Just another writer
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Dewey Decimal Project: 731.42 HOL Polymer Clay for the first time®
I’ve always wanted to learn to sculpt. The whole concept of creating three-dimensional art has always fascinated me. So when I got to the 730s, “Sculpture, ceramics & metalwork” I was sure this was going to be my chance to finally learn this skill. Nope. I picked up this book hoping it would be about sculpting…
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Wait, What?
I’ve grown accustomed to odd things popping out in my Goodreads recommendations, but this is a weird one: Because I’ve begun reading Stephanie (Stephen at the time of publication) Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense, Goodreads has recommended not one, but two books about Jeffrey Dahmer. There’s no index in the book, but a glimpse over the…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 720.483 MAR Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision
Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City has always been a fixture of my perception of downtown Chicago. As a child I attended a broadcast of the local children’s television program, BJ and Dirty Dragon from the Marina City TV studios (now the House of Blues), saw Steve McQueen chase the bad guys through the parking garage until they crashed…
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Rush Limbaugh is dead. Good.
There are few people whose death would make me happy. Limbaugh is one of them. He was a poison in American culture. The only sad thing about his death is that it didn’t come thirty years earlier.
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Dewey Decimal Project: 711.4 SMI The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City
Had I gone to public school in the city of Chicago instead of just outside it, a mandated part of my education would have been learning about Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. Since that’s a counterfactual, I only learned about the plan in dribs and drabs, a lot of retailed by my father and…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 700.19 LAI The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
And now I enter the 700s: Arts & recreation. In the generic category of “Arts” I decided to got with The Lonely City Olivia Laing’s book which is a mix of memoir and examination of the works of artists who treated on the topic of solitude. The mixture of genres within this book worked extraordinarily well and…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 690.837 ADL Outwitting Contractors: The Complete Guide to Surviving Your Home or Apartment Renovation
We close out the 600s—Technology—with “construction of buildings.” Since we were planning on doing some renovations, I thought it might be helpful to read a book like Outwitting Contractors. The book itself is padded with a number of anecdotes which made me think that Adler was perhaps at one point a journalist, although there is no…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 681.145 SWA The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage And The Quest To Build The First Computer
We move from “manufacturing” to “manufacture for specific uses” which doesn’t sound too promising, but I managed to find this book about Babbage’s difference engine among the books in this decade and decided it looked like it might be interesting. Babbage’s difference engine is probably the most influential machine that was not finished. It inspired a…
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Dewey Decimal Project: 676.09 KUR Paper: Paging through History
The 670s are “Manufacturing” and while I was initially nervous about what would be available at my local public library on the topic, I spotted this book about the history of paper and decided that this would be the book for me to read. From my life in typography, I’m reasonably conversant with the history of…