Archive for the 'meme' Category

50 Best Cult Books

Published on 28 April 2008 in meme and books. 4 Comments

I don’t know if seeing this appear on two blogs means it qualifies as a meme, but it’s been ages since I’ve seen one, so I’m claiming this topic - as seen at Bibliobibuli and ADHD Librarian - as a meme. Being about books, 50 Best Cult Books, is a bonus.

Owned: * (not read)
Read: **

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963) **
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) *
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951) **
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965) *
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979) *
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970) *
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979) *
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948) **
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979) *
Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000) *
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) *
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971) *
The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) *
The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968) *
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933) **
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) **
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

What makes a book a cult book? The Telegraph says:

In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.We were able to agree, finally, on one thing: you know a cult book when you see one. And people have passionate feelings on both sides: our appeal for suggestions yielded enough for a list at least three times as long as this one.

I like one of the comments which suggested that a cult book is one that many people own but that few have actually read. I think I have to agree with this definition, given that I have only read a measly FIVE of these books, but that I own, without having read, another ten of them.

Techno(t)

Published on 21 February 2008 in meme and technology. 4 Comments

There’s this meme going round that’s about technology blind spots, I suppose you’d call them - on popular technologies you don’t do or skills you don’t have.

I admit to having occasional attacks of techno lust and have succumbed from time to time (PDA, Tablet, iPod, etc), but such attacks seem to be getting fewer and far between.

My blind spots?

Gaming consoles. I am quite partial to certain types of games (MMORPGs, turn-based strategy a la Civ, puzzles) but have never ever really gotten into consoles. This, despite the fact that we have Gameboys, a Gamecube, Playstation 2, a DS, and a Wii in the house. I don’t know why, particularly. I have enjoyed certain games like Galaga and Tetris on the Gameboy, and bowling on the Wii is fun, but that’s about the end of it. Oh, but recently Whack-a-mole on the DS was amusing. Heh.

Macs. I’ve never really used a Mac and I don’t get the Apple cult at all. (We have a Mac laptop in the house but I’m largely indifferent to it, give me my EeePC any day. Or my Tablet.)

Mobile phone. These days I seem to use my phone for text. In fact I text enough that I’m starting to think I should get a plan for cheaper text messages. But I don’t use my phone for much else, apart from sudoku when I’m forced to stand on the train.

Podcasting. Should I be admitting this, given that I have had a lot to do with podcasting at work? Well it’s not that I don’t like it as a medium, it’s just that I am not particularly interested in creating personal ones. I also don’t seem to listen to many.

Programming skills. I have none, beyond Basic which I learned in high school 6 million years ago. I suppose it would be interesting to be able to write little scripts but I don’t have much motivation to learn, especially when I live with someone who can do this with his eyes closed and it’s much easier to just tell him what I want.

I suppose I could call SecondLife a blind spot. I’ve visited there a few times but always get irritated with the clunkiness and the interface. Chat, changing my appearance and being able to ‘fly’ isn’t interesting enough to get me visiting regularly.

Skype. Never used it.

Video. Blogging or vodcasting or YouTube. I used to think this indifference was just due to a lack of a video camera, but I now have a working camera on the EeePC and I still haven’t bothered to investigate.

What else?

Like Laura I am not a cash register fan. I always break a cash register if I have to handle one. This happens so unfailingly that I am no longer intimidated by the things, I am amused by them and always wonder what bizarre problem I am going to cause next…

Like Fiona I am not afraid to tinker with a pc. All I know about computers is self-taught. I’ve also learned a lot from hanging around with real geeks (e.g. M).

Others: Steve, Dorothea, Rochelle, Jenna.

Yours?

Book meme

Published on 17 February 2008 in meme and books. 1 Comment

From Angel:

Rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pgs.)
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people

I seem to have a few books on my desk at the moment, but the only one that fits the bill is The way of the white clouds: A Buddhist in Tibet by Lama Anagarika Govinda. It fits the bill in that it has sentences; the other books are Teach yourself Dutch, 201 Dutch verbs fully conjugated (rivetting! :) ), Hungry Planet, Seven Hundred Penguins and the Cafe Flora cookbook. 

The sentences:

Indeed, the whole gigantic process of biological development through millions of years seems to have had no other purpose than to create the necessary conditions for the manifestation of higher consciousness.

To the Buddhist consciousness is the central factor, from which all other things proceed and without which we would neither have a notion of our own existence nor of a world around us. Whether the ‘world around us’ is a projection of our consciousness or something that exists in itself, and only appears to us in the form in which we experience it, is of secondary importance.

Wow.

You’re tagged if you feel like it.