May is surrealism month

Upon finishing The Physiognomy, I was suddenly filled with an unexpected and unshakeable need to re-read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.  I immediately called the Borders on Ponce and checked to see if they had it in stock, and then drove there while listening to this song (World’s End Girlfriend – Satan Veludo Children).  I arrived exactly four minutes and twenty seconds after I left—coincidentally where a lull appears in the song after an early crescendo—and walked inside to find my book.

After picking it up I decided to meander around, and I happened to stumble into a collection of Borges’ fiction, misfiled far away from its alphabetical port of call.  I’ve never read Borges but have always wanted to, and accidentally finding it amid thousands of other books seemed like way Borges was meant to be discovered.  So I purchased The Book of Imaginary Beings too.  It seems to me like they should make a pretty good couple, at least in theory.

Then I glanced at the magazines and picked up the latest issue of Hi-Fructose, where I flipped open to an article on the art of Thomas Doyle.  Doyle’s work felt like something out of a Kelly Link story or Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves:

See what I mean? It’s incredible stuff. Check out his site here (I’m linking it twice so you’ll actually go.)

Then I drove home through a sea of green lights, picking up where I left off in the song, and arrived home exactly four minutes and twenty seconds later, which is again, coincidentally, exactly the point at which the song ends.

Life is strange, sometimes, in its symmetry.

the kleptomaniac apocalypse

So Maps and Legends was all right.  It has an amazing cover, for sure.  There was nothing terribly thought-provoking about it, but Chabon’s review pieces were generally pretty entertaining and his essay on The Road goaded me, at last, onto the Oprah bandwagon.  So I’m now reading through Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I am almost a little weirded out and embarrassed by how much I’m enjoying it.  It’s a fast read – I’m about halfway through -  and it’s very engaging.  People say it’s bleak, and I guess it is – I already know how it ends, by the way – but I am just enraptured by the depiction of scrounging for supplies.  What a weird thing to get all caught up in.  The idea of the post-apocalypse as a picked-over shopping mall, a scrounger’s paradise, where kleptomaniacs can finally find justification for the urges they always attempted to suppress.

Maybe it’s just that I’ve also been playing Fallout 3, where if you’re not picking through every little box or corpse looking for bottle caps or ammunition you’re Not Doing It Right.  But when Papa goes looking through some burned-out homestead for a tin of food, I’m totally there with him.  [yo, make sure u check under de bed, there might be a safe there u can lockpik. o shit raiders!!1 equip ur nailbat] I’m not sure if McCarthy could have understood how this video game-influenced perspective affects a reading of his novel.  Or maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe this is the way everyone with a bit of survivalist in them, a paranoid little sprite pacing about with a shotgun and a gas mask, reads these passages. You could, I think, make a very thrilling game out of The Road, and I’m not sure that would be missing the point. It’s about resource management, evading attention, and melee combat.  Sort of the ultimate survival horror game.  Apparently someone else has already drawn this comparison in a more thorough blog post than yours truly.

But I have half a book to finish reading.  I’ll have to come back to this later and flesh it out in more detail…

the seattle central library

Thank you, Rem Koolhaas.

And there’s more to be seen on flickr with the tags ‘seattlelibrary‘ and ‘seattlecentrallibrary‘!  It felt like I was walking around Mirror’s Edge, but thankfully I was able to restrain the urge to attempt some spontaneous parkour.  I suspect this is the beginning of another level in my obsession with postmodern architecture, bright colors, and lowercase Futura bold.

Evidently there is quite a bit of controversy surrounding the building in architectural circles, or so wikipedia tells me.  It’s pretty mind-blowing when you walk in, so maybe I wasn’t noticing things like usability as much as I should. Seattle P.I (R.I.P., LOL) Architectural Critic Lawrence Cheek reversed positions on the library in this insightful if not entirely persuasive retrospective piece:

This one feels, in varying places, raw, confusing, impersonal, uncomfortable, oppressive, theatrical and exhilarating. Ponder any spot in this vast building, and two, three or more of those adjectives inevitably swirl together. That’s the first indicator of trouble. If this building were fulfilling the showers of acclaim heaped onto it, all we’d be talking about is joy.

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obligatory post-prandial minipost

The feast, of course, being the experience of seattle.  I haven’t posted over the weekend because I was busy absorbing the excellence of this particular city in the pacific northwest.  Great coffee, great food, great typography (!), and great weather while I was there.  I’ll have to post more about the details this week as I sort everything out in my head and readjust to work-life.  Thanks V, Al, J.

In the meantime I am now reading Michael Chabon’s Maps And Legends, which has a simply amazing cover – or three of them, actually, that layer – but is mostly meditations on books and comics and is really short. [Seattle also has the most impressive library in the world.  And I've been to the library of Alexandria*.  This is better.]

*Not the original, dumbass.

Fetishable Books

The Book Cover Archive

I could, and have, spent hours looking through this collection. Like many amazing things, it comes from the casual optimist.  from the interview I excerpted earlier: an exchange that I thought was actually very insightful and changed my mind about e-books:

E-book detractors have of a strange idea of what most books are. Those beautiful dusty old encyclopedias, that rare first-edition of Ulysses, even your fancy new Vintage paperback? That is not most books. The Grisham and Grafton paperbacks at the airport, Chicken Soup for the Spirit, college textbooks — that’s most books. Does anyone really care if the next Janet Evanovich thriller has no corporeal form? Wouldn’t that be an improvement?

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Non-Livejournal Diary Entry 001

1. It’s on now, Sterling.  Let’s see if you fare better than that sackless chump Rudy Rucker. Updates to come.

2. In other news, I’ve discovered video editing is a lot of fun and something I’ll be doing more of in the near future.  Hopefully with some results to post here.  After musical experiments have registered as failures on an exponential level it is nice to find something I can slide into easily, and hopefully I’ll be able to produce something cool.  That is what I have spent my time doing this past week.

3. That, and blowing people up in Team Fortress 2.  It’s fun – you should join in.

4. This week, however, promises to be more generally interesting with (2) concerts – Efterklang tuesday, Asobi Seksu wednesday, – (1) dentist appointment, (1) party to attend, and (1) special reunion meeting event.  I’m glad I have all this time to relax at work since the evenings are going to be pretty draining.

5. I thought of an excellent if perhaps disturbing and very depressing gift idea that depends on unhealthy obsession if not psychosis.  Best of all, it’s only $26.  But it would be a lot of work.  I think it might actually register as a piece of performative art, if I can get it to work right.  Which is a big If.

6. In other news, the sort-of-consensus on the economy seems to be that We Are Fucked, Dr. Jones.  I eagerly await updates on the status of said Fucked-ness while I augment my already healthy ration of survival supplies.

7. Additionally, apparently a gang of five men in dark clothes are breaking into people’s houses on the street behind mine.

8. To deter these thieves, I have considered erecting elaborate traps around my apartment – but further consideration of my cat’s daily activity schedule has led me to believe this may not be the wisest course of action.

Until next time.

Why Systems Fail

Why Systems Fail: A Book Review

As anyone who has ever worked in an office can tell you, no shit.  But it’s still fascinating to see it all laid out.  Prepare to nod in agreement a lot.

Some highlights:

2. New systems generate new problems

7. People in systems do not do what the system says they are doing

10. Systems attract systems people

14. If a system is working, leave it alone

22. Complex systems usually operate in failure mode

32. Loose systems last longer and work better

So there are, as you can see, a lot of reasons why systems are almost always destined to fail.  It’s interesting enough to make me want to read the book but these little aphorisms are pretty densely packed with wisdom IMO.  If I ever start up a business I’ll try to recognize some of these principles when setting things up.  Yet even still, you’re reading this, on the internet – think about all the ways this process could go wrong, and yet it’s still working.  WordPress, DNS, your browser, your computer, whatever system of income allows you to be wasting time right now on my site – clearly these systems, while imperfect, still function well enough most of the time for everything to be working.

But now I’m considering the weight of all systems in the country and indeed the world, and it’s scaring the shit out of me.  The small fanatic part of me that just wants collapse is feeling very upbraided right now.