Richard Kostelanetz: Conversing with Cage, 2nd ed (1987/2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, biography, dance, music, music theory, radio, sound recording
Conversing with Cagedraws on over 150 interviews with John Cage conducted over four decades to draw a full picture of his life and art. Filled with the witty aphorisms that have made Cage as famous as an esthetic philosopher as a composer, the book offers both an introduction to Cage’s way of thinking and a rich gathering of his many thoughts on art, life, and music. John Cage is perhaps this century’s most radical classical composer. From his famous “silent” piece (4’33”) to his proclamation that “all sound is music,” Cage stretched the aesthetic boundaries of what could be performed in the modern concert hall. But, more than that, Cage was a provocative cultural figure, who played a key role in inspiring scores of other artists-and social philosophers-in the second half of the 20th century. Through his life and work, he created revolutions in thinking about art, and its relationship to the world around us. Conversing with Cageis the ideal introduction to this world, offering inthe artist’s own words his ideas about life and art. It will appeal to all fans of this mythic figure on the American scene, as well as anyone interested in better understanding 20th century modernism.
Edition 2
Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415937922, 9780415937924
332 pages
Douglas Coupland: Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · biography, global village, mass media, print, technology
“Marshall McLuhan, the celebrated social theorist who defined the culture of the 1960s, is remembered now primarily for the aphoristic slogan he coined to explain the emerging new world of global communication: “The medium is the message.” Half a century later, McLuhan’s predictions about the end of print culture and the rise of “electronic inter-dependence” have become a reality-in a sense, the reality-of our time.
Douglas Coupland, whose iconic novel Generation X was a “McLuhanesque” account of our culture in fictional form, has written a compact biography of the cultural critic that interprets the life and work of his subject from inside. A fellow Canadian, a master of creative sociology, a writer who supplied a defining term, Coupland is the ideal chronicler of the uncanny prophet whose vision of the global village-now known as the Internet-has come to pass in the 21st century.”
Publisher Atlas & Co, New York, 2010
ISBN 1935633163, 9781935633167
224 pages
review (Nicholas Carr, The New Republic)
review (David Carr, The New York Times Sunday Book Review)
W. Boyd Rayward: The Universe of Information: the Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and international Organization (1975)
Filed under book | Tags: · biography, document, information, knowledge, knowledge production, library
A biographical study of the life and work of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) focusing on his work for documentation and the creation of a range of international organizations.
Published for the International Federation for Documentation by the All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (Viniti), Moscow, 1975
FID Publication 520
390 pages
PDF, PDF, PDF (28 MB)
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