. Excellent. Hats off to Gourevitch. I just wish it had more of a scholarly apparatus (bibliography, index, etc. etc.) — that must mean I’m a professor or something. This definitely fall into the ‘If You Only Had To Read One Book’ category — if you only had to read one book on Rwanda, this is the one. Today Gourvetich’s critcisms of the UN and the world of NGOs is par for the course. At the time it was prescient — he was writing when Kaplan’s ‘Coming Anarchy’ narrative of the post-cold war revival of primordial ethnic hatred was everywhere. Gourvetich historicizes the genocide in Rwanda and has an eye for the nitty-gritty ‘whats-going-on-on-the-ground’ stuff that is truly gratifying — especially when combined with his clear, moving prose.

_The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson_
Mediocre. Not sufficiently detailed in it’s futuristic background to be interesting alternate history, and not sufficiently well written — despite Robinson’s obvious skills — to hold literary interest. Vaguely interesting as an example of late cold war sci-fi.

_Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman_
Fluff! Fluffy glorious fluff fluff! A picaresque little novel featuring unchallenging, industry standard prose with a gimlet eye. A fun romp.

_A Signal Shattered, Eric Nylund_
While Neverwhere demonstrates how fun it can be to eat the entire bag of chips, A Signal Shattered reminds you why you don’t do it very often. The characters are two dimensional and occasionally downright embarassing — sexy asian cyborg assasin girlfriend anyone? — and despite pretensions to hardness the sci-fi verges on fantasy. I have to admire the brisk plotting and page-turner quality since it managed to get me to finish the book despite its other numerous drawbacks. I wouldn’t reccomend it.

_Melal, Robert Barclay_
I’m a hundred pages away from finish at the moment. Ethnographically rich, but so far the prose is remarkably pedestrian.

_Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree, Albert Wendt_
I was really afraid that I wasn’t going to like Albert Wendt, and in fact the short stories here range from OK to bad. However, Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree is itself superb — I was much more bowled over by it then I thought I would be. There is a lot — a _lot_ more Albert Wendt in my future.

_Tale of the Tikongs, Epeli Hau’ofa_
I was afraid that I was not going to like this slender lampoon of development in the Pacific. It is another book that Pacific academics and policy types have all read. My big fear was that it would not be as good as _Progress at Mbananakoro_ by O.H.K. Spate. Unfortunatly, I was right. Hau’ofa’s stories are good, but they’re not great — and they can be a bit heavy-handed at times. Spate’s send-up of development politics, on the other hand, is wickedly funny and the stereotypical characters — the development worker, the local politico — are much more finely drawn than in Hau’ofa’s work. I feel a bit bad saying this, since one represents the viewpoint of a Pacific Islander and is couched in traditional forms of story-telling and so forth, while the other is written by a former ‘expert’ of the colonial regime. But what can I say — one is better than the other and _Tale of the Tikongs_ is strong, but it’s not the strongest thing Hau’ofa has produced. For that I’d reccomend “A New Oceania: Our Sea of Islands” — an essay I think everyone who has anything to do with the Pacific should read.

_Guests Of The Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea_
Why isn’t this course being taught in every introduction to anthropology class? Not only is the prose pellucid, but it deals carefully and thoughtfully with issues of gender, religion, fieldwork in a very satisfying way that leaves tons of room open for discussion. And it’s about ISLAM and set in IRAQ which is sort of on people’s radar screen these days, you know. True it is hopelessly heteronormative, and I can see why a certain flavor of 70s feminism might have not found favor with it, but I can already tell this book will be a staple of my teaching for the forseeable future.

_Eon, Greg Bear_
Very satisfying — a bit like _When Worlds Collide_ combined with _A Deepness In The Sky_. A gradual escalation in scale combined with good pacing and three dimensional (if not deeply textured) characterization makes this a good novel depsite its being the Nth reiteration of the Rendezvous With Rama/Ring World theme. I’d reccomend it.

_Consider Phlebas, Iain Banks_
Two pages into this I realized I’d already read it. I meant to take along _Player of Games_. As far as this book goes, I think it was the turning point when I stopped thinking of Iain Banks as ‘wildly inventive’ and began thinking of him as ‘undisciplined’. I like the idea of super-intelligent space ships, though.

_World Enough and Time, Dan Simmons_
Dan Simmons wrote _Hyperion_ and _Fall of Hyperion_, which are two of my favoritist sci-fi books _ever_. So when I saw this collection featured a story entitled “The Ninth of Av” I thought: “aha!” Unfortunately that story sucked, as did the other story in the collection set in the Hyperion universe. The final two stories are worthwhile, and the author’s introduction features some interesting insights into how Simmons thinks about writing and criticism. I don’t think that poorly-understood Foucault and yet another American version of Zen is really the way to go, but it was interesting to see what he thought. This may be worth checking out of the library. Maybe.

_Murmur, J Niimi_
J is a good friend of mine and so I would have felt really bad if I had to write a review of his book and say that it was suck. Luckily this short volume dedicated to REM’s first LP is not suck. In fact its really, really good. The book does an admirable job of tacking back and forth between a very sophisticated discussion of how the equipment used to record the album to personal reminiscence about the 80s zeitgeist into which it was released to the nature of lyrics themselves. The book doesn’t just talk about the kudzu-filled cover — it talks about the natural history of Kudzu in the south. Given it’s small size it’s not clear what genre of book this is supposed to be, and this shows at times when certain narratives are expanded or contracted. Also, J spends a fair amount of time doing ‘boundary setting work’ discussing the nature and function of art criticism, the history of influence, and so forth — a tendency I’d chalk up to the fact that it is his first book, or the akward length he’s been assigned. Luckily, even when the discussion strays from REM to the role of the critic, it is still interesting to see him work through the issues (particularly his relationship with academia). So remember: J Niimi. You heard it here first.

_Joystick Nation, J.C. Hertz_
After a brief flirtation with christmatic megafauna, I’m back on course with the video game project, and doing a lot of remedial reading. This is a classic that everyone but me who thinks about videogames has read, except now, since I’ve read it too. It’s dated, and some more recent stuff has updated and replaced individual chapters, but the book still shines and is at times laugh-out-loud funny. I can see teaching the chapters on “Why Doom Rules” and “A La Recherhce du [sic] Arcades Perdu” — which (unfortunately) does not riff off of Benjamin and Proust nearly as much as it should.

_Everything Bad For You Is Good For You, Steve Johnson_
Steve Johnson took my money _again_. I read his _Emergence_ at the same time I read _Linked_ — a similar book written by a scientist who studies science. I didn’t understand at the time why Johnson was being so hyped when _Linked_ was so much better. So I picked up _Interface Culture_, the first book to establish him as a popular science writer during the internet boom. I disliked intensely. I swore he wouldn’t get any more of my money. However, _Everything Bad_ has a section on video games, it was favorably reviewed in the New Yorker and other such forums, I thought I might be able to teach it, and the only library in Honolulu that has it has it checked out and waitlisted. So I paid my money and read it on the plane. Don’t bother. _Everything Bad For You_ is bad for you. Steve Johnson took my money _again_.

_In Praise of Theory, Hans-Georg Gadamer_
I was going to take along _The Enigma of Health_ but took this instead. It’s a collection of the essays in which Gadamer articulates most clearly his diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity. Unfortunately Gadamer — a philosopher who once admitted that he “only read books at least a thousand years old” and who was almost late to his own dissertation defense because his coat has frozen to the door of his rural, unheated house — is not at his best here. There isn’t any original social diagnosis, and from the point of view of an American who grew up with electricty his rural German suspicion of technology seems naive. Even the artle on the philosophical relevance of the hand to modernity — which could be great — is disappointing. So no, this is not Gadamer’s strongest work — at least not he essays I read.

I’m off to China for a month and have no idea whether I’ll blog the trip or not. Given the length of the trip (crossing the Pacific is _suck_) I’ve been busy planning my reading list. I’ve been aided by a recent library sale as well as one of the local bookstores in town going out of business. I really want to take more but I know that is my Bibliophile OCD talking. The plan is to ditch most of the books as I am done reading them so as to lighten my load as I travel. Here is what I am planning to take with me:

_The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir_
I am having a rapprochement with existentialism. Or at least a cease-fire. Any way it cost US$.25.

_Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, M.I. Finley_
It’s always a good idea to read more Fnley, especially if you are also reading…

_The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald_
Its been a decade. Time to come home.

_We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Philip Gourevitch_
I didn’t see the movie — the least I can do is read the book.

_The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson_
I’ve never read anything by him. Don’t care about Mars, do care about California.

_Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman_
Another novelist I’ve never read.

_A Signal Shattered, Eric Nylund_
ANOTHER novelist I’ve never read. Must keep up with the sci-fi world.

_Melal, Robert Barclay_
Honolulu is to Micronesia as Auckland is to the Pacific. You walk around here and and people are shocked you call yourself cosmopolitcan and have never been to Kosrae. Melal is widely-read and -taught. Consider it remedial Micronesia reading.

_Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree, Albert Wendt_
Generally considered one of the greatest novelists the Pacific Islands has produced, I see Al Wendt at tons of events in Honolulu and have never read anything by him. Remedial Pacific fiction reading. Sometimes I wish I liked reading Pacific fiction more than I liked playing GTA.

_Guests Of The Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea_
Classic ethnography for intro courses. Will teach in fall. Particularly apropos for students connected to the military here in Honolulu.

_Eon, Greg Bear_
I saw Greg Bear speak once at LISA and thought he was fascinating. I read _Darwin’s Radio_ and was incredibly disappointed. I’m giving him another shot.

_Consider Phlebas, Iain Banks_
I used to really love Iain Banks and if I ever teach my ‘first contact in sci-fi’ course _Excession_ will be on the syllabus. But lately the culture novels seem ‘undisciplined’ rather than ‘inventive’ to me. We’ll see how it goes.

Another blast from my past, this time more up-beat. My memories of Marc involve… well… let’s just say I’m not surprised that he’s an entrepreneur, or that his “essay on Yahoo 360″:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6771 is so good. It gives me a warm, self-induglent feeling to be in on the joke when Marc writes that “discipline is complete when the subject-line disciplines itself .”

For fans of “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576753018/104-0552802-2479935: “The Economists Tale”:http://zedweb.cybergecko.net/cgi-raw/a.cgi?1%2084277%20184%201 by Peter Griffith over at “Zed Books”:http://zedbooks.co.uk/

Soon, soon I will do a literature review of the ethnography of IFOs.

If your idea of a good time is writing wikipedia entries on obscure (preferably nineteenth century) intellectuals, then you’ll love the “Biographical Memoirs of the British Academy”:http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgi-bin/somsid.cgi?page=memoirs/index&session=826924A and the “Biographical Memoirs of the National Academies of the United States of America”:http://lab.nap.edu/nap-cgi/discover.cgi?term=biographical+memoirs&restric=NAP&GO.x=0&GO.y=0. The British memoirs are fantastic — “J.A. Barnes’s memoir of Evans-Pritchard”:http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgi-bin/somsid.cgi?page=73p447&session=777523A&type=header has long been a favorite of mine. Unfortunately, you have to pay ten pounds — which these days comes to roughly US$756,285 — to download the PDF. However if, like me, you’ve ever attempted to locate the Proceedings of the British Academy in a library, much less find an _index_ of it, you’ll know how valuable this online reference is. Of course I find this out _after_ I move to an island where holdings for this serial only go back to 1990, and then only in a library ravaged by a flood which is now closed-stack. *Sigh*

The National Academies, on the other hand, have “over three thousand free eBooks”:http://www.nap.edu/. Clearly someone l33t has gotten the ear of someone in the academies — the “about page of the Open Book initiative”:http://www.nap.edu/info/site.html lists the site’s ‘programming/scripting tools’ as “Perl,PHP, BBedit, Vedit,vi,Emacs,Kate,Cooledit”. If you guys are watching your referer logs: thanks tons for this great resource, and keep up the good work.

Canada’s “International Development Research Center”:http://web.idrc.ca/ (IDRC, or, as they say in Quebec, ‘CRDI’) has a gaggle of “books on development”:http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-8958-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html, many of which are on topics such as indigenous people, development, conservation, and other topics that might be of interest to the anthropologist. Many of these books are for sale as treeware, however some, such as “In The Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects, and Globalization”:http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-58137-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html (copublished by the excellent “Zed Press”:http://zedbooks.co.uk/) are available online for free if you’re willing to scroll down to the bottom of the page to get to “the online version”:http://web.idrc.ca/openebooks/004-7/.

Crooked Timber is running a round up of China Mieville news. I’ve only read Perdido Street Station and thought it was awesome, but not perfect — sometimes Mieville just didn’t know when to turn off the tap. Nonetheless I’ve found his criticism of fantasy as a genre fascinating and loved the leftist slant of Perdido — humans and vodranyoi unite against the bosses! — and it’s attempt to see species interests as obscuring more true, class interests super cool. Based on the entry on Crooked Timber, it may be time to pick up Iron Council.

So let’s say you were teaching a course on ‘virtual worlds’ in the fall, and then realized that you had signed up to help organize a conference on the second week of the course. Which films would you show while you were away? So far it appear to me that there are three that speak most clearly to the course, although length, availability, and so forth are still up in the air. Gamerz looks to be the best for what I’m looking for. PBS has — as usual — an educational documentary entitled Video Game Revolution. Finally, there is the recent, Tony Hawk-hosted Video Game Invasion. Now the biggest question — how do I get copies over the island?

Books I found out about this Thanksgiving vacation and would like to read, but almost definitely will not get around to reading:

Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change, Mark Blythe.
The Gospel of the Germs, NancyTomes. Has the Sato Seal of Approval.

Remaindered:
Frantz Fannon: A biography, David Macey.
The Making of New World Slavery, Robin Blackburn

Before I forget:
Farfarers by Farley Mowat. Why not?
The Australian Frontier Wars, John Connell.
Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession
Great Southern Land: A new history of Australia. Definite 22 Books candidate.

You may not like emporer Palpatine, but you have to admire his gumption when it comes to Death Star building. Equally there are a number of people out there who are I fundamentally disagree with but still have some pretty mad skillz. Here are some book that I suspect I would learn a lot from, even though I think their authors are on the wrong side of issues that I care about:

An Unorthodox Soldier: Timothy Spicer is the guy who was in charge of the private military force that the Papua New Guinea government hired to attack and kill its own citizens . Currently contracting in Iraq, Spicer is an extremely competent soldier associated with Sandline and Executive Outcomes. I am anti- what he did in Papua New Guinea, but getting inside his head would be pretty interesting. That’s why I wouldn’t mind reading his book, although Amazon tells me it is more methodical than lively.

Speak Up With Confidence: How to Prepare, Learn, and Deliver Effective Speeches: Jack Valenti is a war hero. He also spent almost 40 years as the faceman for the Motion Picture Industry Association of America. In this guise he was responsible for propgating a whole slew of ideas and opinions about how copyright works that I consider deeply, deeply messed up. But he was around for forty years because he was a fantastic, fantastic speaker. Don’t believe me? Check this out (warning: streaming RAM file). We must learn his secrets in order in order to harness them for the forces of good.

I thought maybe I’d use this blog to keep track of my reading habits. I’m sort of hoping public disclosure will make me work harder. Back at the end of March I made a list of books that I wanted to read. It’s now July. How did I do? There were 25 books on the list. Of those 25 I read 3 (Cassini Division, A Case of Conscience, and Rise of the Vulcans) in their entirety. I also made partial progress on 3 (Titus Groan, Hard Travel in Sacred Places, Hans-Georg Gadamer) but then stopped for various reasons. In addition I read the following books that weren’t on the list:

Fall of Hyperion
Speaker for the Dead
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Pattern Recognition
Norstrilia
Free Culture
Left Hand of Darkness
Consider Phlebas

Those are the ones that I remember, at any rate. March was a long time ago. This doesn’t count the articles and book chapters that I’ve read for the diss. It counts only the full-on books I’ve read from beginning to end. What does it say about my reading habits that I’ve read just over 10% of the books that I planned I was going to three months later? Basically, that I did a pretty poor job of covering the list. But more tellingly, that the list was ambitious – an account of what I wanted to read or (more accurately) the kind of reader I wanted to be three months down the road. So I listed too many books. It’s also worth noting that my intrests shifted almost as soon as I had made the list. Over the years I’ve noticed that this is a typical pattern for me – as soon as I find out about (or buy) a book, my interests shifts somewhere else. I’m restless like that. Finally, the list of books is most obviously shaped by availability – of the three books on the list I read, I checked out two from the library and already owned one. Same thing with the 9 other books I read – two were from the library, three were loaned to me, and four I purchased. In fact, of the original list, I owned six of them, which is why I didn’t read them – I figured I could read them any time. Also, many of them (Code, the Gadamer bibliography etc.) require some concentration and take a long time to read, whereas the books I did read were super light-weight and I could read them in an afternoon.

How much do I read in general? I’d call the last three months a pretty light reading period for me, since I’ve been writing my diss and playing large-scale video games like Knights of the Old Republic. Even my academic reading – Carsten, Chakrabarty, a few others – has been pretty low. So hopefully I’ll be able to get back to work and read more in the future. While I might still read some of the other books on the old list, I’ve got a new list now. Here I’ll list just the books that, off the top of my head, I can remember purchasing in the last 6 months:

Endymion
Rise of Endymion
Foundations Fear
Player of Games
History of Ethnological Theory (Lowie)
Mandarins, Missionaries, Jews: The Jewish Experience in the Chinese Empire
Islam: A Short History
A History of Europe (Roberts)
Chicago: City of the Century
Publics and Counterpublics
Culture: The Anthropologist’s Account
After Kinship
Voices of Modernity
The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Village
Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliation (Simmel)

I’ve been cutting down my book buying since I’ll be moving and this changes how one acquires for your personal library. Almost all of these books were bought on sale, either at the Brandeis book sale or the Seminary Coop’s end-of-the-year sale.

If I was really scrupulous I’d track my article reading (and xeroxing) and my library borrowing. But that would be too crazy. At least for right now.

Recently released books about Melanesia/Pacific:

Dictionary of Kyaka Enga, Papua New Guinea
by Norm and Sheila Draper. Kyaka Enga isn’t much like Ipili, but this promises to be the most substantive linguistic work on Enga since Lang’s hoary old dictionary, so I’l do well to check it out. It’s 700 pages long!

Crime, Corruption, and Capacity in Papua New Guinea
by Maxine Pitt. Frankly, you can never quite tell how good some of these offerings from the Asia Pacific Press are – they range from excellent to embarassing. I don’t know who Maxine Pitt is, but regardless of quality this is the sort of book I need to read.

Papua New Guinea’s Last Place: Experience of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison
by Adam Reed. I’ve seen Adam give several papers and I can safely say his work rawks. The book is about Bomana – the maximum security prison south of Port Moresby. Its out of my strict range of interests, but just sounds fascinating!

Violence: Theory and Ethnography
Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip
By Strathern and Stewart. What can I say? How much quality can we expect of anyone who puts out four books in two years? Well these two touch on stuff I’m interested in, so they’re at least worth a glance over.

Under the Gun: The Small Arms Challenge in the Pacific
by David Capie. An academic, Pacific version of Bowling for Columbine. Must check it out.

A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands
by Sinclair Dinnen etc. Sinclair Dinen on indigenous notions of justice. I suspect I won’t like it, but since he is the law and order guy, I should at least take a look.

A History of the the Pacific Islands
by Steven Fisher. Only 240 pages – but I’ve been looking for years for a well-written, up to date history of the Pacific as a whole, and I just think On the Road of the Winds isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Passage of Change: Law, Society and Governance in the Pacific
Anita Jowitt etc. It’s about governance in the Pacific. I should take a look. Can you tell how enthused I am?

Land Registration in Papua New Guinea: Competing Perspectives
By Hartmut Holzknecht, Jim Curtin, Peter Larmour. Aha! Smart guys talking about Land Registration! Excellent.

Aspects of Conflict in the Contemporary Papua New Guinea Highlands
Another excellent-looking edited collection that is right up my alley. This falls in the ‘must order’ category.

Ran into two interesitng looking books at 57th street today – Stealing the Network, a sort of Cuckoo’s Egg meets O’Reilly in a Nutshell type volume, and Pause and Effect, a book on ‘interactive fiction’. You know, gorgeous with futuristic and heavy card stock. What struck me was the analysis of Renaissance painting. Looks interesting. I will, however, never read either of these books.

In an attempt to stop keeping my lanthorn behind a bushel I’ve been getting out more – which means more trips to the library and bookstore. Here are more books I’d like to read but never ever will:

First and most obviously, there is the vitally important task of reading everything ever written about Lindy. So we have Jazz Dance: The Story of an American Vernacular, the classic (1963) although now dated volume, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance looks to be more interesting. I must say I’m sketpical of investing time in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts , but at least one person says it ‘changed their life’, and since I’m not actually going to read any of these anyway, why not put it on the list? Jookin’ : The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture also seems worthwhile.

And then there’s Kenneth Burke. What ever happened to that guy? I mean Geertz used to worship at his feet. Got to check out the Heritage of Sociology series volume about him. That series rocks.

Also, a slew of interesting new books in at the Coop – including Aristotle’s Children, a light-weight history of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim maneuverings about the classical texst (Mainmonides, the Summa Contra Gentiles etc.) There’s also Dead from the Waist Down – a book which traces the decline (alas!) of Academics as a sexy discipline to go into. It’s one of these Oxbridge Don on a lark kinda ventures.

Less easy but more interesting is Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy, since I just can’t get enough of the whole German-Jewish Intellectual Exile kinda thing. Speaking of which, Exiles in Paradise is an account of German Emigrees in LA which somehow escaped my attention (and Amazon’s as well). Also, Katznelson’s excellent (although shoddily edited) book makes me want to read Lasswell on The Garrison State and Harz’s book on this history of American liberalism.

And then there’s early music – Bernard Sherman’s Inside Early Music is now in paper, and there’s always Haskell’s The Early Music Revival to work through.

It looks like I’m clearly off of the travel literature and back to ethnography, but ‘ve run out of steam and will have to post my interests in that particular area later. Right now I’m still plowing through Kissinger’s big (and very strange) book on diplomacy.

So they finally got around to reorganizing the Current Periodicals in the Regenstein. All on the same floor, and organized by subject instead of alpha. So traumatic! Actually, it’s quite nice to be able to hit up G and D instead of careening between Oceania, Current Anthropology and the Journal of the Polynesian Society (which was always filed as ‘Polynesian Society Journal’ . Blech).

Ton of interesting new stuff up. An article in Contemporary Pacific on Raskols and Law and Order in PNG. Tommy has an article on Judith Butler and the resurgence of Kinship studies in anthropology in the new Ethnos. Sillitoe’s Negotiating Local Knowledge volume is listed as in, but it’s not in the stacks. James Weiner is a mad publishing fool with at least three new articles out in the usual Australian journals. The Journal of Pacific History special edition on the Melanesian/Polynesian distinction is out, which I suppose I ought to at least glance at since I’ve claimed publically that one of the main authors of the issue doesn’t actually exist.

Good stuff all around – I just hope I get to some of it.

p.s. Lindy Hop – proof I may finally have to start taking the notion of ‘the black Atlantic’ seriously.