top 5 (ish) books you've read so far in the Year Of Our Lord 2013

In no particular order:

Ian Bogost - A Slow Year - I got a lot of Ian Bogost from my girlfriend over Christmas, so he would probably show up a few times here, but of all of them A Slow Year is the one I dig the most. The book is actually a manual to 4 games he programmed for the Atari VCS and later emulated for the PC as “game poems.” He makes these interesting arguments in it about finding common ground between poems and games:

“Perhaps games and poetry share a common, if underdeveloped lineage. Good games, like good poems, are provacation machines. Despite the implications of fixity and visual perception the name Imagism suggests, the stuff of provocation in poems and in games are the same: the behavior of artifacts.”

He stays pretty close to Williams and Pound even though I think there’s a lot that could be said about Dada and Conceptualisms, but it’s an interesting approach to games and poetry that for my own interests I find super-rich.

Jena Osman - Public Figures - I’m not exactly sure if I read this in early or in late Winter, but it’s a great book of poems from the great poet Jena Osman so it’s going in here. It’s the first book I’ve read about drones and the weird subject position they represent/allow and the history of several landmark statues in Philadelphia. Her poems are always doing wild things with multiple sources and subject positions while holding them together as a purposeful whole. And since I started writing and thinking about drones it’s served as a really helpful guide to how to work with drones and the material around them (it pointed me to this transcript of drone operators that was really informative).

Alexander Galloway - Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture -Galloway is my #2 guy for game studies after Ian Bogost, but I’ve only been able to find little bits of his writing here and there (I got to sit in on a lecture he gave at Temple though, which was pretty awesome). So I finally got a hold of his first book and it kind of blew the lid on a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about with game ontology. I have dubbed his first chapter required reading for game studies: so many books begin with chapters describing and defining what games are as cultural objects, and while they all come to a very similar conclusion (that games are difficult to make a stable category for) I think Galloway does the most in probing this unstable category for meaningful valences. His Interface Effect is another book I read and loved this year, but it’s so dense I don’t really feel confident talking about it much.

Norma Cole - Natural Light - Hearing a poet read their poems often goes a long way to endear me to those poems, and since I got the chance to read her book Natural Light, attend her reading, and talk with her about my thesis, I feel really endeared to Norma Cole. The poems are beautiful, I guess I’d call them postmodern lyrics she wrote while attending an art event in The Bay. Here’s one I really like:

Nano-Shades

the male deliberately positions himself
over his lover's fangs

the key is gravity
blankets, personal items

and clothing, extra-solar planets (class M)
like our sun, the memory

of history, empty or full
scared the daylights out of the name

Theodore Besterman Crystal-Gazing My girlfriend also gave me this historical and cultural overview of the practice of crystal-gazing, scrying and other divination practices based on looking deeply into reflective or dark surfaces. Apparently the older crystal-gazing practices involved a “pure boy or girl” to look into bowls of water or fresh streams or someone’s fingernails. It’s really strange and fascinating stuff and includes a chapter about how to detect fraud in your crystal gazer.

I’m currently reading the new Agamben book The Highest Poverty and since I already have The Time That Remains and my girlfriend has The Open, we’re going to get our Agamben book club going.