Jason (jcreed) wrote,
Jason
jcreed
Ugh. Got sucked into a book, couldn't put it down. Now it's late and I'm tired. It was Oliver Sacks's "seeing voices", picked up at borders, a collection of a few medium-sized essays about his experience investigating ASL as a language, the neurolinguistic consequences of deafness, deaf culture more broadly, and a big chunk about the 1988 student demonstrations at Gallaudet University that effectively forced the (hearing) president to resign and caused, as demanded, a deaf president to be installed. The writing was a little on the fluffy emotional side, but it was a nice quick read for its length. Haven't finished all the end-notes, though. There's a lot of them. Anyway, Oliver Sacks is cool by me. Some day I should read "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" and "anthropologist on mars".

Speaking of fluff, though, I also recently finished "rules of play" during the sum of many lunch hours. It was an entertaining collection of ideas and perspectives on a very general notion of game, including all of board games, card games, video games, sports, and even some things that might be called "art happenings" or something pretentious like that. But pretentiousness was the name of the game. Plenty of mention was made of cultural rhetorics, metanarratives, and undermining definitions and assumptions. In a way, that was why I enjoyed reading it. I don't really buy into all this pomo stuff per se, but hardcore pomo jargon mixed in the same page with straight-faced mention of pong, centipede, and super mario brothers, not to mention subtle meta-legal politeness social contract issues arising in downtown philadelphia elementary-school four-square, is just gobs of fun.
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