Give me suggestions
And please provide links for my abuse of American consumerism.
This is the web home of John Athayde, designer, musician, developer, and author. Growing tired of a previous design, he went minimal with this one. You can read more on the about page.
And please provide links for my abuse of American consumerism.
April 23, 2002 at 7:57 AM
"Best Food Writing 2001" - including passages from some of the great food writers, and others like David Sedaris. It's not so much a cookbook as it just is...a book of short stories, articles, etc. about food. There's one reprint of an article (which I found the link for) about Christopher Walken cooking. Good stuff. Paperback.
April 23, 2002 at 1:11 PM
well my suggestions are:
italo calvio's "if on a winter's night a traveler"... italian postmodernism at its best...
steve martin's "shopgirl" and "picasso at the lapin agile" funny, intelligent... really genius works...
patrick marber's "closer"... most fucked up, fantasic play i've ever seen/read
yukio mishima's "death in midsummer"... sad, but beautiful collection of short stories by an amazing japanese writer
james joyce's "ulysses"... a little light reading ;-) certainly the greatest novel of the 20th century, and arguably the greatest novel ever written...
ok, i'm done... sorry, but the english major had to weigh in :-)
enjoy...
April 23, 2002 at 4:59 PM
Hey, my first post! Try "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer. Written in the main character's broken English, it's about a Ukranian boy meeting the author, who is visiting his ancestors' neighborhood. Haven't actually read it, but I've heard about it, and it's supposed to be very good.
And since Schlick is suggesting plays: '27 Wagons Full of Cotton', Tennessee Williams; 'Fool for Love', Sam Shepherd; 'Zoo Story', Edward Albee; and some of my scripts might give you a good laugh. Damn, I'm bored at work...
April 24, 2002 at 9:49 AM
phil-
nice suggestion with 'zoo story'... john, you definitely want to read that... theater of the absurd... 8 pages long, completely fucked up, really really good... oh, and i wanted to make one more suggestion...
tom stoppard's "rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead" my favorite play, just absolutely fantastic... that is all for now :-)
john
April 24, 2002 at 11:12 AM
Travelling Mercies By Anne Lamott.An amazing look at faith and life and laugh out loud funny.
April 24, 2002 at 12:19 PM
Kurt Vonnegut - <i>Palm Sunday</i> (auto-biography) and <i>Slaughterhouse-5</i>.
And on a semi-related note, I just watched the black & white film adaptation of Herman Melville's <i>Billy Budd</i> yesterday and re-realized what poetic grace Melville had with words. Great wordplay irony, too.
April 24, 2002 at 1:24 PM
David Sedaris is GREAT!
I'd recommend "Choke' by Chuck Palhanuik. He's a great writer who makes even Kurt Vonnegut and Don Delillo look outdated.
April 24, 2002 at 1:53 PM
I actually performed Zoo Story before. That's one screwed up play. But quite good. I think I'm just looking for a spark to get my imagination running wild again. It's gotten complacent in its old age (aka, too much Television).
April 24, 2002 at 2:36 PM
hey mister...
hey mister...
hey... mister...
...i've been to the zoo.
what a great play.
I'm not going to recommend any fiction, because frankly, I never read any... just don't have time, honestly. Maybe this summer I'll finally read some of my brother's recommendations. But if I can make a couple recommendations of history/biography/politics - the new Churchill biography by Roy Jenkins, I believe, is out of this world. Really remarkably good. And if you want a source for bitching at corporatist elements in the news media, pick up Len Downie and Bob Kaiser's new one, "The News About The News" - highly recommended.
If you want a spark for your imagination... hmmm... I passed a book along to my brother a while ago which is quite good, called "The Creators" by Boorstein... it's basically an artistic and cultural history of the last couple of thousand years. REally easy to read, and good stuff - plus, there's quite a bit on architecture.
Oh, and do me a favor. Buy from <a href="http://www.bn.com" rel="nofollow">Barnes and Noble</a> instead of Amazon... I think I have a couple shares there or something. Damned if I know.
April 24, 2002 at 9:09 PM
I guess my reading level is as outdated as this PC I'm typing these words on.
:^\
April 25, 2002 at 5:00 PM
Hmmm...
I second the Italo Calvino post. I'd also include "Invisible Cities" (short story compendium) and "The Non-Existent Knight / The Cloven Viscount". Both stories in the latter are excellent.
Continuing the Italin writers thread, check out "On Persephone's Island : a Sicilian journal" by Mary Taylor Simeti. Wonderful. Little mob stuff. Basically a journal. Everything is accurate. I wish she had more maps!!!
For the reading impaired, I recommend "Pewter Wings, Golden Horns, Stone Veils (wedding in a dark plum room)" by John Hejduk. Yeah, I know. . .standard Hejduk obsession there. Great story, hardly any text. Don't buy if you're not into stories by Architects. May be difficult to find. For stuff ON architects, "Brunelleschi's Dome" (significant for us FSP grads) by Ross King is fantastic.
Also peep "The Divine Comedy" by Dante, if you haven't already; "Stranger in a Strange Land" (recommended to me by .sara - very good) and of course "Ecce Homo" by Friederich Nietzsche, if you're into being totally oblitereated (like me).
Crichton's "TimeLine" is also good, if standard.
April 30, 2002 at 9:55 AM
Manuel De Landa
A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
1997 Zone Books
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