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Fionnáin

fionnain@bookwyrm.social

Joined 3 years, 8 months ago

I arrange things into artworks, including paint, wood, plastic, raspberry pi, people, words, dialogues, arduino, sensors, web tech, light and code.

I use words other people have written to help guide these projects, so I read as often as I can. Most of what I read is literature (fiction) or nonfiction on philosophy, art theory, ethics and technology.

Also on Mastodon.

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Fionnáin's books

Currently Reading (View all 12)

Hans Zinsser: Rats, Lice and History (Hardcover, 1996, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Distributed by Workman Pub. Co.) 5 stars

The classic chronicle of the impact disease and plagues have had on history and society …

[Rats and lice] are sufferers even as we are, and quite as innocent of intentional malice. For though we acquire the disease from them, they get it from each other and from us. So there [->] would seem to be as much to be said on one side as on the other.

Rats, Lice and History by  (Page 166 - 167)

Page breaks at [>]

I balk at some of the things Zinsser writes in this book about other humans, but this observation on the innocence of lice and rats in the spread of disease is very important and a credit to him.

Anna Chapman Parker: Understorey (Hardcover, 2024, Duckworth) No rating

‘It began as a way of drawing nothing – as near as I could get …

I have made many drawings of brambles on my walks...Those arching stems can't be contained on a single sheet of paper; they make the rectangle of a page absurd, and when I've tried a more distant view in an effort to fit the whole plant [->] in, the drawing looks weirdly polite, which couldn't be less appropriate for this irrepressible, thorny weed.

Understorey by  (Page 127 - 129)

Quote breaks at [->] and page 128 is a full-page reproduction of a 6th Century illustration of a bramble, which is why the reference skips from p127 to p129

started reading Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville (Oxford World's Classics)

Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor (Paperback, 1998, Oxford University Press) No rating

'Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.'

So wrote Melville of Billy Budd, …

In the last few months, other books that I have read have referenced Melville, and in particular the short stories 'Billy Budd, Sailor' and 'Bartleby the Scrivener', so I got this collection from the library. I've never read any of his work so this will be an adventure.

Helen Macdonald, Giovanni Pietro Olina, Cassiano Dal Pozzo: Pasta for Nightingales (Hardcover, 2018, Royal Collection Enterprises Limited) 3 stars

Foreword by Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk.

A unique celebration of the …

A beautiful oddity

3 stars

I'm not sure what to write about this book. It is a print edition of a 17th Century encyclopaedia of birds published by a writer and artist working in Italy at that time. The text is full of wild assumptions and ideas about the birds from that time, and the images, although wonderfully made, are often very strange – some are made from taxidermied critters and some from life.

The book becomes a documentation of a time when a type of observational science was becoming very popular in western Europe. For that, it is a fascinating document, even if it is strange to have it presented this way in modern print and type. While reading, I felt like I needed more information on the book and its content, and on what it may have led to or been useful for. But it's also hard to know what this book is …

reviewed On revolution by Hannah Arendt (Penguin twentieth-century classics)

Hannah Arendt: On revolution (Paperback, 1977, Penguin Books) 4 stars

About the American, French and Russian revolutions.

Always Revolving

3 stars

Arendt is a philosopher who always turns my thoughts upside-down, even when I have read so much of their work. On Revolution focuses on two major events of the past 250 years: The French Revolution (1789) and the American Revolution (1783). By using texts and letters from the time of these events, Arendt shows how much the thinking of the 'revolutionaries' in these events was guided by a very different ontology and way of looking at western politics.

The most striking revelation for me early in the book seems so glaringly obvious now: The word 'revolution'. The word does not imply a new system, it implies that we are revolving back to the same system, with new people in power. Today, we think of things that are 'revolutionary' as somehow counter-cultural or against the norm, but Arendt illustrates very well how this language was co-opted and altered over the last …

Rebecca Solnit: Orwell’s Roses (Paperback, 2021, Granta) 5 stars

“In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a …

Homage to Hertfordshire

5 stars

Rebecca Solnit is one of those brilliant writers who I love reading regardless of the content. Her respect for the craft of writing, along with her brilliant and multifaceted research methods, make her work a joy to read. Another author who I have always loved for this skill is George Orwell, particularly in his essays and nonfiction writing. So reading a book by Solnit about Orwell's nonfiction writing was just a treat.

Solnit doesn't waste too much time with biography, instead leaping into Orwell's contradictory ways of living, his politics and his home life, through the lens of his essay writing. She constructs a person through his work, and the work others have made about him. And she begins with his work not as a writer, but as a gardener who planted roses outside a rented cottage in Hertfordshire, England in the 1930s.

The rose is used by Solnit for …

Sofia Samatar: White Mosque (2022, C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited) 4 stars

A rich history of wanderers, exiles and intruders. A haunting personal journey through Central Asia. …

Unearthing sidelined histories

4 stars

Sofia Samatar's unusual memoir The White Mosque is a hard book to categorise. On the surface, it could be described as a travel book of an author taking a journey through historical sites. But it is far more complex and unusual. The author is Mennonite-Muslim with German-Somali heritage, raised in the USA; her skin, education and accent identify her as 'other' in between so many liminal identities that other people place on her. The place is a pilgrimage route in Uzbekistan that was taken in the mid-1800s by Mennonites fleeing conscription in Prussia and Russia. Samatar's colleagues on the journey are the other Mennonite tourist-pilgrims and she is also accompanied by her large catalogue of biographies of those mid-19th Century travellers.

The result is wildly interesting and completely unique. Samatar's brilliant writing helps her cause in telling this story, because it is all so foreign to me that I worried …