en-US Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:00:10 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 92541 192 Nicholson Baker 0679735755 Justin 3 Good book to read if you have two hours to kill waiting for the fucking night owl bus and its mid-April and 40F and raining. For anyone who has had a distant hero-worship/kill the father literary complex and finds they are constantly comparing the most minute biographical data of the object of said obsession with themselves, this is probably a cathartic read. Baker's anxiety over Updike seems to give credence to Bloom's thesis, but fuck that guy, like Shakespeare wasn't ripping off his predecessors. Best parts are when Baker is at his most absurd, ecstatic over the common bond of their psoriatic afflictions and anguished that of all the hot young literati in Boston, Updike would choose Tim O'Brien over himself as his golfing partner. Shows the petty sniping and vain narcissism of contemporary literary culture and the strange cognitive dissonance between the egomaniac and the coward that is specific to the writerly species. ]]> 3.76 1991
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Justin
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/04/14
shelves:
review:

Good book to read if you have two hours to kill waiting for the fucking night owl bus and its mid-April and 40F and raining. For anyone who has had a distant hero-worship/kill the father literary complex and finds they are constantly comparing the most minute biographical data of the object of said obsession with themselves, this is probably a cathartic read. Baker's anxiety over Updike seems to give credence to Bloom's thesis, but fuck that guy, like Shakespeare wasn't ripping off his predecessors. Best parts are when Baker is at his most absurd, ecstatic over the common bond of their psoriatic afflictions and anguished that of all the hot young literati in Boston, Updike would choose Tim O'Brien over himself as his golfing partner. Shows the petty sniping and vain narcissism of contemporary literary culture and the strange cognitive dissonance between the egomaniac and the coward that is specific to the writerly species.
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Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that "solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order." Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.


The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.]]> 440 Steven Shapin 0691024324 Justin 0 currently-reading 3.99 1985
author: Steven Shapin
name: Justin
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/04/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 356205 342 Stanley Elkin 1564783057 Justin 4
This is not my favorite Elkin work, those being The Magic Kingdom and The Dick Gibson Show (Dick Gibson makes a brief appearance in The Franchiser), both of which rival (and appear as a precursor to) the manically exhaustive style and absurd black humor of David Foster Wallace. Still, the fight with Col.Sanders alone may make this book worth reading, and Elkin's descriptions of illness are fairly unparallel in my mind (though again, Magic Kingdom covers this terrain even more extensively).

For those who have yet to read Elkin, go with the Dick Gibson Show. For others, this review is probably useless. In fact, I am having that kind of hollow-postmasturbatory self-loathing thing going on right now concerning my writing this review. I mean, why does anyone care what I think about this? Why I am I writing this?
I don't feel very comfortable about this whole thing yet. ]]> 3.99 1976
author: Stanley Elkin
name: Justin
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1976
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/04/14
shelves:
review:
A lightly ironic panegyric that seems the literary equivalet Road Runner #2, the stars and the radio towers, the highway your girlfriend, the magic powered bleakness, the weird giddiness that come from smoking too much fluorescence, etc. This is not surprising given both were written during the seventies. Plot revolves around one Ben Flesh, entrepeneur and 'franchiser' (or 'Franchisee' as Col.Sanders indignantly asserts at one point), one of the many invisible hands behind America's surburbanization. Book is uneven, though always carried along by the simple enjoyment of just reading Elkin's prose. The seemingly random changes between 1st and 3rd person was initially confusing(almost annoying), and over the long run just appeared unnecessary.

This is not my favorite Elkin work, those being The Magic Kingdom and The Dick Gibson Show (Dick Gibson makes a brief appearance in The Franchiser), both of which rival (and appear as a precursor to) the manically exhaustive style and absurd black humor of David Foster Wallace. Still, the fight with Col.Sanders alone may make this book worth reading, and Elkin's descriptions of illness are fairly unparallel in my mind (though again, Magic Kingdom covers this terrain even more extensively).

For those who have yet to read Elkin, go with the Dick Gibson Show. For others, this review is probably useless. In fact, I am having that kind of hollow-postmasturbatory self-loathing thing going on right now concerning my writing this review. I mean, why does anyone care what I think about this? Why I am I writing this?
I don't feel very comfortable about this whole thing yet.
]]> 4012246 754 1579809316 Justin 5 4.50 2003
author: U.S. Department of Transportation
name: Justin
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2009/04/10
date added: 2009/04/14
shelves:
review:
MUTCD (the AASHO's second outing), is a haunting, surreal picaresque through the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of a young yield sign who is swept up in events far beyond his control. At the macroscopic level, it is tragic tale of the loss of cultural identity many traffic control devices felt during the Great Standardization of the 1930's, and the problems surrounding their general assimilation into mainstream society. Some parts lag, especially sections on pavement markings and highway signage. Nevertheless the climax of the work alone, set during the bloody coup of the Crossing-Guard syndicate, makes this long, challenging book worth your time. An author's second novel is always the most difficult, but the Department of Transportation eludes the sophmore slump, and serves up a work that leaves us lying prostrate, under the bed, begging for just one more another lick of her nylons, or perhaps the light caress of Wanda's riding crop. But no, there is only a coldcruel hatred in her eyes, and sewn here in this wolf's skin, it fairly difficult to imagine getting out of this place anytime soon.
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