MITPressLog

"A most ingenious paradox"

In "The Pirates of Penzance," time plays a trick on Frederic, making him a victim of "a most ingenious paradox" due to his Leap Year birthday. What better way to celebrate Leap Year 2012 than to dive into books that deal with the various paradoxes and definitions of "time"? Here are a few titles to add to your reading list:

 

The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality
by  David Couzens Hoy

A study of the emergence in post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of temporality.

 

 

 

 

Time and Identity
Edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke and Harry S. Silverstein

Original essays on the metaphysics of time, identity, and the self, written by distinguished scholars and important rising philosophers.

 

 

 

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means
Siegfried Zielinski; Translated by Gloria Custance

A quest to find something new by excavating the "deep time" of media's development—not by simply looking at new media's historic forerunners, but by connecting models, machines, technologies, and accidents that have until now remained separated.

 

 

Time and Realism: Metaphysical and Antimetaphysical Perspectives
Yuval Dolev

A new view of the metaphysics of time, arguing that the traditional tensed-tenseless debate within analytic philosophy should be seen as the first stage in a philosophical investigation of time, and that the next stage belongs to phenomenology.

 

 

twin time: or, how death befell me
Veronica Gonzalez

A young woman's fabulist search for her long-lost twin brother overturns all notions of motherhood, magic realism, and miscegenation.

 

 

Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture Sanford Kwinter An exploration of twentienth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form.

What’s on your bedside table?

A good way to get to know someone (besides reading their blog on a daily basis) is to take a look at their bookshelf. Better still is a glimpse of the books on their bedside table. Lucky for us, Joshua Glenn, Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia producer, blogged about his bedside table on Brainiac, a blog maintained by the Ideas section crew at the Boston Globe. Included in the list of books waiting to be read is Eldon Garnet’s new novel, Lost Between the Edges from Semiotext(e). Here is what he says about it:

Lost Between the Edges (Semiotext/e Native Agents, distrib. MIT). Described by the publisher as ‘a new classic of symbolic warfare waged in the street and the mind,’ this novel by Toronto-based author and artist Eldon Garnet concerns the efforts of X, a ‘renegade academic and punk intellectual,’ to put a Holocaust denier out of business, permanently. I enjoyed Garnet's 1995 novel Reading Brooke Shields: The Garden of Failure (also from Semiotext/e), and I've long admired Chris Kraus’s Native Agents imprint, so this ought to be a good read.

Read the whole post here.

humid and juicy

Beauty Talk and Monsters (Semiotext(e), May 2007), a debut collection of stories by Masha Tupitsyn, was reviewed in the San Francisco Bay Guardian this week. Reviewer Michelle Tea, who wrote The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America (published by Semiotext(e) with a new edition out this Fall), says that “the experience of reading Beauty Talk and Monsters is humid, intimate, and juicy; like spying through a window at a neighbor’s television set, it provides both the voyeuristic pleasure of watching a stranger’s activity and the familiar flicker of a well-known film, now playing in said stanger’s psyche.” Read the full review here .

Multiple Personalities

Playwright and performer Heather Woodbury has forged a unique form which combines the immediacy of performance art with the narrative structure and characterizations of a novel. What Ever (Faber and Faber/FSG, 2003), her critically acclaimed first "living novel," was a ten-hour solo piece which toured the U.S. and Europe and was adapted as a radio play hosted by Ira Glass.  

Woodbury's second "living novel" is a collision of life-stories from New York and Los Angeles spun into an epic mix by a young Echo Park DJ named Manny mourning his grandmother's death. Tale of 2Cities (published by Semiotext(e)), incorporates generations of interwoven characters on both coasts, flashing back to 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers abandoned one neighborhood and, in LA, another was lost to make way for the transplanted team's new stadium. From the rise of Senator McCarthy to the fall of New York's Twin Towers, Manny's mix vividly summons a lost universe of lives otherwise erased, in a style that owes as much to DJ Shadow as John Steinbeck.

A fully staged version of Tale of 2Cities is currently enjoying a bicoastal premiere. The UCLA Live production (running from Sept. 30 - Oct. 8) has been met with glowing praise. Variety proclaimed it "a reminder of what a vibrant and endlessly inventive thing theater can be -- a phantasmagoria of dramatic and structural ambition," while the Los Angeles Times deemed it "breathtakingly expansive" with "a scale that bears comparison to the titanic undertakings of Anna Deavere Smith and Tony Kushner." Tale of 2Cities will take the stage at PS 122 in New York City from Oct. 12 - Oct. 29.

Wordstock

Wordstock, Portland, Oregon’s Annual Festival of the Book begins today and runs through the weekend at the Oregon Convention Center.  It promises to be an exciting event, with over 200 authors reading on 10 stages.  There's also music, food, a kid’s festival, and other activities—really, something for everyone. 

Wordstock boasts a wealth of literary talent—among those on stage this weekend is Semiotext(e)’s own Chris Kraus.  She’ll be reading from her new novel, Torpor, at 11:00 am on Sunday on Multnomah Stage, B115. So, while there's not always a happy ending, this promises to be an interesting event. 

The Fast and the Futuristic

The French entertainment publication Allocine has reported that action-movie stalwart Vin Diesel has been cast as the lead in Babylon A.D., a big-budget screen adaptation of Maurice Dantec’s underground science fiction thriller Babylon Babies. Diesel's credits include the blockbusters xXx, The Fast and the Furious, and The Pacifier. He is rumored to be cast as the lead, a mercenary named Thoorop who is hired to escort a young woman pregnant with a mutant embryo, a genetically modified messiah whose birth may signal the end of human life as we know it.

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (Gothika), the movie will begin shooting in Eastern Europe and Canada in June 2006 and is slated for release in 2007.

Be My (Free-Market) Valentine

On Valentine’s Day, we write poems to our loved ones and quote Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and Browning.  We profess our love by sending flowers and chocolates to those who are close to our hearts (or to those we hope will be someday).  But really, what’s more romantic than a novel that makes a case for free-market economics?   

The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance by Russell Roberts takes a provocative look at business, economics, and regulation through the eyes of Sam Gordon and Laura Silver, teachers at the exclusive Edwards School in Washington, D.C. Sam lives and breathes capitalism. Laura prefers Wordsworth to the Wall Street Journal. Where Sam sees victors, she sees victims. She wants the government to protect consumers and workers from the excesses of Sam's beloved marketplace.  As Sam and Laura navigate their love and their lives, The Invisible Heart also provides rich lessons about how business and the marketplace transform our lives. 

Here’s a bit about Sam and Laura from the book:

The Edwards School hired Sam because he had a master’s  degree in economics and four years of previous teaching experience. He had turned thirty the previous summer. In his first year at the school, he had taught a couple of sections of the advanced placement course in economics along with a class on government and politics. This year he had added his first elective, “The World of Economics,” where he had free rein to teach  whatever he wanted.

Testing "Turing"

One Press author reviews another over on Grand Text Auto, the blog dedicated to computer narrative, interactive fiction, gaming, and other hip digital topics. GTA contributor Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little Passages and coeditor of The New Media Reader, reviews Christos Papadimitriou's Turing, "a novel about computation." Montfort focuses on the way in which Papadimitriou balances personal and intellectual narratives. "If you appreciate ambition and computation," he writes, "and certainly if you are a humanist considering computation and trying to see how it might fit into your work, read Turing."

Montfort's review can be read in its entirety here. He's also got a brand-new piece of interactive fiction called Book and Volume, which you can check out at this link.

Maxim Praises Venusia

Venusia, a new science fiction novel by Mark von Schlegell (and published by Semiotext(e)), received 4 & 1/2 stars in Maxim. Reviewer Mike Errico deems it a "psychedelic sampling of high and low literature that reads like the best of the genre. . . . like a head-on collision between a David Lynch film and a Philip K. Dick novel in the 23rd century."