reading notes

On the Nature of Seeing
by James Elkins
ISBN: 0156004976

There is no such thing as “just looking”; Elkins argues persuasively that seeing is more complicated than that. As an art historian with a willingness to explore not only the metaphorical but biological underpinnings of vision, he’s in a position to know.

He considers extreme images (death, illness, nakedness), bodies, faces, and blindness in his meditation on the meaning of seeing. Elkins is an academic, but you don’t need to be a specialist (in his discipline or otherwise) to follow or appreciate his arguments. Yes, he covers his french theorist bases here (Bataille, Lacan) but he doesn’t dwell on them; he remains more interested in communicating his ideas than exploring arcane theory. He can even be pretty funny, in his own way: “Consider the blue peacock, a bird nearly ruined by centuries of bad poems (figure 62).”

We can all be expected to know what a peacock looks like, and he did just tell is it is blue, so figure 62 is not so bad. The rest of the visual reproductions are not nearly as well-known or recognizable, so why they aren’t of higher quality is a mystery to me. The images are reprinted entirely in black and white, and frequently too muddy to convey the power he assures us they have. That is probably the most serious flaw in the book.

If you are interested in vision — in just about any sense of the word — you’ll probably find something of value in this book. I liked his Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction better, probably because it’s framework was in comparison more aligned with my interests. This is a more specialized interrogation of seeing — which is what it set out to be — than an exploration of an emerging field of study. Elkins is interesting and fairly prolific, so I’m sure I’ll be reading him again.

by Nick Mamatas
ISBN: 9781933368436

In near-future, slightly dystopic Long Island there are hundreds, thousands of discarded smoke detectors at the dump, ripe for the scavenging. Why would anyone want to scavenge elements from smoke detectors from a dump? To manufacture a nuclear weapon in their basement, of course. That is what Daniel Weinberg does, and he enlists his mind-reading son Herbert to help him.

They are successful, so they package their weapon in a garden gnome, plant it on the front lawn, and declare themselves an independent nation. It’s an open question who is more dangerous: the government, corporate forces, or the sort of nutter Daniel has become. It’s also not clear who is actually the better parent to Herbert: the father who probably irradiated him, or the mother pimping the story to the media?

Mamatas clearly isn’t too keen on security theater, preemptive warfare, unchecked corporate power, or the mainstream media. (I suspect he has a love/hate relationship with Long Island.) He manages to be funny instead of preachy about it, and that is what makes the fable of Herbert’s growing up entertaining. It’s a quick read, the sort of book you’d read on a plane ride, or an afternoon at the park, or just curled up on the couch. Everything familiar might seem a little bit creepy for a while after you put the book down, and that is part of its charm.