June Reading
As promised, a few other bits from winter into spring. All recommended reading in general, but some were brought in for actual reading while others were pulled to fuel some improvisation experiments. Take a guess which is which...
+ “From Alexander Pope to ‘Splice’: A Short History of the Female Mad Scientist”
+ “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing’”
+ “Old Print Article: Using Electricity to Reinstill Life”
+ “The Invention of the Internet”
+ ”The Long Story of U.S. Debt, from 1790 to 2011, in 1 Little Chart”
+ “In Los Angeles, Vintage Houses Are Giving Way to Bulldozers”
+ “Planning Ahead Can Make a Difference in the End”
+ “Failing and Flying”
Today I’m adding all things Simone Weil to that list.
In May, Steve and Miriam and I roped prolific performers Billy Mullaney and Katie Kaufmann into help us with the aforementioned improvisation experiments. The session was a delightfully fun and thought-provoking; more on that in another post soon.
In the meantime, I might note that I’ve finally started on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, mentioned in a previous post. Billy and I both are reading it this summer, meeting up weekly to discuss. We’re only on chapter two, but already I can’t recommend this book enough. Packed with dense research, yet so very readable (and not just readable, but mind-blowing)... it’s one of those important tomes that you probably shouldn’t take on the bus, because inevitably you’ll get absorbed and miss your stop.
Debt is a subject that keeps bubbling up for me in this project, a human-made creation that consumes not only individuals but whole societies with such enormous and absurd ramifications. Yet translation starts getting complicated when you explore “collective” creations, amidst systems of power and many generations of history. Are the “creators” the same as those who are being consumed by the “creations”? I am thinking the answer is both yes and no, at the same time. I wonder if I’ll get to the end of Graeber and realize debt needs to be a whole different project.
But for now, it keeps surfacing; even hunting down the etymology of “creation” somehow took a sharp turn into the root of “capital.” I’m so grateful our process includes time for going down these rabbit holes and seeing where they lead.
image: 1 - Debt: The First 5,000 Years book cover (via Wikipedia)