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)
Maybe I'll try another. What's your favorite?
Thanks.
The part with Arnold was just weird and definitely not his best work.
That's one of my favorite scenes, but you're right, Arnold's role would be a disappointment to his fans.
Not all of them I imagine, he did show a lot of skin. :lol:
If there were more artful cat feeding and less showy gun fights, cinema might redeem itself.
I read most of Chandler back in the 1990's. My favorite line from The Big Sleep is 'She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up'
There's a pretty good 1944 Dick Powell adaptation of Murder My Sweet few will remember. But this is books..
I just read a vintage piece of sociology by J Boorstin called The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America It's from 1962 but on the money regarding how publicity and the pseudo have taken over how we set agendas and tell stories and can be applied to that great library of pseudo, social media. Anyone read this? Interesting to read this kind of early analysis outside of academic social theory or philosophy.
I just rewatched that scene with Marlowe trying to fake his cat out about Coury Brand Cat Food. It reminded me why I like the movie so much. About 4 minutes.
Ok, ok. Back to books.
I read "The Little Sister" and I did like it better. Less wordy and less psychological. Less chess. But still overwritten and over-complex for my taste. I like Elmore Leonard's simplicity more.
Speaking of detective novels, have you read Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad books, e.g. "In the Woods" and "The Secret Place?" She's such a good writer but I can't read her anymore. She's ruthless. She hurts children.
I think I'll try Hammett.
But once I've read it I'll be able to toss off an authoritative "Didn't impress me" during conversations about detective novels.
@Noble Dust An update:
I’m more than half way through The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and I’m revising my estimation in an upward direction. It’s really great.
So absurdly perverted that it’s often quite funny:
Well, I finished it. I didn’t like it much, but often it’s the books I dislike that I want to talk about…
Crash by J. G. Ballard: a novel about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes.
It’s very good in some ways. It’s bleak, alienating, repugnant and joyless, and that’s what Ballard was going for—he described it once as a “psychopathic hymn”. Occasionally the images and the similes are extraordinarily good. The psychogeography of highways, transit hotels, and multi-storey car parks is nicely done, and quite haunting. The writing is tonally flat and stylistically unshowy, but it’s strong, and it sometimes surprises you with an unusual but perfect word.
Academics like to write about this novel, and it’s easy to see why. I’m tempted to say it’s all content, no style. That would be putting it too strongly, but what seems to matter is the shock, the message, the social commentary. Thematically it’s a warning about where we’re going, or even where we are already (rubbing our faces in it).
A writer of fiction according to Nabokov can do three things: tell a story, teach, and enchant. Crash is concerned with teaching us about the evils of postmodernity, and is mostly unconcerned with storytelling and enchantment (by the way, enchantment in Nabokov’s scheme is what the greatest writers do, and it includes formal innovation, language play, and unique imagery, not only great ideas and worlds of wonder).
But that’s not quite fair. It does more than an essay could do, and it has an enchanting style of its own. The clinical descriptions of technofetishism, of sexual gratification at the “junction” (a word Ballard uses a lot) of bodies and machines—a junction marked out by injuries, wounds and scars—wouldn’t be as powerful were they rendered as non-fictional speculation and meditation. And I do admire the way that it defamiliarizes the everyday world—this again is the job of fiction.
But the fascination begins to wear off after the first couple of chapters, and it gets numbingly repetitive and pretentious, an interminable gimmick. I think that as a conceptual piece or cautionary tale it would have worked better as a short story or novella.
Although I said the book was joyless, it’s sometimes delightfully bizarre and funny. It’s not clear if any of the humour was intended, though it did feel like a satire on post-sixties sexual freedom and violence in the media, or else a parody of transgressive fiction or pornography. But judging by what the author himself has said about it, I think it’s meant to be taken very seriously indeed.
A quotation from the book can serve as a nutshell summary:
Sounds like many a man cave I have visited...
Have you ever read TC Boyle's Water Music? Politically incorrect, but an astonishing, enchanting use of English in the manner of Lolita (but not about young girls) also something in common with John Barth's baroque The Sot-Weed Factor but less intricate and confusing.
I've read quite a bit about that book, but never actually read it, but it struck me as pretty important. It interests me that they make many of the same criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism as do Christian apologists, albeit from a completely different theoretical basis.
I haven't read the book. I admire your efforts to give a fair evaluation of a book you didn't like. I would likely have been less generous. More likely, I wouldn't have finished it.
I kept on reading for three reasons: (1) the absurd perversity was quite funny and I was curious how far it would go, (2) I wanted to write something about it and couldn’t do that in good conscience without reading the whole thing, and (3) I suppose it was compelling or mesmerizing enough to draw me back in (I did actually abandon it one evening, but returned to it the next day).
Very much in the shadow of WWII and the Cold War. Walter Benjamin, who was an esteemed member of their circle, had been forced to suicide on pain of being captured by the Wehrmacht, apart from all the other massive destruction that had befallen everything around them. (I have a book called Grand Hotel Abyss which is a kind of collective bio of the Frankfurt School, must get around to reading more of it.)
I was reading what i thought was a great thriller, Kolmynsky Heights, Lionel Davidson. But I found to my intense annoyance about 75% of the way through the story introduces a major plot point which I found just beyond the pale of credibility and I had to abandon it.
Yes, their outrage about it leaps off the page.
Yes, I've always thought that if I want to say something about a book, I should finish it. I rarely write negative things about books. There are so many wonderful books out there and I want to point them out to people. There are also a bunch of well-known or popular books that are very bad - either badly written, badly argued, or filled with bad ideas. I'm generally willing to let people take their chances with them. Exceptions - "The Tao of Physics" and "The God Delusion."
By the same token, in writing a bad review I’m providing a service. I’m saying, it’s ok not to read this, try something wonderful instead.
The main thing is though, I find I can’t write anything interesting about books I love, or I just don’t feel motivated to do so. I seem to need some friction, something to get worked up about. Anger is an energy. In the case of Crash I was close to throwing the book across the room a few times (until I remembered I was reading on an iPad).
I wasn't questioning your decision to review the book, only pointing out a difference in our approach. For what its worth, I thought your evaluation was interesting and worthwhile.
Quoting Jamal
It's the opposite for me. It's not just that I want to tell people how much I like the book, I also want to figure out for myself why I do. The reasons I don't like books are generally simpler than reasons I do. Or if not simpler, at least more obvious. To paraphrase Tolstoy - All bad books are alike; each good book is good in its own way.
I know. I was describing my own approach in your terms.
The Wealth of Nations- Adam Smith
The Guermantes Way[/i]
by Marcel Proust
Quoting Jamal
My attitude going into this was that I wanted a brief palate-cleanser between heavy works of fiction, which could also neatly fill a gap in my philosophical knowledge. What a fool! I was forgetting that philosophy is quite hard.
The upshot is that I’m still on the first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” reading it repeatedly and more slowly each time, and I now have a rabbit hole of supplementary reading, including Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, among lots of other material.
It’s great though, otherwise I wouldn’t continue.
:cool: :up:
I've read bits too but not the whole thing. They are pretty direct. Typical excerpt:
"Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce."
:clap:
Excellent.
Who wouldn't be? :love:
by Mike Rapport
I recently realized I know almost nothing about the wave of anti-aristocratic revolutions that swept mid-nineteenth century Europe. I hope in coming understand how and why these arose, but failed, I can help contribute to the success of the global revolution that is surely coming.
It is my first time reading a scientific book on political and economics of Japan. For the past two years I only had read literature (what I enjoy a lot) but I am also interested in other perspectives towards this country. It is a 326 pages long and after reading the introduction looks like so interesting.
I liked the book. It has interesting detail about how evolution starts, not with life, but with replicative chemistry, which in turn provides the mechanism by which non-living matters becomes living organisms . That's something I was looking for after reading "Life's Ratchet" by Peter Hoffman, which deals more with how life works chemically and mechanically at the cellular level rather than how it began.
The book was a bit too breezy, gee whiz, pop sciencey for my taste. More importantly, Pross had a drum to bang, which he did over and over. His point - biology is chemistry. Reductionism is the right way to look at things. Many times here on the forum I have banged my own drum about reductionism with a reference to "More is Different," an article by P.W Anderson which strongly disputes the reductionist viewpoint. Pross has made me rethink that position, although he hasn't changed my mind. What annoyed me is that I don't see how the dispute is relevant to the information about how life starts that I was really interested in.
Still, worth reading.
Finished it. Pessimistic but also utopian, outrageous but also convincing, obscure but also polemical, bitter but also humane, anti-enlightenment but also pro-enlightenment. Dialectical thinking is addictive and I'm seeking contradictions everywhere. Adorno believed that the dialectic couldn't be set out theoretically, only shown in practice; I think this work is a good exemplar.
One of the keys to appreciating the work comes in the third chapter:
It turns out that this was probably written by Horkheimer, not Adorno, and I appreciated it, because it showed me how to understand the whole book.
Generally, it's really interesting to compare the styles and approaches of the two authors. It seems that while the chapters "The Concept of Enlightenment" and "The Culture Industry" were 50/50, the chapter on Odysseus was mostly written by Adorno, the chapter on Juliette almost entirely by Horkheimer. Horkheimer is the clearer writer and seems to build arguments more explicitly, while at the same time is more brutal, caustic, and pessimistic. He is motivated by love and despair for humanity. Adorno is all over the place but is more playful and even sometimes mystical. He is motivated by love and despair for the fading Western tradition of literature, music, and philosophy.
As aficionados will notice from what I've just written, I've begun to mimic their style. It's like the first time I saw The Karate Kid only more Hegelian.
I won't say more because I want to start a discussion about it, but I'm not sure how to go about it yet.
Quoting Jamal
I'm even seriously considering reading Hegel.
:yikes:
Dude, read Adorno's Negative Dialectics before you lobotomize yourself with Hegelian dialectics. :mask:
I guess you must have recommended it in one of the other branches of the multiverse.
New Essays on Human Understanding by GW Leibniz
Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai
I think you'll find D'Espagnat a pretty hard slog, I took it out of the library but I must confess it defeated me, although I wanted to like it.
Great book
Damn man, I actually find it quite intuitive! :rofl: Maybe because I agree with what he's saying. Probably Art Hobson's Tales of the Quantum may merit a look, it's fantastic, tough, but I like how Hobson thinks, takes QM as is, no Many Worlds, no fancy stuff - just interpreting the data and what is means.
Might have helped here, am not sure.
It is excellent, so far, I am liking it more than Satantango, then again, Satantango's brilliance came out in the last 6 pages or so. We'll see, but amazing so far.
It was good. More pedestrian than Dialectic of Enlightenment, and while it’s much clearer, it’s perhaps less persuasive. The critique of pragmatism is good, and I’m already primed to agree with it, though I haven’t actually read much of the American pragmatists so I’m not sure how fair the criticism is. On the whole it doesn’t go into things in much depth and really just gives a kind of overview of the concerns and the approach of the Frankfurt School.
In the chapter on the individual, Horkheimer contrasts the period of the liberal entrepreneur with the technocratic administered capitalism of big business. It’s hard not to read into his words a nostalgia for the old-fashioned business practices of his father, who had a very successful textile business.
But he concludes that chapter with this:
Next, because I started this and might as well do it properly:
The Origin of Negative Dialectics by Susan Buck-Morss
Lectures on Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno
And maybe some of Adorno’s other lectures, such as those on the Critique of Pure Reason (which will be a re-read) and on Philosophy and Sociology.
If that goes well I’d like to read Negative Dialectics itself, although there doesn’t seem to be a well-regarded translation.
by Jürgen Habermas
The role of the sphere of intellectual discourse and literature in the context of modern governance. Looks good.
The consolation of philosophy by Boethius.
Why I am not Christian by Bertrand Russell.
Christ recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis (recommended by @Alkis Piskas)
Rereading: Fear and Trembling;The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard.
Ola! I noted down the first two, to have a look at them.
(I dislike a lot existentialism (re Kierkegaard) and esp. Sartre).
Maybe. If someone has nothing better to read! :grin:
:rofl: :100:
Thanks for bringing in these reading suggestions.
Re Boethius's "The consolation of philosophy":
I had a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Consolation_of_Philosophy
Very interesting key subjects for contemplation and discussion: mind, happiness comes from within, predestination vs free will, determinism, the problem of evil, human nature, virtue, and justice. Wow! What an advanced philosophical agenda for that period of time!
***
Re Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not Christian":
Bertrand Russell answers Why I am not Christian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3b35KkSo-A
Highly recommended! :ok:[s][/s]
From https://weneedtotalkaboutbooks.com/2016/09/15/book-review-why-i-am-not-a-christian/, I liked that Russell had not been engaged in finding flaws in the arguments for the existence of God --anyone can do this and I guess a lot have done it publicly-- but instead:
"Russell chooses to devote his energy to the more difficult interrelated targets proposed by religion’s defenders; that religion, even if untrue, provides an ethical framework to prevent immoral behaviour, it provides emotional comfort, it is useful and beneficial to society and, specific to Christianity, that Christ was among the best and wisest of men."
This is a much more interesting approach and I have also used it myself a few times.
***
About book reading:
The thing is that I have a backlog of materials to read based on priority, and I devote very little time of my life in reading books. To this, add that I am not a fast reader!
I believe this is not the case for you and a lot of other people in here.
P.S. I could try audio books, but I don't think one can find special books one wants to read, like the above for instance. The other solution is our second-to-book companions: YouTube videos! E.g. the one from Russel I brought up above.
This is the book I began with. It is interesting and has deep philosophical inquiries. Another fact to consider is that the book is written in two forms: prose and verse. For example: It begins with a philosophical verse (or poem) like, "To crown with glittering office their ambitions/such blessings leave them cold/relentless greed devours those earlier grains/reopens wide its jaws." Can headlong lust be curbed by any reins, be bounded by fixed laws?... And then Boethius writes a paragraph where he explains his views on life and aspirations through philosophy (influenced by Plato and neo-Platonist)
Great.
Please, find the time to watch --actually, listen-- Russel's video. Even I found the time for that! :smile:
I think you will love it. There's subtle and witty humor in it, which always make watching/listening easier and more fun.
I just watched and listened it. I am not going to lie: this footage or tape is so awesome and with a big philosophical value. I am agree with Russell when he says that Christianity has now another concept or at least, Christians act differently to past times.
On the other hand, it surprised me his voice! I never expected such lightness. Well, it is true that old tapes tend to distort voices...
Glad you liked it!
I think it's something rare. I consider it a great Seminar on Logic.
And it's thanks to you that I had this opportunity to listen to this pearl.
(I have downloaded the video and kept the audio as MP3.)
:up: :100:
Just finished this. A clear and excellent introduction to Adorno but not entry-level. Significantly focused on the influence of Walter Benjamin.
A break from Adorno now: The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche
For the first time in my life, I am able to spell his name without copying and pasting from a Google search. I decided to break it down: niet-z-sche, which is easy to remember.
I'm going to stick with Knee-chee.
[quote=Adorno, Minima Moralia]The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang. It lays itself open to the simple refutation of the senses, and the most compelling anthropological proofs that the Jews are not a race will, in the event of a pogrom, scarcely alter the fact that the totalitarians know full well whom they do and whom they do not intend to murder. If the equality of all who have human shape were demanded as an ideal instead of being assumed as a fact, it would not greatly help. Abstract utopia is all too compatible with the most insidious tendencies of society. That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It regards factual or imagined differences as marks of shame, which reveal, that one has not brought things far enough; that something somewhere has been left free of the machine, is not totally determined by the totality. … An emancipated society however would be no unitary state, but the realization of the generality in the reconciliation of differences. A politics which took this seriously should therefore not propagate even the idea of the abstract equality of human beings. They should rather point to the bad equality of today … and think of the better condition as the one in which one could be different without fear.[/quote]
Fits very well with current arguments against “colour blindness”.
This kind of idea always seems to me to miss the point. For me, it comes back to the words of the US Declaration of Independence—We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. And that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—All people are created morally equal. Equally deserving of respect and freedom. Whatever differences there are are overshadowed by that unavoidable equality.
I see nothing wrong there but the price of freedom good or bad and that includes the right to free speech which allows a racist a bigot to express himself.
And what has free speech got to do with it?
As the Declaration of Independence clearly grants every person the right to freedom (equally) and that includes the freedom of speech though not made explicit but implied in that excerpt.
so what ? You asked what that’s got to do with freedom of speech and I explained that it’s inextricably linked to the idea of liberty and freedom.
Of course I’m defending it, do you wish to suggest an amendment to it ? Go ahead.
If you think there’s something wrong or deficient with the Declaration of Independence feel free to amend…I shall wait.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea. It's the failure to live up to it that's the problem. It still forms the foundation of my understanding of morality.
Coward
T Clark gave a very good rebuke of it which I agreed with.
I didn’t mean to be rude at all…I was hoping you’d express yourself without worry of triggering any perceived sensitivities
My comment to @Jamal0544 was not a rebuke at all. It was a substantive response to a substantive post.
A substantive post which turned out to be a rebuke of Adorno’s verbose complaint regarding equality and difference.
Btw, I did read Jamal’s Adorno quote in its entirety something didn’t quite sit right in what he was advocating. I even almost composed a reply to it.
You then came along with the Declaration of Independence which was the perfect response to adornos complaint.
My apologies if my tone seems somewhat abrasive…I think I need a beer
Looks like unjustified arrogance.
You’ve had enough already.
That’s my middle name.
I knew it!
God: An Anatomy by Professor Francesca Stavrakopolou
My reply to your citation of the Declaration was an initial reaction. I’m not disavowing it but I’m not ready to debate it, at least not here. The Adorno quotation made me think, and the Declaration didn’t seem like a satisfactory response (although it was an appropriate one). I have some ideas around this issue, particularly the contradiction between the French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen and the attempted suppression of the Haitian slave revolt—which is a similar issue—but I wasn’t prepared for a debate about it. Can I go now?
You provided a quote. I provided a relevant response. I didn't see it as a disagreement, just a different perspective. That's as far as I intended it to go here in the "Currently Reading" thread.
by Marcel Proust
How did you find #3?
by Gilles Deleuze
• Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, Stanley Rosen
Thanks, @Fooloso4 :up:
by Eduardo Mendieta
:up:
:up: :up:
Thanks for the reference. I hadn't heard of it. Went on Amazon. Bought it in Kindle.
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid MacCollouch, a very dense survey of the history of the faith begining with ancient Greek and Hebrew culture. Also listening to this with my wife. Actually read this years ago but it's such a wide ranging history that you can't get it all in one go.
Element of the Philosophy of Right - Hegel - suprisingly accessible after the section of abstract right... for a Hegel Book.
Causation: A User's Guide, Hall and Paul. I really wanted to get into this but it is very dry. Might have to return later.
Emma, Austin. Never read it before. Austin brings the delightful dialogue as always. I always like Clueless.
IIRC, quite good. :up:
A good read. Enjoy.
Alma-Ata: A Guide to Soviet Modernist Architecture 1955-1991 by Anna Bronovitskaya and Nikolay Malinin.
Eat some apples, ride a horse. That's where they came from. In a world, or at least a country, full of geographical ignorance, I think Central Asia is the geography we're most ignorant of.
This information will stand me in good stead, so thanks. But while I do like apples, I'm more of a donkey guy.
Quoting T Clark
Indeed, things have changed since the heyday of the Silk Route. Even my recently increased familiarity with the culture and food of the region has just been about Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan in my mind conjures up vague images of hunters on horseback with eagles, and then I think "wait, maybe that's Kyrgyzstan. Or Mongolia".
Life for Sale; The School of Flesh, Yukio Mishima.
Just finished The Melancholy of Resistance - it took longer than I would have liked, I lost a bit of focus towards the last 3rd of the book, with the exception of the concluding chapter.
I can only compare it to Satantango, his only other novel I've read. It's hard to pick one, without spoilers, it seems to me that Melancholy is richer in general content than Satantango, and yet, and yet, the way the ending of Satantango went, tuned it from a decent book to a complete masterpiece, essentially focusing on a simple, yet very powerful philosophical idea/literary trick.
I struggled less with Satantango, and I felt it was somewhat more coherent, but again, Melancholy was richer in plurality of ideas... I suppose that Satantango's execution was just too good, so I'd give it the edge.
How does Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming compare with these two works?
I'll probably read one or two easy novels, then go back to a challenging one, then on to Baron - it requires some effort.
Any general thoughts?
How did that strike you? As I mentioned I took it out of the library but didn't make a lot of headway. But he seems to be one of the 'idealist physicist' genre, so I'm pre-disposed in his favour.
It was very good and interesting. True, it became difficult and heavy-going in several places, particularly when he becomes repetitive. So, some parts I just skimmed over.
I also sensed that the translation, or maybe even his way of writing instead, did not contribute to ease of understanding.
As to the content itself, in so far as I could see, it was rather persuasive, but didn't do a good enough job at explaining why his account of a veiled reality should apply beyond QM to larger objects.
But quibbles aside, it was nice to see someone trying to develop a philosophical system based on QM, by a person who made important contributions to experiments on non-locality.
by Niklas Luhmann
Mendiata's book on Apel's discourse ethics is really excellent.
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
As for a novel:
Death Within the Evil Eye by Masahiro Imamura
:up:
Is there a good "guided" tour that mixes the original writing with a solid framework for studying such a large body of work?
Perhaps looking at several of Susan Haack's articles - many of them freely available on academia.edu, could offer some help.
Alternatively, you can try to look at Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed.
I have not found exactly that, there are several versions, some take articles from different periods of his life and arrange on a topical basis: the introduction to some of these books can offer some framework. So too could Peirce's correspondence with Lady Welby.
Thing is, his writings in a single volume can be erratic, as he wrote on everything. Editors have tried to correct this.
Good luck.
Yes. This would be helpful for me too.
Quoting Manuel
Thanks for the recommendations.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
The Castle by Kafka
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason by Schopenhauer
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Freud
Ubik by Phillip K. Dick
Just finished:
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann 5/5
Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky 5/5
Antigone by Sophocles (reread) 6/5
:party:
Thoughts?
Just started it. So far, so good. Will have more to say later. :smile:
:up:
Hope you like the whole thing. It's quite a trip!
Also looking forward to your thoughts about it.
It’s my favorite PKD novel by a mile. Honestly a substantive philosophy thread could be made about that novel, or a philosophy reading group.
Very much so. He has other philosophical ones too, but this is among his very best.
And it covers quite a lot of territory. Not a bad idea to do a thread about this novel or PKD in general.
Yes, theoretically it would be a great thread with a lot of depth and complexity, but the only issue is I don't think enough folks here have read him, or are interested in philosophy of art. That said, I may make one at some point. Or, by all means, go for it. @Jamal has been bugging me about starting a thread.
One that I found even more philosophical, but sort of sickeningly so, was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. If the majority of PKD novels feel like weird acid trips, that one was beyond the pale for me. I feel kind of scarred for life on that one, lol.
The Issue with The Three Stigmata... is that it's also rather heavily theological, and that can push away some people who would otherwise participate.
A Skanner Darkly is also very deep - about identity mostly, but lots of material. Several others, but Ubik can be interpreted in many ways.
I don't think a thread needs more than 4 or 5 people. And his books are also rather short, can be read in three or four days without much trouble.
It's up to you.
This will have to be my next PKD :grin:
This is at the top of my PKD to-read list; basically the last "late period" novel for me.
Quoting Manuel
True. Ok, you've inspired me. Don't expect the thread tomorrow, or possibly even next week, but the seed has been planted. And I follow through. :razz:
Any thoughts on VALIS? :groan:
Quoting Jamal
You're a brave man. :grimace:
VALIS? Meh. I thought it was average. I suppose the fact that it was semi-autobiographical made it more tolerable. But Horselover Fat? Come on, it's silly.
Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, A Maze of Death and Martian Time Slip were much better.
And of course,A Scanner Darkly.
I forgot quite a bit, as I went on an obsessive binge and read like 14 books of his in three weeks. At my peak I was doing one a day. I couldn't get enough. But the consequence of that is that my memory of a lot of them is extremely patchy, if that.
Silliness is a PKD hallmark, though. The outfits people wear in UBIK alone are testament to this. I need to re-read VALIS; I wasn't ready for it, I don't think. PKD being a philosophical guy himself makes the semi-autobiographical nature of that one at least theoretically intriguing. But I get that it's polarizing.
Flow My Tears didn't do a lot for me. I found The Penultimate Truth much more compelling.
If you'll pick one particular book and give me a couple of days to read it, I'll participate. Preferably one that's fairly accessible. I don't promise I'll have much to contribute, but I'll see what I can do.
We've had some interesting discussions about art here, but we haven't really dug into lichicher.
I'll need time (including time to re-read it), but I'm serious about a UBIK by Philip K. Dick thread. I don't know if you would enjoy it, Clarky, but it is accessible in the sense that it moves at a dizzying pace and the prose is simple. The contents of the plot, on the other hand...accessible? Uh, no. But I'd love to have you on board.
Quoting T Clark
Which is ironic, since we've held several short story contests.
I'm not really interested in writing stories. I like reading them; talking about them; and figuring out what they are, how they work, and how I experience them.
Went to library page on the web, downloaded "Ubik." As I always say at times like these - What a wonderful world we live in.
I'm ready to get started whenever you and the other interested parties are. Please put a tag for me on the OP to make sure I don't miss it.
Woah, you read it already? Ok, I’ll see what I can do… I would like to re read it though, especially since I need to gather my thoughts in order to make a decent OP.
I'm not in any hurry, I just wanted you to know I'm ready when you are. Keep in mind I don't have to work for a living, so I have plenty of time to read.
Well, I mean, what did you make of it?
Assuming you haven't 100% finished, I'll just say, a certain part of it, is quite "trippy", for lack of a better word, in the best sense of that word.
I read it because @Noble Dust indicated he is going to start of thread about it. I don't want to lay my thoughts out till he does.
But no pressure. :lol:
He wants to reread the book before he starts the thread.
I know. I was merely teasing, as he sounded a bit hesitant about it.
It'll be great. Literature has plenty of material for philosophy.
by Marcel Proust
Clear and deep and great fun to read, highly recommended for anyone interested in Kant, whether you’ve read the CPR or not (though some familiarity with the ideas is definitely required).
I had to dig, since I enjoyed Roadside Picnic but didn’t respond much to the description of Hard To Be a God, their other most well known novel. Snail is very bizarre and rather hard to follow but I ended up feeling very rewarded. Plus it’s short and moves quickly.
Perfect!
In other words, a must-read.
So much pressure. I just started reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. :groan: I needed a break from absurd otherworldliness, and figured existential crisis and spiritual longing and alienation would be the perfect tonic.
One for the list.... :up:
I’m currently at lecture 15 and eager to see where he goes next. I would honestly be pissed off if someone spoiled the ending for me.
I hear there's a surprise ending. Enjoy!
I am toying with the idea of doing a CPR reading group here on TPF. I’ve read it once but feel I didn’t really crack it.
That’s a big project though.
I know that feeling. I only really felt like Being and Time started to gel on the fifth reading. I will read the CPR at least once more in my life though.
Tax by design, Sir James Mirrlees.
A better format here might be to encourage people to explain why they are reading that book. What motivated them and what do they want to get out of it. What did they learn that surprises them etc. Because for the life of me, I can't think of any reason why anyone would pick up a book on, let alone write some of these books mentioned (except that they wrote them to publish or perish).
:up:
It's quite good, although I think I might have connected with it more emotionally when I was younger. There are some truly profound insights, however. Worthy of it's own philosophy thread without question.
Sometimes it’s obvious. For example, @javi2541997 hardly needs to mention that he’s reading Fiscal Reform and its Firm-Level Effects in Eastern Europe and Central Asia for sheer pleasure.
But seriously, I quite like that people are free to post here however they like, though I guess it would be nice if they said a bit more. Some do. When they don’t it’s cool.
I reread The Glass Bead Game lately. Also great. Both are worthy of threads. I'm sure 'the suicides' in Steppenwolf are part of the reason I like the poison theme. Harry's undecidable status (on the edge of respectability, despite his lethal worldtranscending angst, thanks to his social capital -- and the dividends of capital capital he lives on) reminds me of Hamlet.
Yes, the Hamlet comparison is apt. I would also throw The Stalker (seen in my profile pic), from Tarkovsky's film Stalker in that mix, although he lacks the social capital. Then again, I don't know if anyone has much social capital in that world.
:up:
Haven't seen it, but thx for the reference !
An incredible film. It's based off of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Similar Hamlet-esque character in the novel, although less likeable but with perhaps more pathos, ironically. I like the film better, but I saw it first, and they are very different from one another.
:up:
I will experience more pleasure leafing through that essay than reading Japanese literature, that’s a given.
Tell me what you think about it please.
Niklas Luhmann
Volume one became painfully theoretical and abstract about the mid-point. However volume two appears to have a more humanistic orientation.
I don't know if you saw this:
Quoting AP
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing the link with me. :up:
Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango are my two favorite books of Krasznahorkai, I'm not sure if I could pick my preference between the two. The concluding chapters for both are sublime. Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming was his only work I didn't fully enjoy. I think it was overly long. I do also recommend Seiobo There Below, which is composed of a number of shorter stories, and War & War. I also loved Chasing Homer which incorporated a music element via QR code. Very interesting. If you enjoy film, and how can anyone not, I recommend his collaborative work with director Bela Tarr.
Thanks, will check those out. :up:
Heisenberg's book, written in the early 1970s, is told mostly as a series of conversations with his contemporaries starting when he was starting college in 1919 through the end of the 1950s. The recollections are very detailed. He must have kept a journal. I wonder also whether or not they were more dramatizations than memories. He knew everyone in physics in Germany during that period - Pauli, Hahn, Planck, Schrodinger, Bohr, and many others who I wasn't familiar with. He met Einstein. Some of this recollections, especially those during the war, seemed as if they might be self-serving.
The part I found most interesting was the timeline of discoveries in quantum mechanics and how each affected the scientific community. His explanation of the discovery of nuclear fission as a sustainable reaction with possible uses for energy generation and weapons was probably the most interesting part, along with his explanation why wartime Germany never put much effort into nuclear weapons.
Although thin on science, the book is very heavy on philosophy of science. Those sections were actually pretty interesting, especially the fact that Heisenberg and his colleagues were having the same kinds of discussions of truth and knowledge we have here on the forum.
All in all, pretty good but not enough science. And short, which makes up for some of the shortcomings.
Incidentally, I plan to read Jim Gauer's Novel Explosives for a third time, it really is a masterpiece in fiction, has plenty of philosophy, amazing prose, countless ideas and is actually fun to read. But it is also challenging.
@180 Proof @Jamal
I think both of you will most surely enjoy Novel Explosives, if you are ever in a mood for philosophical, albeit somewhat challenging fiction, I think you cannot go wrong with it. I am under obligation to make propaganda for it, because it's not well known...
:cool: In gratitude for your generous recommendation, Manuel, I reciprocate in kind: the 'metaphysically haunting' duology The Passenger & Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy. Enjoy!
Ohhh, these look very very interesting, I'll definitely take a look. Many thanks. :cheer:
by Marcel Proust
The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement
Sir James George Frazer
I think that modernity suffers from an insufferable prejudice of superiority, typified by the sanctification of science and the disparagement and desecration of anything sublime which might possibly predate its own high opinion of itself. I think the more comprehensive view is always the more balanced. The Golden Bough should also be an excellent segue to Cassirer's four volume opus on symbolic forms.
Moral Reasoning: Ethical Theory and Some Contemporary Moral Problems, Victor Grassian.
Grassian's book is interesting. He discusses moral and ethics using a variety of dilemmas where it can be analyzed different philosophical arguments.
It's a science-fiction novel, not a philosophy tome. But, it does involve some deep ethical problems, such as a decision to nuke Antarctica, or not, in order to buy a little more time for the rest of the Earth. Ironically, for sci-fi, it's not a typical adolescent male fantasy with bug-eyed monsters, muscular heroes & curvy females. Even though the alien is strange-looking, his appearance is appropriate for his home environment. And he acts like an intelligent being, not a scary outlandish creature.
As in Weir's previous novel & movie, The Martian, it's mostly about a man alone, and he deals with a series of life-or-death challenges, not with laser blasters & light sabers, but with Science & Technology. So, the book will appeal mostly to those with a good general understanding of basic science : physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Again, ironically, the protagonist is a junior high school science teacher, with no heroic qualifications except intellect & imagination.
As the title implies, the whole story is about a cosmic act of desperation. So there's plenty of tension and feats of courage & intelligence. Oh yes, there is an alien, but no eyes at all. He sees with sound, because his home world has a thick atmosphere, impenetrable to light, but not to sub-luminal vibrations. The book is not at all fantastical, but it's as realistic as anyone could imagine, for a world faced with a potential global extinction event. Never give up hope : science will find a way. :smile:
I enjoyed it.
Apparently, they are working on a movie based on Hail Mary. Unfortunately, there's a horror flick with the same name coming out in 2023. So, there may be some low-brow competition, to confuse those with higher standards for intellectual entertainment. On the other hand, Weir's story should be relatively cheap to produce : a single major star, routine graphic effects, and most of the action takes place in the mind, putting emphasis on actor & director instead of wardrobe & make-up artists. I enjoyed The Martian, in part because it was contrary to the typical money-making recipe of appealing to the lowest common denominator, to get pubescent butts in seats. :smile:
I liked the book, but I'm not sure I'd want to see it as a movie. We'll see.
I also would not imagine Hail Mary as a movie, if I hadn't seen The Martian. It's not exactly a typical action-adventure story, since most of the action takes place in the mind of the protagonist. That's why I said that a really good actor & director would be necessary to pull it off. Lots of voice-overs could become tedious for a bang-boom audience.
Side note : I was impressed with Weir's unconventional but realistic alien concept. By imagining Rocky's home planet as a Venus-like world with thick light-blocking atmosphere, the author gave his species a handicap to overcome in developing intelligence & science. The lack of quick-acting vision, and reliance on slower sonar, would tend to limit the alien's inter-action with local Nature, making scientific observations more difficult. Speaking of coincidences, in my current E-book, I just today came across the Sagan quote below, which could indicate why the alien's Science was inferior in some ways to the human's. :nerd:
"Also fortuitous is the transparency of our atmosphere to visible light, which made important scientific advances possible, as Carl Sagan underscored in his 1980 book Cosmos. There he asked us to imagine intelligent life evolving on a cloud-covered planet such as Venus. “Would it then invent science?” he asked."
The Miracle of Man, by Michael Denton
details the complex web of coincidences that allowed the evolution of Life & Mind in a universe otherwise hostile to living & thinking organisms.
I agree. The fact that the aliens were not aware of relativity was clever.
On to The Philosophical Writings of Descartes.
Naomi Oreskes
An interesting philosophical view of linguistics in contrast to the scientific theories being discussed lately around Chomsky's work.
Hey, Javi. I'm reading "Killing Commendatori." I'm enjoying it.
I am happy to know that you are enjoying a Murakami's book.
I read Killing Commendatore back in January, and I enjoyed it a lot. I think he [Murakami] expresses a lot of imagination with emotional backgrounds: the sister of the main character; the painting in the big saloon (Tomohiko Amada); Menshiki and his personality, Mary and her grandma, etc...
You will see.
I read it 15-20 years ago and was amazed. What do you think?
I'm curious as well. The City And the City sort of blew my mind, but I tried to read The Last Days Of New Paris and couldn't get through it.
I won’t say more until Manuel is finished.
Thanks. I'm overdue on the Perdido stuff; Last Days turned me off for awhile. Have you read The City and the City?
Finished it. Tremendously enjoyable and stimulating, but because the lectures are improvised it’s definitely not a “Dialectics for Dummies” or a useful introduction to Hegel. It’s more like a rambling demonstration of how to think dialectically, how that differs from other modes of thought, and the problems with doing so. One thing about it that does make it useful in approaching Hegel is that he gives concrete examples. Another highlight is when, over several lectures, he goes through the four rules of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method to show how dialectical thinking differs from it.
Next:
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson
Beyond Good & Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
I'm reading it slowly, want it to last. So far, amazing. Beautiful language, exotic location, interesting ideas, quite fun too, which never hurts.
This is my first Miéville, haven't tried the rest, though I hear Embassytown and The City and The City are also good.
So far, delightful and lots of eye candy, in a kind of dirty though industrially sophisticated way. Though quite different, reminds me of Imajica by Clive Barker.
I really like China Miéville. "Railsea" is one of my favorite books and "The City and the City" is great. I also enjoyed "Embassytown" and "Kraken." He writes so well. He uses uncommon words without ever seeming pedantic. I can't imagine reading one of his books except on Kindle where I can look things up right away.
I started reading "Perdido Street Station" before, but got lost about a third of the way through. The writing is dense and visual. The world is so odd. That's true of all his books but not to the same extent. I gave up, but you have inspired me to go at it again. That partly because I don't feel like I should try to read "The Scar" or "Iron Council" till I do. I'm about 30 pages in now. The writing is wonderful, the world is bleak and amazing, and I am determined.
Have you seen the television adaptation of "The City and the City?" I generally don't want to watch movies or TV shows of books I like, but I'm curious.
No, I haven't, like you, I've greatly decreased my time watching movies or tv shows, with minimal exceptions.
I am a compulsive book buyer, had this one for a while, but haven't read anything else by him. Unless it becomes boring for too long, I doubt I'll stop. Once you read 2 or 3 difficult books, Pynchon, Joyce, etc., it's hard to give up a book due to it being dense, with exceptions, of course.
I am reading unusually slowly, but it's very enjoyable and I always like visually stimulating books, of whatever genre.
As for the TV show, I would have a look, but I must read the book first, otherwise, I spoil a good novel reading opportunity.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
We all draw a line somewhere.
:grin: But really I'm not sure if it's a boon or a curse that I can't seem to finish a book unless it's nigh on perfect.
What would be a perfect book then?
I don't know but close enough e. g. "The Stranger" by Camus, "Death in Venice" by Mann, "The Trial" by Kafka. + Pretty much everything by Orwell.
Those are classics, no fair.
Btw, read your "insectious" as "incestuous", and I'm like damn, that's quite a spoiler...
"The City and the City" is at heart a police procedural, so I think it's much more accessible than most of Mielville's books. It's also probably the most filmable. I can't imagine what a movie or TV show about New Crobuzon, the city where "Perdidio Street Station" takes place, would look like. Actually, maybe I could. It would be like the bar scene from "Star Wars" as written by Charles Dickens.
Wow Clarky, please don't take this the wrong way but I'm frankly shocked that you're a Mieville fan. Not out of any disrespect, but simply because I don't recall discussing any fiction with you, compiled with the fact that you seem to philosophically oppose the short story contests.
Time to take a load off and have a laugh, Maw-y (that doesn't really work; huh).
I'm surprised that you're surprised. I talk about fiction fairly often on the forum, including in this thread. You and I discussed "Ubik" just a while ago. I have nothing philosophical against the short story contests, I'm just not interested in either reading or writing short stories. I read short stories a lot when I was younger - mostly science fiction. I somehow have lost my taste for them. I'm retired. I read a lot. Mostly fiction, but also science and philosophy - primarily Taoist philosophy.
I wasn't going to mention it, but I just started reading "The Possessed" by Dostoyevsky. Also known as "Devils" or "Demons." I'm not sure if I'll finish it, but I wanted to read something by him after I couldn't get through "Crime and Punishment." After 10 pages I couldn't stop laughing. I read "Notes from the Underground" in college, but I can't remember it much. I don't do well with bleak and tedious books with unlikeable characters. That's the kind @Baden likes.
It is a pity... I personally think that you could make a good contribution when TPF opens up the short story contest. I enjoy this activity and it is one of the aspects I like the most on this site.
I expect that much from you because I am aware that you have imagination (I remember debating with you about Tao Te Ching verses), not like other members who are only focused on physics, maths, logic, science, etc...
Don't get me wrong: I respect their commitment, but I think imagination and literature are also important in our knowledge.
Alas, fiction is not my medium.
A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
On my brand new Kindle.
Poem of the Deep Song, Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca.
Sun The First. Maria Nefeli. Orientations by Odysseas Elytis.
Why not, eh?
E.E. "Doc" Smith
Burroughs was charming, I'll read more. But I'm really liking the meta- nature of Triplanetary.
Gilles Deleuze
Ernst Cassirer
Deleuze provided a concise picture of the various aspects of legislative-creative versus receptive-perceptive thought in Kant. A great preparation for Cassirer's four-volume opus on symbolicity and culture.
I finished it. I don't know anyone who writes better. His language is wonderful, visual.
So do you have a kindle? I noticed it is on sale for $2.99 in kindle format on Amazon right now, at least in the US.
For novels, I prefer paperback (or hardcopy). I am close to halfway through but am reading quite slowly. Normally (with less distractions), I would have finished by now.
Yes, I agree, he writes very, very well and is quite vivid in his descriptions. Better writers? It's a matter of taste. David Foster Wallace, especially in his non-fiction is wonderful too, Jim Gauer has enviable style, a few others too, but Miéville is up there.
On the other hand, what I liked about it made me read his other books, so it’s still up there in my favourite books.
Miellville is one of those writers I wouldn't read except electronically. His use of language is skilled and idiosyncratic. On the other hand, it never feels forced. I find myself looking up words every page or so. I wouldn't do that in a paper copy and I'd miss much of the writing.
I know what you mean when you say monster hunt. It really was a change in style and tempo. It did feel a bit anticlimactic. As for plot - it made me think of "Titus Groan." When you and I discussed that, I said the plot doesn't matter. You disagreed. I feel the same way here. I was never bored.
I've found the first few chapters to be rather interesting, and especially appreciate the insights into Bene Gesserit wisdom that I've gleaned so far. There are other chapters in the book that I'm especially looking forward to reading, some of which focus on technology, synchronicity and other similar topics.
I enjoyed The City and the City so much that I feel I owe it to myself to give him at least one more shot after failing with Last Days Of New Paris. Is Perdido the one? I get the sense The City and the City was atypical, so I’m unsure of how to proceed.
This one is fascinating. It’s early period, so the writing is even worse but somehow the characters are more complex and more human. And all of the perennial PKD themes are there. It just has a bit more youthful energy. Just as much a bizarre, terrifying, hilarious acid trip as later stuff, just more juvenile, and more overtly sci fi.
Of the books of his I’ve read, the Bas-Lag books have stuck in the memory the most, and Perdido is the first of those. I think I’ll probably re-read it. So yeah, I’d say Perdido.
As I mentioned above, I found it disappointing in the last half or third, and I remember the writing as occasionally and undeservedly pretentious, but I might be wrong about all that—and anyway, it hasn’t detracted from the good things I remember about it, and I still want to re-read it.
This is what turned me off of Last Days of New Paris. I felt like I was reading someone's flowery summary of a novel they had read. The City and the City was very brusk which I liked (PKD much?) because he was purposefully writing in a crime noir style. This worries me as to whether I'll enjoy any of his other novels.
I don't think so. It's dense, long, and pretty bleak. The writing is great, but it took me two tries. The Mieville book I like best is "Railsea." Yes, I think "The City and the City" is more accessible than most of the others I've read. It's the most conventional I guess, but it's still got that Mieville crookedness. His way of making impossible worlds seem normal.
I haven't read "Last Days Of New Paris." I guess I should... Just downloaded it from my library. Ain't technology wonderful. Except they don't have it in Kindle. I had to fiddle around to make it work.
On the contrary, I found it exuberant and fun, and dense only in its profusion of monstrous detail.
I like the sound of that.
Quoting T Clark
Nothing about that is off-putting to me, unless dense means constant use of obscure words to which no one knows the meanings. I found that to be the case with New Paris. But maybe my vocab is low. I like the goodreads blurb on Railsea. Good luck on Last Days. You might get more out of it than me; please let me know.
Realized that I forgot to give a big thumbs up to this. *Clarky thumb emoji*
With a sample of less than one, I can't say. I do like the writing and the visuals and the plot, no problems so far. Maybe it will get worse down the line, but it might be worth a shot.
I wouldn't want to read a Mieville book on paper. I need Kindle so I can look up all the words. His vocabulary is incredible but it never feels artificial or pedantic.
Quoting Jamal
Fun? Certainly playful. Dense - every page felt like a chapter. I'd say I had to look up a word every two or three pages. I see that as a good thing.
Ironically, I only read real books. You're more modern than me here. Funny. And sad on my part, perhaps. Or not. I'm not sure.
No, not sad. I still love books and used to love reading them. Now, when I do, I find myself tapping on the page to look up the word. I'm pretty lazy. If it weren't for Kindle, I wouldn't look up words. With Mieville, you have to in order to get the full value. That's especially true of "Perdido Street Station."
Quoting T Clark
Ebooks are real and ebooks are books.
I only read books made out of paper, which is what I mean by "real". I know you know this, and I know you know that I know that you know this. Come on brah.
I’m a member of some online book groups and there are endless stupid arguments pro- and anti-Kindle. I don’t intend to repeat that here. However, I do want to insist that ebooks are real books, lest there be some suggestion that reading an ebook is importantly different, qualitatively, from reading a codex-style book (paper pages bound together between boards or paper). This would be true of “audiobooks,” because you don’t read them—but not of ebooks.
Kindle is better for me for several reasons:
The first two points are the most important. If they weren’t important to me, e.g., my eyesight was as good as it was 30 years ago and I was settled in a house with a dedicated library, or I didn’t live in a foreign country, then I would likely read codex books a lot more.
I realize all of this is obvious and goes without saying. But Jamal’s Law is: online, that which goes without saying doesn’t go without saying.
Now I’m done here.
So you're old and still mobile. Impressive. This feels like a BC bit.
Quoting Jamal
I in some ways envy this, but I also am able to grab my iPhone and do the same in maybe 12 seconds more time total.
Quoting Jamal
I was reading in the dark from age 6. I don't get it.
Quoting Jamal
Fair.
Yeah, I'm done here.
Sure, but there's something beautiful about a wall full of paper books. It feels like you're rich. Like money in the bank. Also, you can't loan or borrow electronic books. Also, going to the library or book store is a social event.
Just sayin.
You can actually. Many books on internet archive (one example website of many) are borrow only. Meaning that access to a particular ebook is time limited and the pdf isn't available for download (or it's encrypted).
Personally I prefer, and indeed have, a nice wall of dead trees.
I was talking about lending them to or borrowing them from friends, but you're right. The best of all is Libby. If your library is a member, you can download books and magazines directly. There is even an extension to Chrome called "library extension" that will tell you whether the book is available from the library when you're on Amazon or other book websites. Then you can download it directly from the computer.
That's how people are going to romanticize ebooks in 50 years when the technology will entail injecting the words into our retinas.
:100:
We've been reading text in physical form for more than 5,000 years. A little regret is reasonable.
Currently reading:
ATHOL FUGARD: Blood Knot
KIERKEGAARD: The Sickness unto Death
This is an excellent play. Reads like a dramatization of Frantz Fanon's work.
by E.E. "Doc" Smith
Yeah. I just gave up on "Last Days of New Paris." It had that Mieville tornado of words and I could tell it was well put together, but it just didn't draw me in. It was a neat idea - a battle between the Nazis and the surrealists in Paris. I think it would have been fun if I were more knowledgeable about surrealist artists.
Perhaps I will go back to it another day.
If anything I think the concept is actually kind of pretentious. A military vs. an artistic movement is pretty on the nose. As long as other novels have concepts that are more realistic, in which to set the fantastic, I’m willing to give something a shot.
I didn't think it was pretentious, but it was definitely a one joke routine. Perhaps a short story.
*Thumbs up pic*
I think I like your riff on my thumbs up tclemoji better than the tclemoji itself.
I just learned what a tclemoji is.
@T Clark emoji. :roll:
I liked it. It’s a short apocalyptic science fiction novel that subverts the escapism and nostalgia of cosy catastrophe by reducing the protagonists to selfish, deluded, incompetent “worms” in a world of transcendent evil. The humans, caught up in…
There is a lot of biblical allusion too, but none of it offers redemption or hope. It seems to be employed to mock religion, and to mock humanity itself.
I was wondering what made it enjoyable despite its unremitting pessimism and several disturbing scenes. I think part of it is the perverse sense of fun in trashing the facile tropes of popular post-apocalyptic fiction, which is at the same time a more general critique of human delusions. The art of its execution, and the simple thrill of subversion, are what’s enjoyable. In a pleasing dialectical twist, the artistry of the most pessimistic fiction is itself life-affirming.
That said, none of it feels so shocking and important as it probably did in 1965, it falls a bit flat in the middle (I got pretty fed up with the long section set inside the roots of the giant plant), and it’s not as experimental or interesting as I’d been led to believe by Disch’s classification as a New Wave writer. Still, I’ll read more of his work; this was his first novel.
Had to stop Perdido at about page 300 or so, I really liked the writing style and the city descriptions (this latter up to a point), but I found it became somewhat of a slog, in that he'll tell bits of the story, then spend pages on the city again and again, making it uneven.
Definitely will try it again sometime in the future, but, I wasn't really feeling it at the moment, especially towards the last 100 or so pages of my reading.
As you've seen here, you aren't the only one who had to come back later. My suggestion - get a good running start and read as fast as you can. Whenever you think of stopping, just say la, la, la over again with your fingers in your ears.
Or, like me, wait till you retire to finish reading it.
This is good advice, especially when the books are quite long.
Having said that, I'll likely wait some time before following your advice, otherwise I risk the habit of not reading novels and finishing them (now that I've started a new one).
Thanks.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
so called "Manifesto of the Renaissance"
The Warlord of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• [i]Outer Dark
• Blood Meridian
• No Country For Old Men
• The Road
• The Passenger
• Stella Maris[/i]
by Ernst Cassirer
My takeaway from volume one is that language (and derivatively concept-formation and logic) is inextricable from the historical project of human existence, in all of its regional varieties. Objectivity, as Cassirer puts it, coincides with "an active interest in the world and its configuration."
Quoting T Clark
I've used this version of the Tao Te Ching some since you recommended it, but just the translated verses, which I've enjoyed, not the essays included. I just read the "Philosophical Introduction." It's so odd to read the Tao Te Ching interpreted in terms of western philosophy. I think I learned more about western philosophy than I did about Taoism. That's not a bad thing. Thanks again.
You might be interested to know I just saw Bela Tarr, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's cinematic collaborator, in-person in NYC on Monday in a very rare US appearance (his last visit to the states was 12 years ago). He introduced 4 of his movies, followed by a Q&A, which included Werckmeister Harmonies, which is based on Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance, and he helped write the screenplay. He signed my DVD of Satantango! Very friendly (and pretty funny!) man.
I enjoy reading books which eloquently and elegantly describe how cancer works, or how historical processes are the meat grinder of civilizations -- including ours. "Ah. So that's how one dies of cancer; or how a country goes down the tubes." At least I don't have to worry about being one of surplus elite.
Very cool! I'd heard that the quite long film version of Satantango was actually very well made and well received, but I've yet to see it.
I didn't know Werckmeister Harmonies existed, nor that it was an adaptation of the novel. I'd think that Melancholy of Resistance would make a better movie than Satantango, so I might check it out. Thanks for the heads up.
After being mostly unavailable Werckmeister Harmonies has a new 4K restoration with a limited theatrical release around the United States. Not sure where you live, but I would recommend seeing it in theaters if possible. Otherwise, it should be out in blu ray sometime this year I imagine. However, unlike Satantango, Werkmeister does not cover the entire book from which it's based.
Satantango has an excellent 4K restoration that was released on blu ray a few years back. The runtime is daunting but I highly recommend you attempt to view it in one sitting (obviously with pee breaks as nature demands). It's how Tarr wishes it was viewed, and the runtime itself is part of the film's overall atmosphere and mood. It's one of my favorite films, would love to see it in theaters one day.
Conspiracy Against the Human Race - Thomas Ligotti
The Trouble With Being Born - Emil Cioran
Nihil Unbound - Ray Brassier
Bunch of papers by Metzinger.
Finally got around to studying Sellars' "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", a fantastic read. Very demystifying.
by Gustave Flaubert
After reading about the 1848 revolutions a few months back this went on the list. I like to round out my understanding of events with source material; I think period literature counts as such.
Nice. Watch out for the windmills.
A collection of some of his earlier short stories. Mostly great. Lots of surrealism, Freud, Jung, and genre-wise more slipstream than science fiction.
I’ll probably read a volume of his later short fiction next. Two stories I’m particularly interested in are “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “The Assassination Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race”.
Hell yes
Seeing you posting here reminds me that we never got around to discussing "Ubik" by Phillip K. Dick. When we first talked about it, I read the book and wrote out my thoughts. Rather than waste all that intellectual effort, I'm going to post it now:
My book report - "Ubik"
I enjoyed reading the book. I haven’t read much Dick and I’m not a big fan. I can’t remember what book or books I read previously. I had some impressions but it’s been so long I wasn’t sure they were correct. Turns out they were.
“Ubik” is heavy on plot, as chaotic as it is, but weak on characterization. I didn’t really like any of the characters and didn’t much care what happened to them. That’s a real weakness for me, although the book was written before science fiction became literature. Going back and rereading books by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, et. al. I found the same was true of them. When I was a teenager it didn’t matter much to me. Science fiction was about ideas, and “Ubik” clearly is. That was the whole point.
The world of “Ubik” is bleak and joyless, which, again, is a weakness for me. As the book rolled on, it turned out the characters, and perhaps all of humanity, were also hopeless. The whole feel of the book is slick and metallic, a framework on which ideas are hung without any sense of direction, which is also part of its point I guess.
I read a lot of science fiction throughout the 1960s but started reading less when I went off to college, so I wasn’t paying attention to the things that were going on in science fiction in the 1970s and 80s. I’m guessing that a big part of the charm and value of the book came from the mind blowing plot and sense of unstable and unreliable reality. That kind of thing has become much more common since. I guess Dick was one of the first, a pioneer. I’ve read quite a few more recent books with similar plot devices that I liked more.
So where does philosophy come in? That’s not a rhetorical question. The book didn’t seem all that philosophical to me. It was - and I think was intended to be - surreal, absurd, disorienting. The peoples’ lives were non-linear and meaningless, although they seemed to be even before the shenanigans started. So, bleakness, hopelessness, meaningless, absurdity - I guess existentialism.
And what’s up with Ubik? The little paragraphs at the beginning of every chapter were amusing and absurd. I’m sure it symbolized something, but I’m not sure what.
Conclusion - my prejudice against PKD is validated.
Interesting to read your thoughts. I still plan on making a thread, so I'll wait to respond. I need to read it again to respond to some of your points anyway.
Exactly this. I had committed to giving a review but I didn't finish the book and this was the reason along with what I perceived as a cliche form of discourse. I wanted to like the book as I like the idea and others I respect here liked it but I didn't. I am coming out of the closet now because I am not alone. Thanks.
I haven't read that, but I've read pretty much all of Philip K. Dick's short stories. He's old school science fiction. The vibe was always like you're being invited to consider something completely bizarre, but based in science somehow. PKD is known for images that stick with you. For me it's an image of this guy sitting in his living room and when he looks up at the window, there's a giant eye staring back at him. I don't remember the rest of the story, I just remember that image.
If you've ever seen the Russian version of Solaris, it captures that old school vibe pretty well.
His later novels are anything but old school Sci-Fi. I plan on starting a serious thread about UBIK. I need recruits.
There are good images, yes, despite his terse prose. I was going to go into more detail but want to save it for the mythical thread that shall one day appear.
Quoting frank
Yes, Tarkovsky's take on Lem's novel. I enjoyed the film a lot and need to re-watch it. With Tarkovsky I'm a bigger fan of Stalker and Mirror, but this is a reading thread. I absolutely loved Lem's Solaris novel, so seeing the film second was a let down because it's so different. But that's Tarkovsky. I saw Stalker first and then read the Strugatsky Brother's Roadside Picnic. It seems whichever you experience first is your preference, at least with me.
Another great Lem novel is Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. "Kafkaesque"...
Really? That's weird that they'd diverge significantly from his short stories. How would you characterize them?
Well, now that I say that, I should clarify since I might have misspoken. I think and write too quickly at times. His later novels are not Hard Sci-Fi involving mutant aliens races and complex future technologies. Some of these things make appearances in earlier works, but they are essentially non-existent in later works. By "old school" are you referring to the truly old school like Wells? I might have misinterpreted. The Sci-Fi qualities of some laters works are nearly subsumed by an obsession with philosophy, mysticism and religious symbols.
I was thinking more about the 1960s I guess? Like Jack Vance, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, etc
Maybe his short stories were just a way to make money. Now that you mention the mysticism, I remember something about someone showing up to PKD's door with Christian fish necklace and it caused some epiphany in Dick? Was he struggling with mental health issues?
I love many of Lem's short stories. I think I enjoyed The Cyberiad the most, of what I've read.
Ah, those I would consider Hard Sci-Fi. PKD began trying to write normal, everyday non-Sci-Fi novels and was not successful, so he pivoted to harder Sci-Fi and found some success. It was a job, yes. He gradually became more successful, and then pivoted away into more philosophical novels.
Quoting frank
Yes to both. There's a fascinating mythology surrounding him, his work, and his life. It's part of why I want to start the UBIK thread. The philosophical merit of the thread would go beyond the novel itself.
Both from The Atrocity Exhibition. Weird stuff.
But don't miss Vermilion Sands for the other side of Ballard.
I'm not super well read on him. I've read a few I didn't care for, like Eden. I do like the recurring theme in some of his work of alien life being incomprehensible to us and resistant to our anthropomorphization, something the Strugatsky Brothers also explored.
Interesting. :up:
I wouldn't try to convince you guys that Ubik is a great novel. I'm not sure he wrote a great novel, really. But all the work I've read is of a piece, and it makes a tapestry I find very appealing.
That said, I like Ubik a lot. I could say some things about why, but it might be hard to disentangle what I like about Ubik from what I like about the work taken altogether.
Just wait for the forthcoming thread, then!
Alright. It's been years since I read it though, and often can't convince myself to reread things just for class.
But you know I'm always up for talking about Saint Phil.
Haha, that's fair enough. There's no requirements, I just personally feel responsible for re-reading it in order to make a quality OP.
Also an excellent discussion point. I’m feeling motivated to get this thread going.
I just figured you'd given up on or forgotten it and I didn't want my effort to go to waste.
I think this is true of a lot of science fiction from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. "The Foundation" and it's two successors had a big impact on me, but rereading the first recently enlightened me to how ham-handed the writing is.
I saw the English version, which was ok. I've been thinking I should read it.
[Edit] Just put the electronic version on hold from my library.
Perhaps we should wait till Noble Dust gets off his ass and starts a separate thread. Then you can, if not try to convince me, at least help me understand why you like it.
Theodore Sturgeon is often credited with pushing sf in a more literary direction from the early 50s onward. Later, there's Bester. And LeGuin. And later still there's Delany. We have some "real writers".
But I love 50s science fiction. It's the triumph of substance over style. There's a purity about those stories, the centrality of the idea, and the demand of the audience that the idea itself be the most interesting thing in a story, not the author's style.
Yes, exactly that. I will try to convey what I love about Phil Dick.
I always hated when people talked about "literary" science fiction. I think that was because it meant so much to me as a kid - it was people with the mind of teenagers writing for teenagers. Lots of ideas and who cares, who even knew, if the writing was any good.
I must admit I've come around since I started reading science fiction again about 20 years ago. Anne Leckie, Martha Wells, Adrian Tchaikovsky, China Mieville, Gene Wolf, Neal Stephenson, Haruki Murakami...
The inventor of my name.
Well there's a whole thing about being respectable that's crap, of course. SF may be "the dreams our stuff is made of" now (book by Tom Disch about how sf took over popular culture), but so far as "literature" (pronounced derisively) is concerned, it's still a ghetto. Which is fine by me.
I reserve my greatest disdain for mainstream folks who figure anybody can write speculative fiction. (The way celebrities seem to think anyone can write a children's book.) They don't get it. They don't get what makes it different.
I think I would have loved PKD too around the time I was reading Asimov, Simak, Arthur C. Clarke etc. But somehow I missed him. So, no disrespect to that, I just can't get back into it. What grabs me now is something different.
I can relate. I've tried to read The Catcher in the Rye a couple times and could barely get 10 or 20 pages in. I think I might have loved it at 15, but now ...
It's cool to compare the American version to the Russian one. There's a very different tone in each. The American one pays closer attention to making sense. The plot is sketchy to begin with.
The book is next on my list as soon as I can get it from the library.
I have a friend who is going through the Hugo winners one by one till he's read them all. When he gets done with that, he plans to go through the Nebula winners not included on the Hugo list.
:grin: :up:
That's a great idea; I might try that.
He's fantasy or, magical realism. Not much sci-fi, a little in his Hard Boiled Wonderland...
You're probably right.
You know of any other authors that combine traditions and sources like Brassier? It's a lot of fun to see the Patricia Churchland next to Meillassoux.
The last time I read a Ballard novel (Crash) and gave it a review, I was too hasty—I’ve since revised my estimation upwards—so I’ll refrain from saying much about this one. Once again, I didn’t like it much, but who knows what I’ll think in a few weeks. Some quotations:
[quote=Ballard]At the filling-station I ejaculated across the fuel pumps, and over the paintwork of the cars standing in front of the showroom.[/quote]
Quoting T Clark
I like the spider stuff.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, I should probably read them as part of that book, as they were published.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Now on my list :up:
Currently reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.
I have not read "Children of Time" yet. I'm sure I'll get around to it. He's really a good writer. Real name - Adrian Czajkowski.
Just a different spelling. People don’t buy books by apparently unpronounceable authors.
Yes. I'm sure you're right. It just seemed neat to me. I like playing with names. How about "T Quark?" "T Kork." "P Pork." "C Lark." "C Tlark." "T Kralc." "Quarky." "Washington Irving."
One dollar for the relevant literary reference.
Speaking of which, Alan Arkin died yesterday.
I approve.
And speaking of Alan Arkin. Another cultural reference for another dollar - "Cub is young bear."
Twenty bucks if you can get them both.
by Ernst Cassirer
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.
That was a masterpiece.
It's been a good while since I've been engrossed in a book like that. Heck, I don't want to rush into my next book just to savor and think about what I just read.
Books like these are the reason literature is so fascinating, giving us a privileged peak into human nature.
Sounds interesting. I'll take a look.
I can't guarantee you'll like it; some aspects can be subject to (probably) fair criticism.
It just hit me at the right time I suppose.
by Charles Dickens
Well !@#$% put it back and get back to reading "Ubik"
Fuck!
You shouldn't be reading either DeLillo or Dick. They are both depressing. I suggest one of my favorite science ficion/fantasy books, "Goodnight Moon."
Quoting Goodnight Moon
For a special treat, you can listen to Christopher Walken's reading:
Edit: what is depressing about PKD? I don't get it.
To me some are, some aren't. Ubik is fun, yes, but Now Wait For Last Year which I just read was pretty depressing. Addiction is a huge theme and the main character and his wife absolutely hate each other. So it depends on the novel.
I get that, and agree for some. One recurring theme is a female character that's always cronically physically ill and fatalistic in attitude; it happens in Now Wait and The Divine Invasion, and some others I believe that I can't remember. Those characters tend to depress me, although The Divine Invasion has probably one of his more hopeful endings, weirdly.
This is a conversation we're supposed to have once [hide="Reveal"]Noble Dust[/hide] gets off his ass and finishes "Ubik."
Be that as it may, I don't have a lot of experience with Dick and I hadn't read any in a long time. My memory was that his books were full of unappealing people I don't care about doing uninteresting things in a bleak world. Reading "Ubik" reinforced that prejudice. The ideas examined didn't strike me as particularly insightful or interesting, although I recognize that the kind of writing he pioneered has become much more common. In a sense I guess he invented dystopian fiction, but that's not something I am drawn to.
Dystopian fiction goes back to the nineteenth century and there are several famous examples from the early twentieth century, so I don’t think so.
Otherwise, thank you for attempting to explain your tastes, not an easy thing to do.
Sure, but it seems like now is the golden age of dystopian/apocalyptic books and movies, if "golden" is the right word. There is a sense of doom that permeates popular culture, and I guess society at large. Seems like Dick was in the vanguard. "Blade Runner" is probably the quintessential instance of the genre.
From a certain perspective, maybe he was, since he was influential in the New Wave SF of the sixties, when authors were reacting against the Utopianism of Golden Age SF. But since the nineties, I get the impression there’s been a lot of more or less utopian space opera. I don’t really read that stuff though (Banks, Reynolds, Hamilton, Vinge, etc.)
As I said, I'm not a fan of Dick, but many people seem to think highly of his writing. I was thinking of "Foundation" and how I loved it when I was a kid, but when I reread it recently found it to be poorly written and boring. I can still feel the impact Asimov's ideas had on me, but I don't think I would enjoy it if I read it for the first time now. I guess I was trying to grant Dick that same benefit of the doubt.
Speaking of "Foundation," it's amazing to me the first story was written in 1942.
Once we get to know you better, we'll playfully tease you about getting your books at Dollar General, but for now, welcome to the forum.
Think I’ve found a new favorite author to binge on.
A masterpiece! you will love it.
A difficult question to answer because my selection is personal and maybe some would disagree with me. I have read 14 books by Murakami and I consider as the best:
Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 (in the Spanish edition these come together in the same book). They are the first novels written by him. Fantastic, full of imagination. Concise and elegant.
Novelist as vocation. Murakami writes essays often. This one is an important book to understand him better. Nevertheless, what I learned afterwards is that the key to success and life is humility.
Second (and final, for a while) reading The True Intellectual System of the Universe by Ralph Cudworth
I have skimmed the essays a bit and have read one essay of his not directly related to physics per se, but related to the topic of "realism".
My own view is that his output tends to be more helpful to the moderately advanced student than to a lay educated audience. However, ymmv.
Letters to the Time/Space of Fond Memories, Kenzaburo Oe.
by Thomas Hardy
I think you're allowed to think for yourself that it's good.
I haven't started it yet. I haven't read Auster; Jamal and I have discussed him, I believe he's a fan, if I remember correctly.
According to the records, as of three years ago, Jamal has read Mr Vertigo, Leviathan, Moon Palace, and a couple of others. If he's read that many it should be clear that he thinks Auster is good, and Oracle Night is good by Austerian standards, so I can say with a high degree of confidence that you're allowed to think Oracle Night is good.
Incidentally, something I wrote on the forum after reading the book...
[hide="Reveal"][/hide]
Thank you. With your permission I now feel empowered to think for myself. It's a new day in this noble, dusty corner of the universe.
You misunderstand, I was merely predicting Jamal's sanction.
I refer you to the post above from , because I don’t remember that one very well, though I think I did read it. I have a feeling it’s a less substantial work than the other Austers I’ve read, all of which I remember more.
Quoting praxis
I think this is my list, in order of reading:
The New York Trilogy
Moon Palace
Leviathan
The Book of Illusions
Oracle Night
Mr Vertigo
Except for Mr Vertigo, which I read about 8 or 9 or 6 years ago, I read the others probably between 25 and 19 years ago. They’re all memorable except Oracle Night, which I seem to recall thinking was just doing things he’d done better in the others, but which I also seem to recall quite enjoying. Or maybe it was that one that made me bored with Auster. Or maybe I never read it at all.
I’d be interested to (re)read it.
Loved the way it started simply with a lost cat and gradually branched into a complex story that came together in the end. Loved the rich and beautifully flowing writing.
:groan: fail on my part. Ah well. Free is free.
I am glad that you are enjoying Murakami's wind-up chronicle :up: Yes, it is beautifully written, and it shows the skills of the novelist in developing such a complex story.
Be careful with Noboru Wataya :eyes:
I'm reading Kafka on the Shore next.
And for those not in the know, no, that doesn't mean I'm going to lazily read Kafka on the beach somewhere, although I'm pretty sure that I've done that too.
Wow! you are deep in Murakami's world!
I know that feeling. When you start reading his books, it is impossible to get rid of him.
by Ernst Cassirer
Early Buddhism: What the Buddha Thought by Richard Gombich (a homage, I suppose, to Walpola Rahula’s work What the Buddha Taught; I heard somewhere that Gombich worked closely with Rahula), The Foundations of Buddhism by Rupert Gethin, The Literature of the Personalists of Early Buddhism by Thich Thien Chau (a complex book but mind blowing), and Buddhaghosa’s classic The Path of Purification.
Early Christianity: Rereading The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant by John Dominic Crossan and The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins by Burton Mack (these two books in particular are good analyses of how Christianity got going and make the connection that Hellenistic philosophy was very influential on Jesus and his disciples).
Stoicism: Rereading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (this is perhaps my all time favorite book and I can’t count how many times I’ve read it; If I was stranded on a desert island for the rest of my life with no help coming for me, this is the book I’d keep close).
Article author also has a book on same.
By Steven Pinker.
by Nicolai Hartmann
"Hartmann developed a pluralistic, humanistic realism that attempted to do justice to both the sciences and the humanities. Hartmann may be regarded as the first genuine ontological pluralist of the twentieth century."
Thanks for the link. I read the article but I don't think it adds anything new to our perennial discussions about this subject. What are your thoughts on that?
I said to myself "Ah, a book on epistemology. I think I'll take a look." It's not about epistemology.
Hah! Nope, it is not.
I normally leave a small comment when I'm reading non-fiction.
by Giovanni Boccaccio
Re-reading:
Tales of the Quantum by Art Hobson
@Tom Storm Tom, you asked me a few months ago what were the best Murakami's books. I replied with a two novels and one essay, but now I must update it because the essay that I am currently reading is a masterpiece.
The book is about the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack. Between February and December 1996, Murakami works as a journalist and asks a few questions to the victims. He even went to the trial of the terrorists too. He did this with the aim to help the victims and their families to get more respect and recognition, because the press was treating them badly...
The testimonial of the victims and the talent of Murakami to transcribe it all, makes this essay very worthy to read. :up:
Over halfway through Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Heard this one is great. Been on my To-Read for a while.
It's fantastic, the prose is breathtaking at times.
I always wondered how would be to read Don Quixote in other languages. If it is complex in Spanish, I cannot imagine in English or Japanese. It may be the same thought when Ulysses is read in a foreign language, as well as Genji Monogatari, and so on.
Translators have made it possible for us to read novels from all over the world.
I also heard it will ruin you. Curious.
Just finished it and the answer is yes.
A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai
Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer
The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz
The Outsiders S.E. Hinton
Crave by Tracy Wolfee
Crush by Tracy Wolfee
What A Life Can Be by Carolynn Dobbins, PhD.
Life and Death by Stephanie Meyer
When You Were Mine by Rebecca Serle
Experiencing and Overcoming Schizoaffective Disorder by Steve Colori
Schizoaffective Disorder Simplified by Martine Daniel
Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege
Nice. You read others by him?
by Karl Popper
Just finished The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz. He's a real talent!
It sounds so interesting! How is it? Do you like it?
I read two of his short books In the Miso Soup and Audition, both were quite good and strange, though perhaps Miso Soup was a bit better.
This one looks to be the best one yet of the short ones.
But frankly, they pale in comparison to his big books, especially his Coin Locker Babies, which is a real masterpiece of mayhem and craziness, crackling fun and imaginative.
His From the Fatherland with Love, was good, but a bit too long and too much about politics, so it can become quite a slog.
I don't know why he is not more popular, nor why they don't release his more of his long books (if he has more, which I'd think he should, but am certain.)
Overall, however, he is great and if you like weird and violent material, he is a must read. If you get squeamish about blood and the like, then it would be better to skip him.
Those sections of the book are mostly history - "I remember this guy doing this while I was a Bell Labs. I didn't like this guy because he was a jerk." I'm reading a very similar book right now too - "What is Real" by Adam Becker. Most of the writing is about how Bohr and his Copenhagen squeezed out Bohm and Everett and their non-standard views on quantum mechanics. It's also similar to Heisenberg's autobiography "Physics and Beyond." Again, lots of he said this, he did that. Some getting the last word in old grudges.
I guess I'm tired of it. I want to hear about the science, not the personalities. To be fair, all the books are well written and interesting, just not enough science. I'll put in a plug for my favorite scientific biography - "Subtle is the Lord" by Pais about Einstein. It has a lot of the personal and social history too, but it's kept in separate sections. The technical sections are all science and they are hard. You have to work at them. Very well written by someone who knew Einstein in the early 50s at Princeton when he, Pais, was a young man.
Sure! Anytime. :victory:
by Émile Durkheim
I looked it up. Sounds like it might be a bit harrowing. Let us know.
Sure, I will :)
I've covered one-third of the book. Harrowing indeed. But the storytelling is very inviting. It's hard to put it down. You should try it.
I'll put it on my list, but I generally don't do well with harrowing.
The work is early in comparison to later discussions found in academia. I am finding it very helpful because it presents his distinctions as they occurred to him.
It has always surprised? confused? me how often the Treaty of Westphalia is referenced (blamed?), 375 years later, in relation to current international relations. Let us know what you think when you're done.
I have had CPRs translated by Norman Kemp Smith and Max Muller. For the first time managed acquire a copy of CPR translated by Meiklejohn. It is a translation for the 2nd Edition of CPR.
I am not a big fan of noir novels, but all the people are recommending me this book. Let's see...
Isn't Mishima a noir character? Shakespearian? A dark, brooding, ambiguous figure?
Bellicism - The policy or practice of resorting to war even when it is not necessary and is avoidable.
You've taught me a new word. Thanks.
@Jamal - I have a vague memory you've read this one, what did you think of it?
Quoting T Clark
Yeh it’s good to have an -ism for it, to oppose to pacifism, but most often the more common bellicosity is probably better.
"Bellicosity" means you're an asshole, "Bellicism" means you're an asshole on principle.
"Bellendism" has similar connotations.
The only references I found for it on Google were to your post.
Another new word. One it is unlikely I will ever use except here or on the Shoutbox.
It's not just the density of bellends, it's also the density of Limeys, Scots, and Irishmen.
Exposing the poverty of the online imagination? :chin:
Quoting T Clark
Well, there's just one Irish I know of--me, so I'm fully dense, I suppose. @Jamal, having @fdrake as company, is mercifully only half dense.
Is there a proper single term for people from Great Britain and Ireland as a group?
The most convenient term is the people of the Anglo-Celtic North Atlantic Archipelago.
Why didn't I think of that. [joke] I think I'll just call you all "Limeys." Is that ok?[/joke]
Correctimundo.
by Samuel R. Delany
The book was very interesting and certainly worth a read. While the book's main thrust is to revaluate the Treaty of Westphalia's historical relevancy in modern International Relations in contrast to the (then?) dominate theories of IR, primarily Neorealism and Constructivism, Teschke goes beyond the Baroque period, analyzing Feudal and Absolutist modes of production and property relation in order to establish the Treaty of Westphalia as a outcome of continental European Absolutism, i.e. pre-modern. Modernity, or rather the modernizing process of IR, according to Teschke, begins with the uneven and combined development of the nascent agrarian capitalist Britain as it struggles with continental European powers. In addition to critiquing Neorealism and Constructivism, Teschke examines theories of Capitalist origin and development, siding with Political Marxism, which at the time of publication was at the apex of it's orthodoxy. He does a very good job of outlining Political Marxist viewpoints and contrasting them with World-Systems Theory, and the former's relationship with alternative International Theories. However, here Teschke, as with other Political Marxists (e.g. Wood, Brenner), falls into the theoretical limitations and historical narrowness of Political Marxism, as expounded by Neil Davidson, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu et. al. Certainly well worth reading.
My book is in English, or Irish English specifically (IrE), and I bought it in Dublin. Warm and nostalgic memories. By the way, it is time to make a break from Japanese folks. Maybe for a month, if I am able to bear it.
Interesting. Thanks for the summary. That historical period in Europe is really interesting - everything is going on at once - the 30 year's war, the English civil war, Shakespeare, Newton, the effects of the Protestant Reformation and Guttenberg's printing press, colonization of the world.
I’m in the middle of 1Q84. It's quite a long book, almost as long as War & Peace. Consistently good though, like every other Murakami book that I've read, which so far includes The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, Killing Commendatore, and What I Talk about When I Talk about Running.
I was only a little disappointed with Kafka on the Shore because it seemed almost geared towards an adolescent audience.
Looking forward to his new book coming out in English.
On the other hand, I fully recommend you to read Underground. What a fantastic essay on 1995 terrorist attacks on the Tokyo metro. He even interviewed some members of the sect, very worth reading.
I am looking forward to his new work being translated too! Do you know that Murakami comes to Spain because he was awarded with a royal prize? I wish I could go to Asturias (Northern Spain) to see him as a big fan. But I will not be able to do so... I am always busy! :confused:
I was curious so I googled it. It looks incredible. I don’t know how I managed to live in Spain and not know anything about the region. I must go some day.
PS. I’ve read 1Q84, the only Murakami I’ve read. I have things to say about it but I won’t while praxis is enjoying it.
Quoting Pantagruel
What do you think? Here’s what I thought (but I’d avoid reading this review if you haven’t finished it)…
First I liked it, then I disliked it, and finally I liked it a lot. It’s a really odd book, not in a “weird fiction” way or because it’s unconventional, but in the way it manages to (or attempts to) be both conventional and unconventional, to be pulpy Golden Age SF while at the same time transcending or parodying that genre. Or maybe the word is appropriating: it appropriates SF tropes to explore wider questions about storytelling, art, language, and culture, and also to take the genre away from its white American traditions (Delany is American but his Earth locations and future cultures are not—only the antagonists represent the WASP aristocracy).
But if you focus mainly on the plot it sometimes feels like a contrived, hokey pulp adventure, with shallow characters, bad dialogue, and a dash of made-up physics. I think that’s why I was in two minds about it, until the metanarrative came to the fore in the last act. Which is not to say that the last act is the best or that the preceding stuff is all bad, just that it made me reassess the whole book following my hasty negative assessment when I was in the middle.
In its far-future world-building, it has some great ideas. Some of the most interesting:
Beyond those purely science fiction ideas, Delany also uses his characters to comment on the novel itself (that is, Nova) and to explore his own artistic personality. The battle between the hero and villain is paralleled by a metanarrative conflict between two other characters, one, Katin, who is writing a novel, and another, “the Mouse”, who is a kind of musician or multisensory entertainer. Katin is an intellectual concerned with permanent artistic legacy, and the Mouse is only interested in moving people sensually and in the moment. This has the effect of creating a two-sided novel, with action on one side and commentary on the other, formally revolving around the idea of the Grail narrative and themes of revolution and rebirth.
The writing itself, I was again in two minds about. It’s slapdash and yet full of energy, confusing yet sometimes stunningly effective and original. The flashback sections set in Istanbul, Paris, and Athens, are immensely involving and evocative, but at other times I couldn’t keep track of exactly what was happening, who was standing where, what kind of place the characters were in, why he just said that, etc. I put this down to Delany’s youthful exuberance (he wrote it in his twenties) and sloppiness rather than my inability to read experimental literature, but I could be wrong—or it could be both.
Some of the dialogue seems awkward, the subject-object-verb dialect of the Pleiades can be annoying and unconvincing (and unfortunately now brings to mind Yoda), the antagonist is an unrealistic camp villain, and exposition is dumped on the reader in an unsubtle way. But focusing on these criticisms is probably to miss the point: it’s not a realist novel (although it does have excellent realist sections, such as the party in Paris) so much as a playful meta-romp. I particularly appreciated the way that the metanarrative aspect of the novel, rather than dropping away in the final denouement as you might expect from the shape of the plot and the conventions of popular fiction, actually ramps up towards the end.
Close to the end, the character Katin says something that might be straight from young Delany himself:
In summary: :100: :confused: :starstruck: :nerd: :cool:
Currently reading Triton by Samuel R. Delany.
The North of Spain tends to go unnoticed, and I don't know why. Maybe it is their "bad" weather (it is rainy and cloudy most of the time, so it is not likeable for tourists which are looking for sunny Mediterranean beaches). I hope you can go there one day. I think you would like it, as well as Cantabria, their brothers. Santander, Pola de Siero, Avilés, etc. are top cities, but underrated by the public in general.
Quoting Jamal
I know that 1Q84 is not your cup of tea. But, trust me when I say that Murakami has books which are worth reading.
I dream of doing a cycle tour around the region over a period of weeks.
You must be right about the reasons it isn’t a popular travel destination. The Mediterranean is pretty special and the cold rough Atlantic is no good for beach holidays. The wet weather, of course, is the reason it’s so green and beautiful.
Quoting javi2541997
I did like parts of it, so I haven’t given up on Murakami entirely.
One of the things in it that will stick with me is that she actually experienced misogyny based on her failures in dating, as in she became prejudiced - from time to time - against women based on how they treated her male persona. It's going to stick with me because it's an amazing demonstration that developing a personal prejudice is still a broadly structural phenomenon.
Noam Chomsky
Yes. Sounds very illuminating. It's very hard to escape social context.
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Chomsky & Me by Bev Stohl
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
Playwrights, one of the best of this literary genre.
Just finished it. Totally great. Better than Nova. Not exactly difficult to read—on the contrary, it’s great fun, even though the prose is … nuts—but quite difficult to get a grip on, because the ideas, themes, and explorations (social, sexual, political, psychological, metafictional, and “metalogical”) are multilayered and go off in all directions.
A clue to how mad it is is that the book as a whole, Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (a reference to Le Guin's Dispossessed), actually consists of the main narrative novel, called “Triton: Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part One,” and two integral appendices, one of which is entitled “ASHIMA SLADE AND THE HARBIN-Y LECTURES: Some Informal Remarks toward the Modular Calculus, Part Two.”
A re-read might be required before I review it properly. For now: a tragicomic Foucault-inspired science fiction work of brilliance about a miserable guy who doesn’t realize he’s an asshole. A+.
———
I recently read Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, supposedly a work of sophisticated eldritch fantasy. Abandoned it half way through. D-.
Oh?
I hesitate to share my opinion while you’re still digesting a book you enjoyed. That can be a real drag.
But ok, we’re all grown-ups here. Here’s what I said when I read it:
Quoting Jamal
My estimation of it has gone way down since then.
None of the characters were particularly interesting, or novel anyway, if you’re familiar with Murakami’s work. They’re very similar to characters in some of his other books, and in fact the character of Ushikawa is in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
I think there’s some truth to the idea that a person can get stuck in an alternate world or a cat town and it takes some kind of ordeal to escape.
by Thomas Nagel
Catriona: Being Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour at Home and Abroad
by Robert Louis Stevenson
A great book elucidating Hegel's system.
Quoting Jamal
Then I started reading it all over again. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before.
Coming up next…
Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To…
Olga Ravn, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century
Anna Kavan, Ice
Jody Scott, Passing for Human
David Ohle, Motorman
Stanis?aw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
I recently noticed that Naomi Klein had published a new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which centres around her experience of being mistaken for Naomi Wolf for many years, something that began to cause her a lot of trouble as Wolf descended towards batshit crazy. I’m quite curious about it, because for years I’ve avoided Klein’s books, like No Logo, on the basis of this very mistake.
:up: Let me know what you think.
I'm sure that someone must have.
by John Dewey
by Lao Tzu
by H.P. Lovecraft
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=jane+mcdonnell&lg_topic=libgen&open=0&view=simple&res=25&phrase=1&column=def
Perhaps man-made IP violations are simply aberrations of the mind-math matrix of reality that birthed them. :brow:
:cheer:
:cheer:
I said I don’t remember it, not that I didn’t like it.
Quoting Noble Dust
:zip:
Aha; my memory is famously bad.
Quoting Jamal
Let's all put it behind us, eh? And by us I mean me. Sorry mate, for being a dick. I said it before. Feel like we're still there. My fault.
Ok ND, I agree to be friends with you again, on condition you never mention my geographical location.
British (is that the biggest umbrella? Can't remember) humor, I cannot read. I can hear it, though.
Btw, I don't know your geographical location, but I have a few educated guesses.*waits for banishment*
Ok, I’ll try responding again, this time earnestly: thanks ND and it’s all cool :cool:
Scottish, Welsh, and English people are all British, but only one of the three groups is English.
Earnestly, @Jamal: Thank you for this.
Jokingly: "it's all cool". What the hell kind of phrase is that?
Are the English people the English people?
That’s one of the defining characteristics, yes.
At my new job, people aren't very forthcoming. I have to dig for info. I'm kind of burnt out on that whole digging thing.
EDIT: It’s either that I’m bad at conversation and thus find it hard to follow what you are saying, or you’ve had too much wine and are beginning to spout gibberish. Either way, it’s all cool, as they say.
https://psyche.co/ideas/learning-to-be-a-loser-a-philosophers-case-for-doing-nothing?utm_source=Psyche+Magazine&utm_campaign=78d8097442-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_06_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-a9a3bdf830-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&fbclid=IwAR3cNftEpT4EMUxsrNGL5tokEGxsPY6vgQdmDvVzK-qJWTgnLLW7h9rEQv8
:death: :flower:
If It helps at all, the Irish people are the Irish people except when they're the British people, which most of them are most definitely not and even less so English. Most of the British people who are Irish people have no such issues though, including the English who are Irish.
Reminds me of Fahrenheit 451.
by Edgar Allan Poe
I like that one.
:up:
I really like this reflection from the opening:
I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess....
Suggests that the truth of events is so complex that we are essentially always "fictionalizing" in order to represent reality.
:up:
Seems to be saying that although what he writes is true, he can't give it verisimilitude. I don't know if he goes on to conclude that he has to fill in the gaps of memory with his inventions, or it's just Poe's narrative trick of saying "you're not going to believe this but I swear it's true."
manufacturing credibility
Massive props to you dude. That book, after it very rough first 240 pages, just goes nuts. Utterly crazy, fun and brilliant!
Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy
By Zeev Maoz
by H. G. Wells
Seems that H.G. Wells wrote a lot of futurist social commentary. I love digging for gems.
edit: Well, fudge that. Impossible to get a usable kindle edition of the collected works. The man just wrote too much I guess.
this instead
Island Nights' Entertainments
by Robert Louis Stevenson
by William James
Wing-Tsit Chan, Translator
Pre-Confucianism to Neo-Rationalism. Should be...enlightening.
My least favorite Murakami so far.
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Robert Sapolsky
Strong argument against free will.
Just got my sweaty paws on Paul Auster's new book Baumgartner.
I admit that it is not one of his best works, but I think it is emotional how both friends get along. They don't have brothers, and in that period and the social context of Japan, it was very rare, so they were considered 'freaks'. It is lovely how they become friends listening to Nat King Cole: 'Pretend you are happy when you are not, it is not so hard to do
But, it is sad how some people who are important in your childhood end up disappearing because of random causes. For example, because of changing the school or house. And then, you no longer see them no more. When I was a kid, I experienced a similar situation to this story. I was friends with a girl in my class who didn't have siblings, like me. We became very good friends the first day playing Pokemon. But one day, their parents decided to go to Gran Canaria to start a new business, and I never saw her again in my life. I remember her name: Alejandra. I wonder if she remembers me as well, and I guess this is what Murakami wanted to tell in this novel with its respective characters.
On the other hand, it is important to note that this book is a 'spin-off' from 'the wind-up bird chronicle'. Murakami decided to write it in another novel about those characters when he corrected the draft of 'the wind-up bird chronicle'.
:smile:
"Lookin' good, but feelin' bad is mighty hard to do" Fats Waller
E.E. "Doc" Smith
The book is divided into three parts i.e. Scepticism in the ancient Greek times, Humes' Scepticism and Kant's Scepticism. It is clearly written, and looks at the methodologies and details of the Scepticisms from different angles, which is interesting.
H.P. Lovecraft
Though I like to think I understand well where it comes from and why it is the way it is; to a modern reader like me, it feels sluggish at times (catalogue of ships!) and I hate when the plot is interrupted by a needless metaphor like when the sailor seeing the island from afar has to take a detour to avoid his ship from sinking into the sand bank that separates the great ocean from the shore.
Institutio Oratoria by Quintilianus.
I am in for the grammar and philology, but I guess I will take the pedagogy as well.
by H.P. Lovecraft
The process by which the continuing debate may correspond to a literal continuum on which the issue could be appraised and narrowed down to manageable levels of approximation.
Any takers in a cognitive default along the lines of Kurtzwell et. al. , toward the archetypical, all inclusive phenomenal unity between apprehension of sense and ‘ non-sense’ (representation)?
Yes.
I would recommend
Unhinged by Vera Valentine, which is smut starring a lady and her apartment's front door. Followed by Plowed By The Pumpkin King by Juno Delight, which is what it says on the tin.
“… as Matthew exclaims, :
But it really happened” ( behind the green door)
Finally somebody's put some monster erotica in this thread.
Well, I was intrigued, so I found the cover:
That one was awful. Unhinged had no right to be as good as it was (it was still bad).
by Terrence W. Deacon
I wouldn't normally grab a fantasy title blind, but my brother (an unpublished fantasy/sci-fi author with an agent) not only recommended this, but bought it for me as a birthday gift. So far it's...a fantasy novel. I'm placing complete trust in my brother, and I do trust him, although our tastes aren't 100% aligned. It did win a Hugo.
Finished yesterday, quite the trip, in the hallucinatory sense.
A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Mark Tessler
Very much so, it's just crazy all over. Those last 150 pages or so, were very, very tough and I probably missed over 60-70% of the references, but, still, a good challenge.
:up:
by Oscar Wilde
Ibsen
Was lucky enough to see Glenda Jackson in it !
Finished Rethinking Commonsense Psychology by Ratcliffe in addition to a couple of his papers that exemplify the method he champions in that book. I want to make a thread about the chicken joke!
The last chapter is particularly lucid, such a succinct presentation of the uneasy bedfellows [some species of] naturalism and [some species of] phenomenology make.
The overall project he has is fascinating. A form of eliminativism toward folk psychology that attempts to refine our understanding of social/psychological categories using a phenomenology of the everyday? Yes please. That he manages to articulate that methodology without asserting any kind of primacy to phenomenology is also very impressive, considering the sources he's drawing from.
That line of argument starkly reveals how impoverished propositional+sentential attitudes are in explaining why and how people do what they do. And especially how people feel. They don't touch the conceptual content of the folk psychology ideas they presuppose, and cannot.
The critical part of the book I enjoyed most was him being both sympathetic to, and strongly undermining, Dennett's heterophenomenology concept. He sees that Dennett's intentional stance is not a personal relation toward another - it's toward their experiences and reports from the third person, not toward a "you". This thus doesn't allow an appropriate encounter with what people are concerned with, or how people really think about what they concern.
That said, the papers I read from him, while insightful, seem to be pulling the same trick. It's a good trick, but it's the same trick. The trick is temporalising a (social or affective) state to distribute it over a history of situations and future of development - eg the looking at the conceptual content of the assertions "It hasn't settled in" and "I don't believe it" in various circumstances. A drinking game for those papers would be "sip every time Ratcliffe uses the phrase "significant life possibilities"". That body of work has a delicious, for the forum, encounter between OLP type analysis and phenomenology that I want to explore.
I will be reading more from him. His book Experiences of Depression is my next philosophy read.
Excellent. Fosse is not disappointing me and after nearly finishing the first short story of this trilogy, I am very pleased and happy. I understand better now why he considers silence an important part of his literature. I recommend this book to you, @Metaphysician Undercover. It has 160 pages, and it is written in a special method which I had never read until I discovered this author. For example:
[i]My father left, Alida said.
I don’t have siblings, said.
I know you have a sister, said.
Yes, I have a sister and her name is Oline, Asle said
I don’t like her, said.
They remain silent, and they don’t say anything more.[/i]
And there are more dialogues similar to the one above where silence is key between Asle and Alida (the main characters), but because I always lack expressing myself correctly, I can’t really explain the beauty of them using just pauses and a silence.
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Collingwood and the reform of metaphysics;: A study in the philosophy of mind
by Lionel Rubinoff
The latter was a bookstore find. It's an impressive tome, with such provocative chapters as "The Essay as a response to logical positivism" and "Metaphysics as a dialectical history of errors."
Since I won't be finishing those this year, here's my 2023 reading summary, grouped by fiction/non-fiction and author
Non-Fiction
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff
The Birth of Tragedy: from the Spirit of Music by Friedrich Nietzsche
Feuerbach: The Roots of Socialist Philosophy by Friedrich Engels
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century by Howard Bloom
1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jurgen Habermas
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze
Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties by Gilles Deleuze
The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel by Eduardo Mendieta
Theory of Society, Volume 1 (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Niklas Luhmann
Theory of Society, Volume 2 (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Niklas Luhmann
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
Oration on the Dignity of Man by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language by Ernst Cassirer
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thought by Ernst Cassirer
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 3: Phenomenology of Cognition by Ernst Cassirer
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms by Ernst Cassirer
Ontology: Laying the Foundations by Nicolai Hartmann
The poverty of historicism by Karl Popper
Suicide: A Study in Sociology by Emile Durkheim
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky
Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel
Essays in Experimental Logic by John Dewey
Pragmatism by William James
A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy by Wing-Tsit Chan
Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence W. Deacon
Fiction
Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1) by Marcel Proust
Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2) by Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3) by Marcel Proust
Sodom and Gomorrah (In Search of Lost Time, #4) by Marcel Proust
The Captive & The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5) by Marcel Proust
Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time, #6) by Marcel Proust
A Princess of Mars (Barsoom, #1) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Gods of Mars (Barsoom #2) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Warlord of Mars (Barsoom, #3) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Triplanetary (Lensman, #1) by E.E. "Doc" Smith
First Lensman (Lensman, #2) by E.E. "Doc" Smith
Galactic Patrol (Lensman, #3) by E.E. "Doc" Smith
Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Nova by Samuel R. Delany
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson
Island nights entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction by H.P. Lovecraft
Intentions by Oscar Wilde
Plotinus by Eyjolfur K. Emilsson
Reading:
The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino
I read this one! How did you become interested in Plotinus?
As I am working on Cudworth's philosophy, I found that he frequently cited Plotinus in favor of his views and I found such views very interesting.
So, I got this book originally for Kindle, but wanted a paper back for closer study, it's very good.
Ulysses by James Joyce, the fisting scene specifically.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
I read it a few years ago. Very good.
Process and Reality - Alfred North-Whitehead.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Quite an interesting book mixing Kant, Heisenberg and Borges to explore the limits of human understanding.
Title based on a wonderful quote by Borges:
"Enchanted by its rigour, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigour of chess masters, not of angels”
"Encantada por su rigor, la humanidad olvida y torna a olvidar que es un rigor de ajedrecistas, no de ángeles.”
Thank you for the Q&A.
Seneca's Letters from a Stoic.
by R.G. Collingwood
Edgar Rice Burroughs
in tandem with
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated) (Series Five Book 24) Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.
Dostoevsky
Do you mean Notes From Underground? A seminal text for me.
Finished. Jamal scores it 11/10.
Now reading Passing for Human by Jody Scott.
Thank you, that is helpful to know. :up:
Yes , must have been a slip, for it is the first existential work I came across, without knowing it was that. Read it at 16 years of age way back
Again, guarantee to script blue, it truly is an ‘existential errand for me,
Don't worry! They'll cook it and feed it to the masses.
“ Don't worry! They'll cook it and feed it to the masses.”
Or promise pearly gates fed to pigs
The Chinese masses are turning middle-class. There's a threat in that that Chinese communism never had to deal with. They have a learning curve ahead of them. But for now their economy is tanking. The immediate significance of that to me is that the Aussie dollar is dropping relative to all other currencies.
by Thomas Hardy
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Redemption-Philipp-Mainl%C3%A4nder/dp/0645498076/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Q1S6IHXRFSEX&keywords=the+philosophy+of+redemption&qid=1705765531&s=books&sprefix=the+philosophy+of+redepmption%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C184&sr=1-1
:victory:
Jack Kerouac
Have you read his short stories "MS. Found in a Bottle," and "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," written a few years before the novel? I've just read them and noticed that they both touch on the Hollow Earth theory, which is alluded to in the novel too, as I recall. Contrary to those critics who claim that Poe was just doing satire in these adventure stories, I reckon he was really into these theories.
I've been on the fence about reading 100 years for a while now but it's obviously a must read. I think it's in the wife's library....
I was the same. Glad I went for it.
:up:
Hermeneutics and the Study of History
Wilhelm Dilthey
I cannot highly enough recommend Collingwood's Speculum Mentis to anyone interested in the philosophy of the concrete mind. It exemplifies how an original text is not reducible to a synopsis.
Uncanny, haunting, and disorientating. Recommended.
Oh so is an infrequent morning fog. Come on, give us a little more than that. Why are you a better or different person, at least, how has your mind or perspective on the world around you progressed or at least changed based on what you've read?
Thank you for your interest. If I wrote a review it would not be about me: not about the progress of my mind or my perspective, not about whether I have been improved by the experience, etc. There’s probably plenty of that stuff on Goodreads and YouTube.
Sorry to be an elitist dickhead :grin:
Actually I don’t think it’s necessarily elitist to expect a book review to be about the book rather than about the reviewer.
Not only an attempt to translate as literally as possible but a system of notation to uncover the details and structure of the Hebrew text. It sounds great read aloud.
Interesting. I had to click a long way into the kindle preview before getting to see some of the text....
Yes, there is a training session at the beginning. The upside to that is the system is easily retained when reading the text.
Just bought an audiobook copy. Always been a sucker for Kafkaesque stories.
:up:
It's maybe a little Austeresque too, certainly his more ambiguous and confusing stuff. Also reminded me of The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.
I came across an interesting observation recently, that asked, if everything is behaviourism, then what exactly is it the behaviourists are doing?
Interesting. I can't think of a single book that has changed me like this. The notion of being a better person or progressing in some way seems very quaint to me. Is this how you judge books?
It's how I judge the works of those with a message worth sharing and perhaps encouraging and naturally later enforcing (though that hardly happens), yes. Not every work is of such value it transcends the genre of entertainment. Nor should there be. But generally speaking yes, the best forms of entertainment are those that manage to do so after the medium (paper or filmography) has ceased. That shouldn't be so abnormal a concept. Why is it to you?
I'm not saying it is abnormal. I just don't think that way. My favorite books are celebrations of language and ideas and are aesthetically pleasing to me. No tome has 'improved' me. Perhaps deep down there are incremental renovations to my psyche that this or that book has contributed to, but nothing sticks out. However I can think of some non-fiction books that have abraded me - Nemesis on Hitler and In the Court of the Red Tsar on Stalin.
I picked up a secondhand hardback copy in mint condition at a beachside book shop when travelling a few weeks ago and I've been reading it...a most powerfully evocative work!
I am motivated to read some more of his work, so I'll put Suttree at the top of the list on account of your recommendation. :smile:
8,5/10
Excellent novel. It surprised me the big differences between the different Arab countries. From Egypt to Lebanon. A good plot constructed with despair and a sense of drama because of the bad luck of living in the wrong time at the wrong moment. I admit that I was very ignorant regarding Arab culture, but this book just opened my eyes.
Life Is Elsewhere, Milan Kundera.
It is my first time reading Kundera. Let's see...
Also been slowly reading the full One Thousand and One Nights
It was really annoying so I abandoned it.
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
Finished. Score: 4.2/5. Susanna Clarke must have been influenced by it when she wrote Piranesi.
Next:
Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Gray Lensman (Lensman #4)
by E.E. "Doc" Smith
10/10. A very good and well written novel.
I am happy about the discovery of Milan Kundera. A great Czech writer. My parents have three or four books by him, so I already know what I will do the next time I visit them.
Currently reading:
Melancholia, Jon Fosse.
The haw lantern, Seamus Heaney. This collection of poems is very Irish. It reminds me of the green plains, cloudy sky, the waves beneath me, and you, my Irish friend. @Baden :flower:
“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
I have another in the collection:
The disappearing island.
Once we presumed to found ourselves for good
Between its blue hills and those sandless shores. Where we spent our desperate night in prayer and vigil,
Once we had gathered driftwood, made a hearth and hung our cauldron like a firmament,
The island broke beneath us like a wave.
The land sustaining us seemed to hold firm
Only when we embraced it in extremis
All I believe that happened there was a vision.
:flower:
To me it's like a parable of climate change, but maybe more likely connects with social conflict in Ireland. Great imagery anyway.
Exactly. It is considered correct this way of see it, because Seamus Heaney explained in an interview that 'The haw lantern' is a symbol of the dignity of the Northern Irish in the face of violence and trouble, and offering a small piece of light and hope in the darkness. :flower:
So, yes he was referring to The Troubles...
Nice, javi. And I know the drive he means. I did it last year. It's the burren coast where you're between the ocean and the rocky landscape he describes.
Quoting javi2541997
:up:
Quoting Baden
:cry:
My mistake. However, I do think javi's point about climate change is perspicacious and should not be overlooked. :nerd:
¡Recórcholis!
Still working through this. A Doozy if ever there was one.
Are you enjoying?
His use of 'novelty' as a force for creativity in 'concrescence' is pretty fascinating to me, if a little shaky.
It was a bad idea to get into this immediately after CPR, though. It upends much of the CPR in terms of conclusions, so difficult for someone fairly new to this stuff. On the other hand, glad to get the toughest stuff out hte way first.
I think i might go to Cicero or Seneca next :lol:
by E.E. "Doc" Smith
by Émile Durkheim
Such an amazing book. If ethics was going to be taught in schools (and it really should be), I would put this up there with Aristotle.
It's very similar to Saint Augustine, who does an excellent job fusing Plato and Aristotle in his ethics, but manages to be far more concise while also being far less ostentatiously religious (a pro for modern audiences). That and the back and forth of poetry and dialogue is really great.
The only weak part is his framing of the absence theory of evil, which is not particularly convincing.
Also been reading the Analects. There is some interesting similarities to Aristotle in Confucius. MacIntyre's After Virtue sold me on the idea that modern ethics is fundementally flawed, but he largely looks back at the Western, particularly the Aristotlean tradition. I wanted to explore the Platonist/Patristic tradition more (Boethius) and that of China, since they also seem to avoid the fall into emotivism and excessive individualism MacIntyre describes re the moderns.
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Currently reading parts of Parfit's Reasons & Persons for school.
9.5/10.
Excellent. Fosse never disappoints. A novel charged with a big, deep sense of loss and understanding of a great (but mental sick) artist such as Lars Hetervig.
Currently reading: All the Names, José Saramago.
My first time reading Saramago. He seems to be both interesting and original. I wish I knew more about Portuguese literature and writers.
@Deleted user. Thoughts on Saramago?
Yesterday I got a copy of Saramago's The Cave. I don't know when I'll get around to reading it.
Quoting javi2541997
I'm intrigued by the premise.
José, the main character, has an interesting hobby: he collects news from famous people in Portugal. But to give them reliability, he decides to complete them with the data of the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, where he currently works. He decides to steal the records cards with the aim of 'collecting' them with news from famous people. One day, José steals the card of an 'unknown' woman and becomes obsessed with finding her around the city.
My dad gave me this book as a present because he knows I have a similar hobby of collecting data from public registries.
I am now an apprentice of land registry... so it is time to read the book. :smile:
Let us know what it's like.
Maybe I read some of him a long time ago, I can't remember anything nowadays however. But he was a laureate of the Camões prize, which is really big.
Sounds promising. I was put off reading it by the crappy film.
They made a film out of it?! That would be like making a movie out of Metamorphosis.
The consensus seems to be that they missed what made the book great.
Quite good, actually.
8/10.
I liked the book. Above all, the writing style of Saramago. Original and interesting. The soliloquy of the main character was an endless but subtle paragraph.
Currently reading: Art, Yasmina Reza.
A funny and comical play about the debate between three friends on the conception of art.
by Alex M. Vikoulov
The Arabian Nights
Husain Haddawy (Translator)
by Émile Durkheim
Getting into Death, a collection of stories by Thomas M. Disch. The one called “The Asian Shore” is top tier. Check it out.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, a post-apocalyptic SF novel written in its own unique dialect.
Super-Cannes by J. G. Ballard. Ballardian creepiness on the French Riviera.
Hothouse by Brian Aldiss. I read it in my teens; time for a reread.
Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy, edited by Matt Rosen, an open access book you can download freely online. It’s “an anthology of essays from contemporary philosophers, artists, theorists, and writers working, broadly speaking, at the crossroads of speculative philosophy and speculative horror.”
Multicultural Dynamics and the Ends of History : Exploring Kant, Hegel, and Marx by Real Fillion, which is an attempt to rehabilitate speculative philosophy of history and “rearticulate a sense of the movement of history as a developmental whole,” with its own dynamics and telos.
Time and Free Will by Henri Bergson. Starts well:
I love rereading books. It makes me feel a sweet nostalgic vibe.
Currently reading: The Tunnel, Ernesto Sábato. A classic of Argentine literature. A novel of gorgeous existentialism and a sense of despair.
The interesting thing to me is how different they seem at different ages. I’ve read Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess three times. The first two times, in my twenties and thirties, I thought it was exciting and fun. The last time, in my forties, I found it sad and disturbing.
Quoting javi2541997
I’ve added it to my list. Argentina has been good to me so far with fiction.
Exactly. In addition, when you read a novel again, some details which were hidden can be perceived, or you can read it with more confidence. I experienced this reading Kawabata. When I was a noob regarding Japanese culture, I was lost in the novels of this author. Later on, and after reaching respectable knowledge of Japanese culture, I started to have another sensation by rereading his books again.
Quoting Jamal
Very nice! This book was on the shelves of my father's office because he loves Borges. So, I think you would like Sábato.
by Nicolai Hartmann
Plodding, plot-driven, prurient, old-fashioned in a certain upper middle class colonial English kind of way, and incredibly boring. I don’t know why I keep going back to Ballard. Well, I’ll be sure to stay away from his later stuff from now on.
I just started that too. First time for me.
Crash is more uncompromising and better executed than Super-Cannes, and I found it intellectually stimulating, though I can’t say I liked it. Same goes for The Unlimited Dream Company: it’s repetitive and boring, but it’s interesting in that it’s fantastical and celebratory while also apocalyptic.
I once listened to the audiobook of Concrete Island but fell asleep. From what I recall its plot and style were exactly what I expected.
But I can recommend his short story collections, The Disaster Area, and Vermillion Sands.
In your face Joe.
The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is so effective it’s a wonder nobody has thought of it before.
Joe’s such a loser!
Don't judge me...
Wayyy too late. You hath been judged :razz:
Read it ten or more years ago. The only line I remember is when the guy says to the girl, "But no shit, ok."
Or maybe that was Cocaine Nights. * Shrug *
:meh:
Interesting. How do you like it?
• A Fire Upon The Deep
• "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" (essay, 1993)
10/10.Excellent. I really enjoyed this book. Sábato had a great talent at developing the psychological behaviour of the characters. Juan Pablo Castel is the name of the main character. He is an artist, and well... he suffers from his own fantasies, dreams and the heavy sense of hopelessness.
Currently reading: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce.
Then I will read Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter to King Manuel.
Have you also read A Deepness in the Sky?
I had greatly enjoyed A Fire Upon the Deep and then I had enjoyed A Deepness in the Sky even more. Now that I'm older the neoliberal/libertarian overtones in both book would annoy me but I was politically naïve when I read those books and they had struck me only as being anti-totalitarian. Purely from the sci-fi/narrative perspective, Vinge's novels are outstanding. The Peace War is pretty good as well.
Yes. I usually reread only the first book (or, alternately, just one other book) in a series. I'll probably reread Peace War too. Overall Vinge's novels are quite good, especially his more speculative ideas.
A Portuguese poet of the Renaissance. Interesting. I think he also wrote in Castilian.
It's quite good. It's nice to dip into from time to time. You have to really sit with each aphorism. I find it similar to my Rumi's collected works in a lot of ways — a lot of short, deep poems.
I am not totally sure where they come from though. I have read The Book of Divine Consolation and most of the Penguin collected works, and it seems like the aphorisms are being pulled from various places. This is good and bad. On the one hand, I really do appreciate them this way. On the other, you do lose some context.
I've seen New Age Eckharts, Perennialist Eckharts, Gnostic Eckharts, and even Buddhist Eckharts in many cases. But I do think these take him out of context. The sermons all focus on the Bible. Often the aphorisms don't seem to be trying to challenge Christian orthodoxy at all, but rather they try to get you to look at their simple principles in a new and deeper light. So, there is a sense where it seems easy for people to "invent their own Eckhart," if this is all they read. And that would be a shame because he is a pretty unique thinker, and in many ways a philosopher with a deep systematic view alongside being a mystagogue.
by Robert Louis Stevenson
"This book is the synthesis of, on the one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated with probabilistic outcomes and, on the other, the aesthetically obsessed, literature-loving human being willing to be fooled by any form of nonsense that is polished, refined, original, and tasteful. I am not capable of avoiding being the fool of randomness; what I can do is confine it to where it brings some aesthetic gratification."
by John Rogers Searle
Beginning a foray into social ontology for the next few books....
But then his ultimate view of extension and motion is quite different. Extension in time and space is finitude. God, rather than being boundless extension, sublates extension — the Myriad (all number/multiplicity) returns to and rests in the Monad (one/unity). Von Balthasar's book on Maximus is quite good and gets into some interesting philosophy of number/multiplicity in Gregory of Nysa, Pseudo-Dionysus, and Maximus.
This reminds me of Whitehead's distinction between the drive to "live/survive" and to "live well" in "The Function of Reason."
by E.E. "Doc" Smith
by David Smart (2023)
Quoting Jamal
Just finished it. It’s fascinating but difficult. I have a feeling that some of the difficulty is down to what seems to me like a not-so-great translation. The novel is very Russian and I think there’s a lot being lost; I could see the sharp sardonic force of the book only dimly through the clunky English rendering. Certain idioms and styles of humour are rendered awkwardly.
The result is that much of the time it’s difficult to get what the brothers are doing and saying. I’m comfortable with anti-mimetic modernism, with the surreal, the psychologically internal, and the inconclusive; the trouble here was that given the context of SF world-building, I was never quite sure of the status of the irruptions of surrealism, such as the chess game in the Building and Andrei’s speech to the statues. I didn’t know how to take it—were these in fact irruptions, or were they mere intensifications of an already unreal reality?
Anyway, it’s a rich and brilliant novel and I could be wrong about the translation. Reflection is allowing me to develop an understanding of it, but I’ll have to reread it.
I agree completely about the English rendering. I have been wishing I could read Russian from the first chapter. It is difficult to access the purely objective descriptions but the dialogues, both inner and outer, are very stilted, like translating one generation's slang into another.
Quoting Jamal
I am still underway in the novel. I will think about that element before commenting.
I think some passages are translated beautifully, like Katzman’s monologue about the temple of culture near the end, but yeah, the dialogue is really stilted sometimes.
Quoting Paine
:up:
????????? ? ????????????, Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye
Jesus! Why is the Russian language that difficult?
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (RIP)
Pretty much the center of imaginary intellects. I love the book and the Tarkovsky movie.
Aquinas commenting on the silly ideas of a bygone error in the Summa Contra Gentiles. Funny how ideas go in and out of fashion.
Flows like honey.
Lelio, or Friendship, also by Cicero.
by Alexander Wendt
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Quoting Jamal
How did you get on with it? It's an extraordinary book, I thought, but hard going in all its self-reflexive cleverness. It's like someone on the spectrum, with a gift for wordplay, has just let rip.
Curiously when I read TC Boyles' Water Music (the only one of his I like... really like) I was reminded of Barth. This is a ball tearer of a book (as they used to say in Aussie journalism).
It’s lined up and ready to go; I’ll report back when I get around to reading it. I tried a few pages and liked it. A bit like Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon but easier to get into.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs,
10/10. Excellent. Dostoevsky never disappoints me. This time, the synopsis is about ethical dilemmas which are around familiar crises. Curiously, Dostoevsky didn't refer to religious themes in this novel. I can say the plot is 'secular' if we compare it with other of his works.
Currently reading: The Fratricides, Nikos Kazantzakis.
I think of the difference between the religious and the psychological as a dynamic that plays different roles in different novels. When comparing The Idiot to The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, the differences collide but never resolve into a single measure of experience. The psychological, by itself, does not have all of the same problems.
Yet a common topic I find about Dostoevsky is familiar issues. He also puts orphans in his novels. Smerdiakov - an illegitimate son - in The Brothers Karamazov and Nelly (Ieliena) in Injured and Insulted, etc.
I guess this is due to the culture of Russia and one of the basic points of Christianity (which is the family).
Remembering Daniel Dennett 1942-2024 (whom I had the honor of meeting after public lectures in 1987 (Boston) and 1994 (Minneapolis)), I'm rereading ...
• [i]Darwin's Dangerous Idea
• Mind's I[/i] (w/ D. Hofstadter)
• [i]Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
• Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse Engineer the Mind[/i]
... for now.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
:up:
Wow. Only read 15 pages so far, but damn was Chomsky not joking when he said that Kant's ideas were very much articulated, by the Cambridge Platonists.
Awesome stuff, will update when finished.
by John Rogers Searle
by H.G. Wells
@Wayfarer Thoughts? I remember you recommended me to read Watts when we had exchanges about the spirit, soul, struggling with religious faith, etc.
The preface of the book is great. It gives me high expectations of the work of this author.
Dune - Frank Herbert
:up: :grin:
Patrick Hoverstadt
I've either been looking forward to or dreading this book. Subtitled "33 Systems Laws and Principles and How to Think like a Systems Thinker" it will be demanding I'm sure. My other alternative is taking another stab at Process and Reality, which is also in the dreaded anticipation category. So the lesser of two evils?
I have read a review in 'Good Reads' and the book seems very interesting. Most of the readers agree that it is a well written book and a nice introduction to a guide on 'thinking patterns'.
Well! Let us know what you think after reading it, and thanks for bringing it up in this thread.
This is why 'currently reading' is one of my favourite threads. I can discover new interesting books.
:up:
by John Ruskin
Inferno by Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi translation. Beautiful, poetic, and informative.
Sadistic horror written by a philosophy PhD. The plot is a rogue philosophy prof literalising thought experiments on willing or coerced subjects. Think it'd give some of you lot a chuckle.
I fully enjoyed Alan Watts' work. It is well written, and for a non-native speaker like me, it is an easy reading to follow. Thanks @Wayfarer for introducing me to this author. I look forward to reading another book by him later on.
Currently reading: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.
Definitely not suitable as an introduction to systems theory. What it does is excavate a comprehensive set of laws that govern systems behaviours and illustrate their role in applied systems methodologies. However you do need a good grounding in systems concepts going into it. Non-linear dynamics is frequently referenced, but not explained. In a sense, the book highlights how the failure of certain types of thought amounts to the existence of cognitive biases, for which the laws of systems thinking are the remedies.
by Alfred North Whitehead
I expect this will take a while....
Understood. Thank you for taking your time reading the book and providing a review for me. I appreciate it, Pantagruel.
It also has some good coverage of John of Sythopolis (a major early commentator on St. Denis) and St. Denis himself.
Here are some of the pages on number if anyone is interested.
https://ibb.co/q11kHL1
https://ibb.co/4ZDhbyK
https://ibb.co/Hgcb9xh
https://ibb.co/XjYYFbk
https://ibb.co/SnZyd5P
https://ibb.co/MgnKntN
Maximus would famously have his tongue cut out and his writing hand lopped off for refusing to recant on his core ideas, so we're lucky that so much of his writing has survived for us. I believe he is the last thinker of the East to be considered a "Doctor of the Church," by the Latin Church.
That's something that has always fascinated me. I'll take a look.
There is nothing like coming back to Murakami after a while. Do you still read some of his works, @praxis?
Yes, currently one of his short story collections also, South of the Border, West of the Sun. I like his novels much better so far. Just checked and his new book will be available on November 19th.
As we have discussed previously, I also like Murakami, but it always takes an act of will to get me to start a new one. The way he writes and the things he evokes are just so different from what I'm used to. Those Japanese. Don't get me started on their movies.
by H.G. Wells
So far this is light hearted and hilarious, I really don't trust it. But it's great.
Yes. Never trust Cormac McCarthy. He is ruthless with both his characters and his readers.
Yes. Blood Meridian is my favourite novel. As of recently. I've never been so affected by fiction.
I've been interested in the Mongol's since I was a boy. Nearly finished with the book. The first third focuses mostly on the origins of the Mongol Empire via Chinggis Khan but then the narrative shifts primarily towards the Jochi Ulus (the Golden Horde) and the socio-economic impact and development it had on the world.
The thing that fascinates me is how big an impact they had on the history of Europe and China and how little we hear about them.
Yes, and not only Europe and China. Their invasions in Western Asia (formerly “the Middle East”) had a massive impact. Most famously, the Siege of Baghdad brought the Abbasid Caliphate to an end. As noted in that Wikipedia article, it’s a common view across Muslim cultures that the Mongol conquest caused the Islamic Golden Age to end, hence the subsequent decline of the Islamic world in comparison with Europe.
You just sent me on a 30 minute Wikipedia walk through Mongol and Turkic history in central and western Asia.
You're welcome.
I finally finished Solaris. I was half bored, half fascinated. I absolutely loved the fictional history of Solaristics (the scientific study of the planet Solaris), and the incredible chapter called “Monsters,” a brilliant flight of the imagination describing the mysterious observed phenomena of the planet (mimoids, symmetriads, dendromountains, etc). But everything that happened in the station—the focus of the film adaptation(s)—was a bit tedious. I’ll read it again, because it’s a (thematically) big book that exceeds my grasp, but I admired it more than loved it, although I loved it sometimes. Translation issues were apparent once again, even though I read the newer translation.
Just started The Sot-Weed Factor. Beautifully written, overflowing with ideas, and very enjoyable indeed.
A short illustrated novel, an excellent mix of cosmic horror and speculative biology. The prose isn't particularly artful - it evokes plaques on museum walls in zoology exhibits - but that in itself is very evocative.
Someone has made a comic based on it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/126pky7/rise_of_tomorrows_comic_based_on_the_book_all/
Very pretty. My favourites were the Modulars.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/aliens/images/4/48/Modular_People_All_Tomorrows.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20171023061528[/img]
And the Mantelopes.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/aliens/images/d/db/Mantelope.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20230311102713
Thinking Being: An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric D Perl.
by H.G. Wells
The BBCode to enter italics on the mobile version is:
Welcome to TPF, Jafar.
Don’t miss Greek literature! :smile:
Favourite quote so far:
Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Naf?s.
Favourite quote so far:
(Also, if anyone has a PDF copy of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, please message me!)
by Mario Bunge
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Vacaciones en el Cáucaso, María Iordanidu.
Again, don't miss Greek literature! It's pure and beautiful.
by Thomas Hardy
It is a polemic which I admit sympathy to before beginning but deals with texts and historical factors I am not familiar with. It seems to be headed toward questioning my understanding of Gnosticism.
Indian Buddhist Philosophy by Amber Carpenter
I recently finished this book. Pretty thick going, as expected. It covers Buddhist philosophy up to approximately the 8th century. It presents different views on many philosophical problems and even introduces a few new ones. Satisfying overall.
Select Discourses by John Smith. Some good stuff wrt innate ideas and a little bit on things in themselves.
Clavis Universalis by Arthur Collier. An actual idealist, rational instead of empirical (Berkeley). Some good arguments whose form anticipates Kant's antinomies. Besides that, really unconvincing and rather boring.
Reading:
Scepsis Scientifica... An Essay of the Vanity of Dogmatizing by Joseph Glanvill
Tooks a break from Richard Burthogge's Philosophical Writings but will now continue. Close to finishing him. It's a crime he is not much better known. A mix of Locke and Kant, genius even.
After your recommendation, I downloaded this book, but I haven't read much of it yet. I started in on the essay you listed, but I got a bit lost. I'll go back and work on it some more. I also downloaded "Causality and Modern Science," which I am currently reading. As I noted, causality is a subject that I've thought and written about a lot. I'm enjoying it so far - clear and well written, or at least well-translated.
:up:
Personally, I'm especially interested in the concept of causality qua instrumentality, and the instantiation of knowledge in the physical form of tools.
My interest is primarily ontological, i.e. by what metaphysical mechanisms does the world operate.
I'll get back to you when I've read more of both books.
Completely unmissable for all thinking people. For two decades I've been trying to understand what is going on in US society - it's toxic food, poor healthcare and incomprehensible foreign policy - and this book explains most of it. , . .
by John Dewey
Dewey never fails to satisfy, like a cool drink of water on a hot day.
Aside from the philosophical arguments it covers the paucity of scriptural evidence for infernalism, amounting to just Matthew 25:46 and some heavily symbolic language in Revelation. This is set against the fact that language suggestive of universal redemption: "all," "the entire cosmos," "every" etc. shows up in all four Gospels, most of the Epistles, and Revaluation, often in very explicit terms. There is also a good deal of annhilationist language (although significantly less than universalist).
In general, the arguments are made very well. The only one that seems weak is the claim that the blessed in heaven would have to be so radically changed not to mind that their loved ones were in Hell as to have become completely new people (and thus it really wouldn't be "them" getting beatified). This is a fine point to make, but it cuts both ways. A true monster like the BTK killer would have to be so radically changed to be saintly as to also have been entirely stripped of their personality. Perhaps this could be proffered as the explanation of the annhilationist language though—there is plenty to suggest that salvation is not a binary.
Finally, he covers how infernalism was virtually absent from the early church and failed to take root in precisely the places where the texts could be read in their native language.
I was impressed by the prose and reasoning so I got his "You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature." This one is much more scholarly and is dealing more with highly philosophical issues. It includes a really good paper on Nicolas of Cusa, and another on classical aesthetics. I am not super familiar with Orthodox philosophy (he is Orthodox) at any advanced level, but a lot of what he lays out is quite consistent with the Catholic tradition.
Been meaning to pick this book up. I've read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the past when I was younger but honestly I didn't get too much out of that book. So people have recommended me to start reading the other books by Nietzsche then give TSZ another shot.
After I finish up that book and before I continue my Nietzsche study I will be picking up Classical Cynicism: A Critical Study by Luis Navia. Been really wanting to study more of the ancient philosophy of Cynicism and Stoicism.
Thank you. I am very happy to be here! If you or anyone on this thread have any book recommendations on any subject of philosophy or various subjects that you enjoy I will gladly take any recommendations. I’m very open into understanding and learning any subject matter.
The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.
Hidden by the Leaves by Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan by Inaz? Nitobe
Spamming your OP is not allowed. :roll: We talk about books and literary recommendations in this thread.
In philosophy people seem to talk mostly about Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil. And in my opinion a great way of approaching those two is to read The Gay Science (or the Joyous Science in a recent translation), which is brilliant and enjoyable.
Thank you, I've been meaning to pick that one up. I will look into reading that one first.
Quoting I like sushi
Appreciate that I will give that a look today.
Appreciate the help!
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm at page 545 of nearly 800, and still loving it. It's a masterful parody, a technical tour de force, beautifully and transparently written. It's convincing and involving and brilliant.The basic experience is of reading an 18th picaresque novel, not remotely like reading other books labelled as postmodern. If it's self-reflexively clever it's in the same way that, say, Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy are.
On the other hand, it's not an 18th century novel, but a late 20th century one, and that makes it something else, something of an oddity.
It's made me realise that some of what's been called postmodernism is a sort of reactionary reaction to modernism—a traditionalist return to the art of storytelling. It's a masterpiece in my opinion, but would be much easier to digest if I didn't know it was so modern; this fact turns it into something else (the important reference here is the Borges story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in which an author faithfully reproduces Don Quixote but in doing so produces an entirely different thing, since it has been produced in a different time and by a different person).
Despite the similar setting and language it's not at all like Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, which is postmodern in subject matter while maintaining the period veneer: Barth isn't willing to mix in conspiracy theories, science fiction, and esoterica—he sticks faithfully to literary tradition, as if in an effort to be comprehensively and performatively anachronistic.
With 200 pages to go I'm getting tired of the convoluted plot, but there's always an adventure, a hilarious mishap, or a fascinating discussion around the next page.
by Charles Dickens
One quality about the "Joyous science" that differs from the other works is the sense of freedom to do something different. The works before and after picture change as a struggle with other views. This work is a claim for his land, unoccupied by others.
How does it compare to M&D (aside from the differences with po-mo) in terms of entertainment and fun factor?
I was born in Easton, Maryland and grew up on the Eastern Shore and in nearby Delaware. My grandfather's farm was on the Chesapeake Bay about six miles north of the mouth of the Choptank River near Cambridge. Looking south from the shore, I could see land in the location where Cooke's farm was located, although I didn't know it at the time.
All that being said, I've never been able to get through more than a few chapters of the book. Maybe I should try again.
Interesting and probably true. I don't have a recent enough memory to be certain. But I did think of Barth a lot when I read Cervantes. I found Barth extraordinary but hard going, in as much as it just never lets up: layer upon layer of prodigious syntactical brilliance. I guess for many people the book is so dense and lengthy that unless you really love the playfulness of this absurd tale, you will probably become exhausted. For my taste, it might have been better (easier on my brain) cut by a third. In some ways, TC Boyle's Water Music is that book for me. That said, there's little quesion that Barth is a genius.
It’s equally entertaining and fun, I’d say, but it’s a difficult comparison. It’s less wacky/goofy/hippy stoner than M&D, but also more consistent: it feels more like an adventure story than M&D, so I guess it’s more entertaining from that point of view; and it’s much easier to read than M&D and contains far fewer obscure references—which makes it both more fun and less fun, if you see what I mean.
It also has a lot more sexual and scatological humour than M&D (“But say, thou’rt all beshit”).
But it’s not all low humour and adventure fiction: it also contains long (but also entertaining) discussions on diverse interesting topics, and a profusion of penetrating insights, and the writing is incredibly good.
Quoting T Clark
Cool! Reading the novel has prompted me to spend hours exploring the region in Google Maps. I’d never heard of many of the names, like Choptank, and though of course I’d heard of Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay, I knew nothing of their geography and history (beyond what I’d gleaned from Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon).
The characters in the book are — among other things — tracking down fragments of a journal from the late 17th century. One part of this old explorer’s journal reads as follows:
When I read things like this I have to go on the internet and have a look at these places.
Late in the book, Ebenezer, who from the beginning has been attempting to fulfill his role as Poet Laureate of Maryland, has to amend his earlier rosy view of the place following a string of unfortunate events:
So I’m glad to now be able to place you culturally.
Quoting Tom Storm
Looks interesting.
Nice way of putting it :up:
In particular, the relationship between Ebenezer and his manservant Bertrand owes a lot to the Don Quixote-Sancho Panza double act.
Thanks!
One of the reasons I like Kindle so much is that I can link directly to Wikipedia and GoogleEarth. It's become almost automatic. I often find myself going off on tangents. I love it.
Quoting Jamal
The Choptank and the Susquehanna are my two favorite rivers. We crossed the Choptank on the way from my childhood home in southern Delaware to my grandfather's farm. The house I grew up in is a couple of hundred feet from the Nanticoke River, which is still tidewater there, 30 miles from the bay. It was not unusual for me to lose my shoes or boots in the mudflats and there was always danger when we used our sleds because our favorite hill, the only thing even close to a hill in flat southern Delaware, there was always danger of missing the turn and ending up in the water.
It has had a big impact on my understanding of the Tao Te Ching. Whose translation are you using?
https://archive.org/details/KantsDoctrineOfTheAPrioriInTheLightOfContemporaryBiologyKonradLorenz
I need to read it a couple more times. Then, maybe I'll start a thread.
Cool. On Aggression was excellent; this looks fascinating.
by Sextus Empiricus
Yes. I've been using an iPad to read books and it's been great for that. However, a few weeks ago I propped it against the window to play music while I was cooking a chicken Madras, but then forgot I'd put it there and opened the window, and it fell out and got smashed up.
Since then I've been reading the old-fashioned way, and it's been really good. No distracting rabbit holes.
Quoting T Clark
I'm getting nostalgic and I wasn't even there.
Kazantzakis once said that if he were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he would only accept it if he could share it with Sikelianos.
I hadn't heard of them. I took a quick look. Let me know how you liked it. I see it includes all 33 chapters, which is good. I actually liked the so-called outer and miscellaneous chapters better than the first seven. Maybe I'll start a thread about it if anyone is interested.
by Charles Sanders Peirce
@praxis @T Clark et all Murakami fans.
His most recent book is fantastic. It is indescribable his talent to express a sweet sense of melancholy through his characters and places. I think Murakami is sentimental and nostalgic, and so am I. That’s why I like him so much. I can’t even express with words why I 'miss’ the characters of this novel and the ‘city’.
It may seem odd, yet when I read Murakami, this is the classic stimulus I grasp…
:up: Can't wait to get my paws on it.
A noble soul. Rare nowadays, but being Greek it doesn't surprise me.
I agree. Greeks are humble and loyal. God bless Kazantzakis and the souls of our Hellenic and Mediterranean brothers!
Well, I found out it's based on the 16th century classic of Chinese literature, Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, which became popular throughout Asia. It was translated into English in abridged form under the title Monkey. I'll read that some time soon.
Currently Mercury by Anna Kavan, which, depending on who you listen to, is a first draft or alternative telling or rejected version of the story that was published as the more famous novel Ice.
Apart from Monkey I have the following to read soon:
Born from an egg on a mountaintop. :cool:
Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so he knew ev'ry tree
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three
[hide="Reveal"]Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier![/hide]
I posted more in the Lounge's 'What are you listening to' thread:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/920232
Audio books sometimes get a raw deal but I'm now a frustrated reader and really appreciate the different ways into a book. YouTube included.
Some time ago, following recommendations, I bought 3 of Pratchett's books [*] but never opened them. Part of my problem is that there are too many to choose from and there are different series. I worry that I need to read them in order but apparently this isn't the case?
[*]
The Colour of Magic.
Going Postal
Night Watch
Anyone read these, any or all of of Pratchett? Thoughts?
Yes, I enjoyed them in the 1980's. Made in the late 1970's. Ended up reading the original stories. They are similar. I could never work out why the monk was a beautiful Japanese fashion model (dead at 27 in the mid 1980's). Perhaps it was a bit like Peter Pan, being played by women in the manner of British pantomime. Piggsy was my favorite.
I'm glad you liked it. It has meant a lot to me.
Yeah, that was baffling to me too. I think that just added to the mystery.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think I like Monkey himself most of all; his arrogance is endearing. But I do find Pigsy to be the most relatable character, since he prioritizes sex, food, and booze.
Quoting Tom Storm
Worth reading, would you say?
Yes. Even if it's just for the curiosity factor. I read the Arthur Waley translation from the 1940's. There may be better versions.
Quoting Amity
I'm quite disappointed not to have any response. Not even a ''Nah, he's rubbish!"
Once upon a time, I remember reading that Pratchett was someone's favourite philosopher (@Banno ?) and wondering why? What is it about his writing that makes him a philosopher? His use of language?
:up: Yeah that's probably the one I'll read too.
I had vague and tantalizing memories of this book from the first time I read it, as a teenager. I've just read it again and that memory has been replaced by the mundane reality: it's good for the first 75 pages, then pretty bad.
I never got around to, the reviews are mixed. Is it actually good or just pop philosophy? Is it really good pop philosophy if so?
I'd read of him but never ventured forth into his amazing world. Right now, it seems to be what I need.
Quoting Wayfaring
Will do, Wayfaring, and Welcome! I'd given up hope of a response. Thanks :smile:
by Tobias Smollett
A Norton Critical Edition I happened across. Includes a critical essay by Sir Walter Scott I'll probably read first.
The prologue was written by Gorki. I don't know to what extent this is important and I don't usually read the prologues of books unless they were written by the authors themselves.
I hate to judge a book by its cover but that one is very nice.
I almost believed that Martin Van De Something was a real name. I searched on Google for the title of the book, and it appeared a guy called Marc Van De Mieroop. It makes me wonder if you actually referred to the latter, but you didn't remember the name or you randomly posted a title of a book – and the name of the author – without knowing whether it exists or not.
Yeah, that is the one.
by Fernand Braudel
The C.S. Peirce collection was edifying. From the perspective of a voracious intellect, Peirce consistently demarcates the different spheres of scientific, logical, and metaphysical inquiry:
the scientific man...ardently desires to have his present, provisional beliefs (and all his beliefs are merely provisional) swept away (312)
the conclusions of science make no pretense to being more than probable (326)
Metaphysics [is] an observational science (313)
that which has been inconceivable today has often turned out to be indisputable on the morrow (332)
Peirce also suggests that there is an overarching kind of reason that encompasses the totality of our experiences, something that is neither reducible nor amenable to scientific expression. For me, this is a fundamental truism.
Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The first was the subject of all sorts of superlatives by T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis, which is how it caught my eye on some algorithm derived list of recommendations. The plot revolves around an esoteric group's actions, which result in Platonic forms, such as the form of the lion, "breaking lose" and roaming the English countryside. One character, obviously a stand in for reducing knowledge to utility, is a scholar focused on the connections between the Pythagorean's and Abelard, who only thinks of her work in terms of career advancement. I looked up her name out of curiosity and it's the name of the woman who was converted by St. Paul with Dionysus the Areopagite (of Pseudo-Dionysus game) in Acts, which sort of gives you an idea of the allegorical flavor of the book. But despite this the fantasy elements come through quite well, it's an interesting book.
The latter is also quite good. I had always written Lewis off on account of mostly seeing him as a children's author and due to his association with Evangelical devotionals (which reprint snippets of his work quite often). But I've quickly come around on him. The Abolition of Man for instance is a wonderful essay, and the guy knows his classics and medieval philosophy/literature through and through.
Out of the Silent Planet is not hard sci-fi. I think it's probably more enjoyable if you go in realizing one of Lewis's big inspirations is Seneca's Platonist myth of Scipio ascending into the heavens in a vision the night before his final showdown with Hannibal and the forces of Carthage (plus Calcidius' commentary). It's a bit of fantasy sci-fi. The story gets moving quickly and the plot is propulsive. Prose is pretty good too.
Also, currently Audible has most of the Oxford "A Very Short Introduction to..." tiles for free (with a membership). I have generally found these to be quite high quality. They get great people, Floridi for information (although I didn't love this one TBH), Scruton for beauty, etc.
They cover a topic in about 4-6 hours or 80-120 pages. The one on objectivity is very good. The one on continental philosophy too. The one on post-modernism is a bit too broad, and the one on post-structuralism managed to be less substantial despite having a tighter focus. The one on Wittgenstein (originally its own book by Grayling) and the one on Heidegger are both good. The one on Aristotle is pretty weak.
I've read both. Charles Williams is a bizarre character; my favorites of his novels are Descent Into Hell and The Greater Trumps. They all have a similar flavor though. But if you enjoyed The Place Of The Lion, I'd recommend those two.
I first read Out Of The Silent Planet as a kid, so it has a special place in my heart. It's kind of a blatant ripoff of A Voyage To Arcturus by David Lindsay, which I'm pretty sure Lewis freely admitted. Where Linday's novel is almost Gnostic in it's philosophy, Lewis I think deliberately took a similar story structure and replaced the arcane and "blasphemous" elements with something more palatable and Christian. Anyway, I do love both novels, but Arcturus is the more memorable to me because of it's bizarre otherworldliness. The writing is terrible, but it's utterly unforgettable. Also recommended. Lindsay has a few other very weird and terribly written novels that will either leave you cold or get you fiendishly obsessed for awhile (the latter happened to me).
I read this when I was a kid and really liked it. I read it again more recently and was less impressed. Still it’s my favorite title of any book ever.
I'll have to check those out. Fantasy can be very hot or miss like that. I'm a big fan of R. Scott Bakker's fantasy novels but I have had a few people I've recommended them to hate them for being too misanthropic and "edgy," which is a fair criticism IMO, it just didn't bother me as much.
It is a great title; there is an Iron Maiden song about it too. Hasn't quite hit the high notes of the Abolition of Man, which mixed a brilliant title with a brilliant essay, but I've enjoyed it so far.
For either of you, there is a somewhat similar book called the Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell that is pretty good. Less of a fantasy book, more purely sci-fi. It is about man's initial contact with two alien species. The first team to make it to the planet is a missionary group, with specialists and a priest.
This has not aged well. Absolutely horrible at times.
Thanks.
I liked Pratchett. I don't read much fantasy, but I found his style and humor appealing. I was introduced to Pratchett by a college buddy who was a big fan. Later I was gifted a set of audiobooks and I would often fall asleep while listening to them in bed :) (not because they are boring, it's just that audiobooks have this effect on me).
The first book in the series is rather unlike the rest in tone and pacing. At that point, he probably didn't anticipate a big success and a long series, so he went all-out. Later books are more measured. Many of the books have reappearing characters and places, so it probably helps to read those in sequence, but it's not essential.
Now reading Carlos Fuentes' "The Death of Artemio Cruz"
I'll be able to say I raised the worm that caught the fish that fed the family. That's how self-sufficient I'll be.
He has some interesting ideas in his Analytics and Physics, but his Big Idea, shown in the Metaphysics ("God" chose to kill himself rather than continue living) section verges on complete embarrassment. His argumentation is paper thin, and I'm surprised he has a few followers...
I had higher hopes for him, but I suppose I'll take out of it a few bits here and there.
I wonder how I managed not to read Pratchett for so very long. Currently, listening to his 'Small Gods', a new recording, courtesy of the Libby app and Penguin: https://www.penguin.co.uk/discworld-in-audio
Narrated by Andrew Serkis - amazing changes of voice/dialect/tone. Om's Liverpudlian? accent made me think of John Lennon and wondered if that was deliberate. I'm enjoying the sense of fun, light and darkness. Also, the wisdom - if only I could keep the words in my head...
Like you, I listen at night. Sometimes falling asleep before my setting of 25 mins! That's fine. :smile:
Quoting SophistiCat
Thanks. I usually would prefer to read in sequence but happy to know it's not needed, given my books already purchased. 'Small Gods' appears to be a stand-alone.
***
I didn't really notice Om's Scouse accent until last night when I laughed out loud at the Q&A dialogue between him and Brutha (his believer). Reading it from my book pp42-47 - it just isn't the same.
Brutha's increasing frustration, anger and horror at the small god Om's (as tortoise) lack of recall as to his powers. Om's accent becoming louder and more incredulous as to the suggestion that he as God was the author of the Book of Creation.
'Brutha put his hand over his mouth in horror.
'Thaff blafhngh!'
'What?'
'I said, that's blasphemy!'
'Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I'm a god!'
'I don't believe you!'
That was an important book for me at one time, but yeah. I see books on psychology as having a shelf life of about 20 years.
The amount of adultery the author committed in their life is not surprising given they give a qualified defence of shagging your own psychotherapy patients after an impassioned essay on commitment being life's meaning.
The phrase "the road less travelled" is from a poem by Robert Frost - "The Road Not Taken." It is ironic that the Peck used this quote because Frost meant it ironically. It is not meant as a paean to a life of non-conformity but rather a wry comment on how we look back on our lives and try to show how we are masters of our fate.
William James, Konrad Lorenz, and even Sigmund Freud still have a lot to tell us, just to name a few. The methods and technology for study have changed, but our minds haven't.
Astute. Very ironic given that much of the book is about self mastery.
I liked this discussion of the poem:
To me the poem suggests recognition of determinism - that many little things make all the difference in the courses of our lives. I think Peck somewhat recognized determinism. And perhaps, that by writing TRLT, he would to some degree determine the course of other people's lives. However, he also had a woo based belief in free will, and yes, using the metaphor from the poem is pretty ironic.
I did not take the passage as a matter of intention. It was more a reporting of a gap. We do stuff and find out later what it brought about. Maybe.
It is not a football game or a throw of dice against a wall. We do not know what it is.
Yes. It's all about the stories we tell rather than what happened. I'm 72. Looking back over the things I've done and that have happened to me, there are no stories to tell. Things just happened. That doesn't mean I'm not responsible for the things I've done, but they don't mean anything.
Quoting wonderer1
I don't think it's about determinism. As I see it, it's just a sly comment on the human need for stories about ourselves.
Quoting wonderer1
Are you saying that free will doesn't exist - that it's somehow a allusion to mysticism or the supernatural? I don't see it that way. Sometimes it makes sense to act as if ours and others' behaviors are the result of outside influences and sometimes it makes sense to act as if we are in control. Free will vs. determinism is a metaphysical issue. Its not about facts - true or false.
Free will doesn't exist in the sense Peck thought it did. That doesn't mean it isn't reasonable to think about what would be a more realistic notion of free will - something along the lines of what Peter Tse is pointing towards with The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation
Quoting T Clark
Sure it makes practical sense, to go with the simplistic modelling of things that our brains generate, including our models of other people. However, I would think it unfortunate, to not be able to see beyond the simplistic modeling, even if only a bit.
Quoting T Clark
All the more reason to take consideration of free will out of the box of metaphysics.
You and I understand metaphysics differently. It's not that we haven't found proof that free will exists or doesn't exist, it's that it is not a question that can be answered empirically.
:up:
This is a topic for a thread. A thread which I have no interest in starting. :razz:
It is a question that has been argued many times here on the forum. I've made my arguments so many times, it's hard to work up any enthusiasm to do it again.
Same here. :wink:
by Daniel Defoe
[Godel, Escher, Bach]
I consider the book an intellectual masterpiece. I've known for a long time that Hofstadter was naive in some of his beliefs about the potential for computation as it was when the book was written. But regardless, Hofstadter provides a lot of valuable tools for thinking about thinking.
Especially valuable (as my 40 year old memory of the book recalls) are Hofstadter's discussion of the importance of being able to flip between reductive and holistic perspectives, and the way he conveys an understanding of emergence.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/915561
I was so impressed by the article I went looking for more information. Lorenz's "Behind the Mirror" is a detailed expansion of the article. It's completely changed the way I think about human and animal behavior and the mind. I was a psychology major in the early 1970s, when this book was written. My first reaction while reading was how could they not have shown this to us, taught this to us. Ethology, the study of animal behavior, gives us a framework, a context, to understand human neurology and psychology. People say that psychology isn't really a science - it has no solid basis in empirical study. Lorenz's and others work provided that basis decades before the techniques of cognitive science were available. This is from the forward.
Lorenz then goes on to describe specific cognitive capabilities in simple organisms and how they evolve into the much more complex capabilities we have today. I think the most compelling idea in the book is there there is a direct continuity between the "cognition" of the earliest animals and the cognition of complex animals such as us.
What is your interpretation of "direct continuity"? I feel there is a "direct continuity" between individual consciousnesses, their socio-cultural encodings, and their subsequent re-encodings (as subsequent individual consciousnesses). Like that?
Anyone got notes?
Lorenz describes animals' "cognitive" capabilities, starting from the most basic, e.g. irritability, kinesis, phobic response, topic response. These foundational capacities are the building blocks for more complex mental processes up to our own. The addition of memory is needed to climb above very basic levels and this calls for a nervous system. Obviously, things become a lot more complicated as you move to the more complex organisms. That's the continuity I was talking about.
Excellent. Thanks to Kundera's novel, I started to see love and time in a different manner. Not in the same pessimistic way as I used to do back in the past.
Currently reading: A History of Eternity by Jorge Luis Borges.
by Marcello Barbieri
I am enjoying Borges' works. I don't understand why it took me too long to start reading him. Maybe he just popped up in my life at the perfect time. Glad that my parents have books of him on their shelves.
If I'm understanding that right, then Lorenz is saying (at least in part) that what is a priori to the individual is a posteriori to the race, or species?
I suspect I'm not using the quote mechanism correctly; I meant to quote T Clark, quoting Lorenz.
Yes, I think that's exactly right.
Quoting Gregory of the Beard of Ockham
In my experience you can't nest a quote within a quote on the forum. Maybe someone else knows how to do it.
Great book. I had some difficulty with it in the beginning: I read the first two or three stories in part one, The Garden of Forking Paths, and thought they were just mildly interesting thought experiments, written in a frustratingly terse manner, so I skipped over the rest and started part two, Artifices. I liked that much more, and when I finished it I went back to part one and for some reason I got on with it much better this time. I guess I had to get used to his writing.
I’ve just read the Republic by Plato, trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Now reading An Introduction to Plato’s Republic by Julia Annas. More than just an introduction, it’s a pretty thorough analysis of the whole work. Recommended.
I had some difficulties reading Borges as well. It is remarkable his vast knowledge on almost everything. However, I feel he expressed himself in a manner that can only be fully comprehended by him. The eternal handicap of gifted!
Quoting javi2541997
I've always been intrigued by translation. I wonder about the difference of your experiences reading it in Spanish as opposed to English.
But, reading literature directly written in English—like James Joyce, John Cheever, Dickens, Shaw, etc.—is a great and fruitful experience. It is hard for me to keep a good 'flow' along the book, but it is not a great handicap. It is obvious that it is better to read Joyce directly in English than in Spanish, because the translators usually 'disrupt' the real sense.
There is a big controversy regarding the accurate translation of One Thousand and One Nights, for example.
Have you ever read a Spanish book and also the English translation? If so, what was the experience like? Did the translation get the original right?
Yes, Gloria Fuertes' poems. She is my favourite poet. She mainly wrote children's poetry, but some poems were more deep and 'for adults'. I also read some of Fuertes' works in English because it was a big surprise for me that she was an important subject of study for American hispanists and other experts in Spanish literature.
Like the poet of my childhood being studied by experts in Hardvard or Yale! Wow!
Quoting T Clark
The experience was actually pretty good. The translators made a good effort to understand madrileño vocabulary. The Spanish poets under the Franco regime—Generation of '50—were awesome but sadly underrated!
Generation of '50
had an influence on...Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger...and was instrumental for Konrad Lorenz's development of ethology.
I'm trying to expand the notion of biosemiotics to embrace the entire material domain, not just the biological (a la Terrence Deacon).
Apokrisis has written a lot about biosemiotics and, based on his recommendations, I've read a couple of articles. I must admit I've never have been able to figure out what it really means - how it manifests in the world. I hadn't heard of Deacon, so I looked him up. Wikipedia says "Deacon's theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at multiple levels...He has long stated an interest in developing a scientific semiotics (particularly biosemiotics) that would contribute to both linguistic theory and cognitive neuroscience."
After reading the Lorenz book we have discussed as well as "What is Life - How Chemistry Becomes Biology" by Addy Pross I have taken a strong interest in evolution as an organizing principle beyond just biology. Both write about evolution as it might apply to different levels of organization - Pross about evolution as a mechanism of abiogenesis and Lorenz about the evolution of societies.
So - is there a connection between biosemiosis and this broader understanding of evolution?
My take is that biosemiosis is essentially the materialization of understanding. So expanding it becomes a kind of self-understanding that embraces and constitutes reality at the deepest levels, through/as the mechanism of semiotic feeback.
by Charles Dickens
Casares was a good friend of Borges, and I discovered him thanks to the latter. My book has a cute little note written in 1988 by Casares explaining the psychology of his characters. What a gentleman, it is hard to find that connection between the writer and readers nowadays. Two years later, in 1990, Casares won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize.
I read The Invention of Morel earlier this year. It's great, and surprising in a way I can't reveal without spoiling the story.
I was actually wondering which of his works to read next, but English translations are not easy to find. Many of them seem to be out of print.
I am back to Saramago. This time, the author tells the story that the King of Portugal gives to Archduke Maximilian an elephant as a wedding present. The elephant's journey starts in Lisbon and has to end in Vienna. If I am not mistaken, @Deleted user was part of the journey. I saw him when they crossed Valladolid.
Edit: more details.
His analytics were quite shaky and dubious.
His physics were ok, some interesting stuff in it.
His metaphysics were pretty bad.
The main bulk of the work, aesthetics and ethics, I did not read, as these aren't my cup of tea, but I can't say if it's good or bad.
It's just my perspective, you could end up liking it and finding it convincing. His aesthetics might be good. If you want to, give it a go. It just didn't live up to the hype in my areas of interest, with some exceptions to be fair.
8/10. A very good novel. Playful language of often Nabokovian precision and inventiveness. Tragic and fun, beautiful and disgusting, compelling and uncomfortable. I might read her other novel.
Looks great. I'm gonna read that in a nebulous soon.
That's exactly when I'm going to read Hegel's Phenomenology.
Interesting first few pages. Pretty much straight into it, eh?
I learned that it is the origin of the popular phrase "the medium is the message" - which is somewhat old at this point, but the more recent meme phrase "human beings are the sex organs of the machine world" is also from this book!
Any idea of the origin of "the medium is the massage"?
Yes. It's from the popular work Loving Hands Are Everywhere: Deferred Touch and the Public Eye, it makes a case that human sensory faculties are dispersed through space and technology through interfaces - phones, computers, doors - and so the principal metaphor for perception and comportment should be tactile rather than visual.
The phrase "the medium is the massage" is the title of the second chapter in that book, a discussion which draws heavily from the notion that touch subjectivises everyone involved an a mingling of sensations. The medium, being our social spaces, are absolutely saturated by signs and thresholds - places we need to get access to. Doors for work, our apartment complex etc. And it makes the point that the distribution of this touch based subjectivising - who counts as a subject and when - is determined by who has the social power to determine access through these interfaces.
Principally, however, that social power is diffuse like an institution's is. Not determined by particular individuals in it. And a massage is conceived of as having an active agent (the masseuse) and a passive agent (the customer). The quote "the medium is the massage" thus connotes the concentration of this subjectivising power along the lines of social power by using the direction of agency in massage, and also that a massage is a medium of touch.
Edit: (I made this up)
A pure feature of Kundera is his unique ambiguity and unbearable feeling of... everything.
The above popular work must have been coterminous with M McLuhan's popularity because the term (.... the massage) was around in the mid 60's and associated with McLuhan.... from personal memories. And was interpreted then as the massively increasing power-to-influence media would have in "massaging" ideas i.e. popular opinion, in a particular 3rd party desired direction. Thereby,forecasting examples of what we now see as social media influencers by its (media's) increasing pervasive presence in the day to day.
Unfortunately, evidence of this is only anecdotal/a schoolchild's sometimes scratchy memory..
self depreciating smile
Sorry, not intending to disagree with or question your erudition. Just sharing a personal memory. Or maybe a brain skip that is now a personal memory.
smile
Oh no worries I made all that shit up.
I was fooled.
Ah, sorry. I edited the post to say it's made up. Turns out all post phenomenological social research dreck seems equally plausible eh.
It was a stellar performance so I'll brook no apologies.
Nice. :clap:
A creative juxtaposition.
The Shortest History of Japan by Lesley Downer
The first sentence of the Introduction: 'The story of Japan begins with a dance.' was a fair hook and bait to continue light reading.
Such beautifully rich writing. Surprising to learn that his work wasn't well received while he was alive.
What Was Neoliberalism: Studies in the Most Recent Phase of Capitalism 1973-2008 by Neil Davidson
He freaked people out. Like hearing Hendrix in the beginning.
Back to Casares and his great and pure style. Thank you, @Jamal, for suggesting this novel to me a month ago.
Quoting Jamal
Let us know what you think of it when you're finished.
Okey-dokey. :up:
So they don’t live happily ever after?
[hide="Full spoilers of ending, also very NSFW content"]Sort of happy. Happier than I expected for the story. It's a manga. Overall story is about intergenerational patterns of child abuse. The main character's incestuous and abusive mother starves herself to death in the main character's flat as he takes care of her out of a mix of duty, guilt and a child's love. The story ends with a time lapse of trauma flashbacks and panels of aged body parts of the main character's face, hands, eye crowsfeet, and a wrinkled half smile. The final three panels consist of him trying to remember his mother's face, and failing, with a relieved expression on his face. [/hide]
I read the first issue online. I don’t think I’ll read anymore. Thanks for the quick summary. A little too creepy for me.
Makes sense. Almost every panel has a palpable sense of wrongness.
[hide=Talking about Blood on the Tracks]I reread the first one and I completely forgot the horror of realising the hand gesture the guy's mum makes to wake the kid up is the same as the one she makes while illustrating touching the dead cat's body, before their inappropriate embrace. It's so fucked up.[/hide]
by H.G. Wells
One of my favorite!
Is it any good? I have liked some of DBH's books, others I found a bit plodding.
Cool. I am on a Latin American streak, currently reading The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso. Will look for this next.
Well, to be honest, I'm finding that he's rehearsing many arguments that I've been having here, so at the moment, early stages, it's a bit ho-hum. I really do like DBH but then I also get the sense he's mainly preaching to the choir a lot of the time. But, I'll persist.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I've also got that massive doorstop of a book. I've never read all of it. I think it's useful to dive in for some themes that he explores - like his idea of 'the buffered self'.
A return to fiction after a long hiatus.
I really think Penguin have done a disservice to Gogol with this cover. It perfectly aligns with the stereotype of Russian literature so often thrown around by people who have read none of it (or have read one or two Dostoevsky novels and feel qualified to speak about the rest). The title, and covers like this, were enough to put me off for a long time.
In fact, Dead Souls is a comic novel, mostly bouncy and light in tone, not ponderous and depressing. The descriptions and similes are exuberantly weird. I particularly liked the apparently undisciplined digressions into irrelevant detail, which would these days be called maximalism. Also fascinating is Gogol's metafictional defence of his own literary style and motivations, within the narration itself. Sometimes it seems that he is writing about writing as much as about the Russian countryside, bureaucracy, hypocrisy, etc.
Ultimately though — and this is where personal taste comes in — I found the sarcasm heavy-handed, the satire obvious, the hyperbole awkward, the characters merely sketched, and the lengthy rhapsodic evocation of "Rus" tedious (even when ironic). This is partly because of the anticlimactic fifty pages of narration after Chichikov has already left town, and partly because much is lost in translation. I expect to come back around to liking it down the line, when I might try a different translation.
I had the virtually same reactions to this breezily sardonic novel a couple of years ago - same edition. I wondered three things - was my ambivalent reaction a cultural matter, a problem of translation or had the bloody thing simply dated?
All of the above I suspect. But I should give it time; I sometimes misjudge a book in its immediate aftermath.
Looks interesting. How is it?
As you can see above, I have mixed feelings about it. I like the Petersburg stories a lot more.
Hey, I resemble that remark.
For the most part, although his book on universalism got some pretty firey criticism from the ol' infernalist crowd :rofl:
I skipped ahead in Taylor's book an I think he makes some very good points about the "authenticity" and "anti-conformist" movements' ultimate failings and co-option by market capitalism, or the essential emptiness at the center of Brooks' "bobos" (bohemian bourgeoisie). I know he is quite old now and probably enjoying retirement, but I do wonder how Taylor looks at the core bobo group, tech workers, increasingly coming to be a vocal element in the alt/nu-right and their embrace of "traditionalism."
You make a good point. I never felt that War and Peace quite fit the mold of "Russian literature," either. Anna Karenina and the Death of Ivan Iylich do more. Master and the Margarita is another one that, while dark in some ways, breaks the "mold" in being quite playful at times.
I am a big fan of Viktor Pelavin, a contemporary Russian author who writes a similarly playful yet serious "magical realism."
Yep.
The bleakest work of Russian literature I've read is probably Life and Fate by Grossman. Or maybe it's harrowing, rather than bleak, since it's fundamentally optimistic and non-nihilistic. Anyway, it's great.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Cool, I hadn't heard of him.
I get why you say it is non-nihilistic but it changed the shape of my nightmares forever.
Dostoevsky can be quite funny. Acerbic, yes, but also just plain funny. Take his Village of Stepanchikovo - his take on Tartuffe (and a dig at Gogol). A minor work, compared to his masterpieces, but a sheer comic delight.
Quoting Jamal
Yeah, whoever picked that painting for the cover clearly had no idea what they were illustrating - just going off "bleak Russian novel" stereotype.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You know who is never funny? Tolstoy. Even the characters and situations that he satirizes just aren't funny. Not that you necessarily miss it in his writing - there's plenty there, even without funny-ha-ha.
Quoting Jamal
I like it, so far (I am a slow reader, so bear with me). It's not a crowd-pleaser, but it's strangely engrossing.
After Watching a couple of movies based on Chandler‘s work, a few months ago I decided to read some of his novels along with some by Dashiell Hammett. I was surprised at how different they were from the movies. Much more convoluted and, I thought, unconvincing plots and uninteresting characters. Maybe you should take that with a grain of salt given that my favorite Chandler movie is the “Long Goodbye” by Robert Altman. That was widely criticized as being far from the standard vision of Philip Marlowe, but it’s one of my all-time favorites.
On somewhat related note, there is a TV show on Netflix right now, “Spade”, that is also a revisionist presentation of Hammetts main character. I only watched one episode, but I thought it was done very well.
It's a magnificent film and, as a revisionist noir, with a twist and directed by a genius, it's hard to ignore. I quite like the world weary Robert Mitcham Farewell My Lovely (done as a period piece 2 years later). I think the books are all about dialogue and mood. The plots are incidental. I just reread The Lady in the Lake and thought it was pretty good. The problem with Chandler is that he did it so well he has been copied continuously since the 1940's and by now the situations and characters are worn out. Hence Elliott Gould in 1973.
For me, Marlowe in the “Long Goodbye” was, in spite of his goofy, sloppy appearance, a man with a fierce moral center. It’s ironic to me that the main character in “Heart of Darkness” was also named Marlow, and also a man of moral strength in a jungle of corruption. I’m sure that’s a coincidence, but I wish it weren’t.
I reviewed it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXRGXX6y-fM&t=2s
It is a very easy read with a few nice little thoughts to play with.
My kind of book!
Quoting Paine
Aye, it's no picnic.
I just finished reading the book. :smile:
My thoughts:
I) The first 20 pages of the book describes the scenario and perception of the ambient with great precision. I like how Casares goes with the rhythm of the music played by the guests —Valencia and Tea for two— and the footsteps in the upper floors. I searched on Internet and I found that these plays influenced writers and artists once, and Herman Hesse also reffered to Valencia while living dreamlike vivid experiences.
II) The woman (Faustine) with the colourful scarf who is sitting on the rocks, watching the sunset. Although I believed in her existence since the first time she appeared in the book, her enigmatic presence puzzled me. I even thought that maybe the protagonist actually dreamt about her, and everything was a product of his imagination.
III) The role and persona of Morel are obscure. I don't attempt to criticise this character, but following the dialogues, it is clear that he has hidden something since the first time he showed up in the story. Like most of the characters, he looks like a shadow reflected in the wall.
IV) When I was getting to the last pages of the book, I came to this conclusion: The museum and people inside it existed once, and due to Morel's invention, they are getting repetitive in an endless grasp of time. They look like a vivid portfolio or photograph. But I highlight that this is not an invention per se; those strange inhabitants of the island were normal people once.
A fantastic and very well written novel. The title is tricky, like The Dream of Heroes. Invention and Dream are used in a metaphorical or rhetorical sense. It is hard to see where the line of dreams and invention actually starts. What is real or a product of our imagination, etc. Casares was a master of this.
Nice.
Quoting javi2541997
Yes. When I read it I thought, why didn't they translate it as "Morel's Invention," since that is the surface meaning. Then I realized it has a double meaning: Morel as he appears has been invented too, in a sense (am I remembering it correctly?).
Yes, you remembered it correctly!
That is a relief.
Now a new favourite author. Very odd and very entertaining. Writing that appears at first to be sloppy but is actually masterful. Fun on multiple levels. Superior to most books you see on top 10 science fiction of all time lists, and maybe could be classified as fabulist literary fiction. Also short enough to read in a day.
EDIT: Also, in a spooky coincidence, there's a scam going on in the novel perpetrated by someone described as a Pavel Ivanovich, a reference to Gogol's Dead Souls.
Pretty good reference book packed with information covering ancient Greece and Rome. Not recommended if you are seeking some fantastical nonsense. It just provides facts.
Why do fantastic themes have to be senseless? Maybe some readers want to read facts and historical events with accuracy, but I would not call the Iliad —for example— a nonsense fantasy tale.