Your unusual dish of everything.
Cărți
Understanding Evil
Feb 24th
I’ve found an interesting article the other day and thought that I should share, because as always, ‘sharing is caring’ people. 
Dr. Evil
It is a much mentioned, but little understood concept. Any individual in the world is likely to have strong conceptions of “evil,” but very few could define it, or ascribe a cause to it. Dictionary.com defines “evil” as “morally bad or wrong,” and also “causing ruin, injury or pain.” While the word “immoral” is more commonly used to connote the first definition (“morally bad or wrong”), colloquially, the word “evil” is most often used to convey the sense of the second definition (“causing ruin, injury or pain”). Realizing that the phrase “evil” is subjective and has many implications, in this essay I will use the word “evil” to convey the sense of the second definition.
From time immemorial, some humans have been perceived to have the tendency to cause harm to others for no apparent or rational reason. These humans, we assume, like to take pleasure in the pain of others. Thus, what appears to be an alien sensibility to us, one which is characterized by an inexplicable perniciousness, is termed as evil. Why “evil” humans are different from the rest of us is not understood by most people. Evil, they assume, is just an inborn quality. And because it is inherent to the individuals who possess it, people believe that the only way to stop them is to their exterminate them, or at the very least incarcerate them, so that they remain away from a society that they could destroy if given free rein. More >
Codex Seraphinianus
Jan 19th
The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing.
Who were the people who had invented Tlön? The plural is unavoidable, because we have unanimously rejected the idea of a single creator, some transcendental Leibnitz working in modest obscurity. – Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
Like a Borges story, this is as much about the quest for knowledge as it is about the knowledge itself. It involves books missing from libraries, lost translations, and people not answering letters.
The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. Each chapter seems to treat a general encyclopedic topic.
The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into an alligator; etc. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with a delicate appearance, kept together by tiny filaments. There are also illustrations readily recognizable, as maps or human faces. On the other hand, especially in the “physics” chapter, many images look almost completely abstract. Practically all figures are brightly coloured and rich in detail. More >
The Magical World of Maurice Sendak
Dec 18th
Best known for his children’s books, Where The Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen, Maurice Sendak has spent the past fifty years bringing to life a world of fantasy and imagination. His unique vision is loved around the globe by both young and old. Beyond his award-winning work as a writer and illustrator of children’s books, Sendak has produced both operas and ballets for television and the stage.
Maurice Sendak
Born in Brooklyn, New York (June 10, 1928), to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Sendak was a frail and sickly child. Spending much of his young life indoors, he turned to books at an early age. His view of the outside world was often limited to the family that came to visit him and the little that he could see from his window. It was during this time that he began to draw and to allow his imagination to run free. At age twelve, he went with his family to see Walt Disney’s Fantasia. This animated world, constructed completely of invented characters and fantasy, had a great influence on him.
Throughout high school, Sendak continued to draw, and after graduating, published a handful of illustrations in the textbook Atomics For The Millions. In 1948, he began working for F.A.O. Schwartz as a window dresser and continued there for four years while taking night classes at the New York Art Students League. After finding work illustrating Marcel Ayme’s The Wonderful Farm and Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is To Dig, Sendak left F.A.O. Schwartz to become a full-time, freelance children’s book illustrator.
Throughout the 1950s, Sendak worked regularly, producing nearly fifty illustrated children’s books. He saw in book illustration the opportunity to expand the imaginary world of the reader. While many illustrators had concentrated on clarifying the images in the text, Sendak believed that an illustration should add to the mystery of the work. His oddly grotesque characters seemed strangely inviting in their imperfections. Unlike much of the Disney cartoons and the illustration that followed it, Sendak’s artistic imagery brought a self-conscious attention to its origin and its maker. More >
10 Great Sci-fi Novels That Have Been Banned – Part II
Oct 21st
#7 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Stranger in a Strange Land is a pro-religion, anti-theist book about free love and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and was controversial even when it was published in 1962.
Fahrenheit 451
So naturally it was challenged as part of the curriculum of a summer “Science Academy” course in Texas.
#6 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
In a textbook example of “missing the point,” in 1981 Jackson County, Florida challenged the presence of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in its schools and libraries, claiming that the book was pro-communism, anti-Semitic, and had sexual references.
While that last one is certainly true, it still sounds like somebody only read the first twenty pages before doing their book report.
The History of Love
Oct 18th
Believe the hype. The History of Love is one of the most imaginative and engaging pieces of literary fiction! It is the second novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
The History of Love is a novel in the form of a homage to things lost, as well as to unsolved mysteries. The novel within the novel, also named The History of Love is the basis for all these questions.
Nicole Krauss
Leo Gursky is an old man who feels as though he is disappearing. He tries at all costs to draw attention to himself, but he still feels he has a void in his life. Eventually, he goes on a quest to find his long-lost son and the novel that he wrote as a young man, now published in Chile under the name of Zvi Litvinoff.
Alma Singer is a teenage girl who is trying to keep her family together after the loss of her father. Named after the heroine of The History of Love, Alma tries to console her widowed mother (who has recently been requested to translate the novel from Spanish) as well as keep her younger brother Bird (who believes he is a lamed vovnik) from becoming a social pariah.
The main characters are: Leo Gursky, Alma Singer, Bird Singer, Zvi Litvinoff, Bruno, Isaac Moritz, Alma Mereminksi, Misha. More >
10 Great Sci-fi Novels That Have Been Banned – Part I
Oct 18th
In honor of Banned Books Week, Geekosystem’s Susana Polo looks at 10 great science fiction novels that have been banned, or at least threatened with removal from libraries and schools. Including some major classics of the genre!
Book
These titles are among the most popular and beloved science fiction works of the last century. They’ve told us how bad the future might be before we get there, how free you can be if you don’t follow blind belief, and that children are perfectly capable of digesting some pretty heavy concepts, actually. But they’ve all been banned or threatened with banning.
#10 Shade’s Children by Garth Nix
Shade’s Children is filled with a creeping dread that the computer intelligence that leads the teenage main characters (through the hellish wasteland of our world filled with terrifying robot soldiers with grafted human body parts who fight over territory in a decades long war-game played by three alien tyrants) does not have their best interests in mind.
Yes, all that other stuff is creepy, including the fact that one of the kids didn’t escape the prisoner camps until after he was castrated, but the real slow horror of the book is that eventually Shade is going to betray the children who trust him and learned from him, and no one taught them to think critically enough to see it coming.
Trusted caregivers put Shade’s Children on the top 100 banned and challenged books of the nineties. More >
A. J. Cronin: The Citadel
Jul 17th
Robert Donat as Dr. Andrew Manson
A.J.Cronin (1896-1981) was born in Scotland. He wrote over 30 books, several of which were filmed or televised, a recent example being Dr. Finlay’s Case Book. He trained in various hospitals, finding himself a naval surgeon as World War One dragged on, and finally graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1919. He then moved to a mining town in South Wales.
The Citadel, a tremendously popular book from 1937, is semi-autobiographical in its first sections.
It is an episodic sort of novel, unified by the passage of one life over time, and with a trajectory through suffering into a kind of grace. It works as a forum for Cronin’s political, socialistic conceptions of medicine, and has been credited with stimulating the creation of the famed National Health Service of the United Kingdom. More >
Deus Ex: Human Revolution novel inbound
Jul 13th
Del Rey publishing Deus Ex: The Icarus Effect novel set for 2011 in Europe and North America; will be set in the universe of the upcoming action RPG.
Read the book, or play the video game? Now you have a choice.
Del Rey books today announced it will publish a novel set in the universe of the upcoming video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The Icarus Effect is currently pegged for a 2011 release, which is the same time window the Square Enix-published title is slated to arrive on Xbox 360, PC, and PS3 at retail.
The book, which delves deep into the cyberpunk dystopia of the game, will be penned by James Swallow, whose previous science-fiction literary efforts include work in the Warhammer, 40K, Star Trek and Stargate franchises.
As for the novel, it is set in the not-too-distant future, a time when great innovation and technology mesh with chaos and conspiracy. More >
Twilight- Eclipse
Jun 25th
Eclipse is the third novel in Stephenie Meyer’s popular Twilight series.You really want to have read Twilight and New Moon (in that order) first before reading Eclipse, because the author doesn’t spend too much time expounding the story-lines of the previous novels but rather drops the reader straight in to the story. You also want to read Twilight and New Moon because they are both excellent novels and, trust me, you are missing out if you haven’t read them.
Eclipse carries on not long after New Moon left off. Bella’s high school graduation is approaching and she will soon be leaving Forks forever, ostensibly to go to college More >
(Pentru că nu mai au din ce trăi) – Intelectualii ieșeni își vind cărțile la anticariat
Jun 22nd
Orice carte așezată într-un raft de bibliotecă nu este decît un obiect atâta vreme cît nimeni nu o deschide.
Fiecare volum prinde viață abia atunci cînd este luat în mînă și citit, iar soarta actuală a cărților nu este aceea de a fi vii, ci mai degrabă de a rămâne în stadiul de obiecte. Pentru că lumea, și vorbim în primul rând de intelectuali, neavînd prea multe mijloace materiale la dispoziție, cumpără tot mai puțin din librării. Un alt loc special în care poposesc cărțile sînt anticariatele. More >
