Owen Hatherley: A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, city, modernism, neoliberalism, united kingdom, urbanism
“The urban state of the nation—from Olympic dreams to broken Britain.
This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on the results of what conservatives privately call “the progressive nonsense” of the Big Society agenda.
In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, but takes in Belfast, Aberdeen, Plymouth and Brighton, Hatherley explores modern Britain’s urban landscape and finds a short-sighted disarray of empty buildings, malls and glass towers. Yet while A New Kind of Bleak anatomizes “broken Britain,” Hatherley also looks to a hopeful future and discovers fragments of what it might look like.”
Illustrated by Laura Oldfield Ford, author and artist of Savage Messiah.
Publisher Verso Books, 2012
ISBN 1844679098, 9781844679096
640 pages
review (Andy Beckett, The Guardian)
review (Sarah Morrison, The Independent)
review (Igor Toronyi-Lalic, The Telegraph)
John M. Picker: Victorian Soundscapes (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1800s, acoustics, history of literature, listening, literature, music, noise, phonograph, recording, silence, sound, sound recording, united kingdom, voice
“Far from the hushed restraint we associate with the Victorians, their world pulsated with sound. This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The representations close listeners left of their soundscapes offered new meanings for silence, music, noise, voice, and echo that constitute an important part of the Victorian legacy to us today. In chronicling the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, Picker draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad.”
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN 0195151917, 9780195151916
220 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2017-3-2)
Comments (4)Mark Rose: Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · copyright, intellectual property, united kingdom
The notion of the author as the creator and therefore the first owner of a work is deeply rooted both in our economic system and in our concept of the individual. But this concept of authorship is modern. Mark Rose traces the formation of copyright in eighteenth-century Britain—and in the process highlights still current issues of intellectual property. Authors and Owners is at once a fascinating look at an important episode in legal history and a significant contribution to literary and cultural history.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1993
ISBN 0674053095, 9780674053090
176 pages