Bibliography, Bibliography, Bibliography !!!
Showing posts with label Bibliography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bibliography. Show all posts
This was one of the first books I ever read in my attempt to understand the cultural trends of homogenized branding and cloned franchise society. I haven't looked at this book in a long time, and this morning while browsing though it I noticed something I had underlined probably ten years ago; a reference to James Kunstler's book The Geography of Nowhere. So why did it take me almost ten years to finally read Kunstler's book ?
"The Kinko's, Starbucks and Blockbuster clerks buy their uniform of khakis and white or blue shirts at the Gap; the "Hi! Welcome to the Gap!" greeting cheer is fueled by Starbucks double expressos; the resumes that got them the jobs were designed at Kinko's on friendly Macs; in 12-point Helvetica on Microsoft Word. The troops show up for work smelling of CK One (except at Starbucks, where colognes and perfumes are thought to compete with the "romance of coffee" aroma), their faces freshly scrubbed with Body Shop Blue Corn Mask, before leaving apartments furnished with Ikea self-assembled bookcases and coffee tables."
-Naomi Klein
No Logo
While I can point to specific non-fiction books as being highly influential on my photography work (see Bibliography), literary fiction has been equally if not more influential on my work, but in a general macro sense. My favorite genre is the short story, and I have read hundreds if not thousands of short stories over the years. To me they are like paintings or sculptures, some of the best are not fully appreciated until after a third or fourth reading. I have been buying the Best American Short Story series for years now and I have started collecting the older editions; the series started in 1978. My goal is to collect the complete set.
It's a fairly elitist selection every year, and the same authors seem to show up on a consistent basis, but certainly no different than any best of selection in the art world, and certainly no different than the elitist nature of the contemporary photography world. But there is no disputing the quality of the choices, and while I have my individual favorites, it is the genre of contemporary American realist fiction itself that captivates me. I have read some of my favorite stories dozens of times over the years. (Just look at the tattered condition of the 1996 edition) They are like paintings that I can return to over and over again. They shape the way I view the world.
Plastic Unreality-
Christopher Alexander
A Pattern Language
In the modern city industry gets treated like a disease. The areas where it exists are assumed to be dirty and derelict. They are kept to the "other side of the tracks," swept under the rug. And people forget altogether that the things which surround them in their daily lives- bread, chemicals, cars, oil, gaskets, radios, chairs- are all made in these forbidden industrial zones. Under these conditions it is not surprising that people treat life as an unreal charade, and forget the simplest realities and facts of their existence.
Since the 1930's various efforts have been made, on behalf of the workers, to make factories green and pleasant. This social welfare approach to the nature of industries is once again unreal, in the opposite direction. A workshop, where things are being made, is not a garden or hospital. The gardens which surround the new industrial "parks" are more for show than for the workers anyway since a few inner courts or gardens would be far more useful to the workers themselves. And the contribution of an industrial park to the social and emotional life of the surrounding city is almost nil.
Christopher Alexander
A Pattern Language
Natural Symbolism-
- Charles B. Wheeler
The Design of Poetry
This kind of symbolism is natural because it is found in nature and because the objects which have symbolic meaning are thought to have it naturally and inherently, not depending on the human mind to give it to them. One of the classic statements of this position is Emerson's: "It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact." The notion is attractive, it suggests that man does not inhabit a blank and irrelevant universe, but one which is somehow congenial to him, reflecting his mind in its own structure and its component parts, providing incessant material analogies to the human spirit. The visible surface of nature is eloquent. As Emerson goes on to say, "Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into a stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful types of all influence." The mountains seem to speak of aspiration and nobility, sunrise and sunset of birth and death, the stars of permanence and order. There are sermons in stone, books in the running brooks. Attractive though it may be, the existence of a natural symbolism has to remain a matter of faith alone, since the conditions for submitting it to proof are nearly impossible to obtain. In order to prove it one would have to find a person whose mind was uncontaminated by any previous notions of natural symbolism, explain to him somehow, without predudicing the experiment, what one was trying to do, and then confront him with an allegedly symbolic natural object to see whether he would spontaneously find meaning in it. What actually happens is that we are already conditioned to see certain meanings in objects by our cultural tradition, meanings that have been read into, not out of, these objects.
- Charles B. Wheeler
The Design of Poetry
"Our society really left home when we placed boundaries between ourselves and the earth, when we moved en mass inside totally artificial, reconstructed, mediated worlds- huge concrete cities and suburbs- and we aggressively ripped up and redesigned the natural world. By now, nature has literally receded from our view and diminished in size. We have lost contact with our roots. As a culture, we don't know where we came from; we're not aware we are part of something larger than ourselves. Nor can we easily find places that reveal natural processes still at work".
- Jerry Mander
In the Absence of the Sacred
Landscape is an active principle.Its existence is the result of human actions and natural processes in ever-changing combinations, and its understanding requires that the senses, the mind, and the imagination be fully engaged with the facts in front of us. My study of landscape began when I asked, "Why do these things look the way they do?"
Thoughts on Landscape
Frank Gohlke
Written in 1903 to an aspiring poet, I think this is perfect advice for the aspiring artist of any medium, including photographers...
- Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
This above all- ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple "I must", then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty- describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
- Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.
- Letters To A Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
- Letters To A Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
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