The physical book

Back in the blog-o-spear.

The books that have had the greatest influence on me as a young adult:

(And I mean the physical book itself, not just the content)

1. Wittgensteins Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
I thought of this as the "other little red book" because it was small and red and not by Chairman Mao. I tended to carry it with me everywhere as an undergraduate, and again when I lived in New York. Wittgenstein inspired me to think of what I did in the world as "philosophy with my hands."

2. Eugene Sue's "Wandering Jew"
I never made it through the two volumes of this novel, but it inspired me to think big and to incorporate myth into my sense of history. I carried the two volumes of an 1880 edition with me on my hitchhiking trips. The first time I meant to read them, after that they became talisman's or good luck mojo, part of a kit of things including a certain cigar box, a certain Nikon rangefinder camera, and a certain set of painting tools that I made a point of always having with me when I hitched around the country.

3. Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano"
This book was given to me by two Boston U grad students driving out to Berkeley for a summer session. They picked me up on the freeway in Kansas and we sat up all night discussing how many different pronunciations of "a" there were in various european languages. It was my first encounter, in literature, with the Spanish Civil War. I had seen Guernica and Motherwell's Elegy for the Spanish Republic paintings. Despite my familiarity with Fitzgerald and Berryman, (personal in the latter case) I didn't connect to the idea of the tragic dissipative artist until I read and related to Lowry.

4. F. Hopkinson Smith's "Travels with a White Umbrella"
This was the first of several original editions of Smith's work I collected. It inspired me to the courage to paint and draw in public. In all my many moves I always took care for this and the other Smith books, as they embodied a spirit of art that reminded me of what I really valued in life.


5. Norbert Weiner's "Cybernetics."
This book had a mystical allure to me. I found it in a lecture hall in the Physics Building at the U of M when I was about 20, and I carried it with me for years, wishing I could penetrate the math. It became the touchstone of my interest in systems theory and systems thinking over the years. The book I found was a first edition, with the dustcover -- another small but intense volume. I think I still have this somewhere.

6. Warren McCulloch's "Embodiments of Mind"
I saw McCulloch's craggy Scotts face staring out at me from the cover of this book in a Dinkytown bookstore about the same time I found the Weiner book, and purchased it I had an easier time with the logic and sentential calculus of neural interaction than I had with the classical calculus of Weiner's work.