BookLog

[curgoth]

Books recently read:

• In The Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification by Victoria Pritts. My "serious" book. The language was a bit dense in spots (I didn't know what things like "post-essentialist" and "post-structuralist" meant, for example), but I pushed through, and ended up getting a lot out of it. There was a lot in here, but the biggest theme I picked out was that body image is like aart - it's a communication. Both the person who's body has been modified and the person viewing that body contribute to the "conversation". Most of the modern body modification groups espouse the practice as something along the lines of freedom to rewrite body-identity, a way to own and rewrite the symbolism of the body. Pritts comes to the conclusion that the individual can realy only do so partly, because the viewer will always bring their own symbols, biases, and cultural background into the interpretation of the body, regardless of what the body artist thinks. There's a lot more to the book - I am pondering writing a longer review later - but I think that was the biggest theme of the whole book.


• The Specials by corwin77 - StB's NaNoWriMo book. Great story, and like most NaNo novels, needs a lot of polish. He and I are talking about turning this into a comic/graphic novel type thing with me as artist.


• Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. Mmmmm, Bujold. The sequel to Curse of Chalion does not disappoint.

I am soon going to need to figure out what my next "serious" book will be. I'm considering trying to find Dick Hebidge's Subculture: The Meaning of Style. If the library doesn't deliver in time, I may do something different, and finally read The Tao of Jeet Kun Do by Bruce Lee.

I'm trying to decide if I want to count The Specials towards my three fiction books - it only took me a day to read, and I have two shiny new fiction books sitting waiting for me...

Comments

[redsash.livejournal.com]

"Jeet Kune Do" is pretty cool, although his english isn't great. You can borrow my copy if you like. Follow up with the fictional "Heroes Die" by JKD expert Matthew Woodring Stover.

I also recommend "Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power" by Peter Ralston. If you're going to learn anything about martial arts by reading, this is the book (although it's also quite a difficult read)

As much as I like Bruce Lee, this guy would drop him in ten seconds. He was the first non-Asian to win the World Championship full-contact martial arts tournament in 1978, and to all accounts, he made it look easy.

http://www.chenghsin.com/

~r

[curgoth]

I actually have my own copy of JKD - just, like most non-fiction books before this year, I picked it up, started to read it, then put it down after the first chapter.

I've hold-listed the Stover book. The Toronto Library doesn't seem to have the Cheng Hsin book, though - I'll hit the website little later.

My main goal in reading martial arts books, beyond improving my theory, though, is to continue to remind myself that I need to find somewhere to train once the office moves in september.

[redsash.livejournal.com]

I have all three. Get Corbet to dig them up for you Friday.

~r