Alexander Stojanovic

Book list



	Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa There is an ineffable sadness and beauty to Miyazawa's hermetic and symbolist stories. Like his famous "Night on the Galactic Railway", these are apertures into a singularly luminous psychosis. The translations are superb.

	Platform by Michel Houellebecq Savagely beautiful and all too prescient. Houellebecq is often castigated for anti-Islamic polemicism but I find his narrative logic and philosophy compelling. Nothing escapes his myopic vision. The 3rd World as sex tourism for the decaying West.

	Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq A scathing and philosophically profound meditation on religion, sexuality, our sense of /self/ and the teleology of modern society. Oh, and tremendous quantities of well written sex scenes. A serious and thoughtful book.

	1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann Superb revisionist historical study on the "New World" prior to the arrival of Europeans. In the same vein as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Engaging and thoughtful.

	Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami Always engaging and stylish, this collection covers a vast timer period of Murakami's writing career. I found it the best writing he's done in a while. After the Quake is still my favorite short story collection of his - Honeypie and UFO over Kushiro!

	Loop by Koji Suzuki Massive A-life simulation meets the Ringu virus in a postmodern Japanese ghost story. Immensely enjoyable and thought provoking in some unexpected ways.

	Raymond Chandler: Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler Brilliant and often sketches of later novels, these stories show the embryonic development of Philip Marlowe. Stylish and clever they represented a new genre in 20th century literature - the emergence of the anti-hero.

	Renewing Meaning: A Speech Act Theoretic Approach by Stephen Barker Significant attempt to refound (ground) semantics purely in pragamtics. This is approach offers considerable theoretical and explanatory power over the reigning Fregean-style semantics and derivatives like Davidson's Convention-T theories. Recommended.

	Winter Sleep by Kenzo Kitakata Fascinating psychosexual thriller of an artist and his protege. One of the few novels that I have read recently that actually seems to understand the aesthetic impulse and its relationship to violence.

The writings of Houellebecq and Miyazawa are incredible in their own way. The former glides effortlessly from philosophical exegesis to full-on sexual depictions (I would not classify them as pornography) while managing to capture a humane but extreme portrait of modern, overly civilized man. Miyazawa also holds a speculum up to himself and society but through an inner language of dreamlike symbols and Buddhistic sensibilities. It is interesting to compare how both authors compare and contrast in their /negation/ of popular, mass culture - one through a hyperrealism of the everyday and a purposefully shallow style that echoes mass media and advertizing and the other through a private mythology of animals, legends and metaphors. Both are true artists, neither compromises in any way. Bravo.

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January 10

ALife and SecondLife: Self-Generating and Recombinant Dynamics

What would the convergence of self-generating 'scapes' and artifacts with the socially mediated economics of SecondLife-style games result in? Who will be the first recombinant viral engineer of SecondLife? Reading Loop was quite a catalyzing experience...

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December 04

Dubrovnik Summer Trip

I have posted a few photographs from our August 2006 trip to Dubrovnik (Croatia). We shot about 6GB of photos - this is just a small sample taken in Dubronvik, Lopud, and Lokrun.

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