15:50, Wednesday 2 Jul., 2008 Link

Books read June 2008, with date finished:

• When the Body Becomes All Eyes, Phillip B. Zarrilli (4th)
• From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (20th)
• Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel R. Delany (22nd)
• A New Philosophy of Society, Manual DeLanda (26th)
• The Periodic Table, Primo Levi (29th)

I'm a huge fan of DeLanda. I find his language and the concepts useful operators in thinking about work and life in general. But this is my second run at A New Philosophy and while assemblage theory hits home hard, I sense that he plays fast and loose with his examples without moderating his language to compensate. That makes it hard for me to take as seriously as I'd like.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture tracks Stewart Brand's rather Count de Saint-Germain existence through the significant events of the latter half of the 20th century. I enjoy this kind of history, and in particular I have a hobby interest in the central role of cybernetics over the last 60 years in the making of the modern world; Turner did not disappoint.

This month my single recommendation is Levi, if only because he tells personal, far-reaching stories, and then drops in lines like man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.

Certainly, I am a centaur.