From the mouth of Wu Ming 1

Wu Ming 1 explains the group's (Wiki) aversion to being photographed or filmed by the media:

"Once the writer becomes a face... it's a cannibalistic jumble: that face appears everywhere, almost always out of context. A photo is witness to my absence; it's a banner of distance and solitude. A photo paralyses me, it freezes my life into an instant, it negates my ability to transform into something else. I become a "character", a stopgap to hurriedly fill a page layout, an instrument that amplifies banality. On the other hand my voice - with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations - is witness to a presence even when I'm not there; it brings me close to people and doesn't negate my transformative capacity because its presence is dynamic, alive and trembling even when seemingly still."

Compiled Reading List

I know I already posted about what books are on my list for post-graduation but it's much more convenient for me if they are in one place and updated. They are in some kind of order, with most wanted near the top. From here on I'll just modify this post as the list expands rather than add new posts.

Round 1 (immediate):
V.S. Naipaul: Guerillas
Hesse: Steppenwolf
Goethe: Faust part 1
Keats
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Auster
Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature
Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality, Social Contract
Wilde: Dorian Gray
Mishima: Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Round 2:
Homer: the Iliad and/or Odyssey
Dylan Thomas
Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
Rupert Brooke: Collected poems
Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned
Plath
Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Kafka: The System, The Metamorphosis

Round 3:
Faulkner: Light in August, A Fable
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Dante: Divine Comedy
Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls, Moveable Feast
Shakespeare: sonnets, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet
Lord Tennyson: Ulysses
Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals
Emily Dickinson
Wittgenstein: Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics), or Philosophische Bemerkungen
Mann: The Magic Mountain
Sophocles: Antigone
Vasilii Semenovich Grossman: Life and Fate
Tennyson: suggestions?
Shaw: Pygmalion (maybe)
Goethe: Götz von Berlichingen
Oppen
Carver: Will you Please be Quiet, Please?, Cathedral
Bertrand Russell: Principles of Mathematics
Schiller: William Tell

Summer list addendum

Reading This Side of Paradise has added some members to my reading list [1][2]:

Rupert Brooke: Collected poems
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Tennyson: suggestions?
Rousseau: Discourse on Inequality, Social Contract
Shaw: Pygmalion (maybe)
Fitzgerald: The Beautiful and Damned
Oppen
Faulkner: A Fable
T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land

Summer reading list

Going through Daniel Marcus' book on Number Fields, completing the proofs of the elementary results about number rings in Microsoft Word is getting tedious so I'm extending my break again. In the same vain as the post on my summer poetry list, I'm starting to compile another list. The two are really one list, but we can think of them as subgroups or, more aptly, orders. ok -

Goethe: Götz von Berlichingen, and maybe Faust part 1


Bertrand Russell: Principles of Mathematics

Wittgenstein: Bemerkungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics), or Philosophische Bemerkungen (Philosophical Remarks) if I don't like Russell's

Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise, The Last Tycoon


Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
Mann: The Magic Mountain
Hesse: Steppenwolf(!), The Glass Bead Game


Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals

Secondaries:

Schiller: William Tell (maybe)
Sophocles: Antigone
Vasilii Semenovich Grossman: Life and Fate

Have any recommendations?

Poets to read

I'm taking a break from writing my thesis, which is due in a week, and I started thinking about all the post-graduation reading I'd like to do. And this got me thinking about poetry. With the internet at my fingertips, I searched for poets I'd like to invite to sit on my never-ending reading list. Given the sheer volume of the poetic repertoire, one can easily imagine the difficulty anyone has in narrowing down the potentials to a manageable collection. I've come up with the following poets so far. Feel free to add or subtract, keeping in mind my position as a genuine new-comer to the world of poetry and the limited amount of time and energy I have to gobble up these works. (Remember, this is not a complete list, but rather a realistic list of the poets I can approach this summer and next year)

Homer: the Iliad and/or Odyssey
Dante: Divine Comedy
Shakespeare: sonnets
Lord Tennyson: Ulysses

Emily Dickinson

Dylan Thomas

Keats

Sylvia Plath


What does your list look like?

Schiller and Hesse

This passage from On the Aesthetic Education of Man reminds me of Herman Hesse's powerful interpretation of Siddhartha's passage to enlightenment through the world of Man.

One of the chief reasons why our physical sciences make such slow progress is obviously the widespread and almost insurmountable tendency towards teleological judgements, in which, as soon as they are used constitutively, the determining faculty is substituted for the receptive. Nature may touch our organs as vigorously and variously as you please -- all her diversity is lost upon us, because we are looking for nothing in her but what we have put there, because we do not allow her to come forward to meet us, from without, but rather strive with impatiently anticipating reason to go out from within ourselves to meet her. And if in the course of centuries one man comes along who approaches her with calm, pure and open senses, and therefore encounters a number of phenomena which we by our anticipation have overlooked, we are mightily astonished that so many eyes in such bright daylight should not have noticed anything. This premature striving for harmony before we have gathered together the separate sounds of which it is to consist, this violent usurpation of the intellectual faculty in a field where its authority is only conditional, is the cause of the sterility of so many thinkers for the greatest benefit of science, and it is hard to say whether sense-faculty which admits of no form, or reason which abides no content, has done the greater harm to the extension of our knowledge.

Not to say Schiller is leading us to the conclusion that these problems can be resolved through the adherence to and practice of transcendental philosophy. On the contrary, he states earlier that the nature of such views contradicts the harmony and unity of opposing forces that is the hallmark of aesthetic philosophy, that is, the subjugation of the natural impulse by the purely intellectual impulse. This antagonism breeds division and discord.