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Vikram Chandra
discusses
Geek Sublime:
The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
This event includes a book signing
DateOct
24
Friday
October 24, 2014 7:00 PM ET |
LocationHarvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138 |
Tickets
This event is free; no tickets are required.
|
Harvard Book Store welcomes internationally bestselling fiction author VIKRAM CHANDRA for a discussion of his nonfiction debut work, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty.
Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?
Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer’s art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.
"An unexpected tour de force. . . . Its ambition: to look deeply, and with great subtlety, into the connections and tensions between the worlds—the cultures—of technology and art. The book becomes an exquisite meditation on aesthetics, and meanwhile it is also part memoir, the story of a young man finding his way from India to the West and back, and from literature to programming and back. . . . Programmers feel an exhilarating creative mastery, and Chandra captures it." —The New York Times Book Review
“Chandra, brainy, delving, and spellbinding, delineates the intricacy and beauty of code. . . . As [he] illuminates links between programming and literature in bedazzling elucidations of Sanskrit, linguistics, aesthetics, and Hindu, Tantric, and Buddhist beliefs, he also conducts unique and heady inquiries into codes, ethical as well as binary. Chandra’s creative and elegant meshing of thought and experience, conscience and storytelling nets both the profane and the sublime.” —Booklist
Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes
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