Bibliophile: Breaking the Code at University of Victoria

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

This is Bibliophile.

After the break, we'll be going to the University of Victoria.  They've got a lovely new titles page, and 488 new books last week.


I'd like to start by noting that the aforementioned titles page's own title is a little weird: It's WebVoyage holding, but with an accent over the a.  Huh. 

Event / Martin Heidegger ; translated by Richard Rojcewicz.
I don't think we've done any Heidegger in a while, bless his Nazi-collaborating heart.  (Cheap shot, I know.)  The Event is book 71 in a 102 book series collecting all of Heidegger's writing, which is... comprehensive, I'll give them that. This book is a self-critique of his earlier book, Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event, which I have also not read.  Essentially, it's all about how the event is to be understood, how it ties to looking, showing, and self-manifestation, and, of course, like any self-respecting book on events, it includes the self-unveiling of gods.  I imagine just cataloging all the forms Zeus picked to seduce women alone takes a few pages.  It's a kind of long book at 336 pages, and from that description, it looks like the previous book Contributions is mandatory.  Not a book for everyone then, but for the die-hard Heideggerian--well, that's 71 down, 31 to go.

Schizoanalytic cartographies / Félix Guattari ; translated by Andrew Goffey.
It`s been a while since the last time Bibliophile looked at a Guattari solo project,
 Machinic unconscious : essays in schizoanalysis. Guattari does seem to love his Schizoanalysis, doesn't he? The book is about enunciation, what autonomous speech and self-expression means for subjects in the contemporary world. And it delves into information theory in order to describe humanity's new relationship with machines, one of reconciliation.  That could be interesting; the book was originally written in 1989, so it's obviously a bit out of touch with current tech trends, but given that Guattari is working from the Continental body of theory and somewhat afield from the usual bunch of technology scholars, he might have an interesting perspective. Quickly scanning discussion of the book online, I noticed that what comes up most often is that people have been waiting for this translation a long time.  So I guess it's a must read if you're into Guattari.

Smoke signals : the native takeback of North America's tobacco industry / Jim Poling Sr. 2012
Tobacco, like chocolate and corn, was one of the discoveries of the New World that the Europeans took back with them fairly quickly.  And like chocolate and corn, it was centuries before people realized it was unhealthy and lead to cancer.  Wait, scratch that last bit. Smoke Signals follows the history of tobacco from its early point as aa miracle cure to its role in government, in terms of revenue and contraband.  Poling looks at tobacco also in terms of what it means for Native populations, and how the existing Native traditions offer a frame for tobacco that could strengthen them today. I was expecting a more economic approach, to be honest,given the word "industry" in the title, but Poling certainly seems to grasp the history behind his subject. According to the description, he's also pursuing one of the greater ironies of tobacco revenue; like alcohol and firearms, the government starts regulating the sale of tobacco through tariffs and so forth, starts to count on that revenue, and then becomes dependent on perpetuating it as a source of income.  Capitalism, am I right?

Network : portrait conversations / by Lincoln Schatz 2012
This is one of those rare books where I look at the title, and have no idea where it's going.  Is it going to be about modern networks, with the metaphor of portraits?  Is it from portrait history, and the networks that portraiture created? Well, the section should have been the clue for me: we're smack dab in the middle of the American History portion of the collection.The idea is that Schatz is using Richard Avedon's 1976 photographic portfolio as inspiration to create a modern collection of "generative video portraits" of 100 of the movers behind every day American life. And the book is the transcription and pictures from those sessions. It's mostly DC figures, with people like Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner mixed with local deputies and secretaries. American history isn't really my cup of tea, but at least the title is unique.

Vanishing Vancouver : the last 25 years / Michael Kluckner. 2012.

 One thing I'm not fond of at the University of Victoria is that it automatically logs me out of the library system after about five minutes.  That is not a great window for the kind of thing I'm doing. Anyway, Kluckner has been publishing books and collections of photographs of Vancouver and British Columbia for nearly thirty years now. Vanishing Vancouver looks at the history of Vancouver, and its more classic spaces, in the face of "city planning policy-initiatives that aim for 'eco-density' and being 'the greenest city.'" As the quotations and focus on city planning over public sentiment may suggest, Kluckner's own feelings on this issue are ambiguous, and lean toward the preservation side. I have to say, I don't really have much first-hand experience on what Kluckner is talking about.  I've been to Vancouver a few times, but that was when I was a lot younger; I don't think I've been there in the past decade or so now.  I'll take his word on it that it has beautiful architecture, though. I'm not sure to what extent that's worth preserving.  On the one hand, being green is a worthy goal, and one that should be pursued out of necessity as much as anything else.  On the other hand, the book is definitely suggesting that it's a politically motivated goal as well, and that sort of thing should be treated with a grain of salt. It's... complicated, and worth discussing, so I guess it's good Kluckner is discussing it.

 

Knightly art of battle / Ken Mondschein. 2011

This is the closest thing to a videogame book this week--literally, the closest thing, since its call number is just a few off from good old GV 1469. This book is a compilation of medieval martial arts, "from wrestling to fencing with the longsword to the subtle tricks that could be employed when jousting on horseback."  It's compiling data largely from the Fior di Battalgia (Flower of Battle) a manuscript with drawings of knights fighting with swords, daggers, polearms, and so forth.  A must-have for the Ren Faire enthusiast on your gift list.  I would have preferred a bit more signs of historical context, and socio-economic whatsit, but it seems like it does a good job with what it's offering.

 

Technology change and the rise of new industries / Jeffrey L. Funk. 2013

The subject here is how and why new industries emerge at significant times in certain countries. "Part I shows that technologies which experience 'exponential' improvements in cost and performance have a greater chance of becoming new industries." Uh, that's... reasonably obvious, isn't it? Part II specifically shows how this process goes from disruptive innovation to actual industry by affecting higher-level systems. And the last two parts are about challenges of new industries for governments, and analyses of particular technologies. From the table of contents, this includes electronics and clean energy. I'm not sure of the premise here; I think one of the big issues, especially now, is that industry has moved into this weird post-national phase, where it's too diffuse to study exactly in this manner. But Funk is an Associate Professor of Technological Management at the National University of Sinagpore, so I'll allow that he probably knows more about the subject than me.

 

Love and money : queers, class, and cultural production / Lisa Henderson. 2013

Henderson's book (and I'll note it's reasonably priced for a Kindle theory book, at $10, compared to the $25 paperback and $70 hardcover--and that $70 is clearly a fee only a library would pay) argues that we need to look at contemporary queer culture through the lenses of social class: divisions like culture and economy, identity and privilege, recognition and redistribution, and left and queer are in operation. Henderson will be looking at texts such as Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain, and By Hook and By Crook, as well as wedding announcements in the New York Times, among other sources, to look at how queerness and class combinations play out across a range of practices.  I like the idea of taking a broader approach to the subject, and any book that takes as its starting point that Will & Grace gets it wrong gets automatic points with me. 

 

Mating intelligence unleashed : the role of the mind in sex, dating, and love / Glenn Geher and Scott Barry Kaufman. 2013
The cover, just so you know, is a comic book drawing of a woman surrounded by five adoring men. One of the commentors call it "a peer-reviewed version of The Game," which is not promising. The starting point is that mating is about more than instinctual reactions.  ...So far so good.  And so, Geher and Kaufman start their study of mating intelligence, a range of mental behaviours that have evolved to help us find the right partner.  ...I'm still following, though that's not technically how evolution works.  And so, they ask questions, based on this mating intelligence: what role does personality play in mating, how do people choose mates, how do women and men deceive each other, why do people create art? I don't necessarily have a problem with describing dating rituals in these terms, although the description doesn't really cover where Geher and Kaufman are getting their data.  It's framing that description as a how-to guide that's more troubling. Judging from the introduction, it's a pop psychology book--so on that basis, it's as much about entertaining as informing.

 

 Modernism and magic : experiments with spiritualism, theosophy and the occult.

Wilson, Leigh. 2012

And with that, we jump straight to literature. Wilson argues that the typical critical approach to modernism and the occult is that there was a loss of faith in representation, and an attempt to draw on science as the primary method of discourse.  And she wants to draw out what that magical practice remakes the relationship between representation and the world. More specifically, her study is about the question of the unseen, how the notion of unseen was part of the modernist yearning for soemthing that existed beyond the materiality of the text. "The birth of modernism resides not so much in notions of aesthetic autonomy, resisting the degradations of mass culture, but in an attempt to reclaim textuality as a magical practice."  I'm not a modernist expert by any means, but from what little I do know, that seems like an interesting argument to flesh out. Among others, she'll be looking at James Joyce, Erza Pound, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei M. Eisenstein.

Body double : the author incarnate in the cinema / Lucy Fischer. 2013

 Fischer draws on auteur studies to look at how filmmakers raise issues about authorship through portraying the onscreen writer. That means looking at the icon of the typewriter, the case of the writer/director, the authoress, and the omnipresent infirm author.  The films she's looking at include Adaptation, Diary of a Country Priest, Naked Lunch, American Splendor, and Irezumi. I like the premise, but it's not really the set of movies I'd have picked; I would have thrown a Woody Allen movie into the mix, and Stranger Than Fiction, for example.  Actually, Alan Wake would be a good game to look at in this regard, since it's about a fiction writer who becomes immersed in his own fiction. (Ah, spoiler.) She seems to be okay with portraying authorship in general, rather than narrowing the medium down to screenwriting or writing books.

 

 Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong : a history of Murphy's Law / by Nick T. Spark 2006

 It's a history of the phrase, like it says. Spark goes on a journey to trace this expression to its origins.  It's described as a combination of Rashomon and Right Stuff--a film about multiple, contradictory versions of the same event, and a film about the test-pilots selected to be the first American astronauts--which I guess means the history both has something to do with rocket science, and is hotly contested. It strikes me as an issue that's a little less Rashomon and more Wittgenstein's Poker, a book-length study of a ten-minute argument between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, which was witnessed by a half dozen people, but no one can quite remember what it was about. But I guess Rashomon has a little more cultural cachet.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes. 2011

I'm mentioning this one largely because I've actually got a digital copy of one of the author's other books, Zoo City, which I keep forgetting to read because I keep forgetting I have it. this book is about four narrators in a high-tech future Cape Town, consisting of an art-school dropout, AIDS baby, tech-activist, and RPG-obsessed blogger, in a world where getting disconnected is a punishment worse than death, "but someone has got to stand up to Government Inc."   Oh, and in case anyone's worried about that dangling modifier, that should be the four narrators consist of the drop-out, blogger, baby and activist, not the city.  If the city consisted of four people, it would be rather underpopulated. Reviews seem very favorable.  Probably worth a look if you want a more modern take on the cyberpunk sort of direction.

Speaking code : coding as aesthetic and political expression / text: Geoff Cox ; code: Alex McLean ;, foreword by Franco Bifo Berardi.

I really wanted to end with the first twelve books looked at, but since there were under 100 left I thought I could finish quickly.  I was wrong. Two more to go.  First up is Speaking Code, with text by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean. It's something of a manifesto for code study, and removing the difference between criticism and practice in digital studies.  Particularly, Cox argues that software has its own aesthetics and political implications. We had a long debate in our game studies meeting once over the value of code studies and platform studies; the general consensus was that it was a useful tool, but not necessary unless you made it necessary by virtue of your object of study.  One of the problems with applying it to, say a AAA game would be that, first, there's no legal way to get at the code, and second, you'd be a single person analyzing code that took a team of hundreds years to develop.  It's feasible in some areas, but not really in others. Likewise, I appreciate what Cox is trying to do, in reading code as script and performance, in applying speech act theory and performance theory to the act of making code. I'm not sure how that amounts to the defense of speech he's proposing, but I'm sure it would be a good read. (Plus, it's $20 hardcover, which for a theory book is practically giving it away.)

 

10 print chr$(205.5+rnd(1));:goto 10 / Nick Montfort ... [et al.]. 

This book is less "will I read it," and more "when will I read it." It's almost criminal that the et al cuts off the rest of the people associated: Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, Noah Vawter.  Essentially, if it's got Bogost and Montfort, it's mandatory reading for game studies. Anyway, the premise of the book is that they take this line of codes to create an anthology of essays on computer, creativity, and culture, including the maze, randomness and regularity in computer art, the value of the Commodore 64, and so forth. It's code studies again, in other words, and it's again a demonstration of its value, that it can wring so much meaning out of what appears to be just a functional bit of code. Mental note to check this out.  Again.

That was fun.  See you next week.