Trickster Makes This World
Lewis Hyde's ambitious and captivating Trickster Makes This World brings to life the playful and disruptive side of the human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls, subverting defense systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating, and stealing, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable culture heroes. In North America, Coyote taught the race how to dress, sing, and shoot arrows. In West Africa, Eshu discovered the art of divination so that suffering humans might know the purposes of heaven. In Greece, Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself. Hyde revisits these old stories, then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frederick Douglass, and others.
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What Hacker News says
- I don't exactly disagree, but I do suggest reading "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art" by Lewis Hyde.
There is a reasonable argument to be made that a lot of art is enlivened by the cantankerous, unpredictable and unyielding nature of the media we use to create art. I don't think this is a necessary feature of art per se, but I do think limitations often help humans create good art and that eliminating them often produces things which feel tossed off, trivial, thoughtless.
I think for commercial produces creating "the exact shot you want" might be what shareholders demand of you. But many artists don't set out to create "the exact shot they want," they set out to collaborate with the world to create an impression that captures both their intent and the unpredictable substance of the situation in whatever sense that might mean.
- Chomsky's oeuvre on politics, in general. There isn't one single book that states a thesis, it's about a perspective. So perhaps start with The Chomsky Reader. An easier-to-digest intro is the documentary Manufacturing Consent. The twist is that a lot of the things you think of as "bugs" in the political and economic systems of the Western democracies are "features" from the perspective of powerful elites. But the meta-lesson is that big questions can be answered. If you get past the mythology in your culture, and read primary sources, you can really figure this stuff out. Chomsky can go off the deep end at times (and his fanclub does so a lot), but his documentation is meticulous. Well worth reading.
For very different perspectives on programming, check out Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming (read it a decade ago and I use techniques from there every day.)
The Gift by Lewis Hyde. Although directed at artists, it is highly relevant to creative programmers and the phenomenon of open source. He is able to articulate things which are very hard to talk about, like the intersection of economics and artistry, and how the gifting ethos is necessary for any culture to thrive. If you think ESR had the last word on how open source works, you need to read this.
Another book of interest by Hyde is Trickster Makes This World, wherein you learn the hacker archetype - the giver of technology; the player of tricks - has been around since prehistory. It's not a coincidence that those two aspects are always seen together.
