Changes To The Book Basket
I spent a long time reading “Lookout Cartridge”, but I’m finally done. I really did read about 4/5ths of that book once before. At about that point, the story becomes difficult to follow - it’s not the sort of book you can read casually in short installments on your daily bus commute. But that’s basically how I did it. Yes, I read a lot of other things during that time, but it took more than a month to read because I frequently had to double back and refresh my memory of what had happened. Part of the genius of “Lookout Cartridge” is the complete confusion of time in the narrative. There is a main thread of timeline, but so much of the story is flash-back, flash-forward, and otherwise uncertain references to subsequent memories of the past that maybe haven’t happened yet(?). I’m still a bit confused. Maybe I just haven’t read enough fiction to keep track of a cast of characters. It gets worse because the narrator often doesn’t know who some of those people are, but as the story fills out, he does have theories about who and what he saw them doing in the past. Sound interesting?
I’ve also just begun reading David E. Nye’s “Technology Matters”. I saw it in the store months ago and was mildly interested. For reasons I don’t completely understand, it had been sitting in an open box with a bunch of other books in my office. I think they were from a return to the publisher. It doesn’t happen to a lot of books, but there are a few that wind up at the office for no good reason. Hopefully I didn’t sent it to myself from the store and then forget… Well, even if I did, it all worked out okay because I bought it. Here is a topic that gets me excited. Of course, this is mainly in response to the pathetic attempts of schools to teach it to me over the years. Back in 1990 GW made its Engineering students take a class called “Technology And Society”. They must really get a sense of accomplishment from requiring a course! That ought to solve everything - just require it as a course!
(Clearly I’m not finished with my thought from last night about not finding anybody to interact with in college.) It’s a real Catch-22, thought isn’t it? At 19 I didn’t have much experience of the world yet, so it didn’t help to sit around in a discussion of other ignorant 19 year olds talking about the dangers of bad computer programming. This was way too far in advance of the Y2K issue - that might have stimulated the discussion. But I will say it over and over until somebody else believes it: Students need to be taught first, then they can form reasonable opinions (if they are indeed reasonable), and then they might have something useful to add to discussions. As the world becomes more complex, I feel less authorized to claim a stand on anything. What you see me doing here is different - I babble about intelligent topics until I start making sense. That doesn’t make me too terribly informed or correct, but it helps to show off the structure of ideas. And it is why it would be much better to have people converse with me about those things instead of me babbling about them like a schizophrenic homeless person. The more books I read the better, but reading all the books in the world isn’t going to substitute for discussion. And last night I remembered too clearly that classmates since high school would see me with a non-assigned book and walk quickly in the opposite direction. As an adult I get a lot of respect as a reader, but also a lot of fear that it is contagious. They probably also respect circus acrobats - but wouldn’t ever want to try out the high wire themselves.
Remember how I read Robert Friedel’s “A Culture Of Improvement”? Well, I notice his name shows up in Nye’s acknowledgments section. So it’s no wonder I was browsing this book back in the Summer. And it is one more reminder that there are “so many books, so little time”. I hardly read a tenth of what I would like to read, and what I would like to read is limited by my reluctance to look too hard for more. (I mean, when am I gonna read that stuff I don’t know about if I can’t even read most of what I do?)
Posted by Evan Bittner Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:30:00 GMT
