watcha readin profcrispy?

astrid lindgren, ronia the robber's daughter
having raised five kids, i have read many many children's books aloud. this might be my alltime favorite: i'd say ages five to infinity. it's amazing on nature, on crime, on boys and girls, on love, on death. the robber involved, matt, is a character for the ages: all his emotions are just huge. anyway i just read through it for the third time with jane; emma got it several times too, if i recall.

howard risatti, a theory of craft
for i guess what must be decades now, i've been arguing that there is no defensible distinction between art and craft. this was in its way an attempt to exalt craft and bring art down a few pegs from its absurd superhuman heights. this book fundamentally changed my thinking by coming at the thing from the other direction: by starting with the concept of craft rather than art, and defending the integrity and distinctiveness of craft as opposed to, say, museum-type paintings. the prose in this book is kind of stiff and repetitive. but the ideas are absolutely fundamental: risatti essentially invents a discipline: philosophy of craft. he does a remarkable job with taxonomies of the crafts, a remarkable job with the phenomenology of a crafter's experience. i do think that the concept of fine art that he deploys here is too narrow and that there is more overlap than risatti indicates. but it's surprising that this book has  someone whose basic positions in aesthetics were worked out twenty years ago and have hardly altered since rethinking the whole terrain.

albert speer, inside the third reich
obviously a classic autobiography, absorbing for its portraits of hitler and the other principals. speer is amazingly self-critical and reflective. first he was hitler's architect, then minister of armaments. together, he and hitler tried to redesign the cities of germany as they developed the aesthetic of national socialism (and national socialism is probably best conceived as an aesthetic system). one thing you see: hitler cared about nothing as much as art, indeed almost cared about nothing except art. indeed he conceived the final solution in aesthetic terms as the creation of a pure form.

ben franklin, the autobiography
franklin, obviously, is one of the great characters this planet has ever produced. he managed to study everything from statecraft to electricity to the tides to astronomy to spelling to manners to god to how to seduce a woman. and as a writer he is unparalleled: hilarious at his own expense, plain-spoken and profound. talking about his relationship to a store owner with whom he was in business, franklin says: "when i had just pass'd my 21st year, we both were taken ill. my distemper was a pleurisy, which very nearly carried me off: - i suffered a good deal, gave up the point in my own mind, & was rather disappointed when i found myself recovering; regretting in some degree that i must now sometime or other have all that disagreeable work to do over again."