Skip to main content

Reading list.

Countdown to departure: 26 days.

Today I received the reading list for Vienna.

There are three categories, in order of importance. The first one, STRONGLY REQUIRED, has three books:
  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  • Café Europa by Slavenka Drakulic
  • It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
The first book is translated from Italian. It is the fictional account of Marco Polo's travels to all the cities in the Tartar empire to Kublai Khan, and the dialogue that exists between them. Quite an interesting read so far. The next is about post-Communist Eastern Europe, and the last is the popular autobiography of the famed cyclist/human being. The last book was no doubt inspired somewhat by the bike trip to Horn the last weekend, but nonetheless I'm looking forward to reading about such a fascinating person.

The next category is appropriately entitled NEXT DOWN:
  • Journey to the East by Le Corbusier
  • Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
  • Disturbing the Peace by Vaclav Havel
  • Signs of Jonas by Thomas Merton
  • Architectural Writings by Alvaro Siza
  • The Spirit of Prague by Ivan Klima
Last but not least, FURTHERMORE:
  • Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
  • Fin de Siecle Vienna by Carl Schorske
  • Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos
  • Minimum by John Pawson
  • Beethoven by Marten Geck
  • Memoirs, Sir Georg Solti by Solti
  • The Twilight of American Culture by M. Berman
I don't read very well, but I'm going to try to get through as many of these as possible. I'm already a good 50 pages into Invisible Cities.

There is also a note on the reading list to start listening to Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, and Mozart, as well as to start working out. Very exciting. I think I'll wait until this evening to run, seeing as it's 90º out right now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mass.

Yesterday, I attended a Catholic mass. I am not considering becoming Catholic (it doesn’t take attending a mass to convince me that Catholicism is not for me). I went because I wanted to experience a mass in St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna’s city center. Several of my friends here are Catholic, including my friend and bunkmate Scott. When the idea of attending mass on Sunday was brought up in conversation, I was initially turned off. However, the more I thought about it, the more interesting the idea became. A Catholic mass in a cathedral in Vienna. It occurred to me that it did not necessarily have to be a religious experience—at least not in the way it was meant to be. One thing about Catholicism that interests me is its diminutive nature. Catholicism to me is basically one big self-imposed guilt trip. You are taught to feel small and inconsequential. God is all-powerful, God knows all the answers; man is fallible by his intrinsic nature, and responsible for the de...
2 comments
Read more

Venezia.

We wake up and get to the train station. The ride is about 5 hours, and the route takes us through the Austrian and Italian Alps. There is an historic railway in Austria between Vienna and the border near Italy called the Semmering Pass Railway. It is considered one of the most beautiful railways in the world. The Alps tower above us, and we cross beautiful brick bridges over sweeping green and trees. We go in and out of mountains. We can’t take our eyes from the windows. We arrive in Venice early in the afternoon, crossing the lagoon, coming out of the train station to the Grand Canal. We make our way to the bus station across the Canal to ride the shuttle to our hostel. The bus takes us across the lagoon again, to a camp site about 15 minutes away. We check into our tents. Our first order of business is to find accomodations in the city center. Unable to find anything within our price range on the internet, we go back across the lagoon on the shuttle bus, which charges a fee af...
2 comments
Read more

New links.

19 days 23 hours 23 minutes The days are passing. Less than three weeks. I posted some new links in the Links bar. MAK is a museum in Vienna that we will be visiting. Here is a mission statement. Bruce Mau Design is a studio that Tate talked up a lot during class. I visited an exhibition his studio put on at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto while returning from Noel's wedding. The exhibition is called MASSIVE CHANGE . There was a lot to take in (I spent two and half hours there and didn't get to see the whole thing), but the ideas that were presented were spectacular, if not a bit idealistic. The exhibition is an extension of the MASSIVE CHANGE project, which presents the idea of sustainability and shelter for the entire human race as a realistic design goal. I find the idea of sustainability to be very interesting. When you put aside the baggage that's associated with "greenies" and "hippies" and "tree-huggers", sustainability is a very...
Post a Comment
Read more