This is Bibliophile.
So I forgot to do a post yesterday. You know the expression, "what if we threw a war and no one came"?. It was like that, but with a blog post. And in this case, the blog post wasn't thrown either. Perhaps it was not that at all. At any rate, today we're going out west, to the libraries of the University of Victoria. UVic hosts Canada's top rate digital humanities workshop, the Digital Humanities Institute every year. Is this randomly chosen week of new books up to that lofty standard? We shall see. Again, a bolded "H" at the end of an entry means that the university I reside at has the book too.
There's 270 new items this week, apparently. Oooh. I can move through this quickly, then. It wasn't until I went shopping around that I realized the full extent of my library's massive influx. After York's impressive showing, I was curious to see what other universities did for their new books tab. UVic is a much more modest affair; it's basically just a list of all the books, much like our own library has--or rather, had. The one additional feature is that it has the covers of the books listed alongside them. It's a nice touch; it would be rather redundant for my library, since the binding process usually means covering over the front entirely, but it's still appreciated here.
Less than nothing : Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism / Slavoj Žižek.
I have a confession to make: I don't get Zizek. I don't mean there are parts of his argument that escape me, and parts that I appreciate; I mean it all flies over my head with a zooming sound that's very faint--on account of just how far over my head it's flying. I'm okay with Stiegler, I've come to terms with Derrida, Agamben is mostly fine, and I can even appreciate Kristeva when I'm in the right frame of mind, but I find Zizek utterly baffling. It's odd, because he's generally regarded as one of the more "mainstream" of the European theorists. I appreciate his use of "Western" pop culture, and his tendency to make jokes, but... the rest just escapes me. Granted, the last time I attempted to read him was before my comprehensive exams, and my capacity for theoretical humanities has gone up quite a bit since then; maybe he's due for a re-examination. Not this book, though--this is not one for the dabbler. At over 1000 pages, "Hegel" is an absolute behemoth of a book, capable of stunning you both mentally and physically. The basic premise is that Zizek is arguing that modern philosophy has struggled with Hegel's theories of absolute idealism without ever being able to go beyond it, and, as Western society reaches a crisis point, going beyond it is exactly what we need to do. A perusal of the Table of Contents suggests that he'll also be looking at Marx, Hitchcock, Heidegger, Lacan, quantum physics, and maybe even object oriented ontology. If you're a Zizek fan, this is essential reading--going to be a long time before I attempt it, though. H.
Oh--and it seems that the listings don't just contain an image of the book's cover--the image is actually a link to the Google book description. That's a very useful feature.
American indians and popular culture / Elizabeth DeLaney Hoffman, editor.
I think it says a lot about the culture and area I grew up in that I'm a lot more uncomfortable talking about Indian--or rather, Aboriginal--racial issues than virtually any other kind. Or virtually any kind of prejudice, really. I didn't grow up seeing a lot of this sort of discrimination, but that's more because my home town is geographically situated far from any reserve than because my neck of the woods was particularly enlightened. I do remember going to university when the Darrell Night case was in the news, and, with the hindsight of twelve years, it's still the monstrous, inhuman thing I remember it to be. Anyway, that's some of the context I bring to Hoffman's book. The anthology looks at how prejudice and stereotypes are reinforced through pop culture depictions of Indians (I'm going to stick the book's term for the rest of the discussion here). It's a two volume thing, where Volume 1 covers media, sports, and politics, while Volume 2 covers literature, arts, and resistance. Topics are loosely divided by era, genre, and medium, so we've got The Eco-Indian: from Rousseau to Avatar; Indian portrayal in Westerns; Marketing the American Indian Casino; and Sacagawea and the Super Woman Super Myth. It looks like a good resource, for those interested in the subject.
Retailising space : architecture, retail and the territorialisation of public space / Mattias Kärrholm.
Karrholm (sorry, umlauts are hard)'s book looks at how retail has expanded out of the mall into our everyday public space. Personally, I would have said it's expanded into the digital space, but I suppose that is a type of public space. Or is it? Karrholm is from Sweden; is this a regional issue, or something that does benefit from a global perspective? The chapter on the history of retail seems to suggest a bit of both, as it describes the modernisation of retail, the peartment store era, and the mall era, with Sweden as the "case study" focus. My off the cuff evaluation is that the most interesting chapter is the one that considers retail in terms of rhythm and territorial synchronization; the idea that you could optimize retail flow and space to correspond to human body rhythms interests me. I suppose the simplest (and probably stupid) example would be locating Tim Hortons franchies so that you come to another one by the time you finish a coffee, but it's probably more complicated than that. H.
Swamplandia! / Karen Russell.
Selected for its subject matter. This is a piece of fiction, where the basic plot is a family who manage a gator-wrestling farm fall apart after the mother succumbs to cancer. There's an encroaching company that wants the land, the father is AWOL, and the oldest daughter has fallen in love with a ghost and moved to the underworld, and it falls to the youngest daughter to manage the gators and her back. And yes, it is a magic realism-type book. The reviews for the book are rather mixed; the consensus complaint seems to be that the magic and real world mix are too jarring. But I'm not really interested in any of that; I just want to read about a family of gator wrestlers. Or watch a movie about it. Yeah, that would make a nice B flick. Make it happen, Hollywood. H.
At the
back of the North Wind / George MacDonald ; edited by Roderick McGillis
and John Pennington ; preface by Stephen Prickett.
If you're into fantasy literature (especially the scholarship and history) and don't know who George MacDonald is, then you probably should. Writing primarily in the 19th century, he's the forerunner of the children fantasy genre, bridging the gap between general folklore ala Grimm Fairy Tales and more modern stuff like Lewis C. Carroll. I haven't read this particular story myself. From what I can gather, the general plot is that a boy befriends the North Wind, and she takes him on a series of adventures, wherein she acts as an amoral force of nature, performing the will of a higher being. If that sounds vaguely religious, you're not far off; Carroll is a good comparison here, because MacDonald often draws on similar religious undertones. I honestly don't have a problem with fantasy stories that draw on religious tropes, as long as they're not overly didactic; Western fantasy lit is already a pastiche of dozens of cultures' religions and folklore that it's only fair the Christian tradition gets its turn as well (again, as long as it's not a thinly veiled propaganda piece). If you want something lighter (pun absolutely intended) from MacDonald, I'd recommend The Light Princess, a story about a princess who loses her personal gravity, and must float until she truly cries. It's got a really good sense of humor to it. H. (Not this particular edition, but others. We also have the Light Princess, BTW.)
The maze runner / James Dashner.
It's apparently a good week for children's/YA lit. As longtime readers know, I'm a sucker for a good maze-based story. And everything I said about mazes there still holds true:they're games spatialized into architecture, they're mythically resonant, and they lend themselves well to allegory. This book--the first in a trilogy--seems to be using its maze as an allegory for community and adolescence. Yes. I am totally up for reading this. From the reviews, it seems to be a bit simplistic in terms of plot and character, but.... maze. Maze trumps all. That's just the way it is.
Alone in the universe : why our planet is unique / John Gribbin.
That's a depressing title, isn't it? The subtitle tries to save it, but doesn't quite pull it off. As you may have gathered, Gribbin argues that life on Earth is a unique phenomenon. The argument hinges around the fact that life on Earth developed primarily because of the presence of our moon, which exists by virtue of an extremely unlikely event of a supercomet colliding with Venus millions of years ago. There's a few more arguments justifying the claim, as well as the stipulation that we may actually not be alone in the universe, but we're almost certainly alone in our galaxy. Oh good; we still have neighbors. That's a relief.
That's it for this week. Sadly, the vast array of incoming digital humanities books failed to materialize. But at least we got some nice fantasy stories out of it.
Later Days.
Alone in the universe : why our planet is unique / John Gribbin.
That's a depressing title, isn't it? The subtitle tries to save it, but doesn't quite pull it off. As you may have gathered, Gribbin argues that life on Earth is a unique phenomenon. The argument hinges around the fact that life on Earth developed primarily because of the presence of our moon, which exists by virtue of an extremely unlikely event of a supercomet colliding with Venus millions of years ago. There's a few more arguments justifying the claim, as well as the stipulation that we may actually not be alone in the universe, but we're almost certainly alone in our galaxy. Oh good; we still have neighbors. That's a relief.
That's it for this week. Sadly, the vast array of incoming digital humanities books failed to materialize. But at least we got some nice fantasy stories out of it.
Later Days.
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