I never even managed to finish *Snow Crash*. I must have some
crypto-antinomian reading disability and/or dispensation: the Imaginary
Library is littered with (by me) half-finished tomes, paradise lost
indeed. I need a sort of impeded readers' AA to help me with
responsible commitment to finishing The Book.
mj
Roger Collett wrote:
> Thanks, Dom for putting us on to Stephenson.
> I am just finishing Cryptonomicon and then will start to read
> Quicksilver.
>
> Roger
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 3:29 PM
> Subject: Re: Half Cocks: Abide With Me
>
>
>> Mari-Lou
>>
>> The Stephenson werke is worth reading, but it's three books, The
>> Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, & The System of the World)
>> more than 2500 pages long. I loved it, an historical fantasy on the
>> change from alchemy to science & the philosophical shifts that
>> accompanied that, with an adventure story of pirates, tough ladies,
>> European wars, competing philosophers (Newton vs Leibniz) etc. thrown
>> in. I think Stephenson tries to be accurate as to the thinking of those
>> 2 masters, but it is a fantastic fiction...
>>
>> Doug
>> On 14-Mar-05, at 3:01 PM, Mari-Lou Rowley wrote:
>>
>>> Dominic, Neal Stephenson's book sounds like a must read for me. I can't
>>> profess to be anything of an expert on Leibniz, but find his writings
>>> fascinating and prescient... as do a lot of computer
>>> scientists/mathematician I interview (the science writing that pays
>>> the
>>> bills.)
>>> So not only things like object-oriented programming, but
>>> aspect-oriented
>>> programming, ant colony optimization, of course nanotechnology.. an
>>> inherent intelligence in the code...
>>>
>>> Makes me thing of Steve McCaffery's work in monodology and poetics.
>>> Heard him here a few years ago. Now he's an expat Canadian, teaching in
>>> thePoetics Program, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo
>>>
>>> So lots more to talk about but am on deadline and must "go under" for
>>> awhile...
>>>
>>> Cheers until I surface again
>>> ML
>>>
>>>
>>> Mari-Lou Rowley
>>> Pro-Textual Communications
>>> www.pro-textual.com
>>> Tel 604.708.8512
>>> Fax 604.708.8512
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
>>> poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dominic Fox
>>> Sent: March 14, 2005 12:47 PM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Re: Half Cocks: Abide With Me
>>>
>>> Thank you Mari-Lou. I have only the one small book of Leibniz's
>>> myself, but other sources - I was recently reading Neal Stephenson's
>>> _The Confusion_, in which Leibniz appears as a character and spends a
>>> certain amount of time explaining his monadology in terms that make it
>>> sound suspiciously like a precursor of various modern ideas in AI and
>>> even object-oriented programming (there's a line about monads
>>> maintaining some encapsulated internal state that could've come from
>>> any Smalltalk primer). Given Stephenson's geek credentials (he once
>>> wrote a book called _In the beginning was the command line_), this is
>>> undoubtedly no accident.
>>>
>>> Stephenson may or may not have known that the word "monad" has
>>> recently been adopted by computer scientists, via category theory, to
>>> denote a particular approach to handling effects in pure functional
>>> programming languages like Haskell.
>>>
>>> Leibniz himself can sound uncannily modern at times. Tell me this
>>> doesn't remind you of Derrida:
>>>
>>> "Also, when we consider well the connection of things, we can say that
>>> there are at all times in the soul of Alexander vestiges of all that
>>> has happened to him and the marks of all that will happen to him, and
>>> even traces of all that happens in the universe, although it belongs
>>> only to God to recognise them all" (Discourse on Metaphysics, section
>>> VIII)
>>>
>>> Derrida's vestiges, marks and traces are more fleeting, of course, and
>>> one wonders whether even the divine Understanding could recapitulate
>>> them.
>>>
>>> There are other Half Cocks in the archives, or on my website here:
>>> http://codepoetics.com/half_cocks/poem.html
>>>
>>> Dominic
>>>
>>> --
>>> // Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
>>> // bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> Douglas Barbour
>> Department of English
>> University of Alberta
>> Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
>> (780) 436 3320
>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>>
>> Speech
>> is a mouth.
>>
>> Robert Creeley
>>
>> --
>> This email has been verified as Virus free
>> Virus Protection and more available at http://www.plus.net
>
>
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