#100daysofantilibraries

Well, there are few helpful reviews of this one. But I have another book by Turchi — Maps of the Imagination: Writer as Cartographer — which I’ve flipped through just enough to have some idea of the author’s style. This book, as with Writer as Cartographer, seems to have a creative, whimsical flair, drawing on diverse inspirations and areas of study to explore what the act of writing is like; of what strange wonders the job and journey of the writer consists.

“Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip-side, puzzle-solving. As he teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling, he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians.” In this exploration, he “reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process.”

There’s material about patterns, treasure hunting, labyrinths, magic and poetry, games and puzzles and difficulty. It’s rather hard to categorize, but seems quite playful and wide-ranging in its spirit of curiosity (and multidimensional love of writing).

“Turchi invites us to think about books as mysteries unfolding in time, giving us clues that we piece together.” Not only is it “a labyrinth of reflection”, it also contains interactive elements — “actual puzzles scattered throughout” the text.

He’s among our “foremost thinkers on the art of writing”, and the book is both fun to read and useful for aspiring writers: “a brilliant book on writing craft, providing the reader with a new way to think about composing fiction.” Sounds good to me!

Subtitle: A Holistic Vision for Our Time. This is quite a short book, one of those books that proposes a simple yet powerful framework or way of looking at and thinking about the world. In this case: systems!

I like systems. They form important, flexible and rich scaffolding for many areas, often investing simple ideas with great meaning and explanatory power. In this book, Laszlo takes the view that understanding the meaning behind the complex formulas of science is more important than ever, and he attempts to explain the systems view of the world as the paradigm of the latest scientific developments.

Systems thinking “leads to a new world view, integrating the sciences of nature and man. It is a world view for our times, explaining some some of our most cherished successes and some of our most distressing problems, and showing ways to resume progress toward new achievements.” Laszlo has contributed greatly to this field of study, and in this book — just a hundred pages long, apparently! — he succinctly summarizes its ideas, postulating a four-part “systems view of nature”. As he describes them, systems are: wholes with irreducible properties; self-maintaining in changing environments; self-creating in response to self-creativity in other systems; and finally they are “coordinating interfaces in nature’s holarchy.”

I don’t know exactly what the above-summarized four points mean in practical terms; the book is apparently rather philosophical and abstract, rather than super specific and pragmatic in how to work with systems. But still, it seems to provide quite an interesting perspective, and a great introduction to concepts like consilience, unity, organization, connection, and universality. One reviewer exclaims that Laszlo’s ideas open “…a world of holism, growth and new paths to a more peaceful world!”

First, what a striking cover: a monochromatic blend of blues, overlaid with stark and simple white text. I haven’t previewed the text itself and don’t have much to comment on concretely — but I love the design.

Second, the title is wonderful, seems at once abstract and specific, evocative in a poetic way. It calls to mind science fiction and libraries and repositories and emergent behavior and object oriented ontology and more.

The book is a “rapturous paean to discoveries and archives, gorgeously illustrated.” It explores the “archival manuscripts” of many great American writers — showcasing the physicality of their work amidst other elements woven into the text. These materials are: “links, discoveries, chance encounters, the visual and acoustic shocks of rooting around amid physical archives.  These are the telepathies the bibliomaniacal poet relishes.”

Doesn’t this sound great? The intersection of the word and the object, ideas and poetics made tangible, the storehouses of memory, legacy, that which endures. It’s a kind of response or counterpart to digital scholarship, affirming the roots of knowledge and learning and creativity in physical existence… With its “ode to the insights, connections, and discoveries available to those who dig through archives the old-fashioned way” this book reminds me of Nicholson Baker’s “The Size of Thoughts”.

Howe considers “such odds and ends as drafts of poems on envelope scraps by Emily Dickinson; first-draft lines of "Paterson" that William Carlos Williams scrawled on pages of prescription pads; handwritten notes Noah Webster made in connection with his 1828 "Dictionary"; and manuscript books that Jonathan Edwards fashioned from discarded semi-circular pieces of silk paper his wife and daughters had used for making fans.”

The one reviewer quotes the concluding paragraph; I’ll do likewise as it’s lovely: “Poetry has no proof nor plan nor evidence by decree or in any other way. From somewhere in the twilight realm of sound a spirit of belief flares up at the point where meaning stops and the unreality of what seems most real floods over us. The inward ardor I feel while working in research libraries is intuitive. Its a sense of self-identification and trust, or the granting of grace in an ordinary room, in a secular time.”

This is “a classic work on the spread of new ideas” — describing the process by which innovation spreads, through early adopters on outward. And it covers an awful lot of material! Everything from how innovations arise to how they get distributed to how they emerge from organizations and end up having an impact. It looks quite well-structured and thorough; academic yet accessible. It’s somewhat technical, but also a bit of a sociological and historical survey.

It’s described as a foundational work in “change management literature” — whatever that is, exactly! — and though apparently it’s heavier on underlying abstractions than practical application processes, that’s kind of my jam so no worries there. He does give principles and “generalizations” to guide the process of building things so it seems quite useful even if not focused on implementation.

One person calls it “a guide for entrepreneurs” — and even provides a chapter by chapter “tour guide” for prospective readers. (Absurdly thorough Amazon reviewers: you’ll always occupy a special place in my heart!) Another person writes, “The book is not a how-to guide, but rather an unbiased view of innovations. By examining the unintended consequences of innovations, Rogers cautions leaders to exercise prudence when pushing others to change.”

The book is “comprehensive, ranging from the elements of diffusion and the history of diffusion research to generators of innovation, change agents, and the consequences of innovations.” The whole thing looks interesting, but some sections, like the one about diffusion networks, seem particularly fascinating and crucial to understand. This is one of those books that, the more I read about it, the more I want to dig in!

This book “argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge.” It’s actually quite short, around a hundred pages, with just three chapters. It’s focused on Polanyi’s idea of tacit knowledge, “which consists of things we know without being able to say how we know them.”

It’s about how we draw from “a vast arsenal of assumptions about how the world works” as well as the discoveries made by our predecessors; and “…it validates what thinkers, artists, designers, writers, poets, musicians, and scientists (albeit too few of these) consistently admit: we cannot account as to the origin of the initial idea or notion that launches our investigations.” These ideas seem to have a lot of currency in pedagogical theory, and a wide-reaching power.

The Tacit Dimension is based on a series of lectures Polanyi delivered at Yale in the early ‘60s, and is a “deeply philosophical book, full of penetrating ideas, particularly about the knowledge of the world and the world of knowledge…” One thing I didn’t know: Polanyi actually become well-known as an innovative scientist before he rose to prominence in philosophy and the social sciences. It seems he tasked himself with no less than understanding the world and the workings of knowledge; he was a polymath, of “limitless curiosity”, who draws on deep understanding of many fields to probe the depths of human knowledge and understanding. Impressive dude!

I actually have another, longer book by Polanyi — Personal Knowledge — which I picked up at a used bookstore in Seattle, and still haven’t yet cracked open. But apparently this is a much more condensed and accessible book; perhaps I should pick up this one to read first!

I really enjoyed Steiner’s My Unwritten Books; he writes eloquently and eruditely about a dizzying array of topics. And I loved Hofstadter’s Le Ton Beau de Marot, which actually references this book by Steiner, which also is all about translation. I have a feeling this will be dense with academic and cultural references, and a somewhat challenging read…but it looks fascinating and well worth taking the time to decode.

It’s a seminal investigation of the “phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages.” Upon its appearance in the mid ‘70s, the book “created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory.”

The book is deep and insightful…going “through the history, theory and justification of translation” over the course of six sections. from the very roots of translation in speech, to the “seemingly counterintuitive diversity of languages” to a language’s sounds and expressive purpose, to the history of translation and its “triumphs and failures” and more. The final chapter, “Topologies of Culture”, sounds particularly intriguing.

It’s worth noting that Steiner is a crazy learned dude, and speaks several languages fluently — English, French, and German at a native level. So his ideas are rooted in both deep scholarship and personal experience, which seems like an ideal combination for writing a book about translation.

The included bibliography of “material which the student of translation will find of particular use” looks insanely thorough and useful; I’m always awed by these kinds of lists, in some ways so specific yet encompassing so much knowledge that I know I’ll never be able to absorb and comprehend. It’s a nice feeling — humbling yet inspiring!

I’ll keep this short because I really don’t know much about this book, besides the fact that it’s an epic prose poem-novel. It’s a couple hundred pages long, written at the turn of the 19th century, a classic of German literature. The book is “a novel of stirring lyricism, philosophical sublimity, and enduring influence.”

The plot: a Greek hermit recounts his life’s phases. But the real power seems to be in the language. Hyperion “has been celebrated for its musicality, the power of its cadences and tones to express a constant oscillation between extremes of grief and joy.” He’s apparently one of the most significant German poets ever.

According to one reviewer — oh wait, I mean, according to Friedrich Nietzsche:  “In the euphonious movement of its prose, in the sublimity and beauty of the figures that appear in it, Hyperion makes an impression upon me similar to the beat of the waves of the troubled sea. Indeed, this prose is music, soft melting sounds interrupted by painful dissonances, finally expiring in dark, uncanny dirges.” I mean…that’s some high praise, right?

By the way, this is a very nice edition from Archipelago Books; I love their deckle-edged, square-format books. In fact, in general I love seeing how small press publishers create consistent and meticulously designed series of books! In some ways is may seem superficial — to what degree, ultimately, does the design of a text change its meaning and import? — but I think it’s an incredibly important element and often the deciding factor for whether I’ll pick a book up off the shelf, grow intrigued, and add it to my “look up later” list…or skim over it without a second thought.

I have Alexander’s The Pattern Language; I’ve only read the first forty pages or so (of that thousand-plus page book…so barely the introduction) but enough to know I like the way he thinks. He takes a broad multidisciplinary approach on architecture and urban design, and in fact his four volume series The Nature of Order is an even more mammoth item in my Antilibrary.

He proposes a “theory of architecture, building, and planning which has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being.” Apparently this is quite a perspective-altering work; his main idea “applies to almost every aspect of life” — the theme of discovering simple solutions to organize our complex world clearly extends well beyond architecture. One person said some of these ideas “inspired Object Oriented Programming” and apparently the idea of software “design patterns” stems from this work — if that’s true it’s an impressive achievement indeed.

This book is actually the predecessor to The Pattern Language; it’s “first in a series of books which describe an entirely new attitude to architecture and planning.” This book also talks a lot about the idea of patterns — of events and of space, of life and of languages — but in a more introductory theoretical way, it seems, while The Pattern Language itself is more of a practical guide through the specific design “patterns” he envisions based on these ideas. (There’s a third book in this series, The Oregon Experiment, that shows how these ideas/patterns apply to a specific architectural project.)

“Patterns”, at the core of his proposal, are ways to “solve a specific problem, by bringing two conflicting forces into balance.” One example of this would be the focal point created by the orientation of windows and furniture in a room. It seems to be all about making sense of complexity, decomposing complicated structures and relationships to clarify the relationships of their parts. It’s poetic in both ideas and language; in parts it can be somewhat imprecise, but perhaps inescapably so.

Final note: Alexander proposes an interesting alternative way of reading it; apparently you can go through and read the italicized sections for an abbreviated overview. I haven’t really seen that explicitly multi-layered structure before but it seems like it could be useful!