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Saturday, January 11, 2003
posted 8:20 AM
FROM MY BEDSIDE TABLE
ALBION by Peter Ackroyd
“The Origins of the English Imagination”. I’m a fan.
THE GREAT DISMAL by Bland Simpson
When I was a very small boy we lived for a couple of years not far from the Great Dismal Swamp. A wonderful book. A gift from my wife.
HOKKAIDO POPSICLE by Isaac Adamson
Recommended, along with its precursor, TOKYO SUCKERPUNCH, by the alarmingly hip French guys at my local Franco-Japanese bookstore. Faux-Chandleresque pomo-picaresque and sort of engagingly, stubbornly goofy, these are novels written by someone young enough to never have thought in terms of “genre” in the first place.
THE TURK by Tom Standage
“The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-century Chess-playing Machine”. Another good one from the author of the excellent THE VICTORIAN INTERNET.
THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Robert Buderi
Radar. History of. Amazing. A gift from Bruce Sterling.
FOLLIES & GROTTOES by Barbara Jones
A Christmas gift from my daughter, and currently, for me, The Book. 1979 revised edition of the 1953 classic. Really, really difficult to discribe. Ostensibly a survey of those oddball large-scale British garden-decorations, but there’s something else coded here, some urgent subcutaneous message about landscape and genius loci; a vision akin to Arthur Machen’s. Still reading it, but so far I’ve discovered one of the three or four spookiest passages of English prose I’ve ever read (a description of a garden I’m not sure I’d be willing to visit) and much else besides. Copiously illustrated, both with photographs and the author’s wonderful drawings.
A STORE CAYCE WOULD BE ENTIRELY COMFORTABLE IN
Huf, 808 Sutter Street, at Jones, San Francisco
One of those places where skate culture has gone so far into design that the skate part vanishes in a stinging mist of Milano-Japanese minimalism, leaving you in a cool white Cornell box with an array of pharmaceutically perfect sneakers.
1/11/03
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