What are you reading?

[zyphus29]

a Season in Hell & the Drunken Boat

[Jonn]

Kafka On The Shore

same here. been trying get into the realm of human psychology but fyodor dostoevsky is a tough one to begin with. gonna start with something more accessible

[Faust]

the tipping point...
how to make a little difference in little things

the tipping point: how to make an entire forum turn against you because you are a disrespectful douche.

[Fuuma]

Thanks, Fuuma. I ordered it a few days ago from Amazon.
Nice choice, justine. If you are curious, the book that inspired BNW is called We, by Yevgeniy (Eugene) Zamyatin.

You ordered "name of the rose"? Try wikipediating about heresies and the conflict between John XXII and emperor Louis IV or you'll miss most of the historical context.

[Fuuma]

the tipping point: how to make an entire forum turn against you because you are a disrespectful douche.

I did read the tipping point, took me about 1 hrs and I'll never get it back. Probably one of the least intellectually rigorous book ever written. I think a critic said his next book made "the tipping point" sound like Critique of pure reason so I'm sorta morbidly curious.

[Faust]

I did read the tipping point, took me about 1 hrs and I'll never get it back. Probably one of the least intellectually rigorous book ever written. I think a critic said his next book made "the tipping point" sound like Critique of pure reason so I'm sorta morbidly curious.

My post was in response to makeupexpression who posted "i am reading tipping point: how little things change big things" to rack up post count in order to start selling in classifieds. I then deleted the post, and now my post is out of context :-)

Thanks for the advice on the name of the rose. I know a little bit about the conflict you mention.

[Fuuma]

My post was in response to makeupexpression who posted "i am reading tipping point: how little things change big things" to rack up post count in order to start selling in classifieds. I then deleted the post, and now my post is out of context :-)

Thanks for the advice on the name of the rose. I know a little bit about the conflict you mention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsilio_da_Padova

Another interesting dude of the time.

[mamaboy]

o proust again!? yes... no...yes...no... yes!yes!!yes!!!!

[mamaboy]

sorokin "saharnii kreml"--...my boy...

[mamaboy]

pelevin 5p

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

Bought these yesterday. I Citibank and their Thank You program Amazon gift certificates. I need a third book case

• 1 of: The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition) (Vintage International)
  Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
• 1 of: The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems & Essays
  Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
• 1 of: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
  Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
• 1 of: The Bonfire of the Vanities: A Novel
  Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
• 1 of: Summer in Baden-Baden
  Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

That's an interesting book, especially in these times, if an economic disaster brings serious breakdown of western societies ...
Milton Friedman and his chicago boys really got around.

Always Proust, mamaboy!

[Faust]

pelevin 5p

He was amusing 8 years ago...

[BECOMING-INTENSE]

Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, preposterous History Mieke Bal(1999)

The traditional notion of "influence" is amazingly persistent. Although the logic of influence has been deconstructed, reinvented and reversed by several critics during the last seventy years, many people can't resist its attraction. T.S. Elliot challenges it elegantly in his 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent":

Whoever has approved this idea of order (...) will not find it proposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past

Or more radical put by art historian Michael Baxandall:

But influence I do not want to talk about

Elliot propose a reverse mechanism, not instead of it, but next to it; the past is also altered by the present, while for Baxandall "influence" is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrongheaded grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account.

If one say that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality

As Baxandall sugest, in the case of any "good" artist, it is not only he/she who is the agent instead of the patient, but the kind of activity which he performs on the work of the predecessor is much more diverse and complex than what is implied by the shallow term "influence":

If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneslf of, appropriate from, have ressource to, adapt, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, paraody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to, master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform, tackle ...-everyone will be able to think of others

The complex way in which art acts upon predecessors suggests that it is not so much the present but rather the past which is conditioned by a perpetual flux. It is precisely this idea that is elaborated by Mieke Bal in her 1999 book "Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, preposterous History". reading contemporary art works in their relation to Caravaggio or other baroque works, she demonstrates the idea that art's engagement with what came before it, involves an active reworking of the predecessor.

Hence, the work performed by later images obliterates the older images as they were before that intervention and creates new versions of old images instead.

If we take Eliot's, Baxandall's and Bal's critigue of the idea of influence into account, it entails a major shift in the discourses of art(every artform!). It breaks down the hierarchy constituted in the shallow term "influence", and we are left with much more interesting questions. We can now start to see/read art for what art should be, a reinvention/reconcentration of matter.

[raddy]

What Remains - Kirino
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

[skecr8r_l8r]

I envy you Faust, I am still too lost in post-modernism's foggy universe to begin with Mieke Bal, but I am as anxious as a little child waiting for christmas to see what she offers. Thanks for reminding me of her works!