sunday, july 22, 2007
Little creatures on my shelves
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thursday, july 19, 2007
Between the end and the beginning of a year
My second year of college is over and I’m waiting at home for a couple weeks until I escape to intern at del.icio.us again. On my birthday, a week and a half ago, I usually list things learned in the past year (see 19, 18, 17, 16), so here is what I’ve learned this year: CCS Literature is a nice way to get a degree, and I might want to go to a library/information science graduate school, but I like my self-assigned website stuff most. I’d rather do all these classes later, when I’m tired of working. On my birthday I also usually post twelve of my best pictures from that year.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote from September to June:
- An essay about language use (foreigner English, native English, and non-English) in Maus II.
- A handful of little autobiographical comics.
- A long essay discussing the use of various mediums in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #13 (it’s good; buy it).
- A mini-essay about “Fantomina” and Moll Flanders.
- A list of the pages on the website of the Nonprofit Support Center of Santa Barbara, which was trickier than it sounds.
- The outline of an essay about taxonomies of memory in philosophy and neuroscience.
- A rant about “Remix and Remixability” by Lev Manovich and another about “The Futures of Literacy” by Gunther Kress.
- Long theoretical explications of an ugly collage and an interactive map.
- Several pages of wandering thoughts about stories by Jorge Luis Borges.
- A formal essay about fears of cloning as portrayed by a play, book, and movie.
- A blog post and accompanying analysis about my jeweled platypus.
- An edited compilation of my diary entries about a couple boys.
- A description and history of the CCS Computer Science Lab.
- A list of the best things I’ve eaten in Santa Barbara.
This may be less substantial than last year’s list; next year’s list needs to be better. Also, compare that post’s picture to this one:
Soon I’ll post a picture of my as-yet-unknown summer room in San Francisco, and it’ll look pretty much the same.
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I won’t finish them all, but here they are
These are books I brought with me to read this summer:
I got Invisible Cities a while ago, thinking that I should try something by Italo Calvino other than If on a winter’s night a traveler, which I didn’t enjoy much, but I read a few pages of this one and didn’t get into it either — probably because I hadn’t been properly initiated into postmodernism yet. If I enjoy reading Invisible Cities with the power of my college-acquired literary skills, I’ll try to read If on a winter’s night a traveler again.
I’m halfway through The Architecture of Happiness; I’ve been reading it on off and on since my dad gave it to me several months ago. I like it. Alain de Botton ties together several things I’m interested in — industrial design, architecture, evolutionary psychology — and he makes it entertaining without being either dumbed-down or terribly exciting. I got interested in the book because Henry Petroski reviewed it positively; I’ve read a bunch of his books and learned a lot about design from them.
I’ve already consumed much of The Total Library, both for the Borges class I took last quarter (taught by one of the book’s translators!) and independently, but this collection is so big that there is always more of Borges’ crotchety-old-geek nonfiction to read.
See Invisible Cities above for why If on a winter’s night a traveler is in the stack.
Sky in a Bottle explains why the sky is blue and the historical process of figuring that out. My dad gave me this for my birthday a few years ago and I read partway through it. It’s neat, but I haven’t picked it up again.
I bought The Emigrants last year because I loved another of W. G. Sebald’s books, The Rings of Saturn, which I read first for fun and later for a great class. I haven’t started this one yet, but it might be assigned for one of the classes I’m taking this fall so I figure I should try reading it before then.
My dad gave me Skin: A Natural History for my birthday this year because I like scientific literary nonfiction and I was into the single-subject gimmick for a while: a book about oranges, a book about blood, a book about pencils, etc. I’m hoping this will be like an extension of the amazing chapter about skin in my high school physiology book, which made me understand how cuts heal.
I got I Am A Strange Loop for my birthday too, because I read Gödel, Escher, Bach several years ago and loved it like many people do when they read it at the right time — before they already know a lot about the ideas that Hofstadter brings up. So, I may or may not like this book, depending on how much I learn from it.
My sisters and I grew up in bookstores and libraries poking around the children’s books, waiting for our English-professor dad to stop browsing and just buy his five or eight books already. Now I find myself sneaking into bookstores and libraries knowing how to use them, and he annoys us in other ways.
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thursday, july 12, 2007
Dense and mixed, tense and unequal, mostly yummy
These are tiny impressions of some places within walking distance that I’ve visited in the past couple weeks:
- Little Otsu
- I liked browsing through their quirky notecards, vegan wallets, handmade books, and arty branded t-shirts, but I didn’t have a reason to buy anything. That might have crossed the line into too much hipster anyway.
- Therapy
- This cutesy gifts/clothes/useless junk/etc. store lacked the moleskine that I wanted but has a sizeable selection of greeting and note cards, one of which will be mailed to my sister in the Peace Corps in Mongolia when I figure out the right postage.
- Taqueria La Cumbre, Pancho Villa Taqueria, Taqueria Can-Cun
- Tasty burrito with grilled vegetables, a lovely sauce, and cashews. Dry veggie burrito with stringy broccoli. Delicious soft veggie burrito with hot salsa. To be continued.
- Pork Store Cafe
- I’m vegetarian and Doug is omnivorous with an emphasis on meat, so when he visited last weekend I couldn’t resist taking him here. It was nice and neighborhood-y on a Saturday afternoon, and our veggie scrambles (plus bacon for him) were greasy and good.
- Tartine Bakery
- This French bakery’s reputation means a long line and endless debates over whether it’s worth the wait. I don’t know; I ate a couple of their cookies and liked them.
- City Art Gallery
- This is friendly, accessible art and some of it is nice: understated urban photo prints, modernish feminist watercolors, wacky thick oil paintings, art glass, linocut prints, chunky jewelry, etc. Like all college students, someday I will move up from grabbing promotional postcards to buying stuff.
- New College
- I haven’t been inside here, but I got curious about the bright green buildings and found out that the college has a rather interesting history of scandal and dissent. It’s even on probation for its accreditation.
- Bombay Ice Creamery
- My rose and cardamom ice cream insisted a little too much on the rose flavoring, but I’ll be back for the plain cardamom ice cream. I adore cardamom. I like rose too, but I don’t need to taste like perfume. With ginger ice cream and more, this place might satisfy my taste for weird sweets like Sheng Kee Bakery did last summer.
I like this neighborhood — it’s part of what a city should be, and I have fifty more places to try in the next two months.
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wednesday, july 04, 2007
Excluding my close-ish friends for fairness
While I settle into the summer I give you five other blogs to read, in alphabetical order:
- Jason Scott rants about geeky subjects.
- Joe Clark crushes the unworthy and takes pictures of type.
- Nasty Nets surfs the web and presents it for your enjoyment.
- Preoccupations thinks about education and technology.
- Raspberry Debacle is the most literate food blog.
