I read Blindness last month and finished it yesterday and although it won a Nobel Prize I was not a fan of the book. I haven’t had time to digest it properly yet but I think that it was at a disadvantage.
It explores what it would be like to live through an epidemic, but we have all been through a global pandemic now. The ideas and concepts of this book, are thus theory, rather than life experiences that we have all had.
It’s Day 26 and today I was playing with 360 video. Specifically I went for a walk in the woods and placed the camera ahead of me to provide people with the opportunity to look around. Doing this is a risky strategy during the pandemic because if you cross paths with anyone there is nowhere to avoid them. I quickly went back to open space and retreated for home. One runner passed too close.
Dziga Vertov is an interesting personality because of his ideas of the Cinema eye. His notion was that with the cinema eye, the Kino Glaz you could capture life unawares whilst being involved in the creative treatment of actuality. After making some quick money by answering some social networking questions I dropped by the apple store only to find that computer games are far too expensive for what they are. I dropped down via the usual streets and got to waterstone’s.
When I heard with what hate one podcaster talked about the Cult Of The Amateur I told myself that I should read this book because it addresses a question that is at least two hundred years old, mainly the difference between high culture and low culture. High culture is seen as everything that has taken research and thought to create whilst popular culture is anything else. High culture might be a painting displayed in a museum whilst popular culture is something that most people could succeed in doing themselves.
I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts rather than radio and one of the weekly podcasts I enjoy most is This Week in Media, where some people discuss what’s going on in the media landscape, from how they will only sit in five or six seats out of the cinema, how they’re early adopters and how they’d love to have cameras capable of 1080p The reason I mention this podcast is that recently they mentioned a trilogy of books of which snow crash is the first.
After having spent the whole night without sleep yesterday my energy levels were low and I decided that I would rest. In doing so I’ve spent quite a bit of time online but I’ve also conclued my reading of Idlewild. I was with a friend and he was looking for post apolaptyic books and was struggling to find anything. I was looking around at random books without any particular goal. After asking for help and getting some books suggested by the staff I decided to take a look at the books in the same section as he had been looking.