Book Thread For Bibliophiles (learning is fun! :3)

[Selfsurprise]

The Globalization of World Politics by John Baylis and Steve Smith. Will be needing this book a lot considering my major. It's a useful for anyone considering studying international politics. But seriously, this book is large enough to kill a man.

That's Oxford Press overdoing it for you The prices of the books can often be staggering though, which admittedly won't prevent me from buying stuff in the end - despite any "uhmming" and "ahhhing" on my part. I have a few from that particular publisher in my mental wish list.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[longliveprose]

I'm currently reading a 1947 copy of Richardson and Scarlett's General College Chemistry. It's pretty good, and from my knowledge there hasn't been a fundamental change in the inner workings of chemistry, so it's been a help.

[Selfsurprise]

Sat down and read Judith Mok's marvellous poetry book Gods of Babel. Her thoughts seem to exist breathlessly in the present and past, with a fantastic disregard for tense or context. I can't help but enjoy her motifs, her peculiar emotional responses to a given time or place, her highly personal interpretation on the symbolism of plants and animals. A short but exceptionally sweet book.

 

 

"How sad his eyes were, the old boar, sanglier, in his stinky little hut. The man had caught him as a baby and wanted to fatten him up. He did and then he loved his fat boar and kept it as a pet. Speaking of matrimony: Do we like to fatten each other up and keep each other as sad pets?" - Judith Mok, Blood or "Le Sang des Autres"

 

"I am the one with books bound

On my bedside table, a golden throat

And the ringing of diamond chimes as a gift

From my good fairies in my eager ears

I am the poisoned one

[...]

The hours fill the night

And my small screen keeps flashing

Star after fallen star,

Sores for my sad eyes" - Judith Mok, Solitude Snow White

[Selfsurprise]

You might recall that book written by Hal Foster titled Bad New Days, which I talked about in the threads first post, which was an art criticism attempt at defining certain tendencies and occupations in contemporary art. Since reading that I've been rather taken by Mr. Foster's extremely broad minded and cyclical interpretation of art history, he writes a kind of history of art informed criticism and literature that purposefully foregoes the usual hoary cliche of "movements" and individual artists "phases" and instead presents modern art as some inextricably linked to its cultural setting, regardless if it's conceived in establishment (i.e. the gallery and museum, political consensus, even the previous neo-avant-garde) or as a reaction to given set of social standards.

 

In The Return of the Real, Foster (having written the book in the mid 1990's) Foster reacted to what he perceived as an unusual return to and demand for "reality" in art - often as a adversarial mode held by both an older generation of Greenbergian formalists and latter-day defenders of abject realism (i.e. the one thing minimalists and pop artists had in common despite their antipathy to one another). It's not too often that you come across an art critic and writer beyond the late 70's who presents a genuinely refreshing and original interpretation of the field, even many great writers on the subject who are informed of past literature and discourse tend to fall into two categories; firstly those that experimentally attempt to set a "new paradigm" of thinking in relation to art, or secondly a somewhat those that cast a mournful dejection of what they perceived to be a lost opportunities of past artists and philosophers.

 

 

"Since the Industrial Revolution a contradiction has existed between the craft basis of visual art and the industrial order of social life. [...] With minimalism and pop this contradiction is at once so attenuated (as in the minimalist concern with nuances of perception) and so collapsed (as in the Warholian motto "I want to be a machine") that it stands as a principal dynamic of modernist art. In this regard, too, the seriality of minimalism and pop is indicative of advanced-capitalist production and consumption, for both register the penetration of industrial modes into spheres (art, leisure, sport) that were once removed from them." - Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Chapter 2, The Crux of Minimalism

 

"[...] this ethnographer envy is shared by many critics, especially in cultural studies and new historicism, who assume the role of ethnographer usually in disguised form: the cultural-studies ethnographer dressed down as a fellow fan (for reasons of political solidarity, but with greater social anxiety); the new-historicist ethnographer dressed up as a master archivist (for reasons of scholary respectability, but with great professional arrogance)" - Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Chapter 6, The Artist as Ethnographer

 

"Modernism has never meant anything like a break with the past" - Clement Greenburg