JACkory
Struggling Artist
Posts: 167
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Post by JACkory on May 17, 2004 23:01:57 GMT -5
 In this section of the Lounge my valued customers discuss the books they've been reading or have just read. If you're looking for a good book reccomendation, you've come to the right place, because Lounge patrons are known for their high literary standards. Every once in while someone gets the urge to recite some original poetry in this booth, and this is encouraged (though we would never dream of competing with the main poetry venue around these parts, the Beatnick Coffeeshop)... |
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Post by Meursault on May 17, 2004 23:21:55 GMT -5
Wow, good ideas for "Booths", but the headers are pretty gay. Suppose it could always be called Booth # 4: Tao though.
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Post by Thorngrub on May 18, 2004 10:52:56 GMT -5
 I am currently reading, at long last, Carl Sagan's [shadow=red,left,300]Contact[/shadow] I've always wanted to read it, ever since seeing the movie w/Jodie Foster all those years ago. Let me say it is great escapist literature. That is all.
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Post by Thorngrub on May 18, 2004 10:59:02 GMT -5
 Yesterday while browsing through BORDERS bookstore, looking for something with which to spend my birthday-cheque sent by me Mum & gripped in me hot little mitt, I stumbled upon the startling discovery of none other than [shadow=red,left,300]Bruce Sterling's[/shadow] latest novel, which I had no idea even existed. It is called [glow=red,2,300]The Zenith Angle,[/glow] and is described as the "Dot Slash Catch-22 for the post 911 generation", or something along those lines. I purchased it quicker than an electron danced from my eye. Don't you hate it when you discover a brand new book you're dying to read immediately, but are halfway immersed in another one-?Such is the sad state of my affairs. I must finish Contact afore I may plunge into Sterling's latest mindcandy. 
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JACkory
Struggling Artist
Posts: 167
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Post by JACkory on May 18, 2004 11:39:13 GMT -5
Don't you hate it when you discover a brand new book you're dying to read immediately, but are halfway immersed in another one-? Yeah, man, that happens to me ALL THE TIME! Not that I'm a particularly slow reader, but I do like to take my time and savor a good book, so when I'm smack dab in the middle of one and I see another interesting one it is VERY tempting to just abandon the one I'm reading (especially when it's turning out to be less than expected)...but there's a thrill I experience when I get to the end of a book, especially one that's difficult, and so I do my best to finish what I start. The last books I read were The New Centurions by Joseph Wambaugh and Desiring God by John Piper. I've been interested in criminology and law enforcement ever since I began regularly watching NYPD Blue...  ...and Joseph Wambaugh is one of the best fiction writers in that genre. I read his The Blue Knight a couple of weeks ago and had read The Onion Field many years back, so I thought I'd check out more of his stuff. I'll probably read The Glitter Dome this weekend (I've been reading these at work, as they are fairly quick reads)...  The John Piper book (subtitled "Meditations of a Christian Hedonist") is a work heavily influenced by the works of theologians Jonathan Edwards and C.S. Lewis which offers Biblical support of what Piper calls "Christian Hedonism", a philosophy rooted in the understanding that "God is most glorified by us when we are most satisfied in Him". It's a book that I probably would not recommend to non-Christians, since it's basically written for people who are already Christians, but it is nevertheless an excellent work and who knows but that the unbeliever might yet find something of value in it's pages. You can read the online version by clicking on the following link: www.desiringgod.org/library/onlinebooks_index.htmlAt the moment I have undertaken a massive project...I've always wanted to read Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace, and I'm not getting any younger, so that's what I'm reading now. It will, no doubt, take me quite a while to plod through it's 1500 pages (and I have started but never finished it at least 3 times before), but I'm hoping my advanced age has given me a modicum of patience and tenacity with which I can see it through this time around. Now Playing:  Bob Dylan
Empire Burlesque |
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Post by Rit on May 18, 2004 13:39:25 GMT -5
Jac, don't bother reading War and Peace. Like you said, you're not getting any younger, so why would you want to use it up with that minefield of a book? It sure is long. I have it, and its all i can do to stare at the book cover... Nicholas, Pierre and all the rest of those Russian nihilists will have to wait on.
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Post by Thorngrub on May 18, 2004 17:05:16 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Jac, don't bother reading War and Peace[/glow]
Yeah, screw Tolstoy, it's Dostoyevsky all the way man!
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Post by Kensterberg on May 18, 2004 17:05:37 GMT -5
I'm currently very slowly working my way through Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (I think that's the proper full name), which is the book that inspired one of my all-time favorite television dramas, Homicide: Life On the Street. It's fabulous ... so good that I'm rationing it out. Once I'm done with this, there won't be any more "new" Homicides left for me. At least not in Baltimore ... not like this.
This book is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in the life and work of police officers, or who enjoyed the television show. While the characters are all different than on the show (completely different names, for one thing) you can see the seeds of all the primary characters in the show in this text. Fabulous book, IMHO.
After that, I'm going to read William Shatner's Get a Life.
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Post by Meursault on May 18, 2004 17:07:13 GMT -5
I've got a bunch of books on the go right now. Most recently working through The Dangling Man by some guy.
Got Spinoza's Ehtics sitting here in front of me, haven't read it since grade 11.
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Post by Mary on May 18, 2004 18:38:59 GMT -5
Oh my God Ken, here's something besides music that we totally agree on: Homicide may well have been the greatest TV show ever. Alas, I've only seen a few episodes, because a friend turned me on to Homicide long after it went off the air due to the fact that Americans are too fucking stupid to appreciate good shows (kidding kidding! well, sort of...) so I've only seen the episodes that she had on tape. But holy shit, what an intelligent and engrossing show. The one episode that I can never get out of my head is the one where the guy gets caught in the train tracks in such a way that as soon as they move him, he will die. So he knows that he is basically a living dead man, and he has like the last hour of his life to say goodbye to whoever the cops can track down for him (which turns out to be nobody) and to confront his mortality. That show threw me for a complete loop. Totally fucking searing, it was. Errr sorry JAC, you might have to open a TV room too - didn't mean to bring the high-falutin literary folks down to my plebeian level here!!  Let's see on a literary note then, I'm preparing to write a chapter about the relationship between emerging commerce and libertinism in 18th century France, so I'm reading all these crazy 18th century libertine novels. Of course I immediately read Dangerous Liaisons, but now I'm reading this unbelievable Denis Diderot book called The Indiscrete Jewels - the premise is that this Congolese sultan (who is very transparently intended to be Louis XV, and the sultan's "favorite" is obviously Mme de Pompadour) acquires a ring that, whenever he rubs it, compels womens' vaginas to start talking. So he goes around the kingdom compelling all these vaginas to confess to all these affairs and scandals that supposedly faithful wives or virginal prudes have been involved in. Virtually all women are exposed as dissembling, lying, canniving sex addicts. But men don't come out much better, as the ones who brag about affairs are exposed in their own turn as liars by the vaginas of the women they claim to have conquered ("i've never known him, never at all!") Sounds insane. Well, it is insane. But it's also a very smart satire of the French court under Louis XV, with lots of implicit comments about the decadent luxury of the French aristocratic class, the sexual hypocrisy of French morals, and the moralistic attachment of greater virtue and purity to women in the French sentimental literary tradition. Great stuff!!! Cheers, M |
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Post by samplestiltskin on May 18, 2004 18:52:05 GMT -5
All right, I've known you for years Mary... but what is your major? I'm a dumbass. I'm looking at grad schools. Not even sure what I want to get my Masters in. I got my Bachelors in General Studies, which is an absolutely worthless (but fun!) liberal arts degree. So like, anything I want to get my Masters in I'll probably have to pick up a shitload of classes just to start grad work. My mom wants me to get a teaching degree and teach English. I would like to teach, but the only way I'd teach would be upper-level college classes. No way I'd touch K-12 or even freshmen college students. So.... um, I'm thinking teaching is probably out. But I dunno what else to do.  And I'm also a little afraid of grad school; it seems like soooo much work that I might not be smart enough for. Scary! And of course there's the fact that I'll be in debt for the rest of my life if I get a Masters. |
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Post by samplestiltskin on May 18, 2004 18:56:24 GMT -5
Oh, since I stopped smoking pot I've actually been able to read books again! So I read some Chuck Palahniuk book about sex addiction (very perverse and nihilist) and now I'm reading a bunch of "short" novels (yeah, that take me days and days to read ONE of them) by all the "Greats". Melville, Dostoevsky (whom I love, props to whoever mentioned him up there), FLaubert, Henry James, Chekhov, Mann, Joyce, Kafka.... Heavy stuff. I consider it a form of self-punishment, plowing through stuff that makes my brain sweat.
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Post by Mary on May 18, 2004 19:00:33 GMT -5
Hi samps...
Well, technically I'm getting my phd in political science, but my subfield is political theory, which is kind of like philosophy crossed with history. Does that make any sense? Basically political theory is the black sheep of political science, we think the work that other poli sci people do is usually crap, and they think the work we do is usually crap, and we spend a lot of time grumbling about each other at meetings.
I would definitely encourage graduate school if you're intellectually motivated. I can't imagine doing anything else now, and I'm sooo glad I didn't go to law school (I mean, I get to teach constitutional law every summer anyway, and I can write articles for law journals if I want, and I don't actually want to be a lawyer, so this works out infinitely better!) I rarely have to teach beginning undergrads, by the way...I can usually finagle my way into teaching an upper division undergrad class, so usually I have juniors and seniors, which is a great experience. Not that I'm averse to teaching freshmen, but it's a very different sort of intellectual challenge, and at this point in my academic life, it doesn't feel as useful to me.
I understand the financial concerns though..... nice thing about a phd program is that you can often get decent funding. I mean, you're never going to be living well as a grad student, but I always have an income and my tuition is either totally or mostly paid for depending on the kind of fellowship I have or teaching assignment I'm doing. I've taken out a few small loans here or there but paid all of them off very quickly and I'm not in major debt from grad school. But it's harder with a masters program on that front,as you can't get that sort of funding usually... you have no interest in going all the way for a phd?
If you're interested in English by the way, you should send ueb5 an email. I could give you her address if you want. She just finished her masters in English at UNC and is going to begin a phd program in the fall... at South Carolina I believe, in Charlotte.
Cheers,
M
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Post by samplestiltskin on May 18, 2004 19:09:04 GMT -5
Oh my goodness, I'd love to just spend my entire life in school, honestly. PhD and everything. Three or four of them, ha. If I could just be a professional student, I'd be so happy. But there's money constraints. I have literally a little under $200 to my name. I realise there are scholarships and loans but... Ugh, I just hate spending money.
I'd love to get my Masters in English (and then PhD of course) but everyone tells me there's nothing you can do with it if you don't teach, and "everyone" also says that if you do teach with a Masters, you're not going to be teaching juniors/seniors. Plus, I don't want to teach English. I want to teach 300-level philosophy classes, art history, things that are impractical in other words. Things that are not in demand for teachers.
So, I thought maybe I could get my K-12 certificate and then work on a subject that I actually liked, and then get some post-secondary work in instruction so I could actually teach where and what I wanted.
So are you going to mainly teach with this PhD?
Bleh. In my heart I know for sure that I'm no English teacher. I just wish I knew what the hell I was. If you think of any suggestions (not that I'm expecting anyone to even care) I am more than open to suggestions. I need to decide SOON so I can get the ball rolling and get back in school where i belong.
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Post by Mary on May 18, 2004 19:32:34 GMT -5
OK, I gotta run and get some work done, so this is my last reply for now... but let's see -
You know, the curious thing is that getting a phd is often more affordable than getting a masters. Obviously it varies a bit from subject to subject and school to school, but there is way more money out there available for phd students, and also many more schools who will pay your tuition for you. The situation here is that you get a massive fee reduction if you are a TA, and only phd students are allowed to be TAs, so tuition comes to a grand total of $270 a year ($135/semester) when you're teaching. And when you aren't teaching you can often find fellowships that pay tuition plus a stipend. This year I had a $16,000 stipend, tuition paid, and I taught in the fall, and I'm teaching again in teh summer, so I actually wind up making like $28,000 this year. You just can't pull shit like that as a masters student.
I really do understand the terrible financial reality of grad school (I mean, this was my best year ever, usuall it was more like $15,000 income total all year, which is crapola in the bay area), but if that's what's pushing you toward a masters instead of a phd, then honestly, you should start looking into the kinds of financial offers you can get as a phd student, becasue perversely, you may find that 6 or 7 years getting a phd is easier financially than 2 years getting a masteres in an "impractical" subject. Obviously things change completely if you're going for science or whatever, cause then as soon as you're done with the masters you jump right into some nice high-paying job and it's way more cost-efficient than sticking around for 7 years to get a phd. But since you're thinking along the lines of the humanities, then, you might be pleasantly surprised...
As for what I want to do, well, yes, I want to teach, but I want to write and publish in the field too. My ideal would be to teach at a small liberal arts school with a highly motivated (dare I say geeky!) student body, but to have enough time left over outside of teaching to continue my own research. I definitely don't want to end up at some giant research university where teaching is the lowest priority of all and undergraduates are treated like crap.
OK and if any of this is ever going to happen, I really need to go actually write my dissertation, so I gotta run... good luck samps and feel free to email if you have any other questions!!
Cheers,
M
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I am currently reading, at long last, Carl Sagan's [shadow=red,left,300]Contact[/shadow]
Yesterday while browsing through BORDERS bookstore, looking for something with which to spend my birthday-cheque sent by me Mum & gripped in me hot little mitt, I stumbled upon the startling discovery of none other than [shadow=red,left,300]Bruce Sterling's[/shadow] latest novel, which I had no idea even existed. It is called [glow=red,2,300]The Zenith Angle,[/glow] and is described as the "Dot Slash Catch-22 for the post 911 generation", or something along those lines. I purchased it quicker than an electron danced from my eye. 
And I'm also a little afraid of grad school; it seems like soooo much work that I might not be smart enough for. Scary! And of course there's the fact that I'll be in debt for the rest of my life if I get a Masters.