I first read about Ashes to Ashes in Harold Pinter’s Nobel lecture “Art, Truth and Politics“, in which Pinter revealed the origin of the play, an image. “Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the […]
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“A Place of My Own” by Michael Pollan
A librarian lady recommended this book to me, saying “He is a good writer. If you like Christopher Alexander’s books, you’ll like this”. She was right. This book is a delightful read, packed with humor and thoughtfulness. Pollan tells the story of how he built a writing hut from the ground up with the help of an architect and a carpenter, weaving into the account the history of architecture, the […]
Read more“No Man’s Land” by Harold Pinter
Excerpts: “You’re a quiet one. It’s a great relief. Can you imagine two of us gabbling away like me? It would be intolerable.” “Experience is a paltry thing. Everyone has it and will tell his tale of it. … The present is truly unscrupulous. I am a poet. I’m interested in where I am eternally present and active”. “Tell me then about your wife. … How beautiful she was, how […]
Read more“The Stuff of Thought” by Steven Pinker
Informative Professor Pinker introduced the readers to some of the major constructs used in the English language, such as content-locatives, container-locatives, double-object datives, prepositional-datives, causatives and intransitives. He also gave an overview of various linguistic theories, such as Extreme Nativism, Radical Pragmatism and Linguistic Determinism. I find it very informative and interesting, especially the ingenious experiments conducted to test the theories and explore the cognitive capabilities of babies, monkeys and […]
Read more“Creating a World Without Poverty” by Muhammad Yunus
Because poverty denies people any semblance of control over their destiny, it is the ultimate denial of human rights. Forty-two People, Twenty-Seven Dollars Muhammad Yunus was not a banker, but an economics professor, who felt the emptiness of the economics theories and “wanted to do something immediate to help” the poor. He talked to many poor people and found out, to his shocking surprise, that they needed just a little […]
Read more“Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
Eco-Efficiency vs. Eco-Effectiveness The authors pointed out the ineffectiveness of the “eco-efficiency” movement, as characterized by the Four R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Regulate). Eco-efficiency does not halt depletion and destruction, it simply slows them down. They propose a new system in which designs are modeled on nature, specifically, the cycles of materials in nature and services provided by the self-sustaining, self-generating ecosystems. “Imagine a building like a tree, a […]
Read more“The Nature of Order: The Process of Creating Life” by Christopher Alexander
As someone with a biology and computer science background and no creative power whatsoever, I’m fascinated by Dr. Alexander’s notion that the creative process is essentially the same as the genetic process (seen in the unfolding of an embryo or the growth of a seed). Both processes are subclasses of the Living Process, which is defined in this book. The Creative Process “The whole system of order we observe is […]
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