twitter diet and book fast  

Ended a self-imposed twitter diet and book fast, moments after Nicole and I bought wedding rings. We were walking by Book Thug Nation in a euphoric stupor. The last time we’d been there together, I was short of cash to get a copy of “Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future” and—forgetting myself—I popped in to see if it was still there. Spending begets spending, no? It was, and I bought it with every dollar and penny of cash both Nicole and I were carrying. Aaron knocked off a few cents and told me this was not, in fact, the same copy but another that must just have come in.

+ Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future — Hamid Dabashi

The next day, Nicole and I were walking and I found a slightly waterlogged copy of The Potent Self by Moshe Feldenkrais on the street and picked it up; first ground score of the post fast. I must’ve already told myself the embargo was contingent on rings or a suit or something; wedding plans in fair enough shape, my resolve against street books crumbled. I read The Potent Self years ago as a library book and had been telling Nicole about it just a few days before.

+ The Potent Self — Moshe Feldenkrais

Two key concepts I remember were that (apologies, this is going to get bodily) in children, erections are not a measure of sexual attraction, but of curiosity. The autonomic nervous system and whatnot. And I’d been saying that this book had changed some part of my life in which I was much happier to process an attraction to someone—whether a stranger, a friend, an advertisement, whatever—as curiosity; by framing initial attractions—which invariably fade—as sparks for learning about, making projects with, asking questions of a new person I made friends and cohorts instead of makeouts and regrets. And really and truly find that to be a more pleasant life. The other concept of the book was that of learning physical things as slowly as possible, which is a core concept of Feldenkrais somatics.

So that was two.

Anyway, here was that book I’d been talking about, so I grabbed it, froze it, put it in the sun. Amazon says I bought no books between April and August, which is remarkable, but between these two, the book storms began again.

+ Points in Time — Paul Bowles
+ Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose
+ Ulysses (Modern Library, 1946) — James Joyce
+ Ulysses (The Corrected Text, 1986) — James Joyce
+ Ulysses — Hugh Kenner
+ Dash Snow: I Love You, Stupid
+ Love Roses (Dash Snow)

But the fast was less to do with any rejection of book-ness, and more to do with cleaning up the stacks and lists I’ve already made. Mostly, I’ve been reading (and making progress towards finishing) these:

√ Thinking Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman [highlights]
+ Pro Git — Scott Chacon [readmill]
+ The Dialectics of Seeing – Susan Buck-Morss
+ The Arcades Project — Walter Benjamin
+ What Technology Wants — Kevin Kelly
√ How the Universe Got Its Spots — Janna Levin [readmill]
+ Magic for Beginners — Kelly Link [readmill]
√ How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti [readmill]
+ Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever — Justin Taylor [readmill]
√ The Fever — Wallace Shawn [readmill]
√ Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace [readmill]
√ The Coming Insurrection [readmill]
√ CSS for Web Designers — Dan Cederholm
√ Responsive Web Design — Ethan Marcotte [readmill]
√ These Days — Jack Cheng [readmill]
√ The Library at Night — Alberto Maguel [readmill] [highlights]
√ Tubes — Andrew Blum [highlights]