I hate the word "meme" with a violent passion, so even though I accept Telecommuniculturally's challenge, I'm going to call it a questionnaire. Which is my right, since it is one.
1. One book you have read more than once
I am reminded of Jesse Sheidlower quoting Umberto Eco about his library, "when people ask if I've really read all these books, I say, some of them more than once." It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.
So I'll say Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin, which in 10th grade or so I would read to the end and then immediately start reading again. There have only been a few books I can say that about, and certainly Winter's Tale was the first. Helprin did a reading for his latest in Park Slope recently, and if I'd been in town I would have been tempted to go and say "I could not disagree with your politics more profoundly on a bet, but I love your fiction."
2. One book you would want on a desert island
The best answer I've seen for this one is Robinson Crusoe, for the survival tips! Right now, it would be Infinite Jest, since I'd like the uninterrupted time to actually finish the thing, and it would be neat to go back to it now that we're up to the time in which the book takes place. I've been on a bit of a DFW kick lately, what with his Federer piece in the Times and having a bit from The Broom of the System stuck in my head most of the early part of this week.
3. One book that made you laugh.
Joy in the Morning, by P.G. Wodehouse. Really, anything by Wodehouse will do.
4. One book that made you cry.
I rarely cry at books, at movies, TV, any of that, but The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay just made me weep.
5. One book you wish you had written.
Emma. Or, as John Ramsburgh once called it, in full Kowalski-voice, "EMMMMAAAAAAAAAAA!" So sharp, so funny, so beautifully constructed. Read it once, and then read it again to really get all the jokes. Sigh.
6. One book you wish had never been written.
Oh, hm. Mein Kampf is too easy, isn't it? Spengler's Decline of the West, then, without which Germany wouldn't have been ready for the creepy little Austrian anyhow.
7. One book you are currently reading.
Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, by Paul Dourish. I'm so lame. But I do groove on the way that the importance of thinking of the user as embodied actor moving in historically specific space(s), the pleasures and limits of embodiment, is starting to grab hold in interaction design, if only because I've already done so much of the reading already.
8. One book you have been meaning to read.
I'd like to re-read Mason & Dixon before the new Pynchon comes out. At Powell's last week, I bought Rory Stewart's The Places In Between, David Chinitz's T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, Alison Bechdel's memoir Fun Home, Where The Action Is, and a UI patterns book. Oh, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I'm looking forward to.
9. One Book That Changed Your Life.
Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 didn't so much change my life as bring my life into clearer focus for me, which helped me change it, mostly for the better. Computers, literature, the difficult importance of being in the world rather than just observing it... what's not to love?
10. Now tag five people
This is always the part of these things that make me cringe, so as much as I'd love to see, say, Amy, Terri, Harry, Shana, and David answer this, I refuse to insist, especially since I know David doesn't read anything other than instruction manuals.
(Note: edited 10/16/06 to correct the Eco quote (thank you, Jesse) and the Powell's haul list.)
Where are you going, where have you been
At the end of a long research project: we've logged something like 20,000 miles in the air so far, and that's before the two trips out west to present our results. I want to do a full-on Jan Chipchase and post about the pleasures and terrors of doing user research far from home, but for now I'll leave you with this vivid warning sign from the Milan subways. Never attempt to have sex with the train doors, people, and have a good weekend.Quotation of the day
Ultimately, the meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it. Consider the similarity between what is involved in creating and using a tool and the sequence of narrative. Even the chimpanzee picking up and peeling a twig to "fish" for termites requires the mental projection of a sequence, including an initial desire, several actions, and successful feeding. The sequence becomes more complex where more tools are involved, or when the same tool is used in several ways. Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities. Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time. Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes. Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience. In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.
-- David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With
My only World Cup post
Proof of Clive's theory that history now happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as videogame: the Zidane headbutt game. Created, of course, by someone at an Italian address.
I was heartbroken by the awful end of Zidane's game, and career. But even I have to admit that it's a pretty amusing piece of Flash.
Lorraine Hunt Lieberson
I listen to less classical music these days than I ever did, and it was never my primary music love. But I listen to and read enough about it that sometimes, an extraordinary artist still catches my attention.
I was introduced to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's work through a rave review by Alex Ross of the New Yorker. So it's apt in a way that I should learn of her untimely death from cancer at 52 from his blog as well.
One of the first things I bonded with Turi over was Lieberson's work -- I lent her my copy of Lieberson's Handel arias shortly after we started working together. She invited me in turn to what was supposed to be a performance by Lieberson of a new work by her husband, composer Peter Lieberson, as part of a series of quasi-educational concerts by the New York Philharmonic. The Liebersons cancelled that concert, and we saw Elliott Carter speak to a performance of a recent work instead -- wonderful, and inspiring to see a man so engaged with his art in his late 90s -- but we were both hoping that next season, we might get to hear what we'd missed.