Currently Reading
Getting back into Proust's In Search of Lost Time. I find it relaxing, like watching snooker at the Crucible on TV on a Saturday afternoon. But it's better than snooker:
[quote=Proust]But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.[/quote]
[quote=Proust]But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.[/quote]
Comments (3457)
Having spent so long on Anti-Oedipus i can honestly say that unless you're interested in the minutiae of psychoanalysis, it's honestly not worth it. The third chapter, which offers a kind of idiosyncratic typology of human social development, is the best thing there, but everything else is hyper narrowly focused on some very obscure debates within psychoanalytic theory. You're far better off reading Fanon. It really dismays me that it's Deleuze's most well known work.
And yeah, both Rodney and Galeano are definitely on my list to to-reads - if I keep up the historical bent of reading that I'm planning for next year, they'll be there for sure. Ironically, despite my dislike of AO, it's that third chapter that kinda reawakened by interest in history.
Also picked up Man and Technics by Oswald Spengler and A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright.
It's an OK read. It surprisingly comes off as a history of... bureaucracy. Which I suppose is not all that different from the state.
Albert O. Hirschman - The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
Gilles Deleuze - Foucault
• Searching For Whitopia, Rich Benjamin
• The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, K?jin Karatani
• The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, Ritchie Robertson
• Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, Peter Turchin
• Big White [url=https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/491196]Ghetto, Kevin D. Williamson
re-reading
• Memoirs, General William Techumseh Sherman
Sounds interesting!
It does.
Starting this too
Looking forward to these. Structures of Thinking was a tour de force
by Herbert Marcuse
Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, Clifford Ando;
A Cultural History of Chess-Players: Minds, Machines and Monsters, John Sharples;
Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn;
John Dewey's Ecology of Experience, Kai Alhanen;
The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, Michael Strevens;
Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present, Philipp Blom (Long title award)
by Max Scheler
Wingfield's Hope by Dan Needles
--
Giovanni Arrighi - The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times
Works of frustrating lucidity; books empowered with a forceful and cogent conceptual apparatus (i.e. historical materialism), packed with material that I find it simultaneously brilliant, yet aggravating. Aggregating in that there is clearly much more that can be told beyond the selected political and social philosophers. To your point "pop". Wish there was more meat to it. I love Jonathon Israel's work, and I agree with the thrust of it, but it's somewhat conceptually limited by prioritizing "ideas responding to ideas" while subordinating material and social explanans.
Read:
Reading:
To-read:
Suggestions for more dystopian reading is welcomed!
Here's eleven (kinda all over the place):
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
Nevet Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Known World, Edward P. Jones
The Trial, Franz Kafka
It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
[s]A Canticle For Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr[/s]
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
edit:
The Peace War, Vernor Vinge
Strangely enough, I am reading the novel, by Mary Shelley, 'The Last Man,' too and I think it a very good book.
Nick Srnicek - Platform Capitalism
McKenzie Wark - Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse?
Crowds and Power - Elias Canetti
The Dispossessed - Ursula K LeGuin (so-so, making myself continue. Kind of like a left-libertarian Ayn Rand book, though the prose and characters are better, all in all.)
Shamanism - Mircea Eliade
Sabbaths Wendell Berry ( reading one poem each Sunday morning)
I'm enjoying the mix, trying to do a chapter/section of each a day. My first time reading Crowds & Power besides a desultory flipping-through the first pages a long time ago. I like how clean and readable the prose is - it goes down really easy. Eliade's Shamanism is much denser - some technical/academic philosophy of religion discussion gluing together a shit ton of hyper-detailed anthropological case studies (much, much baggier and far-flung than The Sacred and the Profane.) Doesn't go down so easy, but it's really fascinating.
A fascinating read so far.
More dystopian literature:
Anthem by Ayn Rand
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
An overlooked item from my own library. Elitist orthodox intelligentsia as a contributing factor to the Holocaust.
Fantastic prose and insight. A joy to read. It covers all topics, going into art, poetry, theology, science, trade, war , and politics.
There are great aphorisms spread throughout. On the topic of decadence and societal decay: "every civilization is born a stoic, and dies an Epicurean." On the foibles of war "ever must the fertility of woman struggle to make up for the foolishness of man and the bravery of generals." Aside from Gibbon I don't know if I've ever read such keen insight and quality prose in history, and I read a lot of history. Which is not to say the long sections on architecture don't get to be a bit much.
It's taken me forever because it got me rereading the Canterbury Tales and Beowulf.
Now I'm reading Le Morte d'Arthur. It isn't on the level of the Iliad in art, nor as enjoyable as the distinct stories of The Arabian Nights, but it has a certain appeal. It's rough around the edges, which is part of what makes it really capture the feel of the high Middle Ages. It's an irony that chivalry truly peaked at just the time that gunpowder and mercenary armies would soon make it go extinct. I don't know if I'm going to read it cover to cover, most likely not. More of a cool archetypal story collection to dip into, like the Arabian Nights and Grimm's Fairy Tales, which I also pick up from time to time. The Witcher short stories (Last Wish and Sword of Destiny) are also pretty good collections for that sort of reading. I found the actual novels underwhelming though.
• The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey, Paul Broks
• How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, Stanislas Dehaene
• Skepticism and Mysticism: On Mauthner's Critique of Language by Gustav Landauer 1903, David Grunwald
• New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, David Ives
• After Capitalism (New 2nd Edition), David Scweickart
• Hitler's American Model, James Q. Whitman
Halfway through... Very good, so far.
Mindshaping is Inescapable, Social Injustice is not: Reflections on Haslanger’s Critical Social Theory, Australasian Philosophical Review, 3:1, 48-59, 2020
Intelligent Capacitie, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxviii, Part 3, 2018
Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes, Eur J Philos. 2018;1–23.
That looks good.
:up:
Essay on Metaphysics by R.G. Collingwood
The Metaphysics of Pragmatism by Sidney Hook
This was my first read of Grundrisse, and so it was interesting to compare with Capital given that the latter was an edited work, whereas Grundrisse is collected manuscript of notes that wasn't meant for publication (and was never completed anyway). So through stream of consciousness, it reveals a certain side of Marx that you don't quite see in Capital. Of course Marx develops his economic thoughts more concisely in Capital (and there's more writing on class struggle in V1), so it shouldn't be a substitute for it, but through the occasional digressions in Grundrisse he reveals more overarching thoughts about society, such as alienation, ideological production under Capitalism, and human development, and some abstract considerations for what Marx's post-Capitalist society might look like. For example, the creation of disposable time that becomes theoretically available for all under Capitalism, but, for the working class, becomes subsumed under Capitalism's raison d'etre viz., wealth accumulation. Under Marx's socialism, real wealth comes from disposable time so that all individuals may pursue their own free desires, interests, and other means that enable and fulfill self-development.
A page earlier from the above, he approvingly quotes a passage from an early 19th century book,
But I think the largest benefit of reading Grundrisse, for me, was that it threaded together Capitalist production, circulation, distribution, and consumption (which are more isolated focus points that comprise the three volumes of Capital), thereby edifying their interactivity and emphasizing the Totality of the Capitalist system, which further elucidates Capitalism as a profoundly complex mode of production and in turn has decisive effects on society and social relationships. This helped further clarify Marx's Historical Materialism for me.
For Creators, Everything Is for Sale
:death:
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Cedric Robinson
[i]On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings
The Constitution of the Human Being: From the Posthumous Works, Volumes 11 and 12
Selected Philosophical Essays[/i]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xOqhJnPtLxxDBVxGNLPjjrfoxTp7-WuL/view?usp=sharing
Apparently Heidegger conceived this work to be both a companion and the heir to Being and Time. It's been on my bookshelf for nearly a decade - overlooked gem.
If you don’t mind I want recommend you an interesting book called Heidegger and a hippo walk through those pearly gates. by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel M. Klein.
It is about the role of death in a philosophical point of view.
Mckenzie Wark - A Hacker Manifesto
Various things by Leibniz (The Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Principles of Nature and Grace...)
:rofl: :clap: :fire:
Max's central writings on metaphysics and anthropology
Gilles Deleuze - The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
David Harvey on the contemporary neoliberal elite:
"The question arises, and has been much debated, as to whether this new class configuration should be considered as transnational or whether it can be still understood as something based exclusively within the parameters of the nation-state.32 My own position is this. The case that the ruling class anywhere has ever confined its operations and defined its loyalties to any one nation-state has historically been much overstated. It never did make much sense to speak of a distinctively US versus British or French or German or Korean capitalist class. The international links were always important, particularly through colonial and neocolonial activities, but also through transnational connections that go back to the nineteenth century if not before. But there has undoubtedly been a deepening as well as a widening of these transnational connections during the phase of neoliberal globalization, and it is vital that these connectivities be acknowledged. This does not mean, however, that the leading individuals within this class do not attach themselves to specific state apparatuses for both the advantages and the protections that this affords them. Where they specifically attach themselves is important, but is no more stable than the capitalist activity they pursue. Rupert Murdoch may begin in Australia then concentrate on Britain before finally taking up citizenship (doubtless on an accelerated schedule) in the US. He is not above or outside particular state powers, but by the same token he wields considerable influence via his media interests in politics in Britain, the US, and Australia. All 247 of the supposedly independent editors of his newspapers worldwide supported the US invasion of Iraq. As a form of shorthand, however, it still makes sense to speak about US or British or Korean capitalist class interests because corporate interests like Murdoch’s or those of Carlos Slim or the Salim group both feed off and nurture specific state apparatuses. Each can and typically does, however, exert class power in more than one state simultaneously. While this disparate group of individuals embedded in the corporate, financial, trading, and developer worlds do not necessarily conspire as a class, and while there may be frequent tensions between them, they nevertheless possess a certain accordance of interests that generally recognizes the advantages (and now some of the dangers) to be derived from neoliberalization. They also possess, through organizations like the World Economic Forum at Davos, means of exchanging ideas and of consorting and consulting with political leaders. They exercise immense influence over global affairs and possess a freedom of action that no ordinary citizen possesses."
Does it talk about how NY banks loaned money to foreign governments, waited for them to get close to default, and then came in and reorganized their economies?
Quoting StreetlightX
But neoliberalism is about the rise of financial institutions as central figures in the global economy. The World Bank and the IMF have been used as vehicles for it. Harvey says that in the 70s, neoliberals were learning to force change in non-democratic states and create consent in democratic ones. By the 80s, neoliberalism had already become "common sense."
I'd be interested in a 1970s viewpoint on what was happening.
Cool
• The Ethical Slut (3rd Edition), D. Easton & J. Hardy
• Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, Michel Henry
• From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe, Michel Henry
Nice.
:rofl:
Yeah! It's hard to read cause' it's so, so dark, but he has interesting things to say in terms of metaphysics and epistemology. :)
Am currently in Spain, where I am from, is a good philosophical question. Dominican/Spanish/American :)
Actually, I might be able to help. I would not have discovered the Spanish version (which is sadly just selections from the whole book, some 300 pages out of what 800 to 1000 pages?), if I had not stumbled onto Mainländer through reddit. Long story short, the official translation should be out next year, but, a very enthusiastic person, translated whole portions of the book in English. It's not perfect, but it's quite good. I'll send you the link to the work and, by all means, check out the site, plenty of good Mainländer stuff there.
Here's the link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mainlander/comments/93778q/pdf_of_the_english_translations_of_mainl%C3%A4nders/
Enjoy!
:up: ¡Gracias, hombre!
Hell yes! :fire:
edit: for a really interesting excursion into the social mechanics of epistemology the short story "The Village Schoolmaster" is a really fun read.
March-April readings
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, Rickie Lee Jones
• The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr
• Holes and Other Superficialities, R. Casati & A.C. Varzi
Still reading
• The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy As Practice, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson
• Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, Michel Henry
• From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe, Michel Henry
Rereading
• The Old Guard Book One: Opening Fire, Greg Rucka & Leandro Fernandez
• The Old Guard Book Two: Force Multiplied, Greg Rucka & Leandro Fernandez
There There- Tommy Orange
Collected Stories - Chekov
Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
Palm at the End of the Mind - Wallace Stevens (collection of poems edited by his daughter)
I tend to avoid confrontation and lie, but one vibe you get in Chekhov, is that a bunch of currents, very current then, petered out. Negri & Hardt, for example, analogy. But marx doesnt. something burst forth from him. Synoptic, and omni-literary-voracious. I worry our generations leftists too easily... I mean a marx of our time wouldnt have only read marx and left-sympathetic texts, you know? What you reading from the right?
--
@frank: So I finished reading Hudson's Super Imperialism and like I thought, it really isn't about neoliberalism at all. It is very much a history and account of state action, focusing on international monetary and trade policy (along with the institutions I mentioned). An alternative subtitle to it may have been: how the US has financially bullied the rest of the world - including and especially it's 'allies' - into economic submission from WWI to the 70s and beyond. It's even explicitly written against Marxist accounts (Hudson is a Keynesian) by trying to show how the American state has functioned as an autonomous agency at a remove from (just) class politics in order to effect a world economy oriented around American trade and foreign policy interests (particularly - getting the rest of the world to pay for America's wars and debts). If anything, neoliberalism piggy-backed off this success and developed into its own, subsequent autonomous force. In any case, I don't quite see it as a 'competition' - both state and capitalist power can and do function autonomously and in interaction with one another, at points complimenting, at other points clashing with one another.
While it's probably fair to say that the state has been progressively subsumed by neoliberal interests, it's also the case that the state worked to incubate and foster those interests in an environment in which the state was very much in the driver's seat. That all said, it's a great book to understand exactly how world finance shaped up post-WWI, and exactly what happened with the gold standard and the legacy that its abandonment left.
@Maw and @180 Proof - love your recent reads.
True. Since I read David Harvey's book, I've struggled to put the pieces together. I thought we should look at large scale events as fusions of diverse agendas that we later organize by ideas. Harvey and Blyth both emphasize the importance of the idea in the case of neoliberalism. Yes, there's a global class of elites who reinforce the idea, but this class was actually created by the rise of neoliberalism. It wasn't there previously to engineer events.
As it relates to American military intervention, remember the US was demilitarized prior to WW2. This is one of the reasons the Japanese attacked when they did. They had information that American soldiers practiced with broomsticks because they didn't have rifles. It took two years of war before the American military was capable of contributing substantially. During that time the military-industrial complex was formed.
So when we look at American interventions post WW2, we're looking at how people the US government decided to use the logistical infrastructure they inherited. The Cold War gave them freedom to experiment with South America. Harvey sees the Chilean experiment as ground zero for the rise of neoliberal values. The US neoliberalized Chile when the US itself still had embedded liberalism. From that point on, success in military adventures was measured by how well any form of social solidarity had been destroyed in favor of the rise of an elite class who could be manipulated. Whether it might have been immoral to do this just wasn't considered in the light of the threat of communism within and without the US.
So anyway, yes, Harvey says neoliberalism is quasi-independent of states. I've just been trying to understand how. I'm going to read Mark Blyth's book Great Transformations next.
I read Ayn Rand, Hayek, Milton Friedman, von Mises, Murray Rothbard when I was 20 to around 24 when they enjoyed a resurgence of interest shortly after Obama was elected. I read Locke and Burke not long after that...some Buckley too. Mostly centered on far right-wing economics.
Culturally, Trump's election in 2016, Bannon's brief role, and some additional individuals and events, changed the trajectory of conservative intellectual interest away from the more economic-focused thinkers and towards more unsavory socio-political ones, such as Evola, Schmitt, etc. whom I don't have much interest engaging with, at least at book-level, at this point. Otherwise, I've read some First Things and Claremont Institute articles, some Yoram Hazony, National Review, Douthat op-eds from time-to-time, but I don't find any of them intellectually serious.
Quinn Slobodian's Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism might be helpful here
The idea, I imagine, is that neoliberalism - although frankly I would prefer to talk here simply of capitalism - has interests and imperatives that simply do not coincide with states. So like, if you take the primary function of the state to be either say, the consolidation of sovereignty over a territory, or uncharitably, to extract the resources of a territory for the purposes of an exploiting class, the interests of capitalism - endless expansion of accumulation - do not coincide that of states.
With respect to neoliberalism in particular, you can see how this operates when states enter into commercial agreements with regard to the privatization of public resources. In these cases states cede sovereignty so that private companies take control of public resources - sometimes with 'perks' like reduced tax rates, laws that restrict competition, exceptions for environmental controls etc. And more than half the time these companies are multinationals which end up funnelling money offshore, so your population is left holding the bag of increased living costs while profits leave the country.
As an aside, Wood's Empire of Capital, which I'm reading now, is working towards making the case that "capitalism is unique it its capacity to detach economic from extra-economic power, and that this, among other things, implies that the economic power of capital can reach far beyond the grasp of any existing or conceivable, political or military power. At the same time, capitalism's extra-economic power cannot exist with the support of extra-economic force; and that extra-economic force is today, as before, primarily supplied by the state". I'm just on the early, historical bits (dealing with the Roman, Spanish, Arab, Dutch empires etc), so I haven't got to the meat of the argument just yet, but I thought it was relevant.
(If you want to get mad, read this shit: "Virginia’s 2006 contract with two private firms to build toll lanes on the Capital Beltway requires the state to compensate the companies whenever carpools exceed 24 percent of traffic in carpool lanes for the next forty years—“or until the builders make $100 million in profits.”; In 2008, the private consortium that owns the Northwest Parkway in Denver, Colorado, opposed improvements to a nearby public road, pointing to contract language that barred improvements—for 99 years—on city-owned roads that might divert traffic and “hurt the parkway financially.”; The state of Indiana had to reimburse the private company operating the Indiana Toll Road $447,000 in 2008 because the state waived the tolls of people who had to evacuate during severe flooding. The company also refused to allow state troopers to close the toll road during a snowstorm because it would hurt profits.")
Currently going through the following:
-James Hynes, "Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques".
-Richard Spence, "The Real History of Secret Societies".
It's insane.
Quoting StreetlightX
That would be much appreciated.
:up: Challenge presented, and handily taken down, respect. My personal go-tos have been 'rationalist community' adjacent-thinkers. I don't tend to agree with their economic views, but they present their ideas much better than most culture-war people, like the national review or douthat etc. Ideally, to me, the end goal of learning history and economic thought should be (1) fully understanding the present and then (2) something like the serenity prayer - "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference." The danger - and something you often see - is trying to leverage the historical/theoretical stuff in service of sustained, fact-checked, condemnation as endpoint. Not that one shouldn't condemn what is condemnable, of course, just avoid ending there. If we agree there, then we're on the same page.
That fits nicely with Harvey's analysis, as I remember it (been a while, & I think I only read the first 3/5 or so) Ideological 'neoliberals' want to reduce the role of the state, officially, but their ideology includes an explicit awareness that the state will have to continue to serve some minimal, order-sustaining role. But when theory becomes reality, the ideologically purity of the economic-eye-from-nowhere theorist is lost - Once the state gives a businessman some special dispensation, that businessman has every incentive to milk that dispensation - and so you have a weird chimera that's part- 'pure'-neoliberal, part-patchwork-of-state-cronies. (I it can also go the other way, the state calling upon its cronies - I vaguely remember something about thatcher and the Falklands War in Harvey's book?)What we call 'neoliberalism' is that chimera - which, as you guys are saying, involves two semi-autonomous, but deeply linked...entities? (hard to find the right word here...it's not 'entities')
The toll-booth stories are a great example.
But rather than get mad, maybe it's better to suss out what the current incentive structure is - how it leads, of its own autonomous logic to monstrosities - and then figure out how to break out of it. Not that anger's bad. But there are different types of anger, or, if you like, modes of using anger.
It's like Marx's contradictions - we have a moral desire to condemn and locate evil in the heart of the evildoer, but we also have a (marx-derived) understanding that we're dealing primarily with systemic issues, extra-personal structures that are like geology meets sociology (Levi-Strauss). This contradiction is as potent as that between use and exchange values. We want to be the prophet righteously denouncing, while at the same time we want to be someone who understands that it's the system that's broken - and a system's insentient, our righteous denunciations can't even fall on deaf ears - there's no ears at all. Which is more effective - the denunciating prophet, or the patient, focused steward of systemic evolution in time? Maybe the steward needs the passion, and the prophet needs the project. Surely the resolution is meaningful action.
A good historical analysis would resist the urge to denounce, and channel the anger into understanding (1) the conditions of the incentive structure that led to that toll-booth shit & (2) understanding the present, through the past, find a plausible model for how to get out of it then finally (3) act upon that. That's about as marxist as you can get.
(@StreetlightX if this is clogging up the 'currently reading' i wouldn't be offended at it being split off into a new thread.)
Yes, liberals need states to protect property rights.
Neoliberalism is a doctrine that's very hostile to labor solidarity. Globalization successfully limits the power of labor by making Europeans compete with Chinese, for instance. States help reduce the mobility of labor, which helps keep them weak.
Jairus Banaji - Theory As History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation
Dance Dance Dance - Haruki Murakami
Writings 1902-1910 by William James
EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody
Understanding Disney: Manufacturing Fantasy by Janet Wasko
:100: :up:
I also like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 1Q84
:cheer: :fire:
Both fantastic books! I'm re-reading this one and my next re-read is gonna be Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it was my favorite of his from what I can recall.
1Q84 was also great. :)
Haven't heard very good things about Killing Commendatore, so I'm very hesitant to read it...
Me neither! Because Murakami has an extent collection of books. In my case, I will give it a chance to Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage the title looks so interesting so I decided purchasing it.
I stopped after 1Q84, I read like 6 of his books in a row. But I wanted to read different authors.
I might try that one: some people say it's very good, other people not so much.
That would be so awesome. Also I made a goal to myself try to read at least one book from a Nobel prize winner. I find it interesting :sweat:
:up:
The Amazing Colossal Apostle – Robert Price
The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God – Margaret Barker
I love Dickens as historical documentation of the exploitive excess of early capitalism and the counter-balancing social sentiments and trends. Dickens is a great complement to Marx.
Highly recommended.
Quoting Maw
This was brilliant, can't recommend enough
I've been mildly curious about this bloke but you should read him while keeping in mind that he is a prolific sexual abuser.
Reflections on Socialism in the Twenty-First Century - Claes Brundenius
Also listening to Will Durant's the Story of Philosophy. Maybe there is too much overlap here, but I appreciate Durant enough as a writer to want to get his own unique take on different philosophers.
Then I'm also listening to the Great Courses series on the Persian Empire because I have a 2,000 mile drive coming up and need to reground myself in Greco-Persian history of a novel I want to right. Fantasy set in a roughly "real" world, with Christianity and references to real people like Aristotle, but taking place in the context of made up geographies, with magic and monsters, is a growing setting in the genre. I think it has real perks in that you can do plenty of world building, but also can allow people's knowledge of history and culture to do some heavy lifting. It also allows you to tackle philosophical concepts by direct reference.
Very little fantasy takes place in Classical Greece. Most is set in the Middle Ages. I thought a Greco-Persian setting would work well. You know, it's just that Pythagorean school men can actually war reality and do magic with their musical scales, and Zoroastrian priests can actually summon fire; it adds a little flash, so will sparring doses of hydras or gorgons.
NB: Burr and Lincoln are also among Mr. Vidal's best novels
Thanks for the tip. I will check out Creation , sounds like a similar time frame for what I'd like to use.
Guess Herodotus and Xenephon will be on the menu since you need to include the classic sights. I'm thinking if there is a metaphysical big evil it will be up north, above the Scythians, since there are way less sources on them so more can be changed. Of course Hyperborea is up that way too, and said big bad can be blamed for the Bronze Age collapse and burning of Knosis, so there is plenty to work with.
Like a number of folks loitering on these fora, I've been "working on" a (novel) for some years too. A 'near-future, about-to-happen-singularity, climate apocalypse' scifi-thriller –
a spicy gumbo (of primary influences) such as
Neuropath by R. Scott Bakker,
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman,
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler,
The Children of Men by PD James,
A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr
& the movies Ex Machina & Blade Runner
– whether a novel or an anthology of "stories" (like Max Brooks' World War Z), I haven't decided – the narrative hasn't dictated which – yet. It took over three years just to start writing after several years of gestating / procrastinating, then the pandemic hit and sapped the project's mojo. I think I've got a real tiger by the tale – not "grimdark" or "misery porn" as post/apoc stories tend to be – and hope sooner rather later this beast turns and bites me harder and harder till the writing gets done. Mention of your project, Count, is quite encouraging. :up:
FWIW I did think the Moretti book was very interesting.
Any recommendations? I previously bought a bunch of Ellen Wood books and Domenico Losurdo's Liberalism: A Counter History, all of which I recommend.
• The Framer's Coup, Michael J. Klarman
• The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter, Peter Robin Hiesinger
• Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas, ed. Eugene Redman
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
still reading:
• Holes and Other Superficialities, R. Casati & A.C. Varzi
• Mama's Last Hug, Frans de Waal
• From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe, Michel Henry
How are you finding Henry? I've only read bits of his phenomenology which seems miles removed from politics, so I've been intrigued. Does he square the one with the other, or are they relatively independent?
Quoting Maw
Mike Davis, Andras Malm, Wolfgang Streeck, Erik Olin Wright, Gindin and Panitch! I think I'm going to pick up The People's Republic of Walmart next week.
Ah, ok, I can see how that would work for him. Cool.
This book seems a good introduction to Phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty's main ideas.
I read half of Huxley's' The Perennial Philosophy'. I may finish it later this week amongst replying to comments on my threads and applying for jobs. I am impressed by it so far.
I don't have 'Ends and Means'. I can't download any more books at present because I have filled the capacity of my Kindle and tablet. This is probably a good thing. But, when we have both finished 'The Perennial Philosophy', do you wish to discuss it?
Can you add an SD card to your tablet for more capacity?
I think that I am seeing my devices being full to mean that I need to read the books which I have. But, now that shops are open I will look out for paper books again.
This is one I keep coming back to, it's so, so good.
An Outline of Philosophy - Bertrand Russell
Up next:
Enemies of Hope - Raymond Tallis
Pure Invention - Matt Alt
Should I buy this? I know Anievas and Nisancioglu cite it multiple times.
I'm learning a ton, and it's pretty easy to read. would recommend.
Sells it for me!
Vol. 1 & 2
by E. Husserl
Quoting Maw
:up:
• John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, William A. Edmundson
• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste by Philip Mirowski
And also reading a novel:
The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Great, I was looking forward for this to come out in English! I will read it in short order.
Also Nature Loves to Hide, an exposition of philosophy of physics by Shimon Malin.
Brendan Lindsay – Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873
Exterminate Them!: Written Accounts of Murder, Rape and Enslavement of Native Americans during the California Gold Rush
Randall Milliken – A Time of Little Choice: The Disintegration of Tribal Culture in the San Fransisco Bay Area, 1769-1810
Damon Akins – We Are the Land: A History of Native California
Yes, the first essay was excellent, read it earlier this afternoon. Did you read Pristine Culture? I didn't really enjoy it. Perhaps in part from having read How the West Came To Rule, I found it too myopic and boring.
Just finished this, thanks for the recommendation. What a fantastic read.
The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda
I know they may not be as urgent, but I have a feeling that novels are quite important for understanding human beings. Just suggesting to folks to read one a year, if not many more...
Then again my intuition could be bs.
Tell me more.
--
I finally finished Davidson's How Revolutionary Were The Bourgeois Revolutions - an 800 page weapon and the best thing I've read all year so far. Holy shit it was good. So currently on to:
Theda Skocpol - States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo - The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry [PDF]
Two articles by Neil Davidson, "What Was Neoliberalism?", and "Neoliberalism and the Far Right: A Contradictory Embrace [PDF]".
I've almost finished, it's very interesting; the first 2/3rds provide an analysis of several pre-Capitalist modes of production including the Asiatic mode, the Feudal mode, Peasant mode, Slave mode, etc. their internal dynamics and tensions, and the subsequent development, the relationship to Marxism (the Asiastic mode and Feudal mode in particular), which are transhistorically constructed by looking at specific historical formulations and comparing and contrasting case studies (e.g. the Asiastic mode as it existed in Ancient Egypt, the Peasant and Feudal mode as it develop in early/middle Iceland and Norway, the Slave mode via Rome, South America, Ancient Greece). The last third, which I started today, revolves around structural change in the modes of productions by looking at debates involving economic determinism, superstructure/base, (not unlike Wood's discussion in Democracy Against Capitalism) and the role of religion, kinship, etc. that penetrate and incorporate themselves into ideological justifications for the mode of production they inhabit. It's been interesting to ponder the role of Christianity in Feudalism vs. the role of Christianity in modern Capitalism. Last chapter, which I am very much looking forward to reading, seems to be about the value theory as it applies to late Feudalism.
Richard Wolff
Little (paraphrased) excerpt on workplace alternatives I think is worth sharing:
“I want to extend democracy to include the workplace because I believe it should never have been excluded from it. I find it bizarre that in a country that makes a big deal of its commitment to democracy that it never applied that so-called value to the workplace. You know, the workplace is where most adults spend most of their time. Nine to five, five out of seven days a week, in most parts of the world — the best hours of the day you’re working, many more hours you’re recuperating from it or getting ready for it. This is a very crucial part of your life — and a democratic society really doesn’t deserve the label if it excludes the workplace from the democratic commitments that it articulates.”
Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin
SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas
A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality by Ralph Cudworth
Reading:
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man by Thomas Reid
Lady Joker Volume I by Karou Takamura
Arendt was excellent, albeit a dense read. More concept-driven than thesis-oriented, which suits me well.
:up:
Peter Guardino – The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War
William T. Vollman – The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War
1) new introductory lectures on psychoanalysis.
2) totem and taboo.
3) moses and monotheism.
With these three books one has good ammunition and a great insight into the mindset of propagandists on the left and right,religious or secular.
Freuds nephew Edward bernays made a career disseminating capitalist and consumerist propoganda by mastering the principles of his uncles work.
Counter the evil of capitalism and communism!
Know thy enemy!
Boy freud is an angry atheist in this one! Reminds me of some posters here.
He admits at one point that secularism could be an illusion just like religion. Then backtracks and rants about reason being the "god" of science and the way to truth.
He's more self aware than most secularists and a clear writer but still,when under pressure retreats to the opium of science and propoganda.
"Next up, "Civilsation and its discontents" by freud,and a whole stack of freud books in the post.
Then Edward bernays with "crystallising opinion" and "Propoganda".
And Washed down with chomsky on "manufacturing consent",and the cigar is Austins "How to do things with words". About speech acts and language.
Remember words are actions and desires!
Plan to read:
Theories of ethics by Philippa Foot.
The rain lasts eleven years by Yong-Tae Min (Poems).
España invertebrada by Ortega y Gasset.
The name sounds like Korean. A Korean poet?
Exactly, it is Korean but surprisingly, this book was written in Spanish because back in the day Yong-Tae Min was a philologist teacher in Madrid.
Agreed. Ortega y Gasset is a very special thinker. I am Spanish as him and somehow I feel the same impotences in terms of culture and the decadence of our homeland...
Wow, a Korean Philology teacher in Madrid, and wrote poetry in Spanish? Sounds interesting.
He also translated Don Quixote to Korean. What an intellectual man!
Sure. Please enjoy your readings. Thank you for sharing. :up: :pray: :smile:
Andrew Isenburg – Mining California: An Ecological History
Louis Warren – God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America
Robert Righter – The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism
Anton Treuer – The Indian Wars: Battles, Bloodshed, and the Fight for Freedom on the American Frontier
Kevin Starr – California: A History
One of my favourites.
By far the best book I've read on Whitehead, finally I can begin to make some progress here.
Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Maxim Gorky - Creatures That Once Were Men
Mirra Ginsburg - The Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Soviet Science Fiction
Next up, for a larf, Yuval Noah Harari's history and prophecy of humanity:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
and
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
John Fante – Ask the Dust
Jack London – Martin Eden
Frank Norris – The Octopus: A Story of California
Josiah Royce – The Religious Aspect of Philosophy: A Critique of the Bases and Conduct of Faith
What a wonderful book. I very much like his interpretation of QM and the way he thinks about all the complications associated with it, the book has very much a philosophical flavor. Not that I agree with him on all points, but highly recommend it for people interested in the topic: quite easy to read and understand. Simply great stuff.
• A Quantum Life, Hakeem M. Olesuyi
still reading:
• Holes and Other Superficialities, R. Casati & A.C. Varzi
re-reading:
• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
Leonard Pitt – The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846-1890
Gregory Nokes – The Troubled Life of Peter Burnett: Oregon Pioneer and First Governor of California
John Rollin Ridge – The Life and Adventures of Joquín Murieta
Nathanael West – The Day of the Locust
Neal Harlow – California Conquered: The Annexation of a Mexican Province, 1846-1850
James C. Scott - Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
@darthbarracuda I remember you reading the first - how did you find it?
:up:
Essay about the Greeks by Friedrich Nietzsche.
I'm just past the first chapter and it's absolutely absorbing. He writes with such momentum!
In the middle of The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. :up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcDyPH8nTJ4
Karl Popper's attempt to make philosophy useful by clearing up some old debates in a non-dogmatic framework. Read by Elyse Hargreaves with permission from the Popper library.
I love this man so much. It was a true philosopher of science and a good person. Before he passed away at the age of 92, he was still answering all the letters to his disciples. Incredible.
It is one of the funniest books I have ever read. James recommended reading it slowly, perhaps five pages at a time. I sometimes manage only five sentences at a sitting, which may amount to the same thing. When a character meets his friends arriving by train it takes one chapter to get them out of the station. Even then we have to go back to pick up some observations we might have missed. You go to a party and after three or four pages you have just about got across the lawn and sighted some of the guests through the window. Each sentence is a journey and you often arrive holding onto unfamiliar luggage, having unaccountably lost your passport, your return ticket and your left shoe.
It's exactly like what you'd expect for it to be like.
looking forward to this one given @StreetlightX's glowing review
I keep coming back to that one, over and over.
The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene
Plan to read:
Los desamoramientos by Javier Marías.
Oh, what a paradise it seems by John Cheever.
Excellent book! One of my favorites from Murakami.
My intro. Looking good so far.
Marshall Sahlins - Islands of History
...continuing my anthropology kick.
For anyone who enjoys Dickens or Victorian literature or just a good fiction, The Eustace Diamonds is quite a gem. I could not put it down.
Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within by Colin McGinn
Not much philosophical literature on innateness, unless it's technical linguistic related matters. Great book.
Reading:
The Last House of Needless Street by Catriona Ward
Erik Loomis
Quoting Pantagruel
And an awesome story, too. Should be required reading.
The book is a steaming pile of shit, I do not recommend it at all. Save your time, most of it is just atrocious.
Finally I found someone that thinks like me about that stupid ass book! Thank you. I remember getting tired before the page 100...
Barack Obama
found it at a used book store
The warrior of the Tiger skin. by Rustaveli.
This is a collection of epic poems from Georgia (most of them in Tbilisi) where Christianism, Muslim, and Hinduism are influenced. All these poems were written between XII and XIIIth century.
Note: If you are interested in this book, be careful and search it also as "panther warrior" because for some authors Rustaveli referred about this epic animal not the tiger.
The poem is composed by 1487 quatrains.
Looks "phenomenal"..... :)
Wendy Brown
Got the same book. Looks an interesting book well written.
If you start a reading group with it, will follow.
I have the Guyer, NKS and Max Muller translation version.
I prefer the MM version best for clarity of the translation. Cross referencing between the 3 translations will render flexibility.
• Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff & Mark Johnson
• The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry
• Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag
:up:
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
this is going to take a while, studying the nature of human thought through self-exposition...
How was that? Penrose is a treasure, and his CCC is super interesting. Guy is just a machine (90 years old now!!!)
See there are more comprising theories? But that machine is a crackpot. no?
maximum crackpot level achieved!
No. He's wrong. Hyper jackpot!
Maybe. Probably. Still interesting, and its not like you have any clue either way, so why pretend?
Why should I have no clue? Why do you think I pretend? How can it be interesting when wrong? Anyhow, this is a book part. I have started the wrong discussion but you tossed up Penrose. His tiles are amusing though.
Feyerabend-Science in a Free Society.
Went way over my head, especially with all the math.
I remember seeing reviews on Amazon before someone got me the book, from professors etc, saying the same thing.
This book cries out for reading group.
Quoting Seppo
I thought that would be the hardest read, but it's pretty understandable if you slow down and take your time with it. I'm at page 100, having a break from it to do other things.
A lot of the classical actual infinity thought experiments he has answers for, but for those he doesn't he asserts that just because certain actual infinity thought experiments are impossible, it doesn't mean actual infinities are impossible. He points out that even finite scenarios can be impossible.
Yes, that's probably true, it looks....dense.
Et voilà
yeah he's written quite a few fantastic responses to various parts of the causal/cosmological argument, and in particular he had one of the best arguments RE infinite/eternal past that I've seen, so I'd be super interested in that book. May have to check it out on Kindle here.
There had been a huge RG for the book already.
But it looks like it had been closed.
Wonder if it would be good idea to open a new one.
Started The Tunnel by William H. Gass.
• Classical Indian Philosophy, P. Adamson & J. Ganeri
• Razorblade Tears: A Novel, S.A. Cosby
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/books/s-a-cosby-razorblade-tears-crime-novelist.html
• Agon, J. Harper & S. Nittner (ttrpg)
• Exterminate All The Brutes, Sven Lindqvist
So interesting indeed :up: :flower: it is important to look into Asian philosophy sometimes.
In honor of Stanislaw Lem's 100th:
• A Perfect Vacuum
• His Master's Voice
• The Investigation
• Solaris
• Summa Technologiae
Arundhati Roy - The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile
Hito Steyerl - The Wretched of the Screen
He served as the Minister of Education under Sarkozy's presidency. I found him by and large ok, a bit old style.
Brother karazamov. Fyodor dostoevsky.
Through the looking glass. Lewis carroll.
Problems of dostoevskys poetics. Mikhail bhaktin.
Bhaktin is a philosopher whose work on Language is far far better than any of the famous philosophers or linguists.
You could solve all the pseudo epistemological and ontological problems with his dialogical concept.
Does God Exist? - A. E. Taylor
Charles W. Mills - The Racial Contract (@180 Proof, he passed away this week :sad: )
Jon Roffe - Abstract Market Theory
I'd meant to meet him on one of my next visits to NYC through a friend who happened to have been Mill's student decades ago – the pandemic has delayed my travels, and now he's gone. Thanks for letting me know. Excellent read. In his honor I'll soon start on
Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race
I've had the book for some time, a follow-up to The Racial Contract, which is long overdue for study. Coincidently, I've been reading Exterminate All The Brutes by Sven Lindqvist which I very much recommend as sort of a massive 'historical case study' of Mills' thesis.
...Nonwhites then find that race is, paradoxically, both everywhere and nowhere, structuring their lives but not formally recognized in political/moral theory. But in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, or whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races those who, unlike us, are raced-appear. The fish does not see the water, and whites do not see the racial nature of a white polity because it is natural to them, the element in which they move. As Toni Morrison points out, there are contexts in which claiming racelessness is itself a racial act".
Gosh it's like the debates haven't changed changed for two and a half decades.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B99wZK39VTQ
(a film review + some background)
Charles W. Mills 1951-2021
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-house-that-charles-built
"By recognizing it as a political system, the "Racial Contract" voluntarizes race in the same way that the social contract voluntarizes the creation of society and the state. It distinguishes between whiteness as phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for "white renegades" and "race traitors." ... Correspondingly, the "Racial Contract" demystifies the uniqueness of white racism (for those who, understandably, see Europeans as intrinsically White) by locating it as the contingent outcome of a particular set of circumstances ... In a sense, the "Racial Contract" decolorizes Whiteness by detaching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a parallel universe it could have been Yellowness, Redness, Brownness, or Blackness. Or, alternatively phrased, we could have had a yellow, red, brown, or black Whiteness: Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations."
Absolutely killer. The dissent article is a fitting tribute.
:fire:
The Murder of Professor Schlick: the Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle, David Edmonds.
[SPOILERS]
I just read 1Q84 and after the first book of the three, which was compelling and fascinating, it seemed to just fall flat, dominated by (a) mundane activities--which can be described interestingly in fiction but not here--and (b) the dull, bloodless thoughts of the main characters, especially Tengo. I can happily live with a main/point-of-view character who is evil or contradictory (or breast-fixated), but not with a boring one. He's the most boring fictional main character I can remember. In the third book, no sooner does the increasingly likeable and interesting Ushikawa begin to liven things up than he gets caught by Fuka-Eri's gaze and becomes as boring as the others, just before getting killed off.
It was my first Murukami and I've seen people say it shouldn't be the first one you read. And it has indeed put me off reading more.
Currently reading and reading soon:
I also want to try those big difficult American classics, Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow. Until now, just as the thought of being stuck in an upper class manners-infested house for a whole book has put me off Jane Austen, so getting bogged down in anything to do with tennis has put me off Infinite Jest. Maybe it's because I myself was a promising tennis athlete for a short time in my adolescence, before throwing it all away.
• The Nature of Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Carl F. Hostetter
Quoting jamalrob
Brilliant! :up:
I'm really looking forward to Dune when it opens here in the US next month. At IMAX (matinee if possible). I've never ventured past Titus Groan, so maybe I'll give Peake's trilogy another chance. What do you think of Moorcock's Gloriana with its deliberately Gormenghast-like 'mood'? Btw, reading Gene Wolfe rewards patience.
I definitely recommend the second one, Gormenghast, but the third is non-essential and really not of a piece with the first two. But it's fascinatingly odd.
Quoting 180 Proof
I abandoned it when I tried reading it in my adolescence but I'd be interested to try again. But although Moorcock loved Peake, I don't think he's the same kind of writer at all, so I don't know how he'd succeed with that kind of thing. I could be wrong about that, because there's a lot of Moorcock I haven't read (I've probably only read his Eternal Champion/Multiverse stories, and less than half of those). What did you think of it?
Quoting 180 Proof
Glad to get some support for my suspicion that he's not just crap after all!
EDIT: btw, I saw Dune in a beautiful "premium" cinema with big chairs and tables and all that, and only four other people there. It was a very good experience, but I'll say no more.
I first read Moorcock back in the late '70s – The Eternal Champion-Silver Warriors duology and Elric stories mostly, later Behold the Man, von Bek stories and "sampled" quite a few other of his novels. I really fell for Moorcock's pulpish weird fantasy (i.e. sword & sorcery), especially Elric and the Multiverse back in the day (which, along with Conan stories and Lord of the Rings-The Silmarillion, lead me to running & designing tabletop roleplaying games through the mid-80s). Foundational stuff for me. Also, Ursula LeGuin, Poul Anderson, "Cthulhu Mythos" stories, Gene Wolfe, Charles Saunders (Imaro) ... Frank Herbert, et al.
:up:
Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek
:cool:
I was into the Corum and Von Bek stories back in the day. Later on Colonel Pyat.
Quoting 180 Proof
:up: :up: :up:
It varies. Gravity's Rainbow is quite difficult. You need to be able to withstand not understanding almost anything for 240 pages, then it takes off for a good while. But the last 100-ish pages go back to obscurity. It was quite a feat finishing that. Feels like an accomplishment. But at least most things you read afterward become easy or they cease to intimidate. A unique experience, no doubt about that.
Infinite Jest, on the other hand, is much easier to read and has some creative and fun moments. But the endnotes killed me. Sure, you can skip them if you wish, but then I felt like I was cheating the book. But going back and forth all the time just became a total slog. And I wasn't enjoying it, not because it was hard, but because it was unrewarding despite some nice pages and passages. Stopped at p.400.
But some people swear on this book.
There was a time when I went for big difficult books in the way that young men do: to prove to myself and to others that I was a serious intellectual.
These days, it's more like curiosity and exploration. These books stand in the cultural landscape like mountains to be climbed.
The endnotes thing puts me off, I have to say. Friends of mine have raved about Infinite Jest, but I feel more drawn to Gravity's Rainbow. I can handle books I can't understand so long as it seems like the writer knows what he's writing about, and if it looks like it could be interesting. That's when I know I have to go and do some research of my own.
There are whole guidebooks for GR. Once it gets going it's crazy: characters appearing left and right, changes in prose from paranoiac to authoritative to funny all in a few pages. You have to be determined to finish the book, at least that's how I read it.
Mason & Dixon, on the other hand, took him something like 25 years to write, to get the language right and the like, it reads beautifully - a total mastery of the English language. But it's also very hard.
IJ is curious. Obviously Wallace could write very well, but I think he was much better in his non-fiction essays by a lot. The end notes did not enhance the experience for me.
Since this is a philosophy forum, you might want to check out Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer, it is amazing. Better than GR, imo. I have to do PR for that book, since you mentioned these two novels. ;)
I loved "Titus Groan," but I'm surprised I finished it. Luckily, about a quarter of the way in, something grabbed me by the collar and dragged me the rest of the way through. Really odd, but wonderful. I've been trying to get up the nerve to read "Gormenghast."
Just so you know, there is a rule for books identified as "classics" - you get just as much credit for reading short easy-to-read ones as for the difficult ones. I recommend "Heart of Darkness." Mr. Pynchon, he dead.
Titus Groan is ponderous, if you can imagine that as a positive, but Gormenghast I found somewhat lighter and more comedic, in a Dickensian kind of way.
Quoting T Clark
:up: :100: :cool:
This is always quoted, but the thing is: the whole book is like that.
I looked at one today, but I approach literature as I do film, knowing as little about it beforehand as possible and certainly avoiding plot spoilers, which this guidebook apparently has.
That's the best way to read novels.
This is the only Pynchon novel I've "withstood" long enough to finish. Enjoyed it though. At the time, I was also reading William Gass' The Tunnel which I very much preferred. Ever read David Markson's "novels"? If not, I highly recommend Wittgenstein's Mistress (and Springer's Progress too). :up:
I couldn't finish The Tunnel when I first tried. Wasn't in to it back then, am going to have to give it another shot.
Yep, Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress is great. Will check out Springer's Progress, that I have not seen.
Thanks!
Well, I'm an idiot, that guy's a white supremacist :vomit:
Quoting Manuel
Neither could I, it went a bit over my head and felt like a chore to get through. I'll try again some other time.
Yes, these authors tend to produce dense works that require persistence and patience, ideally, it ends up being worth the effort. Depending on the person, it can pay off in spades or it could be garbage. People have both loved and hated Pynchon and Wallace. Same with Gass.
Definitely not the type of book you'd pick up casually.
Georges Dumezil - Mitra-Varuna: An Essay on Two Indo-European Representations of Sovereignty
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time
Kathryn Yusoff - A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari - Kafka
[s]Also Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad.[/s] Cannot read it right now, the copy I got has so many notes on every page that it's impossible to focus on the story.
• The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Kenneth Patchen
• The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead
Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Quoting Number2018
How is this?
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
:razz:
Loved loved How Revolutionary. One of my favorite reads of the year. Intellectually dense, and with acerbic wit and confidence that I admire.
I see it has a chapter on naturalistic dualism, which came up in a thread recently and relates to the A.N. Whitehead books I just finished.
:up:
Love me some Doug Adams.
'A Kierkegaard Anthology' edited by Robert Bretall
I am about 1/3 the way through the anthology, on Fear and Trembling now.
I just felt like popping in and saying WOW - that Dane was on to something! Any S.K. admirers here?
Going back in.
I haven't read this yet, but it is recommended by an author I respect and it looks interesting:
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Barbarism-Manifesto-Planet-Fire/dp/1788738772/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1634597242&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Anthropocene-Fossil-Capitalism-Crisis/dp/1583676090
Scientific evidence.
You can read online articles, such as this, which gives references:
Vital Signs of the Planet
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
I would get a textbook from a college course on climate change. David Archer wrote one.
Thanks for this. Looked him up. He is lecturing online free. The course starts today!
Quoting Coursera: Global Warming I - Prof. David Archer
https://www.coursera.org/learn/global-warming
More on David Archer: biography, books etc:
https://geosci.uchicago.edu/people/david-archer/
Looks like it has the full video University lecture series. I signed up but didn’t pay the $50 for certification so I won’t be a bonafide CCV (climate change virtuoso).
:smile: same here, not gonna pay £35 for a piece of paper !
Looks good. Course is based on David Archer's book 'Global Warming - Understanding the Forecast'.
I like the breakdown of Video Lectures with links to Reading/Resources/Models.
Not sure how far I will get with this - bit of a brain twist from Stoics, CBT to Maths'n'Stuff :scream:
If you like to listen, LibraVox has a reading I really enjoyed. Free.
Tony Norfield - The City: Global Finance and the City of London
Georges Dumezil - The Plight of the Sorcerer
Vladimir Propp - Morphology of the Folktale
Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky.
Purchased a few more books along with this to take me well into 2022...
Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth: An Inquiry into Consciousness, Metaphysics, and Epistemology by Andrew Gluck
The Tree of Knowledge: the Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto Maturana
Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud by Herbert Marcuse
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind by Michio Kaku
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault
Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber by Anthony Giddens
The Psychology of Intelligence by Jean Piaget
The Piaget I am most looking forward to. Reading is a privilege and a blessing.
Monsters of the Market was interesting. Some of the analogies are a bit ham-fisted and awkwardly argued, but I really appreciated his discourse on zombies, and ultimately his insistence on emphasizing the monstrosity of capitalism.
Nice list!
If I don't remember incorrectly, you read Quinn Slobodian's Globalists, which was an excellent dissection of Neoliberalism. It led me to other fantastic books on the topic, particularly Jessica Whyte's Morals of the Market and then Philip Mirowski's Never Let a Serious Crisis go To Waste as well as Wassernman's The Marginal Revolutionaries, which is an intellectual history of the Austrian School.
I got a decent picture on Neoliberalism. Nevertheless, I was looking to reading something similar to Slobodian's book, that kind of quality. Do any come to mind?
Ah, cool. The idea of the family used as excuse for implementing market discipline kind-of thing?
I'll be sure to check it Cooper out.
Many thanks!
Kind of. It's how 'the family' became the last bastion of non-market socaility, and how much this absolutely has ruined people. Also explains how neoliberalism and social conservatism basically dovetail into one another on this basis. She kind uses the family unit as a prism through which to view the neoliberalism's social effects. It's devastating.
Sounds right up my alley. :up:
Do you mean the pictures of family happiness in advertising?
No. It has to do with an economic system dating back to the late 70's in which economic policies were forced down people's throat under the guise of freedom, etc. And much more, long story.
The books I mentioned above, plus @Maw and @StreetlightX's suggestions will give you a good idea on neoliberalism, if you're interested.
Ah yes. It still happens today. In an increasingly wicked and thought-through fashion. For example, there are many advertisements in which "individuality" is pushed upon. I'm not sure if you point at advertisement, or commercials (both part of an economy based on endless inflating production and consumption of the products) but I think I get your message. Advertisements claiming that that all we see is constructed by us, directing away our attention from Nature. Commerce in the service of a system that assigns us an individuality, while in fact it makes people more unified than ever. In the name of personal freedom and individuality.
Yeah. It's an important aspect of a massive change in political ideology that is still with us to this day. I haven't read the book yet, but know a little about such ideas, if a politician says he/she upholds "family values", then that's an excuse to not do anything for anybody in terms of implementing laws that could help people in need. Why? Because they have a family to support them.
But it's even deeper than that. I have to read that book to get a better understanding of what's involved.
Exactly! All that talk about family values offers a neat way out of values that are non-value-like. The anti-family values are shunt from law implementation and law-making. Having consequences for the people who don't give a shit about family-values. Making society family-racist, so to speak. Same holds for the so popular free-market values. There is nowadays no escape from advertisement. The gathering of money and goods has never been so popular, and while one person wallows in billions of dollars, drinking from golden taps and letting his jet fly him automatically around the globe, others look for a place to sleep and a meal to eat. But hey, it's a free market...
Pretty much. :up:
Currently reading:
My View of the World - Erin Schrödinger
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding - David Hume
Almost done with:
Ducks, Newsburyport - Lucy Ellmann
I didn't look into that one because it did not look inviting for some reason. But if people here think it's good, then it probably is. Thanks.
:up:
Yeah, by me.
I recommended it 12 years ago.
:rofl:
Nerds all of you!
:cool:
by Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela
Quoting Maw
Yeah so read this book
• In the Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish
• The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow
• The Good Old Days, eds. E. Klee, W. Dressen, & V. Riess
rereading:
• Pyrrhonism, Adrian Kuzminski
• The World of Parmenides, Karl Popper
• Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Quoting StreetlightX
I cannot wait to read this!!
Quoting 180 Proof
Yay!! A qualification: alot of the time, Witty is also talking about words in language-games where they "don't belong". Words which, in one language-game work perfect fine, but, when employed in another with the expectation that it will 'work' in the same way as it's 'original home', makes for wild confusion (this is 'being captured by a picture').
:cool:
TPF - the place where theories of everything come to be born.
Definitely going on the short list.
by Andrew Gluck
Now for the other side of the coin.....
@StreetlightX looks like the Verso end of year sale has started. Could have sworn it was 50% off last year though.
It might not be "postmodern", but surely a masterpiece. It will take considerable effort and you may not like it but, I must add to the "hard books worth reading".
@180 Proof @jamalrob @Deleteduserrc
You guys might want to consider checking it out, if you're up for the challenge. I can't vouch for it like I do for Novel Explosives, which is a must for philosophical-literature fans but, it's worth knowing about.
I read the first few pages on Amazon's "look inside" and thought it was a fun read. The form looks interesting, less so the themes and subject matter. It might be a matter of taste.
And there's the blurb:
"A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster"
Yawn! But I guess I shouldn't judge the book by the blurb.
And then there's ... "the fact that". Would I be a middlebrow philistine fool to point out how ugly this phrase is? Maybe it takes on a pleasing hypnotic quality as you get into the book, I don't know. Think how much paper and readers' time could have been saved if every instance of "the fact that" had been removed. Now, I expect the sentence wraps up at the end brilliantly or movingly or shockingly or whatever, when "the fact that" finally pays off, but still, I wonder if it justifies making the reader put up with it for almosty the whole reading experience.
Of course, these are just initial reactions combined with my tastes and prejudices.
Quoting Manuel
I suppose it's kinda modernist in that it has a superficial resemblance to parts of Ulysses, though maybe without the poetry. Whether it's postmodern, I don't know. I don't even know what "postmodern(ist)" means when it comes to fiction. It can't be about the cool stuff like self-reference, metafiction, nested stories and so on, because that was going on at the beginning of the novel in Don Quixote, and hasn't stopped since then.
All my 'booky' friends are really into this. Rave reviews all around. I might read it in a decade or two.
:up:
It's what she uses as a way to connect sentences, it could be annoying to some, I thought it worked well. As for the subject matter, yes, it doesn't sound interesting at all, it actually surprised me that it was interesting.
I said "postmodern" in relation to Pynchon and Wallace which you were thinking about reading eventually. Good point about Don Quixote. Maybe challenging book might be a better term.
I can't say you'll enjoy it, it might turn out to be very boring for you, but given that you were talking about GR and IJ, difficult books or unique books in general. Now you know about it.
Quoting StreetlightX
:lol:
Given the books you discuss, I'd say there's no hurry. I think David Graeber's upcoming book, is going to be really worthwhile.
:up:
Yep, and I enjoyed looking into it for a few minutes. Who knows if I'll go further with it. Maybe in two decades.
Krasznahorkai is shaking right now.
He's upcoming for me later this year. I hear he's excellent.
I admittedly don't read a lot of novels but I do love me some Krasnahorkai.
One of his came out a week ago:
https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Homer-L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3-Krasznahorkai/dp/0811227979/ref=sr_1_1?crid=149FD2G9HHW6K&keywords=lazlo+krasnahorkai&qid=1636510031&s=books&sprefix=lazlo+kra%2Caps%2C197&sr=1-1
Also currently reading I guess:
Edmund Leach - Rethinking Anthropology
Roland Barthes - Elements of Semiology
Claude Levi-Strauss - Myth and Meaning
Radhika Desai - Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire
Enjoy, I'll be joining you guys soon! :victory:
by Jean Piaget
J. L. Austin – How to Do Things with Words
J. L. Austin – Sense and Sensibilia
John Searle – Speech Acts
S. I. Hayakawa – Language in Thought and Action
C. L. Stevenson – Ethics and Language
Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai
by Morton Hunt
by Aristotle
Now, probably on to some more fiction. Something from: Gene Wolfe, Cervantes, Dostoevsky's Demons, Huysmans' Against Nature, Calvino's Invisible Cities, short stories by Gogol and Lem.
I've been reading some stories by Donald Barthelme: "The Balloon", "The School", and "On the Deck". Great stuff. I'd never read anything like them before.
:cool: :up:
Austin's Sense and Sensibilia –
Really incredible. No idea why I hadn't read it sooner. Section VII should be mandatory reading for everyone. Sadly some of the finer-grained judgments he uses to attack Ayer strike me as either mistaken (in that I actually agree with Ayer's linguistic judgment) or too slippery to be used effectively as a methodology, and some of the ripostes struck me as ad hoc. It's a testament to how ineffective this kind of appeal to ordinary language tends to be that it breaks down precisely where interesting questions are asked, and the audience can't seriously sympathize with either party without just claiming to have one linguistic intuition over another. But, in the critique of foundational empiricism, really incredible.
Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action –
Seemed stupid, stopped reading near the beginning.
Searle's Speech Acts –
As with all Searle, this is mostly boring, and not particularly insightful beyond a few clarifying points with regards to past authors (updating the Gricean notion of meaning in terms of the Austinian introduction of illocutionary acts, for example). Some of the postulates he appeals to, like that what is referred to must exist, that reference requires being able to uniquely identify an object to be successful, etc. just seem straightforwardly wrong, and I think treating predication and reference as 'speech acts' just muddies the Austinian terminology unnecessarily.
Stevenson's Ethics and Language –
Seems promising so far, though maybe out of date by this point as a work of analytic philosophy. Only a short way into it.
Austin's How to Do Things With Words –
Rereading this one. Still a masterpiece. I see new things every time I read it, and the insights seem to hold up better and better with time.
Probably going to read Vendler's Linguistics in Philosophy and Derrida's Of Grammtology next. And maybe Barthes' book on semiotics.
Re-reading:
Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and his Realism by Lucy Allais
I've not read this, but one of my favorite texts on ethics of all time is the 3rd(?) section of Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason, where he brutalizes this book.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Am currently reading this one atm - schematic and functional, but good.
Quoting Maw
:cheer:
Also, about to start:
Michael Roberts - The Long Depression: How it Happened, Why it Happened, and What Happens Next. A defense of Marx's thesis on the 'tendency of the rate of profit to fall', in light of the post-2008 world economy.
:gasp:
Cool, I might check it out. Stevenson is mainly referenced today as an influence on a kind of non-cognitivism about moral language, so far as I know (which I don't think is plausible).
The Present Age, Søren Kierkegaard
by Karl Jaspers
Second time through. Last time was about 20 year ago and I wasn't paying attention.
Noam Chomsky – Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought
Benjamin Lee Whorf – Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
Wilhelm von Humboldt – On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species
Abu Nasr al-Farabi – The Book of Letters
Intan Suwandi - Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism
by Karl Jaspers
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
• Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Antonio Damasio
• A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible, Edward Dodge
• The Nature of Middle-Earth, ed. Carl Hostetter
• Set the Night on Fire, Robby Krieger
re-reading
• What the Buddha Taught, Walpola Rahula
• Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, R. Hanhel & E.O. Wright
"A Ballena Press/Center for Archeoastronomy Cooperative Publication." I doubt that I paid more than 20 bucks for it. Probably mid-1990s? It's a 9" tall X 6" wide paper back.
Yikes! I had no idea. I'll be more careful with my coffee! Anyway, I have to go needle my wife about this. :rofl:
:zip: :grin:
The Revisionaries by A.R. Moxon
Re-reading:
A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality by Ralph Cudworth
Even though I very much enjoyed this book the first time through, this time now there's so much more to take out of it, it truly is a goldmine of knowledge and insight. I can surely see why Chomsky thinks these ideas are richer than Kant's, in some respects at least.
It's a bit of shame he's not much, much better known. But, being a very dense theologian does not help.
Rather than a boat-rowing metaphor, I like the idea of scratching an itch. Sometimes that itch is too hard to reach, so I use a back scratcher, which would be a book. Hopefully it's not too sharp or too fast, like a chain saw. I'm not that tough.
I like a tree with the bark on. Something that stands still, and solid, while I work on it. AHHHH! A little lower! Perfect!
I've had a hard time finding the perfect tree. I thought of planting a few my own self, and I actually did; twenty years ago, even. But they still aren't throwing shade, or scratching any backs but my own. So I turn to others in the old growth forest.
But I hear chainsaws in the distance.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities :up: :starstruck: :sparkle:
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature :up: :down: :yawn:
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness :up: :down: :yawn:
Nikolai Gogol, Petersburg Tales :up: :lol: :love:
Samuel Beckett, Molloy :up: :100: :death: :rofl: :sparkle: :love:
:up: :100: :sparkle: :starstruck: :cool:
Simples for Short Story Competition :party:
:cool:
I think I've had Molloy on my reading list since I noticed you saying something about it years ago, either here or on the old forum. So, thanks. :cool:
(Now the pointlessness and stupidity of my existence is confirmed beyond doubt :wink:)
Adrian Johnston
by Herbert Marcuse
“While Candide, the baron, Pangloss, Martin, and Cacambo were telling one another their stories, while they were disputing over the contingent or non-contingent events of this universe, while they were arguing over effects and causes, over moral and physical evil, over liberty and necessity, and over the consolations available to one in a Turkish galley, they arrived at the shores of Propontis and the house of the prince of Transylvania. The first sight to meet their eyes was Cunegonde and the old woman, who were hanging out towels on lines to dry.
“The baron paled at what he saw. The tender lover Candide, seeing his lovely Cunegonde with her skin weathered, her eyes bloodshot, her breasts fallen, her cheeks seamed, her arms red and scaly, recoiled three steps in horror, and then advanced only out of politeness...”
by Michael I. Posner (Editor)
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
New Essays on Human Understanding by G.W. Leibniz
And, of course, fiction:
Sunflower by Tex Gresham
History
Political Economy
States and Revolution
Anthropology and Structuralism
Mostly Philosophy
Nice list! I'm about to finish Suwandi's Value Chains and when I'll do I'll do a quick write up of that and Smith's Imperialism. Did you like Family Values?
Loved Family Values; the chapter on Inflation was particularly enlightening.
[M] - memoir, auto/biography
[L] - literary re: poetry, novel, short fiction
• Classical Indian Philosophy, vol. 5, P. Adamson & J. Ganeri
• Searching For Whitopia, Rich Benjamin
• The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey, Paul Broks
• Holes and Other Superficialities, R. Casati & A.C. Varzi
• Razorblade Tears: A Novel, S.A. Cosby [L]
• Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, Antonio Damasio
• In the Presence of Absence, Mahmoud Darwish [L]
• How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, Stanislas Dehaene
• A History of the Goddess: From the Ice Age to the Bible, Edward Dodge
• The Ethical Slut (3rd Edition), D. Easton & J. Hardy [M]
• John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, William A. Edmundson
• The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber & David Wengrow
• Skepticism and Mysticism: On Mauthner's Critique of Language by Gustav Landauer 1903, David Grunwald
• From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe, Michel Henry
• Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, Michel Henry
• The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter, Peter Robin Hiesinger
• The Nature of Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Carl F. Hostetter [L]
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro [L]
• New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, David Ives
• Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour, Rickie Lee Jones [M]
• The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr [L]
• The Framer's Coup, Michael J. Klarman
• The Good Old Days, eds. E. Klee, W. Dressen, & V. Riess
• The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, K?jin Karatani
• Chasing Homer, László Krasznahorkai [L]
• Set the Night on Fire, Robby Krieger [M]
• Exterminate All The Brutes, Sven Lindqvist
• The Psychology of Stupidity, ed. Jean-François Marmion
• Agon, J. Harper & S. Nittner (ttrpg)
• A Quantum Life, Hakeem M. Olesuyi [M]
• The Journal of Albion Moonlight, Kenneth Patchen [L]
• The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot: Philosophy As Practice, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson
• Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas, ed. Eugene Redman [L]
• The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, Ritchie Robertson
• Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
• After Capitalism (New 2nd Edition), David Schweickart
• The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford [L]
• The Anomaly, Hervé Le Tellier [L]
• Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, Peter Turchin
• Mama's Last Hug, Frans de Waal
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir [L]
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead [L]
• Hitler's American Model, James Q. Whitman
• Big White Ghetto, Kevin D. Williamson
A fitting start to 2022?
My 2021 readings, in chronological order:
Fiction:
Nonfiction:
In-progress:
The major themes were:
I will likely continue with these themes next year.
• Spinoza's Religion, Clare Carlisle
• Sounding Out Semantics, R.J. Mott
• Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck
re-reading
Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective, Karl-Otto Apel
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin - The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
Quoting 180 Proof
Put both on my to-reads, they look interesting.
Waves look good hope you got some body surfing in
The Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz
Sadly, none of which really gathered too much in effect in policies or mandates against reckless market behavior.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
:up:
Yes, there was a lot of talk about the film production a few years back. I've been holding my breath.
Not suicidally, I'm not doing it justice, but the opening aphorism touches on the idea that dying without leaving an impact is terrible and disagrees with it.
The big distinction that he makes - which is the thing that I think is going to leave a lasting impression on me, no matter how much else I forget - is that between value created and value captured. For him, the North captures value, even as it is created in the South. It's this distinction that is papered over in bourgeois economics, which only has an eye for value-added as a matter of exchange rather than production. It literally does not have the conceptual capacity to make this distinction. The other thing it really drove home to me was just how novel the shift of global production to the South has been. I've been so used to hearing about production in developing countries that I never considered just how contemporary this has been - I mean, we're talking in the last twenty years, on unimaginable scales. Any attempt to come to grips with modern capitalism without recognizing this shift is going to come up short. It's not an easy read and it's a bit dry in places, but it is incredibly comprehensive and massively well researched.
Suwandi's book shifts the focus from economics to sociology - her study is a study in control. It looks at the mechanisms by which control is exerted by the North on the South, and busts myths about globalization being a matter of decentralization. Decision making happens in the North, no matter how much production has shifted to the South, which remains utterly dependant. The complementary side of that is her focus on labor practices - how this control actually plays itself out on the factory floor: the deskilling of workers, their 'flexibilization', the lack of bargaining power, etc. The crowning chapter is her fieldwork in a pair of Indonesian factories, where she details a few interviews she has with factory executives, and shows how much it's the imperatives from elsewhere that govern work on the ground. It's alot more qualitative than Smith's quantitative approach (and alot easier to read), and the two together really paint a nice (and depressing) picture of how contemporary imperialism functions.
Both are also pretty hostile to some other Marxist takes (like David Harvey), which reckon that imperialism either isn't such a big deal any more, or that it takes place outside the capital relation (through sheer violence and cohesion, etc). Both show nicely show imperialism isn't some extrinsic force to capitalism, but that it's central to it's function. Given that domestic markets in the North have been more or less saturated, and it's easier just to move capital out of the North than to attempt to drive down worker wages and standards (further than they have been), the shift in production is necessary for capitalism, not just some corollary. The big lesson for me is that imperialism needs to join the list which includes the explosion of finance, the reliance on real estate, basement low interest rates, and private equity and privatization, as among the major pathologies of contemporary capitalism. The latter issues are so often debated about in the West (because they are more 'tangible' for 'us'), but you hardly hear about the former (I'm guilty of this). Yet in terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, imperialism is probably the most damaging of them all.
:up:
Do you think the division between political north and south tracks the division between the two sides of 'profit upon alienation' in Theories of Surplus Value? And furthermore that profit upon alienation is strictly a redistributive mechanism of value, rather than a creation of value.
But, having said that, damn, what an impressive piece of work. Most of it holds up remarkably well 400 years later. Surely worth the time investment, I'm a huge fan now.
If my brain doesn't melt when I'm done, next up is:
Hume's Treatise.
Currently Reading:
Brunists Day of Wrath by Robert Coover.
Yes, but if I understand correctly, Smith is interested in the particular form in which profit upon alienation takes under imperialism. To the degree that profit upon alienation is redistributive, he notes that Marx outlined three such ways in which such redistribution could be maximized: by lengthening the working day, by increasing productivity, or by deceasing wages. Smith contends that Marx only examined the first two mechanisms at any length, because he (Marx) figured the labour market would always equalize wages via competition anyway - but he never contended that capital would go HAM in restricting the free movement of labour, which makes the third mechanism particularly relevant in the conceptualization of imperialism. It's worth quoting Smith on this point actually:
"Marx treated divergence of wages as the result of temporary or contingent factors that ceaselessly mobile capital and labor would erode over time, and which could be safely excluded from analysis, as he made clear in Capital III: “important as the study of frictions [local obstacles obstructing the equalization of wages] is for any specialist work on wages, they are still accidental and inessential as far as the general investigation of capitalist production is concerned and can therefore be ignored." This exclusion from consideration of systematic divergences of wages from a common average, implying the exclusion of divergences in the value of labor-power and the rate of exploitation, applies to the whole of Capital.
Marx’s level of abstraction is clearly inappropriate for our task. Study of workers’ status in labor markets and their mobility across borders reveals that, in today’s imperialist world, the condition of equality between workers is profoundly and shockingly violated; and ... global competition has not produced any measurable progress toward the international equalization of real wages—on the contrary, overall wage dispersion has increased during the neoliberal era. Neoliberal globalization has greatly relaxed restrictions on the mobility of capital across national borders, but there has been no such relaxation of the free movement of labor—on the contrary, imperialist governments are responding to increasing migration pressure by militarizing their borders and criminalizing migrant workers".
To that degree, what Smith calls 'global labour arbitrage' is the imperialist form which profit upon alienation takes in contemporary capitalism. The redistribution becomes geographic - extensive and 'horizontal', as it were - rather than intensive and 'vertical' between capital and labour. It's super interesting.
Super interesting, thank you.
by Michel Foucault
• How Civil Wars Start, Barbara F. Walter
What did you think? I thought I was a fan of theirs but since I read this and Hard to be a God a few years ago, I've forgotten everything about them. Could be the problem was me, I don't know.
Recently and currently:
Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
Any thoughts? Have you read other PKD?
Quoting Baden
Same question to you both. Any thoughts? I didn't love it, but I knew going in that it would be quite different than Tarkovsky's Stalker.
I'm currently reading The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick.
No thoughts from me, as I can't even remember it. How much that's forgettableness, and how much forgetfulness, I'm not sure.
I find that interesting because, while I didn't love it, I certainly didn't find it forgettable. Maybe that has more to do with my own weird taste in fiction. It reminded me of PKD's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", quite ironically, as that was just mentioned above by @john27.
Maybe. Are you into/have you read Philip K. Dick?
Fair enough; I usually begin with the assumption that people find him weird at best. If anything, I probably have an unhealthy obsession with his work. The only question I'll ask is have you read UBIK?
I agree with @Noble Dust, didn't love it. Preferred Stalker (I wasn't expecting the book to be so different).
Quoting jamalrob
Yes, I remember just giving up on one of his books for this reason. Haven't read one since.
What's his best one, you think? I might try again.
He says different languages are like cuisines and he discusses the sapir whorf hypothesis.
Yup. It's surreal, hilarious, and terrifying. A mind fuck.
To me UBIK is the best, but it's maybe an acquired taste. I would say The Man In The High Castle is a good intro to his style and themes, although it's a bit slow.
And weirdly, when I first started reading him I also was annoyed by what I thought was mediocre writing, but now I don't even notice it because I find his worlds so engrossing.
Yeah, there's great storytellers who aren't very good writers and vice versa. When I read plot summaries of his stuff I'm blown away.
Ubik is excellent. I'm probably in the minority wishing the last sentence wasn't there.
I've read a lot, but not everything, and I love him not for the what-is-real? stuff but just for the humanity. Somewhere he said that his typical novel is a guy who loses his job, stops at the bar on the way home to drown his sorrows, comes home drunk and out-of-work so his wife leaves him, and *then* aliens land in the front yard.
He was a haunted man.
WHAT? :scream: :scream:
That last sentence made me realize, I never came down from my high.
Dick is absolutely fantastic. But his prose is not amazing. Though I think that in A Scanner Darkly, he steps it up considerably.
Ahhh, that’s next on my list, although I feel like I should read some earlier work first. My brother recommended Martian Time Slip.
For sure, although I’m a fan of both. Any favorites for you?
Scanner is really special. That and Radio Free Albemuth are the most autobiographical I guess.
I loved Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Has some of that Alfred Bester dazzle to it, and very Phildickian themes. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Another early one, Clans of the Alphabet Moon. Plus all the usual ones we've already mentioned. Only stuff I've deliberately stayed away from is VALIS. There's an edited version of the Exegesis out now, but I won't be reading that I think.
I've never been even slightly disappointed by any novel or short story of his. They used to be hard to find so my collection is slightly random. Feels like I'm forgetting an important one but I can't think of it
There's also at least one collection of interviews available and it's good
I didn't pay (much) attention to order, he has like 8 -10 classics and then everybody has a few personal favorites, usually not on the list.
I kid not, the most reading I've ever done, was reading 14 of his books in a row, in 3 weeks. In my peak I was averaging a book a day.
I would not recommend it, I don't remember Martian Time Slip too well, nor Dr. Bloodmoney.
Flow My Tears, Maze of Death, Palmer Eldricht, were also amazing.
The underrated charm from me would be The Game Players of Titan.
/End rant
I did too, although it was a bit overwhelming and sort left me with a sickly feeling for some reason.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I know this is a perennial favorite, but it's the only one so far I didn't really care for that much. The ending left me cold I think.
VALIS I thought was...good. Obviously it's very bizarre. I actually really enjoyed The Divine Invasion, which is a very loose sequel I guess. As to the Exegesis, I have a copy and have read about 100 pages...it's a pretty dizzying glimpse inside his brain. As you said, a haunted man. If I'm being honest, I share some of his mystical preoccupations. It's hard for me to look away.
Quoting Manuel
:lol: Sounds about right. I'm sure you're not the only person to have done this.
Quoting Manuel
Noted. :up:
Some of the novels amble along doing this and that, and then like 2/3 of the way through veer sharply into religious territory. Like he's really not able to control it. But then he saw a giant metal face in the sky, so ...
I should read more. It's been too long. Maybe I'll try the VALIS books after all.
I think really I just value his company. Like Bill Hicks. Just another confused guy you meet on the road, and he makes the journey more bearable.
No doubt.
I'll throw in a book not by Saint Phil that's nearly forgotten and strangely out-of-print: Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.
Woah, thanks, that sounds bizarre and awesome. Gonna see if I can find a copy. I'll do you one more: A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay. If people think Dick is a bad writer, get ready for Lindsay. But it's a strange, addictive story that you won't forget anytime soon.
“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”
:up: See, to me I do consider that good writing. As @Srap Tasmaner was saying, PKD has a way of eliciting humanity. To me, his writing is coarse and unadorned, but this is what makes it human and affecting.
I know of it, of course, but I’ve never read it, so thanks for the endorsement!
Just do it! I'm sure you can find a good copy on abebooks for like $5.
By the way, I have Rogue Moon on order ($6 total) from abebooks. :up: Always in search of recs for sci-fi that scratchs the PKD itch, i.e. stories about people dealing with weird shit, rather than hardcore sci-fi.
I read my first PKD after college, and loved it. Different smokes for different smokers...
(An unrelated case of being — less inexplicably — out-of-print is Cordwainer Smith. Whole different deal from Dick, or from anyone. Really, anyone. Of all publishers, Baen did a two-volume paperback set several years ago, but it’s already gone. Worth hunting down. Robert Silverberg used to say that the only consolation he could find for Cordwainer Smith writing as he did was that he was actually from the far future.)
Rogue Moon, right?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Heard of him, but haven't read. More stuff added to the list.
Heh. Yes, you ordered the right book. I can’t even blame autocorrect, but I should’ve gone to sleep hours ago.
:ok:
I read and enjoyed Budrys's Who? after being haunted since childhood by the memory of the film adaptation starring Elliot Gould.
I haven't finished it yet, but his writing style is interesting, to say the least.
by Michio Kaku
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter
Did you ever see the film by Robert Altman with Elliot Gould? I guess a lot of people don't like it because of it's unconventional Phillip Marlow, but it's one of my favorites. I've always liked Gould.
by Elizabeth R. Valentine
Creating Christ (How Roman Emperors invented Christianity) by J.S Valliant and W. Fahy?
OR
The personal memoirs of U.S Grant?
The Five Books of (Robert) Moses - Arthur Nersesian
Mark Blyth - Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
Tiqqun - Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
Tiqqun - Theory of Bloom
by Joe Haldeman
One of my favorite military science fiction books. Clever and well-written.
:up:
My favourite overall sci-fi.
Excellent! Enjoy it.
:up: :up:
A classic. Enjoy.
Besides being insightful, by which I mean he see's things in a way similar to me, the book also fulfills my primary requirement for a philosophical work - it's short.
The book you're referencing is 350 pages, so it's not exactly short. There is a book on Amazon claiming to be Collingwood's "The Principles of Art," but it's actually a 20 or so page abridged version.
You've still got 330 pages to go.
There you go. I was feeling all virtuous and wise and you ruin everything. The long version is not available electronically. Part of my Taoist faith is that books that can't be read in electronic versions do not exist. "The text that's not on Kindle is not the etermal Text." That's what Lao Tzu would have said.
Thanks. I'll take a look.
As in, you'll look at the book, but not necessarily read it. Instead of saying, "I didn't read the book, I saw the movie," you're saying, "I saw the book, not the movie."
I've been studying speed reading, so I already got the books and read them. It took me ten minutes. They involve philosophy.
Ravenna, by Judith Herrin
Search for a Naturalistic World View - Shimony
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Buried Knight
Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse
Tommy Orange – There There
I looked Aickman up on Wikipedia. He sounds like an interesting writer.
Joan Didion – Play It As It Lays
José Antonio Villarreal – Pocho
John Steinbeck – Tortilla Flat
by Werner Stark
edit:
It is only through the conversation of man with man that ideas come into existence. Two human beings are as necessary for the generation of the human mind as they are for the human body
~Feuerbach
Interesting introductory quote; I'd agree with this: Consciousness is essentially interactive.
by Thomas Hardy
I love returning to his novels once and a while. One of my favorite writers.
I really like Hardy, but I've never read that one.
It is one of his best, IMHO. Go get a copy!
The Buried Giant, surely? (It's on my list.)
Books I read recently:
Ivan Bunin - Stories and novellas
Thomas Mann - Death in Venice and other stories
JM Coetzee - Waiting for the Barbarians
Dino Buzzati - The Tartar Steppe
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Olga Tokarczuk - The Books of Jacob - just started. This one will take a while...
Quoting Pantagruel
A great read, but gloomier even than Tess, in its own way.
:up: :up:
Seven Japanese tales by Junichiro Tanizaki.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
Sputnik, sweetheart by Murakami.
A personal matter by Kenzaburo Oe
But specially dedicated to Kawabata Yasunari:
I read "1Q85" and really enjoyed it. Almost a fantasy but not quite. Is it magical realism? It scrambled up my mind. I keep thinking I'll read more of his work, but when I take a look, I find myself unready to jump back in to such an odd world. I'm sure I will eventually.
It is similar but with some different tones. I think the magical realism of "Sputnik, sweetheart" is not close enough to 1Q84. Nevertheless! It has that Murakami atmosphere that you can check in most of the books: loneliness, random grils out of nowhere, Metaphysic conversations, nostalgia, etc...
I'll add it to my list. Maybe this will give me the impetus I need to read some more Murakami.
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller
:clap:
Enjoy.
Quite hard but beautiful language.
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
An Inquiry into the Good, Kitaro Nishida.
Love and St. Augustine, Hannah Arendt.
The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt.
Currently reading
Lots of stuff by Kierkegaard: The Present Age, The Sickness Unto Death, On the Concept of Irony, Attack Upon Christendom, Fear and Trembling along with his early journals. I’ve also been reading up on Thomism too, namely Orthodox Readings of Aquinas by Marcus Plested and Person and Act by John Paul II.
You would enjoy it :up:
Rogue Moon - Algis Budrys (thanks @Srap Tasmaner)
Platonism, Naturalism, and Mathematical Knowledge, James Robert Brown
The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity, Stratford Caldecott
This sounds fascinating.
When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves, S. Nadler & L. Shapiro
A haunting and desolate novel. Don't read it if you are feeling low...
It looks like so interesting. I going to check it out and put it on my next readings.
No kidding!
Colin Moores - The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany
Wow! It sounds so interesting indeed. Tao Te Ching needs good interpretations so if you found good notes it can help to understand it better!
Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima (?? ???)
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata (?? ??)
A Shameful Life: (Ningen Shikkaku) by Osamu Dazai (?? ?)
:100:
Interesting. Thanks.
by Anthony Giddens
The Mantle of Kendis-Dai (Starshield #1)
by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
North, Céline
Which, incidentally, is why I loved the Mooers book. If you've read both Davidson's How Revolutionary? and Wood's Origin, Mooers is like the perfect in-between and follow-up. Like Meilants, it's also comparative history, but intra-European: France, Germany, and England. And Mooers does this incredible juggling act where he tracks the interests of all sorts of actors within these states - peasants, bourgeoise, nobility, crown, wage-labour, bureaucracies, the state itself as an autonomous actor - and shows how they converge and diverge at various points, and give rise to different historical outcomes. Like Davidson, the subject of the book are the 'bourgeois revolutions' and their role in bringing capitalism about. Unlike Mielants, who basically pays zero attention to revolution, Mooers shows just how necessary the revolutions were in advancing the causes of capitalism, and equally as interestingly, shows how such revolutions can take place in different forms. I wish I had read this before I'd read Davidson, because it's just alot more compact and tight, and easier to track the stakes of the debates being discussed. Davidson was a bit sprawling, and because he juggles so many balls, there were times I didn't follow the significance of certain debates. After having read this I feel like I need to go back to Davidson at some point because I think I have a much firmer grasp on alot of the issues, especially the European ones. Helps that Mooers is also a Marxist, and again unlike Meilants, also engages (critically) with alot of the literature in that tradition. My biggest gripe is that I wish it had a chapter on Holland.
If you can, let me know how you find the Traverso book.
---
Anyway! Next up, and continuing the theme:
Henry Heller - The Birth of Capitalism: A 21st Century Perspective
Henry Heller - The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789-1815
Henry Heller - The French Revolution and Historical Materialism: Selected Essays
Jean-Pierre Vernant - The Origins of Greek Thought
by Albert Schäffle
Collectivism at its finest......
I'm a bit mixed on it. The thesis wasn't as compact as, say, Dienstag's Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit; it bounces around a lot between history of left-wing political defeat, memory, the relationship, both personal and philosophical, between particular Western Marxists, imagery (movies, art), Bohemianism. And I would say that at least 25% of the material was very thinly connected to melancholia. Otherwise, some of the material was certainly interesting, but I was left wanted a lot more.
The Mooers book sounds great, I'll add it to my Verso cart.
by David Graeber, David Wengrow
John Bishop
Strong start so far, different emphasis than my other books on FW.
James Joyce
Richard Ellman
'Read' it many years ago when too young (too much a Stephen then, not enough of a Poldy). Excellent and helpful for understanding the works.
• White Debt, Thomas Hardin
• A Paradise Built on Hell, Rebecca Solnit
• Ignorance and Imagination, Daniel Stoljar
• Europe and the People Without History,
Eric Wolf
Like you, I've only read the original three books, but for me it was about 55 years ago. They meant a lot to me. I think the realization that there could be really, really big ideas was what fascinated me.
The True Intellectual System of the Universe Volume I by Ralph Cudworth
Domenico Losurdo - War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century
Domenico Losurdo - Liberalism: A Counter-History
Quoting _db
Would like to hear your thoughts, when you're done.
hell yes
Here's a link to my goodreads review of it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4624457569
I didn't really like it.
• The Nature of Sympathy, Max Scheler
• Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Max Scheler
• Scheler's Ethical Personalism, Peter H. Spader
[i]In Praise of Shadows[i], Jun'ichir? Tanizaki
I cheated and haven't yet read these two because I got distracted by a bunch of others in the meantime:
Davide Tarizzo - Life: A Modern Invention
Eugene Thacker - After Life (reread)
Giorgio Agamben - Means Without End: Notes on Politics
Michael Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
Lisa Adkins et. al. - The Asset Economy: Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality
On to Losurdo soon enough.
---
Thanks! Really cool that you're going through all the feminist classics. Much respect.
The Order of the Death's Head, Heinz Höhne
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis by John Smith
Far Approach by Seicho Matsumoto (?? ??)
Confessions by Kanae Minato
:up:
It might be one of my old texts...?
by John Rawls
Your handwriting?
The Village of Eight Graves by Seishi Yokomizo
Paul Bishop's Reading Goethe at Midlife: Ancient Wisdom, German Classicism, and Jung
David Rose, Jonathan Schaffer
40% off Verso books until May 16th
• Metaphysical Animals, C.M. Cumhaill & R. Wiseman
• An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme, Kwame Gyekye
• The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuz?
• There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World, Carlo Rovelli
• Death and the Afterlife, Samuel Scheffler
still reading:
• Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Max Scheler
rereading:
• HUMANS: A Brief History of How We F[s]uck[/s]ed It All Up, Tom Phillips
Craig Lundy - History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity
Jay Lampert - Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History
Claire Colebrook - Deleuze and the Meaning of Life
Peter Hallward - Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation
Daniel Barber - Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence
Roland Barthes - S/Z
Edmund Husserl - Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology
Michael Parenti - The Face of Imperialism
Michael Parenti - Against Empire
What did you think of Smith and Suwandi?
Quoting 180 Proof
I have heard good things about this.
I enjoyed them both very much, thanks for the recommendation. I found Smith's work very informative, albeit highly technical and dense at times, as you mention in your short review. Suwandi painted a clearer picture (she's a better writer too) that offered a more material understanding of some of the more abstract concepts Smith provided, e.g. concrete examples of global labor arbitrage, or labor flexibility, and the interviews she conducted with Indonesian factory managers, etc..
Still making my way through The Second Sex.
2022 spring / summer addendum
• Brian Aldiss, Greybeard
• Justin Cronin, The Passage
• Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things
• Hanna Jameson, The Last: A Novel
• Ling Ma, Severance
• Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death
• Mary Shelley, The Last Man
• Peng Shepherd, The Book of M
• Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow
• Wilson Tucker, The Long Loud Silence
• Colson Whitehead, Zone One
• Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan
by Ervin Laszlo and Anthony Peake
I made a post about this book (and the philosophical issues surrounding aging/death) here, in case you wanted to contribute.
edit: It's an old thread from last summer to which I've posted once. I read your OP again and if I find something which interests me I'll respond. I've participated in several other threads on "life extension" "immorbidity" "immortality" "transhumanism" "bio/ethics" etc.
Graham Joyce, Indigo
Recently read
Robert Silverberg, The World Inside :up:
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley :up:
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend :down:
Soon to read
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
Robert Silverberg, The Book Of Skulls
Christopher Priest, The Glamour
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Peter E. Gordon
I was going to pile Rawls' Political Liberalism on top of his Theory of Justice (which I just finished) but the material is just too dense. Saving that one up.
Currently Reading:
Joshua Kates - Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction
Drucilla Cornell - The Philosophy of the Limit
Gillian Rose - Hegel Contra Sociology
Leo Strauss - The City and Man
Adrian Johnston - A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and Dialectical Materialism
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (finally and damn, it really is hard-going even knowing the main ideas before reading it).
The Kimono Tattoo by Rebecca Copeland
I'm surprised your PhD program didn't have this as a requirement. But, like math, there are many paths to follow.
Parts of it were discussed, not the whole book. There was more emphasis on obscure phenomenologists and the Ancient Greeks. Maybe related tot he fact that it is a Catholic university, I think.
To force people to read the entire Critique, would be cruel. Several distinguished philosophers, like William James or Bertrand Russell, got very little to nothing out of him.
But I'm rectifying that mistake :halo:
Kant is very popular today.
He sure is, as he should be.
All I'm saying is that people vary wildly in what they get from him - either a great deal, something or very little and everything else in between.
Why should Kant be popular in philosophy departments?
Are you arguing for the sake of it?
He should be popular because he made important contributions in epistemology, metaphysics, morals and aesthetics, among several other topics.
Modern philosophy developed in part as a reaction to his thought.
Nevertheless, I think there are classical philosophers that are more interesting than him and anticipated his thought. And I also think Kant exaggerates his own importance.
But that he should be popular, is evident.
Never.
:up: Not evident, however, to incorrigible "beginners"...
I delayed my read of Losurdo! I'm doing a couple of Hegel books atm, then after that I will read his book on Hegel then back to Liberalism + Revolution.
I am traveling soon and have a long flight ahead. What would be some good books to read along the way?
I'm reading London Fields by Martin Amis. Would recommend.
I checked on Amazon. Turns out the book was praised by the International Pulpwood Queen and Timber Guy Book Club. No, I'm not joking.
The book sounds interesting though.
It's a way to learn about Japanese culture that is entertaining. The book was pretty good, she knows Japan very well. But there are others that are much better, by Japanese authors.
Mostly murder-mysteries, with some exceptions.
I like books that take place in other cultures. I just finished the "Night Watch" books by Sergei Lukyanenko translated from Russian. I have also really liked the Dublin Murder Squad books by Tana French and the Hamish MacBeth mysteries in Scotland.
Love his essays, dislike his fiction. Did enjoy Night Train a kind of parodic noir recently which most people dismiss.
I have heard of Night Watch, but have not read it.
If you want a mixture of Russian culture with Buddhism, I think you might very well like Viktor Pelevin's Buddha's Little Finger, it's very philosophical. I have to re-read it again, but I remember being quite impressed.
I will have to check out the Dublin Murder Squad, the name sounds interesting.
French is a tough writer. Hard to read. Here is an Amazon review I wrote for her book "The Secret Place."
"The Secret Place" is about two Dublin detectives, Stephen Moran and Antoinette Conway, investigating the murder of a student at an upper-class boarding school. The focus of the story is on the friendship of four 16-year-old girls. Here is the message I left for the author, Tana French, on her webpage:
Ms. French:
Your books are wonderful, but you are ruthless – to your characters and your readers. I’ve just finished “The Secret Place,” and I am heartbroken. I called my daughter and cursed her for recommending your books and swore I will never read another one. She laughed, not unkindly, and told me she will accidentally leave “The Witch Elm” on my table next time she comes home.
I am grateful to you for sending Stephan Moran to lead me into the lives of those four girls. He and I are kindred spirits; grown men - I’m almost 70 – who still know, have always known, that girls are magic. He would understand my grief.
Thank you.
Thanks for sharing that beautiful review.
I can handle tough, I think. But not boring (for too long anyway).
Hopefully we could exchange some further opinions on several novels some time.
Then go for it. She is a wonderful writer. I keep wanting to read more of her books, but I can't bring myself to do it. I have two on my shelf my traitorous daughter gave me.
Quoting Manuel
Not boring, but intricate. Probably the best police procedural I've read. The interrogations are tough too. I don't know if it's accurate, but it has what my 11th grade English teacher called verisimilitude. It seems very real.
Also, the description of the Irish location and culture are absorbing and convincing.
The 6 lessons of physics are truly amazing in terms of beauty, clarity and fun. The seventh one on the place of man is disappointing. Couldn't be otherwise I guess, given that the question is more biological than physical.
Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife – Bart Ehrman
From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith – Louis Markos
The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus – J. D. Crossan
by Thomas Carlyle
Interesting and more relevant than ever. Will eventually create a thread in this vein.
Is there anything good about hell? Our discomfort about hell and its ultimate good – Paul Dirks
That all shall be saved: Heaven, hell, and universal salvation – David Bentley Hart
Four views on hell, 2nd ed.
Think I'm gonna lean mostly into history this summer
I don’t know this Gary Gerstle dude. Thinking of picking it up.
rereading:
Silence, Shusaku Endo
Gillian Rose - The Melancholy Science: An Introduction To The Thought Of Theodor W. Adorno
Dominco Losurdo - Hegel and the Freedom of Moderns
--
Oh, that's a big one. Let me know if worth, if you can! (I plan to actually read Losurdo this time...)
Also @Jamal and @Clarky, I'm hung up at about 100 pages into Titus Groan. I have mixed feelings.
Quoting 180 Proof
Interesting choice, he was a big influence on me as an artist back in my Christian daze. I still respect him, and his art is incredible.
The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
Currently reading Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter - math emeritus with long interest in neurological modelling. Not a philosophy book as such but with considerable philosophical ramifications. Also an autobiography called Silicon, but not able to post the author name as it sets off the spambot (ironically!)
Any other recs in that vein?
by John Rawls
Hopefully this will counteract the vile taste of the current debacle of Roe v. Wade in the US.
I was absolutely mesmerized by Hardy's last novel, so I'll also now be reading his first:
Desperate Remedies
by Thomas Hardy
I looked him up. I really like the paintings I saw. They all looked like book covers for dystopian science fiction novels.
Haha, a strange interpretation. His paintings make me feel very calm and generally ok. I had the good fortune of meeting him and seeing some of his work in person, years ago. i was running slides for him at a conference. When I handed him the remote, he asked "which button turns back time?" :lol:
If only I had been that clever.
I'm a little over halfway through it and it's excellent so far. Very thorough. Helpful in filling some gaps in the period of Europe I was arguably most unfamiliar with. Going to read his book on Medieval Europe next.
Unfortunately had to take two days off of reading; finally caught Covid last week after successfully avoiding it for 2+ years, which were instead were lying on the couch watching mindless movies.
By Francis Fukuyama
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
By William Finnegan
Going into it I was very skeptical of a surfer autobiography but the Pulizer is well deserved.
The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain
By Steven R. Gundry, MD
An important book if you care about your health, particularly if you have any autoimmune issues.
The Sound of the Mountain, Yasunari Kawabata (?? ??)
• Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy, vol. 6, Peter Adamson
• Chronicles of Dissent: Interviews 1984-1996, Noam Chomsky
still reading
• Silence and Beauty, Makoto Fujimura
• Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness, Neil Vallelly
The Patient's Secret by Lorenth Anne White
Keyser's book is extremely interesting, very provocative and suggestive of our mental makeup, would definitely recommend for people interested in how the arts and innatist philosophy of mind interact.
Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami (?? ??)
I didn’t like it when I read it 20 years ago, but now I do. Many people go on about how deep and difficult it is, and fail to convey how beautiful, engrossing and enjoyable it is.
In contrast, I recently read Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg, having been impressed by some of his earlier books. Like the Wolfe, it has an SF-tinged fantasy setting, but it’s embarrassing, the kind of stuff that gives fantasy fiction a bad name.
Ah, you never said if you enjoyed Mason & Dixon, did you finish it?
I'll have to go back to re-reading someday, it's been several years...
It’s an odd thing what happened. I loved it, was totally into it, totally involved and swept up, but with around a hundred pages to go I don’t know what happened, I just dropped it. It was like okay, that was a lot of fun, but it’s boring now and I don’t need to read on.
I’ll likely go back and finish it some time soon though.
It's an interesting phenomenon. Lots of people love the beginning at the ending (remember it best), then they forget what happened in the middle. That happened to me.
So your case is not too strange. It's very curious that it happens with that book.
Now I think about it, there was a point when I just stopped reading for a month, from around February 24. Mason & Dixon may well have been the book I was reading at the time. So, blame Putin.
I thought we had a tacit agreement on this... Of course it's him, always.
Anyway:
The Logos by Mark de Silva
Re-reading:
A Treatise of Human Nature Volume I by David Hume
Describes too many of my relationships.
And they both lived happily ever after. The end.
If I can evoke a pensive moment, especially one burdened with sentimentality, i feel I've been successful.
More on satisfying endings in life:
I think of sentimentality as akin to regret but distinguished from regret in that instead of wishing you could travel back in the past to change your errors, you wish you could travel back and relive the romanticized perfection of what once was. It shares with regret the impossibility of correction and so a melancholy.
This gets at it:
It only makes sense if you saw the movie.
Good chat.
:cry:
https://antilogicalism.com/primary-sources/
Don't let the website's name, Antilogicalism, throw you.
It's also free from Springer: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1
Information—Consciousness—Reality: How a New Understanding of the Universe Can Help Answer Age-Old Questions of Existence is a dissertation that looks to summarize all the "big ideas" of human knowledge. It starts from how mathematics can describe reality and allow us to make predictions about the world. It divides the methods of mathematics into two categories, the mathematics of the continuous, which we use in our universal laws, describing symmetries, etc. and the mathematics of the discrete (graph theory, chaos theory). It also has a lot on epistemology and the philosophy of science. Basically, it's a big picture look at the edifice of human knowledge, with a focus on the twin "revolutions" of information and chaos. It even goes a bit into markets and politics (applying insights from earlier sections on mathematics, philosophy, and physics), and niche areas like cryptocurrency.
Then part two looks at all the problems with knowledge. All the ways what we can know is fundamentally limited, Hume's argument against induction etc.
The last part is authors foreword looking vision of how our knowledge could progress. Going off the summary he gives to start (haven't made it to the end), he focuses more on the potential fruits of information science, hence the title.
Really seems like a great summary resource.
Also reading The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. It focuses on how matter, particles with mass, emerge from energy. The other big focus is on the energy content of the "vacuum" and all that goes on there. It includes a really good attempt to explain quantum chromodynamics and quarks intuitively, although it is really hard for me to wrap my head around local symmetries. The explanation of how an area of (mostly) empty space (which may not exist like we think it does) produces quark condensate, generating quarks from nowhere because their existence is more stable than their not being, is very good too. A lot of intriguing questions on what the vacuum is (definetly not empty space) from a Nobel laureate doing his best to make this stuff intuitive, great stuff.
And I read Hoffman's The Case Against Reality recently, which is already discussed in detail in this thread: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/720043
by Paul Ricoeur
Jonathan Wild
by Henry Fielding
So far it’s fantastic.
I’ve heard a YouTube lecture from Mayer on this but never read the book.
by Henry Fielding
Wow.
I look forward to his other novels now.
I thought my father was God, Paul Auster
The Holy man of Mount Koya, Izumi Ky?ka (? ??)
Runaway horses, Yukio Mishima (?? ???)
I took a look. From the Amazon blurb is sounds a bit like Carlos Castenada's books, e.g. "The Teachings of Don Juan." I was heavy into them in my youth in the 1970s. Have you read any?
I've avoided Castaneda because I've read that the books were largely shown to be fictitious. Daskalos (as the Magus is called) is much more obscure of a figure, as far as I can tell, so there's less mythology surrounding him. I'm not aware of Markides' account as having been called into question. He's an anthropologist and seems trustworthy. You can even find interviews with Daskalos on youtube.
His ideas are a marriage of Christian mysticism and Hinduism, in a nutshell, which automatically attracted me. If you read mystic literature across disciplines, and then read this account, it's basically all the same thing. It's the Perennial Philosophy.
Yes, I live in the heart of Mordor so I know it's all true.
:yikes:
I read them when I was an impressionable youth. I think they probably had an effect on my current understanding of the nature of reality. So, true or false, they have influenced me and I remembering enjoying them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/kevin-mccarthy-lindsey-graham-trump-devotion-2024-election/661508/
Yes, that may be so, but when one avoids the drugs and reads carefully there are jewels of wisdom there. His instructions for what he called the Art of Dreaming are spot on and worked on my first attempt, providing an astounding experience that has stuck with me for half a century.
Currently I am reading Born to Climb: From Rock Climbing Pioneers to Olympic Athletes, by Zofia Reych. A beautifully written account of one of the fastest growing leisure sports and a young woman's journey along an existential path.
I think our late friend Streetlight would disagree with you about where that is located.
• The Origin of Phenomena, D. B. Kelley
• Defending the Axioms: On the Philosophical Foundations of Set Theory, Penelope Maddy
• Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, A. Honneth, J. Rancière & ed. Katia Genel
still reading:
• Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy, vol. 6, Peter Adamson
re-reading:
• Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective, Karl-Otto Apel
• From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader, Edmond Jabès
• The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death, eds. Michael Martin & Keith Augustine
by Maryanne Wolf
Whether digital technologies may be impacting our capacity for critical thinking.
Finished it. Brilliant, and in my opinion gets steadily better as you go through the four parts. Sort of Jack Vance plus Nabokov, Borges and Proust. As it happens he was influenced by all of those, and references them pretty openly, though indirectly.
I must say though, I was able to get through it much more easily this (second) time round only because I was reading on an iPad, so I could look things up. Even a regular dictionary isn’t sufficient, because the lexicon makes use of many archaic words, so it was essential to have easy access to the web.
I’m sure I’ll read it again. Not right now though. Although I am curious about his other Sun books.
I love paper books, but now I find myself tapping on words I want to know the definitions of or get more information on. Turns out that doesn't work. So I mostly stick to my Kindle. It has changed the depth of my reading experience. Sometimes I'll look up a word or place and then go off on a tangent for 15 minutes, looking at maps and photos, following a Wikipedia trail off into the sunset. Love it.
I do that too. Doesn't work for me either :chin:
Quoting T Clark
Too, I do that too. Attention deficit.
No tapping on words here! Back in the day of cassettes :nerd:
The Shadow of the Torturer Audiobook (Roy Avers, noise reduced)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xnw8WXRZbAM
0:00 - Introduction
3:59 - Chapter 1: Resurrection and Death
20:12 - Chapter 2: Severian
36:02 - Chapter 3: The Autarch's Face
52:32 - Chapter 4: Triskele
1:09:33 - Chapter 5: The Picture - Cleaner and Others
1:22:35 - Chapter 6: The Master of the Curators
1:48:48 - Chapter 7: The Traitress
2:10:37 - Chapter 8: The Conversationalist
2:24:00 - Chapter 9: The House Azure
2:38:17 - Chapter 10: The Last Year
2:55:00 - Chapter 11: The Feast
3:08:33 - Chapter 12: The Traitor
3:24:02 - Chapter 13: The Lictor of Thrax
3:40:56 - Chapter 14: Terminus Est
3:55:32 - Chapter 15: Baldanders
4:13:50 - Chapter 16: The Rag Shop
4:29:20 - Chapter 17: The Challenge
4:43:45 - Chapter 18: The Destruction of the Altar
5:00:42 - Chapter 19: The Botanic Gardens
5:18:55 - Chapter 20: Father Inire's mirrors
5:35:26 - Chapter 21: The Hut in the Jungle
5:50:41 - Chapter 22: Dorcas
6:03:28 - Chapter 23: Hildegrin
6:18:08 - Chapter 24: The Flower of Dissolution
6:34:28 - Chapter 25: The Inn of Lost Loves
6:51:28 - Chapter 26: Sennet
7:03:56 - Chapter 27: Is He Dead?
7:15:10 - Chapter 28: Carnifex
7:28:24 - Chapter 29: Agilus
7:42:15 - Chapter 30: Night
7:56:17 - Chapter 31: The Shadow of the Torturer
8:09:30 - Chapter 32: The Play
8:28:15 - Chapter 33: Five legs
8:41:13 - Chapter 34: Morning
8:52:26 - Chapter 35: Hethor
9:15:36 - Appendix
In any case, prepare to have no idea what is going on or why. :grin:
All I know is he's free :up:
Quoting Jamal
I will probably fall asleep before I realise how confused I am :wink:
I'll take your word for that :smirk:
Sayin' nuffink that will get me into truble :zip:
??????????? nyet :scream:
????????? ???? :yawn:
Regards, stay safe 'n well.
• Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy, Andrew Collier
:up:
Sounded interesting, so I looked it up on Amazon. Here's from the spiel there:
The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories.
That certainly is...provocative. Any thoughts so far?
:cheer: my favorite from him by far. Addictive, a fever-dream pace, hilarious, flamboyant, disturbing, horrifying all in one. And pretty damn short.
Not yet, I just started. I'll let you know. Check out her wiki
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Barad
and the synopsis of her "agential realism". I'm interested in her "feminism" only insofar as she grounds it in (her) ontology, which is new to me (in this formulation).
I took a look. Sounds pretty creepy. Set me straight if I'm wrong.
Ok, ok. Just let us know what you think once you've finished.
by Ervin Laszlo
The eclipse of Yukio Mishima, Shintaro Ishihara
The last words of Yukio Mishima, Takashi Furubayashi.
[joke]I've decided you won't be allowed to read any more Japanese authors, especially Mishima. I think they have a bad influence on you.[/joke]
My parents literally think the same :rofl: they are worried because they see I am pretty "obsessed" with Mishima!
https://nautil.us/how-the-physics-of-nothing-underlies-everything-22894/
Pretty interesting, indeed. Thanks for sharing the link :100:
https://libretexts.org/
At the top of the page, click on "Explore the libraries."
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
Novel:
Infinite Ground by Martin McInnes
Nice. I've been wanting to re-read this for some time. Enjoy.
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment
by Ernst Cassirer
by George Orwell
https://quillette.com/2022/08/20/the-unexpected-future/
The predictions it makes about future population growth are significantly different from ones I've read elsewhere. I'm not sure if that should make me suspicious. Numbers I've read elsewhere say that human population will reach a maximum level of about 11 billion people in 2100 and then drop off a bit until it reaches equilibrium. This article predicts a maximum population of about 9 billion people in 2050 dropping to equilibrium of about 8.5 billion by 2100. That population will have a significantly different age distribution than our current one - a much larger proportion of old people. This is predicted to lead to a drastic worker shortage, a much heavier burden on the young to support the elderly, and the end of economic progress, at least by the mechanisms which currently drive it.
Excellent choice! Enjoy it friend! :up: :ok:
by Anthony Trollope
Just hitting the good bits and it's grand. :up:
• Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Karen Barad
• Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy, Andrew Collier
• The Origin of Phenomena, D. B. Kelley
• Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics, Peter Lewis
• Defending the Axioms: On the Philosophical Foundations of Set Theory, Penelope Maddy
• Giving Beyond The Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania, Elliot Wolfson
Let us know if this is worth reading once you've had a chance to read it.
After the Banquet, Yukio Mishima.
Death in Midsummer and Other Stories, Yukio Mishima.
by Max Horkheimer
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe
by George Eliot
Christopher Priest, The Dream Archipelago
Recently read
Christopher Priest, The Glamour :up: :sparkle:
Gene Wolfe, The Urth of the New Sun :confused:
Robert Silverberg, The Book of Skulls :up: :sparkle:
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake :meh:
Soon to read
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
Thomas M. Disch, Camp Concentration
Michel Houellebecq, Submission
José Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity
by Jürgen Habermas
by Hermann Hesse
For the second time.
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fiction called 'prophetic' by critics, citizens are manufactured by genetic engineering on assembly lines to fulfill their respective roles in society, they anaesthetise themselves into acceptance by sex and opiates, children are conditioned to hate flowers and books, the calendar begins from the first creation of cars on the assembly line of ford, A.F.- after ford- as opposed to -anno domine- A.D. polygamy is encouraged and monogamy is a perversion, love and parentage are disgusting anachronisms to the conditioned citizens of the brave new world
3 characters have the intimation of the emptiness of their lives, one is a woman who falls in love with a man who is physically defective for the caste he was engineered for, another is a case of refinement above his upper echelon purpose, a fortunate idiosyncracy of the assembly line,
The society is predicated on empty hedonism, the material needs are provided for, so the culture is without neccessity and without purpose, or meaning, it is not a totalitarian imposition, it's enclosed upon itself by citizens' anaesthetised acquiescence.
The soma the citizens consume resemble psychiatric medication to assuage the anxiety of a life without purpose or meaning, the material needs are provided for, the spiritual sense negated, reflected in the calander measurement, of "our Ford"
Aldous Huxley lamented he did not include nuclear power in the narrative, it would have lended the prediction greater accuracy, a complaint in spite of the accuracy of the culture he wrote of in the novel, it was so spot on, using nuclear power as a concept would have been clairvoyant
I read the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, the edition of the Communist Manifesto had a treatise on the horrific conditions of the lives of the newly created working class in the major cities of Britain, "property is theft" and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" appeared to be an appropriate response to the injustices inflicted by the economic power of the bourgeoisie, the Manifesto is thought to be a worthy ideal because it advocates for property to be centralised, parentage is negated in the manifesto itself
I think Aldous Huxley took the communist manifesto as a template for the utopian ideal inverted in brave new world, characters include a woman called Lenina and a protagonist named Marx,
In the Gulag Archipelago a faithful rendition of the disaster of Stalinist USSR is revealed in its outright hellishness, a criticism to a friend of the regime was weighty enough to be sentenced to a 5 year prison term, that is a minute detail in the epilogue of horrors, not to be glib, but it was hell.
by Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Also ploughing extremely slowly through Locke's Essay this time around.
Excited to dive into this
I told you, no more Japanese reading. Except for those cool porno comics.
:lol: ! I promise those are the last books of Japanese literature in my room. I will read other types of literature in the coming months.
Great timing. I'd value your thoughts on this and Lawson - would you mind offering a brief assessment when you're done? I saw an extended interview with Lawson on his notion of closure and his non-realist metaphysics and found myself being sympathetic.
Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions :up: :sparkle:
Recent
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller :up: :sparkle:
Christopher Priest, The Dream Archipelago :up: :sparkle:
Robert Silverberg, Downward to the Earth :up: / :meh:
From the Wikipedia description, this sounds all post-modernist and self-referential and stuff. It seems like it might be fun and funny, but I could also see it might be tedious and obvious. From your emojis it seems like it's not that.
Yep, I like that kind of thing.
Quoting T Clark
I loved it, but I gather that several other intelligent readers do indeed find it tedious and obvious.
EDIT: Incidentally, I posted something about it in the Shoutbox a few hours ago. It’s also relevant to your discussions of literary interpretation.
Yes, I saw that. That's why I asked. Thanks.
Got it from the library electronically. What a wonderful world we live in.
I know you have a cherished dislike of emojis, so I’ll translate: cool.
by Michael D. Jackson
Due to laser surgery to treat acute retinapathy in early September and again a couple of weeks ago, I'm still reading the following:
Quoting 180 Proof
Also added to the pile
• Philosophy in Crisis, Mario Bunge
• A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke
• Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx, Jonathan Israel
rereading:
• Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, Graham Oppy
Asleep, Banana Yoshimoto
Hunger; Pan, Knut Hamsun.
Where in Japan is Knut Hamsun from?
Aomori!
Jokes aside, I want to give a try on Nordic existentialists.
by Karl-Otto Apel
edit: @180 Proof
I see you are very familiar with this work. Not too many references to Apel on TPF either.
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan.
Talking to My Daughter About the Economy or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails, Yanis Varoufakis.
by Niklas Luhmann
Just got a copy of Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. That's 1232 pages that will keep me occupied for a while.
I thought I ought to finish it before starting Against the Day. It's good to be back into it.
Cool! Mason & Dixon is wonderful.
I did not like Against the Day too much, maybe your experience will differ.
I agree. I've found it fairly easy to get back into the language, although I've forgotten some of the characters. I reckon I'll re-read it in the near future.
Excellent. Curious to hear your thoughts.
The Battle For God: A History of Fundamentalism - Karen Armstrong
This has been on my list to read but I've been waiting for the paperback edition (along with The Enlightenment That Failed)
It's a wild ride, very enjoyable, original, and stimulating, and obviously hugely influential. He's full of ideas and has the ability to pile them up and repeatedly surprise while also maintaning a good story. He can make you feel you know a character with only a few words. He makes ideas as exciting as action. The corny, anachronistic, sixties-drenched stuff won't please people who look to science fiction for credible predictions (at least about technology), but it's humorously weird and also obviously satirical. The descriptions of clothing are ridiculous and seemingly pointless, but perhaps knowingly so. I liked that about it.
The ending threw me off. I can't tell if it was a mischievous afterthought or if it had been part of the design all along. It ends making you feel like the layers of reality can continue to be peeled back indefinitely.
So I like it a lot and I'm happy for people to class him as one of the literary greats of the twentieth century, and yet something about it rubs me the wrong way. Never mind the unreliable narrator: I feel with Dick we have an unreliable author. I don't quite trust him or feel an affinity with where he's coming from. I can get used to the occasionally clunky prose, even though I sometimes find it annoying, and I don't mind that characters are still using phone books in a world of commercialized precognition, flying cars and robot shop assistants, but there's something bordering on madness that's a bit alienating (could be I'm just saying that because I know he went mad in the end, in which case strike it from the record).
Also I think he uncritically assumes a philosophical position that I don't get along with, namely the soul or mind as in principle independent of the body and the physical world, as in fact tied down by the physical world to its detriment. This seems basic and unexamined for Dick, but to me it's a cliché.
I'll definitely read more though.
I think that was my impression. It was a bit cheeky. He was known to write a lot of these novels under deadlines and on a wide variety of drugs, so my guess is that very last bit wasn't very premeditated. I can understand the frustration. It didn't bother me so much, but my feelings on endings are apparent from my short story contest submissions...
Quoting Jamal
I get that, and yeah, I've always assumed that his own mental states influenced this aspect of his stories. I don't think it's correct to say he went mad, though. There's an interview with him on French television on youtube towards the end of his life that shows him as very cogent, to me at least.
Quoting Jamal
He was very deep into investigating spirituality, mysticism, religion, etc. It's a hallmark of his work, and it's more and more a part of it later in the chronology. So I suppose that automatically alienates some readers.
But why charge a fiction author with uncritically assuming a philosophical position? Isn't that a given? It's a story, not a treatise.
It didn't really bother me either; it was just disorientating. To end the book "making you feel like the layers of reality can continue to be peeled back indefinitely" is far from being a bad thing.
Quoting Noble Dust
Well I agree with you, and that's one reason I'm going to read more of his work.
:up:
Excellent. For its general theory of how human minds operate, for its exposition of effective narrative and for how well written it is.
Welcome bruv, think you'd like it.
A Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Palmer Eldritch, Dr. Bloodmoney, A Maze of Death, etc., etc.
He's fantastic and highly philosophical.
And also, he was schizophrenic and detailed this episode in his book VALIS and followed it up with two more books. Very strange beliefs, but unique, nonetheless.
A Scanner Darkly is next on my list. Or maybe I should go back to his earlier period first. I haven’t read Dr. Bloodmoney...
I think A Scanner Darkly was his best, or at least, tied with Ubik, certainly not worth watching the animated film of Scanner, it was garbage. The novel is fantastic, and his best prose by far.
Dr. Bloodmoney I remember liking quite a bit but remember very little of it. I went on a binge and read 14 of his books in 3 weeks, so, that might be the reason.
I think he has good stuff in all his periods, though I personally did not think too much of his VALIS work. But ymmv.
Cool, Scanner has been on the docket for too long for me. I liked VALIS, but it is bizarre. I don't think I understood it (not sure if it can be). But I want to re-read it. I actually felt that The Divine Invasion was excellent; I think it's overlooked. The atmosphere he creates in the last act reminds me of UBIK. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer I couldn't get through.
by John Dewey
• The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III, Peter Byrne
• The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy
• Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy
by Stephen R. Donaldson
Nice to see this show up here. I have the whole set of Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. One of my favourite antiheroes :smile:
I finished Peter Hudis' book and found it to be a well-grounded, well-reasoned, at at times an eye-opening reading of Marx's work and perspective. Per the title of the book, Marx does not delineate concrete mechanisms or detailed institutional forms that would comprise a post-capitalist, socialist society. Rather, Marx provides some conceptual lodestars. The most concise summary I can offer is that Marx's concept of the alternative to capitalism centers on the production process and humanity's social relationship to it. Marx wishes to flip the script so-to-speak, or inverse the subject-predicate logic that infests our current socio-economic horror show. Rather than value-production dominating and alienating the wage-labor that creates it, as we see in capitalism, the "total aggregate product" of a free and democratic association of labor "is a social product", which "remains social to renew or reproduce the means of production" or is consumed by individuals as subsistence as determined by "labor-time" (crucially distinct from socially necessary labor time, which is unique to the capitalist mode of production). The distribution and application of the social component to the social product requires conscious and democratic discussion and debate, the form of which Marx does not articulate or detail (aside from being "democratic) as the organization is up to the free association of producers.
Alternatives which fundamentally center on distribution, the abolition or alternatives to the market or private property, will continue to rely on a core constituent of capitalism, value-production, and its autonomous force that eclipses the autonomous power of free and democratic association of labor which is why (among other things) Marx wouldn't have called the USSR "socialist", "communist" etc. ("Capital without Capitalists").
Turning to David Schweickart's work, which as I said before I haven't read in about a decade and have recently just skimmed the section on the basic model of Economic Democracy. I think there are some elements that Marx would agree with and much that he would not. Focusing on the latter, most significantly, I think Marx would criticize Schweickart's "Social Control of Investment" as driven by the anarchic and autonomous force of value-production and therefore not centered of the free association of producers. As Schweickart himself states, "I use the term socialist to refer to any attempt to transcend capitalism by abolishing most private ownership of means of production". Marx would disagree on this appellative change as the abolition of private property does not entail the abolition of capital, and therefore its autonomous force of value-production remains intact. "Private property," writes Marx, "is the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labor". The "conceptual pivot" of Marx, writes Hudis, "the heart of the problem is abolishing capital itself, by ending the estrangement in the very activity of laboring."
Marx's conceptualization of the alternative to capitalism remains quite abstract, which I'm sure some might find unsatisfying. However, perhaps this is the price we pay now, for a future which will hopefully be deliberated, debated and exercised among and centered on a free and democratic association of social producers. I'll have to reread Schweickart's After Capitalism again this winter and chew on this more.
by Paul Ricœur
Keen to read this as it is relates to my own 'core hypothesis': as individual thinkers we are critically limited by our (in)ability to project absolute freedom on others, the ultimate cognitive bias, thus are prevented from realizing that power ourselves, through the inexorable logic of reciprocity.
Yep there is nothing quite like this trilogy.
Looks interesting. :up:
Re-reading: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima.
:up:
Still re-reading Locke's Essay, been having lots of trouble concentrating this second time around - fantastic book though, worth re-evaluation imo.
Before I take on the monster that is his Against the Day, I'm currently reading Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.
I'd suggest V or GR before Against the Day. It can be a real possibility that this latter book will erode your endurance. It's not a bad book by any means, but it far inferior to V and GR. V is probably his most fun book.
But good luck with whatever you choose. Inherent Vice was quite fun.
Thank you for this excellent advice, which I have decided to ignore. :grin:
It's your mind pal.
As he says in ATD: Good Luck.
:victory:
Now...
A great challenge to many past and current views of human prehistory. In addition to the scientific research, the book specifically discusses elements of 'Enlightenment' political thinkers that made me glad I had accidentally read them in the past.
Cartesian Meditations
by Edmund Husserl
(À la recherche du temps perdu #1)[/i]
by Marcel Proust
ISO...lost time. Thanks Amazon!
Boxed Set
I, too, was greatly impressed by the influence of indigenous voices, both as a competing vision of social order and how the thinking in Europe was changed through the encounters.
What I find most interesting is the challenge to the 'stages of development' framework often used to link human capacity to particular levels of organization. The presentation reveals a bias that I did not realize that I was keeping alive.
Awesome box set.
Years ago I read the first two volumes but faltered in the third, which means I may have to begin at the beginning again if I want to read the whole thing (which I do). That's no bad thing, because those first two are excellent.
Enjoy the journey.
Hah! I will say, that opening quote is probably my favorite of all time.
I really hope you enjoy it. I stopped at pg. 910 - no joke. Yes, I am that stupid.
:victory:
300 pages in and loving it.
by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson
I've seen this book mentioned a few times on TPF. Looks really good.
Yukio Mishima:
[i]Confessions of a Mask.
Thirst for Love
The Age of Blue
The Sound of Waves
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
After the Banquet
Runaway Horses
The Decay of the Angel.[/i]
Yasunari Kawabata:
[i]The Dancing Girl of Izu
The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa
Snow Country
Thousand Cranes
The Lake
The House of the Sleeping Beauties
The Old Capital
Beauty and Sadness
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.[/i]
Jun'ichir? Tanizaki:
[i]Some Prefer Nettles
In Praise of Shadows
Seven Japanese Tales[/i]
Haruki Murakami:
[i]Hear the Wind Sing
Pinball, 1973
A Wild Sheep Chase
Sputnik Sweetheart[/i]
Kenzaburo O?:
[i]A Personal Matter
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age![/i]
Seicho Matsumoto:
Far Approach
Shintaro Ishihara:
[i]Season of the Sun
The Eclipse of Yukio Mishima,[/i]
Teru Miyamoto:
Muddy River
Looking for reading even more Japanese works in 2023.
by Marcel Proust
I’m at around page 750 and while I do love it and think I’ll probably read it again, it’s so overwhelmingly maximalist and sometimes repetitive (almost repetitive in its endless inventiveness if that makes sense) that I’m getting tempted to skip sentences. And I’m forgetting some of the characters or getting them mixed up, maybe because they haven’t been fully drawn.
But it’s far too early to assess it. When I finished Inherent Vice my thoughts were not entirely positive but I’ve come to see it as top class, so I think these things take a while to digest. Although I get the feeling that AtD is indigestible first time around.
I shall plough on.
It was just lazy on my part not to force myself to read the last 100 or so pages, but I kept putting off till' it was way too late to read it, I forgot so many characters and plot that I have to start from zero.
Strangely, his prose in ATD is probably his easiest to read. I also thought quite well of Inherent Vice, the movie was shit though.
[quote=Thomas Pynchon]“So of course we use them,” Scarsdale well into what by now was his customary stemwinder, “we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from them their muscle and eyesight and health, leaving them in our kindness a few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture or the race? We take what we can while we may. Look at them—they carry the mark of their absurd fate in plain sight. Their foolish music is about to stop, and it is they who will be caught out, awkwardly, most of them tone-deaf and never to be fully aware, few if any with the sense to leave the game early and seek refuge before it is too late. Perhaps there will not, even by then, be refuge.
“We will buy it all up,” making the expected arm gesture, “all this country. Money speaks, the land listens, where the Anarchist skulked, where the horsethief plied his trade, we fishers of Americans will cast our nets of perfect ten-acre mesh, leveled and varmint-proofed, ready to build on. Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. When the scars of these battles have long faded, and the tailings are covered in bunch-grass and wildflowers, and the coming of the snows is no longer the year’s curse but its promise, awaited eagerly for its influx of moneyed seekers after wintertime recreation, when the shining strands of telpherage have subdued every mountainside, and all is festival and wholesome sport and eugenically-chosen stock, who will be left anymore to remember the jabbering Union scum, the frozen corpses whose names, false in any case, have gone forever unrecorded? who will care that once men fought as if an eight-hour day, a few coins more at the end of the week, were everything, were worth the merciless wind beneath the shabby roof, the tears freezing on a woman’s face worn to dark Indian stupor before its time, the whining of children whose maws were never satisfied, whose future, those who survived, was always to toil for us, to fetch and feed and nurse, to ride the far fences of our properties, to stand watch between us and those who would intrude or question?” He might usefully have taken a look at Foley, attentive back in the shadows. But Scarsdale did not seek out the eyes of his old faithful sidekick. He seldom did anymore. “Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into silence, but money will beget money, grow like the bluebells in the meadow, spread and brighten and gather force, and bring low all before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun.”[/quote]
This is the final flourish reminding us that Vibe is the arch-villain, and it’s also a concentrated outpouring of Pynchon’s anger towards capitalism. I’ve found the stuff on US labour conflicts in the book really interesting, because I didn’t know much about it. I’m guessing this history is covered in Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, a book I haven’t read.
Finished it. A big fat mess. Recommended.
Next: Stephen Gregory, The Cormorant.
This is an old union song sung to the melody of an Appalachian spiritual.
C'mon all you working people
Good news to you I'll tell
All about how the good old union
is coming here to dwell
Which side are you on? (sung four times)
Rich man say he's gotta put us down
and educate his child.
His children live in luxury
and ours are almost wild.
Which side are you on? (sung four times)
Now we got the good fight
I know we're bound to win.
Cause we got those gun thugs
looking mighty thin.
Which side are you on? (sung four times)
Should've been finished much sooner, but attention issues and all. Just finished Locke's Essay for a second time. Majestic and a true classic. I will forever be a fan.
Now onto Leibniz' New Essays.
As for novels, finished reading Higashino's latest novel am now reading Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend.
by Friedrich Nietzsche
I've just started reading that!
It is well worth the effort, there is a treasure trove of useful and insightful stuff in it. And even in areas in which one might disagree with him, there is food for thought.
If you're stuck or need help in one section, let me know, I'm happy to help.
:up:
I haven't read this since uni but I remember being struck by the humility of the man who could write such a work, but still refer to himself as a humble "under-labourer". A must-read-again for me too.
Yes, I think the topic of humility is one that should be re-visited again, especially in philosophy. It's really quite remarkable he could draw such arguments so soon after Newton's legendary work.
I think his arguments are, more often than not, persuasive, sober and thoughtful. I'm going to open a discussion group to talk about 3 chapters in the book.
In any case, good idea to re-read him. :up:
Weird fiction from 1805 by a Polish count who thought he was a werewolf and killed himself with a silver bullet. As one reviewer says on Goodreads, "When there’s lesbian incest demon sex on page 11, you know you’re in for a ride."
:gasp:
by Friedrich Engels
by Howard Bloom
This is one of the reasons I love reading on Kindle. When I forget exactly who a character is, I can just search for the first instance in the book where the person's role is usually specified. Kindle has really improved the quality of my reading.
This looks fascinating. Recommended? Based on what you know of my taste.
It’s 600 pages and I’m 200 pages in. I’m finding it mostly fascinating and enjoyable, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it unreservedly. It’s made up of innumerable nested stories told by different characters one after the other with little in the way of interior reflection from anyone, even the main character, who doesn’t seem to be a normal main character at all, more of an absent centre around which the various stories revolve. Generally it’s not concerned with character so much as diverting and odd events and dramas, like a picaresque novel.
On the other hand it involves zombies, demons and vampires that may or may not be real (I’m not sure yet); bandits and outlaws; encounters and tensions between Christians, Muslims, and Jews (including a couple of Kabbalists); plenty of sex, though never described in detail; and all things Andalusian, Spanish and Southern European.
I’m half expecting it to feel too long in the end. One of the stories I found boring and almost gave up, but I’m glad I didn’t. So far it’s hard to tell if there’s much of an overarching plot and how much the individual stories are contributing to that or whether they’ll just keep on coming and not add up to much. I’ve seen suggestions by critics that it does tie up in the end.
It reminds me a little of Don Quixote, partly because it’s set around the Sierra Morena, and also because of the multiple stories told by different characters, but Don Quixote has a character dynamic at the centre of everything, which is missing from this book.
But it’s too early to tell.
Yes, I do that a lot.
Hmmm, interesting. For some reason your description reminds me of Candide, which I'm not a big fan of.
Indeed.
Director Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye - Note, spoilers.
"Originally I didn’t want to do it. I’ve enjoyed reading Chandler, though I never did finish The Long Goodbye, and I liked those 1940s movies, but I just didn’t want to play around with them. I was sent the script by the producers and at first I said, I don’t want to do Raymond Chandler. If you say ‘Philip Marlowe,’ people just think of Humphrey Bogart. Robert Mitchum was being proposed for it. But I just didn’t want to do another Philip Marlowe film and have it wrap up the same way all the other films did. I think it was David Picker, the production chief at United Artists, who suggested Elliott Gould for Marlowe—and then I was interested. So I read Leigh Brackett’s script—she wrote the script of The Big Sleep for Hawks—and in her version, in the last scene, Marlowe pulled out his gun and killed his best friend, Terry Lennox. It was so out of character for Marlowe, I said, ‘I’ll do the picture, but you cannot change that ending! It must be in the contract.’ They all agreed, which was very surprising. If she hadn’t written that ending, I guarantee I wouldn’t have done it. It said, ‘This is just a movie.’ After that, we had him do his funny little dance down the road and you hear ‘Hooray for Hollywood,’ and that’s what it’s really about—Hooray for Hollywood. It even looked like a road made in a Hollywood studio. And with Eileen Wade driving past, it’s like the final scene in The Third Man! I decided that we were going to call him Rip Van Marlowe, as if he’d been asleep for twenty years, had woken up and was wandering through this landscape of the early 1970s, but trying to invoke the morals of a previous era. I put him in that dark suit, white shirt and tie, while everyone else was smelling incense and smoking pot and going topless; everything was health food and exercise and cool. So we just satirized that whole time. And that’s why that line of Elliott’s—’It’s OK with me’—became his key line throughout the film.” —Robert Altman
Thanks for the info. Do keep us updated if you think of it.
I'm reading Leech by Hiron Ennes. It's their published debut as of 4 months ago, recommended by my writer brother. It's honestly addictive, although not for the squeamish. The author creates a very distant post-apocalyptic world which feels both realistic and fantastic at the same time. It's interesting to read "current" sci-fi/fantasy, something I never would have done if not for my brother's influence. The writing can get a bit wordy, but overall very engrossing.
Fun in a twisted sense, yes.
Thanks for that. I really liked the movie. Elliot Gould was great and the rest of the cast was very good. It had a great script. But what really got me, stamped the movie into me, was that last scene. It was different from and wouldn't have made sense in the book.
Denny McClain, who played Terry Lennox, was a former baseball pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. He won 31 games in 1968, an amazing feat. I don't think he ever acted in anything else.
Including an uncredited early performance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I see the book and the film as two entirely different things, both good, but hard to compare. I don’t find the book’s prose to be distracting at all, maybe because I’ve read a lot of Chandler and find it very natural and comfortable. It might be his best, but it’s not my favourite, I think because it’s heavier than his other work, more emotionally revealing, tragic, and dispirited in tone.