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)
by John Dewey
"Lucan and Cicero said it, it must be true and we need to work it in somewhere."
Here is a particularly poignant passage.
Lewis is a keen observer of the same phenomenon Charles Taylor looks at. Although, I think the move is more bi-polar than they let on. Man becomes the sui generis source of all meaning even as all reality (as opposed to appearance) is shifted over to the "world" side of the ledger and man reduced to a mechanistic automaton from the "perspective of the really real." Kant's attempt to save God and free will by casting them into the noumena at the end of the Prolegomena is a sort of rear-guard action on this front. So, man is aggrandized even as he is abased. He is finally freed by some 20th century thinkers, only to have this freedom debased into vacuous, indeterminant potency.
African literature is unique and pure. Gurnah only focuses on Tanzania and Zanzibar, because these are the places where he was born and raised before moving to London.
I read 'Paradise' the last year and it was outstanding. What I've read thus far, seems to have the same narrative line. A group of helpless young people who had the bad (or good) luck—depending on how we interpret it—of experiencing the beginning of African decolonisation.
I always recommend reading Gurnah. A deserved Nobel laureate and a nice person.
Honoré de Balzac
Richard Murphy
:up:
The effortless grace of it is scary.
One critique: I would not reduce the negation of the negation to Nietzsche's Will to Power. But I could just be misunderstanding too.
It definitely sounds up my ally. I just haven't gotten around to reading the pdf yet is all.
"Up my ally" is what is going to happen to Europe when Trump retakes office.
The fascination also comes from the fact that despite him writing about events that took place thousands of years ago, it still feels very relevant.
What's some good poetry you've been reading?
My rule is basically to try and read two or three different viewpoints on the same subject at the same time to weigh and value the ideas better, and to guard against instilling biases.
I mostly read haiku. But I recommend you give a try to Sikelianos' poetry. A wonderful poet. There is a 1996 edition of selected poems that is pretty good.
I tend to read fiction one book at a time, but non-fiction; generally science, sometimes philosophy; I often read in episodes. If I really want to read a book that is slow going or takes contemplation, I'll read 20 pages a day and then let it sit while I read other things. That way I'm less likely to get discouraged and it lets my thinking about the book percolate while I'm not paying attention.
After Ove's father drank to death, this Norwegian author decided to write a set of novels called 'My Struggle'.
The collection is formed by six novels, but you can start with the one you want. They are not necessarily sorted.
Mostly, the first novel focuses on childhood, the acceptance of the death of his father, family problems, etc.
A great author that I discovered thanks to Jon Fosse.
I have been reading a very good source book for Presocratics. It is a good reference. The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, by Robin Waterfield. Probably the most solid resource I have for the presocratics. No nonsense scholarship.
This might be up your street too:
[i]Diogenes Laertius
Lives of Eminent Philosophers[/i]
an edited translation
edited and translated by Stephen White
Was written sometime in the 3rfd Century CE. Of course, not exactly accurate but being closer to the actual time period it offers some insights into how these early philosophers were regarded at this time.
The Yates one is fairly dry. Bruno is hard to read too. If you read what I suggested first it will either give your the fortitude to read the others or not. Yates was more interested in the history of occultism so it is more or less a historical account of the different systems employed and there relations to more esoteric uses.
I could not get along with this one. Knausgård has the most Norwegian man's narrative voice imaginable. He represents the ancestral urge to escape loneliness by living in the family's country hut in complete isolation.
It is a 500-page book, and I guess I will be able to finish it -- on the other hand, it reminds me of Fosse and the Norwegian type of narrative. I think it took him 10 years to finish this first novel. Wow...
You mean reciting it loudly in Greek? :smile:
Lemme know what you think when you're done please!
I wish it too! I read Greek authors in Spanish. My school taught Greek, but I decided to study geography instead. One of my biggest mistakes in my teenage era.
Quoting fdrake
Righto, mate! :smile:
I read the Republic in German, and sometimes I wonder how German translations of Greek texts compare to the English ones. How is it in Spanish?
Nihil Unbound by Ray Brassier through fully for the first time.
I went back to his dissertation Alien Theory. I didn't finish it because it would require a lot of further study for me to understand. Though I was surprised by how Brassier writes in it! He's usually very sardonic, and when he attacks a position you feel as though that position has been put firmly in its place, in this one there's a sense of catharsis in his critique. The dissertation just bulges with utter frustration at the navel gazing hermeneutic meta-game of continental philosophy and social science at the time.
Currently going through - I stress going through, not reading - Nick Land's Thirst For Annihilation, it's quite a book. The prose has a prophetic and thoroughly debased quality to it, though its coke fuelled rambling is marked by great self awareness:
and often there are fecund critical insights:
the style of argument in it isn't what you would expect though. There are no syllogisms. There are no premises. There are scarcely conclusions. Where there is is a sustained and thorough attempt to get you to imagine everything around you differently. The book operates at the level of ideology without being propaganda, a surgery upon worldviews. It wrestles with intuitions that would make anyone imagine the world and its history of ideas in any way at all. All in the style of a candyflipper asking you to hold his snuffbox before running at a wall.
I think it is pretty good, actually. The books I have are edited and translated directly from Greek. There are some notes by the responsible of the edition. They are nice to study. At least, these were that my teacher of philosophy recommended me in school, and I never found a better edition in Spanish.
Quoting Jafar
Wow, if you are able to read complex books in German, then you sure could read original texts of Nietzsche or Kant!
[tweet]https://x.com/koninklijkhuis/status/1856002888599740644?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1856002888599740644%7Ctwgr%5E08562587893c110daa9329fc57616bdc4216d980%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.libertaddigital.com%2Fchic%2Fcorazon%2F2024-11-11%2Fel-regalo-de-agradecimiento-a-la-ciudad-de-madrid-de-la-princesa-amalia-de-paises-bajos-7185307%2F[/tweet]
Funnily enough, if you are reading the Iliad you can probably see how it was originally a story passed down via oral tradition. If you get that presocratic book I mentioned you will also notice how many of the presocratics shifted form more oral traditions based on mythology to more modern conceptions of philosophical discourse (Thales), and others not mentioned in the book extensively such as Pherecydes, Xenophanes and Hermotimus.
I'll be getting the book on the pre-socratics. It looks like a lot of fun and it will be good to read with Homer.
(Also could someone show me how to quote?)
I had never heard of the Institute, so I looked it up. I also downloaded "Alien Theory." I can't imagine I'll read it all, but I at least wanted to check it out, not so much out of specific interest, but more because I wanted to see what a mild-mannered statistician saw in such a [s]goofy[/s] unusual subject.
Projects like that give you entire other ways of imagining everything. There isn't too much evidence for how we see the world at a base level, so it's nice to be able to view it from a remarkably alien perspective.
But at some point works like that became closer to how I see the world, in terms of worldview and metaphysics, than the everyday pretheoretical intuitions I live in. If whenever I open my mouth fairytales fall out, I may as well learn as many as possible.
As I noted, if something this unusual catches your attention, I'm interested to see what it has to say.
by Oscar Wilde
by José Ortega y Gasset
by Lucretius,
It does a good job mixing high level details about planning at Stavka and with Stalin and planning at OKW and Hitler's involvement in the decision to forestall a breakout from Stalingrad when it was still likely achievable (although perhaps with dire losses).But, like all detailed histories, it uses divisional journals and orders and personal journals extensively and focuses a lot on the orders of battle, logistics, and individual movements/engagements (including the Soviet's firefight with other Soviet formations when the pincers of Uranus met).
The most astounding thing is how 1940s Russia, reeling from a massive invasion and relying on uneducated peasants and what were essentially often slave soldiers, and using horses and camels for supply lines, could carry out elaborate corps and field army level maneuvers, whereas now you barely see coordination above the level of the BCT. To be sure, drones and satellite imagery have made force concentration harder, but the Kursk offensive (2024) shows it is far from impossible.
Also dipped into the later parts of Herman's "The Cave and the Light," a survey of Western intellectual history through the lens of Plato and Aristotle. Actually seems quite good as far as surveys go.
Given that Russian conscripts own term for their leaderships tactics in Ukraine today is "meat offensives," it seems that this has not totally improved.
I finished the book (My Struggle 1).
It is complicated to do a review in such a deep book. I think it has a lot of crucial parts, but Knausgård focuses on one point: loneliness. I have been jotting down the parts where he felt that way -- 15 years old; 30 years old; and when he is currently writing the book, around 40 years old or so.
There are different stages where Knausgård feels lonely. The relationship with his father, rather than being bad, I would say it is incomprehensible. It hit me when he says in the book: I was reciting a performance at school. I was nervous, so the storyline didn't go well. When we were in the car, my father said that he has never felt that embarrassed, and he will not show up to another performance. He kept the promise.
The attitude of Knausgård's father was exactly that. He never was there, and I think it caused an emotional trauma to this writer. He admitted in some paragraphs of the book that it took him ten years to write a book of his father, because there are some questions that remain unanswered. I believe this book was a self-guide to answer those questions. Precisely, I think the death of alcoholism was not the issue here, but the fact that his father will no longer be physically around anymore. Maybe he had the faith to build a paternal relationship, and this is very sad.
On the other hand -- it is interesting to see how he embraces loneliness when he became an adult. There is another page that says -- I disliked living in my childhood residential neighbourhood of Norway. I gaze at this Swedish suburb with a lot of buildings with unknown people, and I feel fine.
Well, I never read something like this. I think the way he approaches solitude is unique and original. There are five more numbers. I don't know if I would read them all, but the first volume gave me the impression that he also wants to focus on his brother, Yngve. The last pages of the book show a similar sense of loneliness in his brotherly relationship when they attended Bergen University, but he was not as deep as with the father.
by José Ortega y Gasset
Maybe in print. This was what turned me off the book though. He wrote in a narrative voice like every Norwegian man with social difficulties I'd met. This perpetual fleeing from the prickliness of the world into an unfulfilled solitude that he convinces himself he's fine with.
Something I'll remember from it though is that his schooling in the 1950s was similar to mine in the 1990s, and it's still quite similar to kids now in 2020s I think. 70 years, slow progress on not emotionally devastating people from birth.
I am currently reading Intermezzo from Sally Rooney. It is a novel but the way she writes is full of everything. This is the third novel of her that i read. She writes without quotation marks, without dividing conversations but you can still follow and realize who is the one talking to who.
And most importantly the thing i love about her writing is she is writing with all the parts that live in our mind as id, ego, superego, shadows and so on and she makes this without any effort. She generally focuses on relationships between a man and a woman or with two friends or two brothers so you can easily find yourself or someone you know in her lines.
If anyone is out there who has same taste with me i will be glad to know :)
Have a gerat moment :)
Welcome to TPF :grin:
Quoting Burcu
Quoting Burcu
Quoting Burcu
Well, according to that writing style, I also like some authors whose novels are similar to the one you are currently reading. But only in regard to the style, not the topic.
For example -- Jon Fosse and José Saramago always wrote in that way. Without dividing conversations and the format is written all in a row. Fosse doesn't even use chapters. I think Saramago either.
I've seen Intermezzo recommended in three separate places I frequent now, I should really get to it.
Yes many authors write like that but the most fascinating thing is she is not eliminating any desicion of the character, she gives all the thoughts at a moment and you feel like you are living in that characters brain. And also between occasions she put some general information about the situation that i can name as a kind of philosofie.
Also i recommend her first novel to the ones who like this style, Normal People which had awards and turned into a tv show also. That novel for me deeply show the Jung’s basic archetypes Anima and Animus.
Hope it didnt tuned our to be commercial i really get thrilled as i mentioned :)
Yes, it is fascinating. It reminds me of Melancholia by Fosse. The main character is Lars Hertervig. A Norwegian painter who suffered from a mental illness. Fosse gives all the thoughts and the anxiety of Lars at the same time that he relates to the outside world. A complex writing style that only a few are able to do. Well, Fosse is a Nobel laureate -- as well as Pamuk. I just checked your profile info, and you are Turkish! :smile:
Quoting Burcu
It is fine! We are often very emotional with some authors and novels. I remember being very obsessed with Mishima and Japanese literature a few years ago. We want to share this feeling with others, and this is gorgeous. :up:
I did not read any Mishima but i have his books.
By the way i am at a bookshop right now and while i was waiting for my coffee i turned my back and there was the book, Intermezzo again at the desk :) I do not believe in coinsidences though everything is happening as you believe and focus on so... And i smiled at that book and it smiled at me too i guess :))))
Firstly, I think it is notoriously to say that Kierkegaard's works are difficult to translate into our languages. I spent more than half an hour finding out on the Internet the proper translation of Forførerens Dagbog in English. My edition is in Spanish, which was translated from Danish in 2008. So, I think it is an accurate edition.
On the other hand, is there a Danish mate here in TPF? If so, please explain why the Danish language used by Kierkegaard is that complex to translate.
Edit: Thirdly, the book is a collection of fragments from a personal diary, where Kierkegaard shows his anxious love towards Regina Olsen. :heart:
[quote=VNS, A Cyberfeminist Manifesto For The 21st Century;https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/the-cyberfeminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century]
we are the modern cunt
positive anti reason
unbounded unleashed unforgiving
we see art with our cunt we make art with our cunt
we believe in jouissance madness holiness and poetry
we are the virus of the new world disorder
rupturing the symbolic from within
saboteurs of big daddy mainframe
the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix
VNS MATRIX
terminators of the moral code
mercenaries of slime
go down on the altar of abjection
probing the visceral temple we speak in tongues
infiltrating disrupting disseminating
corrupting the discourse
we are the future cunt[/quote]
There's something Cool Hand Luke about it you've got to respect.
But since I'm not an accepted member of that tribe (alas, being cuntless), I can only observe their artistic expression from afar. I couldn't actually interact with those gentle souls because I'd be likely be struck by the grenades their military wing would toss at me.
I am under the impression that the modern cunt doesn't need to have a cunt, so perhaps you can still be a cunt in the future cunt.
It reminds me of some of Robert Frost‘s later poems.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
by José Ortega y Gasset
by Alexandre Dumas
A collection of seven short stories. Cleverly written, as most of Kundera's works. An interesting fact that I did notice about their characters -- when he wrote in Czech, he used Czech names such as Ruzena, Havel, Klíma or Škréta. But, when he wrote in Frech, he used typical French names like Agnes or Paul.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami
This is my favorite book. I’ve given it to all my children. Actually, I’ve given it to all my children more than once. My memory is not all that great.
About half way through Herodotus, which in its own way is also a compendium of strange and dark stories.
This is a really great work, both volumes, not so much because of Fukuyama's individual contributions, but because it's fairly encyclopedic and is good at synthesizing views on state development.
I think I would have expected your favorite to be less dark.
I'm listening to the audiobook and the richness of it is made a little richer with Kenneth Branagh reading.
:up:
I know what you mean by "dark," but I don't really see it that way. For me, Marlow is a decent man who maintains his moral center while other British in Africa fall into brutal corruption. It's a story of his integrity in the face of European avarice and ruthlessness.
by Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels
I've previously written about an earlier book by Damasio - "The Feeling of What Happens."
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/724418
Damasio is a cognitive scientist who has written extensively about mental processes. The earlier book, published in 1999, did include a discussion of consciousness, but in a broad context of how the mind works with a heavy emphasis on anatomy and physiology. The newer book, published in 2021, focuses on feeling and consciousness from a process and functional perspective. In it, Damasio describes the mental processes that combine to make us conscious as well as the functions that consciousness carries out in the overall process of maintaining the internal equilibrium of human and other organisms.
Damasio clearly intends the discussion to address issues related to the "hard problem" of consciousness from the "what's the big deal" point of view. I'm sure it won't be convincing to those find the idea of the hard problem compelling.
Definitely a short book for the price, but it helped me start to put words to how I have always seen this issue.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/when-philosophers-become-therapists
But then I've been reading about Patristic philosophy, particularly from Syria and Egypt, because this is probably one of the key eras where philosophy is practiced as a sort of therapy on a large scale.
The Philokalia is another great example here, although obviously not focused on the laity.
It is nice to read about the link between the neighbours of an American suburb. Cheever was a master of describing the mysterious and dubious normality of these people.
I guess it is important to say that Cheever himself was from Massachusetts; so is Clarky ( @T Clark ). Two great human souls who belong to the same place of the Western civilisation. :smile:
Arrian's style of critical admiration with concise recounting of events is awesome.
To my surprise and pleasure, the tales of Robert Louis Stevenson proved to be some of the most finely crafted literature I've yet encountered. I was also inspired by both the fiction and non-fiction of H.G. Wells, profound and prophetic.
FICTION
A Harlot High and Low by Honore de Balzac
Thuvia Maid of Mars (Barsoom #4) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Chessmen of Mars (Barsoom #5) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Master Mind of Mars (Barsoom #6) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Fighting Man of Mars (Barsoom #7) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Swords of Mars (Barsoom #8) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Mucker (Mucker #1) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Synthetic Men of Mars (Barsoom #9) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Llana of Gathol (Barsoom #10) by Edgar Rice Burroughs
John Carter & the Giants of Mars and Skeleton Men of Jupiter by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
The Arabian Nights by Daniel Heller-Roazen
Gray Lensman (Lensman #4) by E.E. Doc Smith
Second Stage Lensmen (Lensmen #5) by E.E. Doc Smith
Children of the Lens (Lensman #6) by E.E. Doc Smith
Humphry Clinker: An Authoritative Text Contemporary Responses Criticism by Tobias Smollett
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson
New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson
Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Sleeper Awakes (Penguin Classics) by H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells
NON-FICTION
Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis by Marcello Barbieri
Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel
Scientific Realism: Selected Essays of Mario Bunge by Mario Bunge
Speculum Mentis by R.G. Collingwood
How We Think by John Dewey
The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays by John Dewey
Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Selected Works Vol 4) by Wilhelm Dilthey
Moral Education by Emile Durkheim
The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method by Emile Durkheim
Outlines of Scepticism by Sextus Empiricus
The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gasset
History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History by Jose Ortega y Gasset
Man and Crisis by Jose Ortega y Gasset
New Ways of Ontology by Nicolai Hartmann
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments by Max Horkheimer
The Grammar of Systems: From Order to Chaos & Back by Patrick Hoverstadt
The Way Things Are by Lucretius
Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 by Karl Marx
Collingwood and the Crisis of Western Civilisation: Art Metaphysics and Dialectic by Richard Murphy
Philosophical Writings of Peirce by Charles Sanders Peirce
Collingwood and the reform of metaphysics: A study in the philosophy of mind by Lionel Rubinoff
Unto this Last; The Political Economy of Art; Essays on Political Economy by John Ruskin
The Construction of Social Reality by John Rogers Searle
Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization by John Rogers Searle
NOOGENESIS: Computational Biology by Alex M. Vikoulov
A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells
New Worlds for Old: A Plain Account of Modern Socialism by H.G. Wells
Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology by Alexander Wendt
Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology by Alfred North Whitehead
The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
Also a History of Philosophy, Volume 1: The Project of a Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking
by Jürgen Habermas
I'm very excited to read this first of a brand new 3 volume history of philosophy by Jurgen Habermas at age 94! Volume 2 just came into print; volume 3 out in a few months.
...the history of Western philosophy as a genealogy of post metaphysical thinking....Habermas situates Western philosophy in relation to traditions of thought founded in the major worldviews (Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism). So says the flyleaf.
Impressive. The only one on your list I've read is "The Wisdom of Insecurity." It's probably my favorite book by Alan Watts. It's one of his earliest and I have imagined it represents an early stage in his path from western toward eastern philosophy.
I dumped that into ChatGPT and asked it. I didn't actually look each one up individually. Had I manually looked up each book for the number of pages and then did the math myself, GPT says it would have taken me about 1 hour and 20 minutes.
To complete that book in a year, you would need to read 0.44 pages per day. No way you read that fast.
Quoting Hanover
Interesting! Yes, I tend to read 25-30 pages per day, with the only exception of Russian authors. I need to read their stories very carefully. Their prose is very deep and long.
I did not indicate how long it took me to read the book.
Neither did I. I provided the outcome of a hypothetical situation and then I commented on your ability to perform in that hypothetical situation, which would have been poorly.
Laughably poorly. As in, ha ha, Clarky can't even read 1/2 a page daily.
Yes, hypothetically I acknowledge I am a very poor reader.
Or alternatively - I hypothetically acknowledge I am a very poor reader.
Or maybe - I acknowledge I am hypothetically a very poor reader.
My reading list for 2024:
Additionally, I've been reading One Thousand and One Nights each night since January 1st of 2024, so at the time of writing I am on Night 361
Quoting B Franklin's remark that the (US) Constitutional Convention had produced"...a Republic... if you can keep it..", the author indicates a/the relevance of this historical study to current times.
Easy read with sufficient references from contemporary sources not to burden the general reader.
Mikhail Sholokhov is an early Soviet Russian writer with reasonably balanced (politically for the times) story lines and some intellectual depth that might interest you if you're interested in early Soviet Russian literature. "Quiet flows the Don" is often quoted as his best, but that is arguable. He wrote several Russian Civil War novels with noticeable undertones/influences of the late Imperial greats.
Working with 55-60 year old memories, so treat above with care. Was into Russian literature around 12 to 16 years old. 1960s, shows tolerant ( or ignorant ) parents. Lucky!
encouraging smile
I know about Sholokhov, but I haven't read anything from him yet. My parents have a special edition of 'Russian Masters,' and Sholokhov's 'The Don' is included in the collection. If I am not mistaken, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Soviet Union forced him to decline the prize.
I am interested in Russian literature in general, but now I want to be focused on classical Russian writers, when Russia was under the Tsar dynasty.
"... but now I want to focused....... under the Tsar dynasty."
That will keep you busy for sometime.
Recently read a very Modern Russian short stories compilation. Some good, some not. The eternal question "What makes good reading?"
cheery smile
A brilliant and fascinating dystopian science fiction novel, written in the same year he wrote A Clockwork Orange. The author’s homophobia, which he expects the reader to share, makes it difficult to endorse the book, but somehow Burgess’s contradictions and prejudices only make him more interesting. Not to let him off the hook, but it’s worth pointing out that while The Wanting Seed appears banally homophobic, and in an interview in the 80s he talked about the “gay mafia,” his epic Earthly Powers, with its gay main character, has been called the greatest gay novel of the twentieth century.
Russian literature to start 2025 with! It is a novella about—mainly, amongst other topics—sexual abstinence. It was censored by the authorities when it was published the first time.
I have this sitting on my bookshelf because I really like his podcasts. I haven't read it yet though because I am pretty well versed in the period, but it would be nice to stroll down memory lane again at some point. I often contend to those afraid of President Trump making himself a dictator that he is, at best, a Sulla, but probably more a Gracchi. He isn't competent enough to be a Caesar, let alone an Caesar Augustus. Maybe a Marc Antony lol.
His Revolutions podcast is coming back. He is going to be doing Cuba, Iran, etc. It's a shame he is dodging the Chinese Civil War though; it'd only take him a few years to cover all 50 years of it after all...
Now we have to find a new book for 2025. The criteria 1) We're both interested 2) We would never read it ourselves because of it's length 3) We'll get bragging rights and be able to pontificate for the rest of our lives. We're thinking about "Infinite Jest."
Wonderful. I imagine you had a great time reading and discussing a book with your daughter. She has to be very proud of you, so you of her, of course. It is important the culture that we receive by home.
Quoting T Clark
"Infinite Jest" is a good choice, indeed. A long book and seems interesting; holding a lot to discuss. I was about to recommend you "One Thousand and One Nights" because I imagine it might be interesting to read a tale each night and then choose your favourite at the end of the year, for example.
We haven't decided finally yet. We may yet pick another book.
A shorter book, The Public Burning by Robert Coover, (1976) an account of the events leading up to the execution of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, might be a nice change of pace. It's historical fiction -- most of the characters are historical; you might even consider The Phantom (communists) and Uncle Sam (jingoism cubed) real. The story is narrated by Richard M. Nixon, who spends quite a bit of time reflecting on his own virtues.
It's quite funny, despite the subject matter. For instance, in the prologue the execution is scheduled to take place in Times Square with a replica of the Sing Sing execution chamber on a stage. Times Square is decorated in red, white, and blue bunting, flags, etc. This is Uncle Sam's doing. Happily the plan is spoiled by The Phantom (presumably). Signage on the stage begins to be corrupted: "AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD" mysteriously changes into "AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD" and worse things. Eventually the whole stage collapses into the street in a big wind storm.
It was recommended in a NYT editorial a few days ago. It is weirdly relevant.
I’m a poor reader too. I had a period of 25 years where I read a great deal. These days I lack curiosity.
In December I did read Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis, described as a epic poem about vulgarity and old school fame culture. I was fascinated by Burton for a while and read everything on him. Lewis' book is an unorthodox, shamelessly personal, highly literate and quite bitchy biographical account of the doomed couple. It's not the book he thinks he wrote. We know this because he keeps telling us about his intentions. He says he doesn't want to judge the dysfunctional duo, but he can't help evaluating choices, actions and behaviors. The book is fun but lacks coherence and is somewhat repetitive. Lewis leaves us with a familiar albeit vividly realized lesson: fame can fuck you up.
What is the cause of your lack of curiosity?
It might be that you have already read a lot of books in that 25-year span, and now it is complex to find out what can be interesting.
One advise -- I tend to schedule what I want to read depending on the origin of the author. A few years ago, I was deeply interested in Japanese literature, but now I am no longer thrilled. Therefore, I was looking for new stimulation since the end of 2023; reading Russian literature and trying Nordic and Eastern European authors as well. After that, it would be interesting to chew Australian writers, etc.
Who knows! Maybe you could end up having curiosity in Hispanic literature: Argentina (Borges, Sábato, Casares...) or Spain (Cervantes, Lorca, Cela...) :wink:
Probably just getting older I have less motivation to explore the world through books and am more interested in people.
Quoting javi2541997
I read Lorca poetry in the 1980's (he was being rediscovered here) - my girlfriend was obsessed with him. Pretty sure we saw his play El maleficio de la mariposa. Wonderful rich stuff. I adored Cervantes - some of the story digressions in the Don are a bit much. The Lost Steps by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier was really memorable. Not an easy book to find these days. Perhaps this is a gauche comment but Spanish appears to be the most euphonic and beautiful language for literature.
This is very interesting, because I feel otherwise. I want to explore the world through books rather than with people because I am scared of humanity in general. Perhaps my mentality will think in the future.
Quoting Tom Storm
Honestly, I think the same. :lol:
Yet only a writer (Mario Vargas Llosa) won the Nobel Prize during the current century. I don't understand the lack of appreciation for Hispanic authors by the Swedish Academy.
When we finally finished the book, my daughter and I agreed that we will never mention his name again. An amazing but despicable man. A genius. He could easily have been a Stalin or Hitler in a different circumstances.
Quoting BC
What you've written plus this from Kirkus Review's 1977 review, make me even more interested in taking a look at the book.
Quoting From Kirkus Review of The Public Burning
The first time I became aware of Elizabeth Taylor was when, in 1963 I guess, I saw her up on a gigantic billboard in Times Square costumed as Cleopatra. That was before all the electronic imagery you see there now. I liked the old fashioned look better, especially the famous Camel cigarette billboard which used a smoke generator to make smoke come out of mouth of the man in the display, who changed over the years to keep up with the times.
My mother grew up in New York City and we used to go there once a year to visit my grandfather. It was magic to me then and it’s magic to me now.
A lot of it was over my head, but a lot of it wasn't. Seems very plausible. Here's a link.
Towards an evolutionary theory of the origin of life based on kinetics and thermodynamics
If you're up with late Roman Republican period, you won't learn new stuff reading "The Storm before..." Nothing too controversial, just a lean here and there. But, a few "that's like now" moments.
All backed up by references of writers within a century or so of the times. Honors Bachelor standard.
Agree. Sulla, no, not affecting enough long term uplift for "his" (Trump's) people.
Gracchii, maybe, smash a few assumptions/standards. Pave the way for a real "hero"? Who knows? If there is/ever was such in politics?
Cheery smile
The Eternal Husband, Dostoevsky.
I started on Monday a novel by Tolstoy about a drama based on jealousy. Now, I will continue with a complex relationship triangle between a widower, a former lover, and a deceased wife.
Who gives the most, folks? :wink:
by Franz Kafka
One-hundred Years of Solitude was absolutely spellbinding.
Spoiler alert: It's not because God wrote it.
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Fosse's talented narrative grasps our attention in this short but intense novella. The first four pages are about the birth of a child in a random coastal village, and then the same child becomes an elder remembering the old days fishing with his dad.
Melancholia, nostalgia, memories... all I love in literature.
Do you read everything in Spanish or do you sometimes read in English?
John Cheever is one of the authors that I only read in English. I don't think I've ever attempted to read one of his translated works. His novels are very well written and easy to follow for a non-native like me. I tend to buy his books from an Irish bookshop called "Kennys," but I remember purchasing one book from a random bookshop located in the USA. It took me about a month to receive it.
In whatever language you read, the breadth and depth of your interest, commitment, and understanding is impressive. You also read really fast.
Agreed :up:
by C. Wright Mills
Also by Habermas was daunting and incredibly dense. Best to be acquainted with Jaspers' theory of the axial age prior to tackling it. I'm going to wait a bit before tackling volume two (volume three won't be published until June anyway...).
by Nikolai Gogol
Anyone got pointers or a particularly interesting reader?
We are reading the same author at the same time. It is interesting how fate works. Isn't it? :smile:
Enjoy!
Richard Bodeüs who taught me courses on Aristotle and Plato at The University of Montreal wrote very illuminating notes in his translation, but the notes and the translation are in French!
Nice. I must have read it a dozen times over the years. I discovered this book at 10 and never looked back. Each time I re-read it (like The Great Gatsby) I find it sadder and more nuanced than the last. It's curious that for all the inadequate children's adaptations in movies and TV, no great director has ever tried to film this complex story from a more adult perspective.
One thing’s fer certain, ain’t no adaptation gonna have that n-word in it, no matter how grown-up it tries to be.
I doubt anyone will translate to English (or any other language) a French translation from the Greek. Unfortunately, the book also only appears to be issued as a print edition. If a digital edition was available, then you could use a chatbot to translate Bodeüs' enlightening notes in English.
Well, reckon folks steer clear o’ usin’ that word in “Huck Finn” nowadays ‘cause it’s mighty hurtful. Back in Twain’s time, it was common talk, but now it stings somethin’ fierce, remindin’ folks of bad times and ugly ways. Some swap it out or leave it be altogether, figurin’ it ain’t worth keepin’ if it’s gonna hurt folks. Others use it for learnin’, talkin’ ‘bout how things used to be so folks don’t go forgettin’. Either way, it’s a tricky business tryin’ to honor the past without hurtin’ folks in the here and now.
Yes, fair. I agree - probably why it hasn't been done. I think if one were to adapt, and remove that word, one is not fit to adapt it.
Ain’t nothin’ but a pile o’ words, not no holy book or such. I reckon ol’ Twain wouldn’t bat an eye ‘bout swappin’ one word for ‘nother.
I would humbly disagree. But neither of us are timebandits, i'd think :P :P
Published in French only.
(The Prophets of AI - Why Silicon Valley sells us the Apocalypse)
This was recommended by a friend who supplied the first chapter. It was enlightening enough to motivate me to buy the book. The author may have some misconceptions regarding the nature of the technology (and its present capabilities) but has dug deeply into the historical, sociological, ideological and economic aspects and incentives that motivate(d) the main promoters and developers of AI.
by Nikolai Gogol
I started to read Knausgård's series two months ago; I remember and me sharing a common thought on the deep narrative of his novels. These are not easy to read because they are laden with much pain and drama, but I started to get engaged with this Norwegian author for a lot of reasons.
Since Knausgård himself said that we are free in order to read his series, I decided to skip the second part (it is about divorce and love failures and I am not ready to jump on it yet), and then start reading the third part. It is about when the author was just eight years old in his mother's family home, in a random small Norwegian fjord.
Memories, nostalgia, unanswered questions, childhood friends, etc.
I remember missing more presence by the mother in the first part, and I guess this third part will lead to what I was looking for a few months ago.
by Hauke Brunkhorst
C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite is deservedly a classic. All of the characteristics Mills describes of the worst types of abuses by the worst types of men can be seen in even starker relief against the backdrop of the tableau of modern politics.
by William Barrett
My favorite book. I've read it three times and listened to it once.
A History of Judaism by Martin Goodman
Was it Jeremy Bentham who wrote one paragraph,one sentence, one page long style English?
Used to love that. A good primer for short term memory loss sufferers.
smile
No, it was actually me.
(Just kidding, Bentham was doing this also.)
Hope your's was as grammatically correct as Bentham's generally was also.
wink & a smile.
Quine's Pursuit of Truth
Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Discussions
Bernays' Propaganda
Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and Birth of Tragedy
Foucault's Madness and Civilization
And an MITx Philosophy course on "Paradoxes and Infinities."
Might pick up some Godel.
I know that's weird, but I go through sections, stop move to another person and allow my thoughts to ruminate upon what I've read. After I get enough handling and understanding of the sections I'm on, I then revisit where I left off.
It's kinda like grade school, but with philosophy subjects as each topic.
A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich;
Of Mice and Men/Cannery Row;
The Crying of Lot 49; and
The Problems Of Philosophy (about 11 pages to go) this year.
by Jeremy Bentham
Apart from spellcheck not keeping up with the DeMille name, good thriller writing with consistently simple sentence structure, character complexity and nicely rejuvenated "mole in the spy agency" plot.
Minimal brain tax.
smile
by Franz L. Neumann
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
re-reading....
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Skimming Nietzsche as I always do through the insights of post Nietzsche philosophers I'm currently reading.
The Pursuit of Truth by Quine
Nietzsche and Philosophy by Deleuze
Wonderful little book. Have you also read Cancer Ward? It's equally poignant.
by Franz Kafka
Coplas por la muerte de su padre by Jorge Manrique.
Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education (a comparison of monastic Christian education and the pagan education of late antiquity, framed largely in the terms of contemporary secular philosophy).
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Foucault was himself a big fan of Hadot. This is a look at the role of spiritual exercises in ancient philosophy, with a focus on pagan thought and particularly Stoicism and Socrates.)
Sites of the Ascetic Self : John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation (A study of St. John the Ascetic in largely post-modern terms, building off Foucault's late interest in asceticism, and using some elements of feminist theory and queer theory).
They are all related in that they are studies of ascetic education and philosophy as a [I]practice[/I]. I have a lot of ideas about this and maybe I will start a thread on it some day.
The first is definitely the best, at least for my uses, since it is a quite detailed look at actual pedagogy from a period where philosophy was a "way of life" (and were all great philosophers were expected to be saints). But all three do a good job showcasing the much larger role for emotion in epistemic pursuits and the much broader notion of the intellect in ancient thought (whereas Charles Taylor's A Secular Age does a good job showcasing how the intellect and epistemology because distanced from the rest of the human person and their environment).
The last book does show some of the more serious pernicious effects of siloing in philosophy, with claims like "people were generally uninterested in asceticism due to Nietzsche and Weber's critiques until Foucault revived interest by showing how it could be transgressive." I am sure this "lull in interest," would come to a shock to the thousands of Christian and Buddhist monks and nuns living in contemplative orders over this time period, or even to the laity in traditional churches (a large majority outside the Anglophone world), for whom monasticism has continued to be a major influence (particularly in Eastern Christianity).
But it's also a great example of what Charles Taylor points to using Hume and Gibbon, the way the "disinterested scholarly frame" ends up choosing what to "bracket" out of consideration (Latour's late work makes a similar charge). So here, any consideration of the truth of the religious claims of Cassian, or of the metaphysical underpinnings of his practices, gets bracketed out, but the ethical and aesthetic values of the modern secular Western academy (particularly its post-modern side) are definitely very much assumed and "left in."
That said, it's still an interesting book because it makes some solid connections between early Christian thought and contemporary "Continental" thought. One example is the way Cassian's psychology is generally in line with embodied cognition and a sort of enactivism (which is not unusual for his period).
But I've long thought there was actually a strong overlap here that gets ignored. In many cases, "radical new ideas" such as non-overlapping hermetically sealed magisterium or disciplines as discrete language games are actually present in ancient or scholastic thought (in this case in Averroes double truth doctrine and Latin Averroism).
Notably, some of the heretical sects in some of these movements did adopt a sort of "free love" attitude but these tended to be relatively short lived outbursts (especially when compared with intentional communities/communes spanning millennia).
by Jürgen Habermas
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:up:
Yes please. Authenticity.
It makes me wonder, does any institution teach "philosophy as a way of life," as in, fully embracing the "ascetical education" that defined much of philosophy for many centuries?
Obviously, there are still monasteries, but that is:
A. A religious vocation (although it does involve a deep, "lived" study of many thinkers);
B. A lifetime commitment, as opposed to a time-limited education.
I know that, for Catholic priests, there are the Oratories, which are very similar to religious orders, but are only temporary, for parish priest formation. And I know of "secular" projects in terms of communes and intentional communities, but again, that is more of a long-term, "lifestyle" commitment than a program of education.
I wonder what the appetite for it would be, if you could even get students. There are outdoor education programs that are quite strenuous, NOLS being the big one, so I don't think the hardships would necessarily be the limiting factor. I am not sure if secular interest would be enough to keep a program open, but it certainly seems like there is enough interest in retreats and monasticism in the lay religious community that something like that could flourish.
From a purely business lens, the good thing about an ascetical school is that I imagine it is very cheap to run. All you need is some shacks and daily ration of lentils! Since labor was always a big part of "meditative focus" and the cultivation of humility (often farming, but crafts like basketweaving and ropemaking too), you could maybe even make things self-sustaining to some degree (although in my experience having novices help with organic farming and construction is normally a pretty fraught affair unless you have a long time to train them).
All I know is that, if I opened one, we'd definitely bring back the old "philosopher's cloak" as a uniform. Dress for success!
Of course, to this day universities still have modern students dress in the garb of medieval ascetics for graduation, a sort of funny holdover.
Antiquities of the Jews - Josephus
Book of Jubilees - Jewish Annotated Apocrypha
Antiquities of the Jews is a must read for anyone interested in this subject. You simply won't find this depth and this coverage of history elsewhere; relating to the Jews, that is. I'm coming to the end of it, but afterwards I will absolutely be going on to The Jewish War. This book contains one of the earliest Jesus references as well.
Well, life has to be ultimately "self-sustaining" - so if your philosophy is truly to be a way of life, then it would have to work in that sense too. On the other hand, communities of thought can have "complex identities," as they come to be shaped by visions and personalities that may not always be completely well-intentioned shall we say. Shared practices can be powerful tools but also dangerous weapons.
Who wants to join me? :rofl:
This is from “The Black Cottage” by Robert Frost, one of my favorite poems.
Los tres gauchos orientales by Antonio D. Lussich.
Love this one.
Possible inspiration for the next literary activity? Hmm... :wink:
by Robert B. Westbrook
Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol 2
by Jean-Paul Sartre
,
That was a hasty judgement, made before Mr Rochester's appearance. From then on, it's bad.
Recently:
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov (re-read) 5/5
Russian Stories from Everyman's Library 4/5
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer (ongoing) 5/5
Under the Skin by Michel Faber 3.7/5
Currently:
Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno 5/5
Coincidentally, also been reading this. A lot of good stuff in there.
And:
Propaganda by Jacques Ellul
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
States of Shock by Bernard Stiegler
Faust Part 2 by Goethe
Recently finished:
The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills 4/5
The Language Game by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater 4/5
Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man by Friedrich Schiller 5/5
Scorched Earth by Jonathan Crary 4/5
Faust Part I by Goethe 5/5
Infocracy by Byung-Chul Han 4/5
I'm likely not going to finish anything I would give less than a 4 to. The one I love most of the above is the Schiller book.
Schiller seems to come up a lot in critical theory but I’ve never paid any attention. Your comment and the description on SEP make the Letters look more interesting than I expected.
This looks great. Are you reading chronologically from start to finish or jumping around?
Chronologically. I'm about half way through and have already discovered many authors that were new to me.
Taking a break now though, because it's massive.
Extremely interesting. Having read them, I'd say a must for anyone interested in the intersection between art and philosophy (the real meat of the theory starts only at about letter XI though.)
:up:
And as far as I can tell there’s even more to it than that, e.g., the aesthetic sense in general and its connection to morality, and the role of play in the development of the aesthetic sense. So, it seems to be significantly anthropological and more than just philosophy of art.
Schiller is definitely interesting, going beyond Kant in so.e important ways. Hegel was a great appreciator, and even more of Goethe, who he called his "father," but Hegel gets so cerebral at times that you'd hardly know it unless you knew where to look!
IMHO, the Romantics at least partially recover something quite important, although I think the radical deflation of the way "reason," "intellect," and the "will" came to be conceived prior to this era stopped the full recovery of a much richer, earlier aesthetics. Sadly, Beauty and Nature still end up being something somewhat "irrational" (sometimes just to the extent they are truly desirable), instead of being the very thing "sought for its own sake" that can orient any "rationality" at all.
Still, I think Taylor is pointing to a pernicious dualism that remains unresolved here. It reminds me a bit of what made the Desert Fathers stand out from Pagan ascetics, the embrace of the emotions, embodiment, the passions, and the appetites to the extent that they are "rightly oriented" towards true beauty, hence "The Love of Beauty," (as opposed to love of wisdom) being a popular title for anthologies from the Fathers.
:up:
Yes, definitely.
(See also: Response)
China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties by Mark Edward Lewis
I sometimes feel I ought to read that, but tennis and drug addiction have always been turn offs for me.
Every year - well, for two years now - my daughter and I read a really long book together. Last year we read the “Power Broker.” This year it’s “Infinite Jest.” My younger son and his girlfriend are reading it with us this year. Just a hundred pages a month. The criteria is it must be a very long book that we would never finish on our own.
It’s hilarious. I rarely laugh out loud at books, but I do all the time with this one. It’s also difficult to follow, non-linear, and absurd. I think It would be accurate to call it magical realism. I’m sure many will scoff, but it reminds me of “100 Years of Solitude” sometimes. The language is amazing - obscure, playful, and funny. I’d hate to read this without Kindle. The characters are goofy and damaged, but mostly sympathetic.
It’s clear to me that, after about 250 pages, I would’ve quit by now if I wasn’t under pressure from my family. Which is the whole point of doing things this way.
How does it hold up? Read it in the 1990's.
Very cool TC. I tried to get a "buddy read" going with my brother but he postponed it for so long I couldn't wait any longer and read it myself (One Hundred Years of Solitude, it was (5/5); who knows, maybe DFW was influenced by it, although I imagine the surrealism in Infinite Jest is just as likely to have come out of his love of David Lynch movies).
How disruptive do you find the endnotes?
I also found the line, "Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics to political life," quite poignant.
I am not sure what you mean by disruptive. I love them, they’re wonderful - funnier than the main text. It’s another reason I wouldn’t read this without Kindle. I probably would never turn to the back to look at them. With Kindle, all I have to do is push a little hyper text button.
:cool:
Well, since the popular ideal of reading is smooth uninterrupted flow, and I'd heard people say the endnotes were a disruption of that flow, I wondered if you'd experienced them in the same way. But yeah, that kind of thing doesn't bother me anyway.
Maybe those people weren't reading the e-book.
Yeah, that’s why I can’t imagine reading it without Kindle. The flow is barely disrupted at all - and the tumbling, rumbling flow is one of the best parts.
Welcome to the forum. You should tell us about something you have been reading that you particularly like or particularly hate.
El asesinato del perdedor (Translation in English is not available) by Camilo José Cela.
I did not care for B.F. Skinner's "Beyond Freedom And Dignity" because of its attempt to ground human action into non-material qualities. although I think he might have a point here and there I always thought there was more to it than that, possibly a third quality to human action beyond consciousness and the action itself.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset "Revolt Of The Masses" was satisfying though as I sensed much that's wrong with the world is more or less due to the opinions of those who do not examine their life closely.
The narrative and imagination of Mircea are just amazing. I am addicted to his trilogy called 'Orbitor' in Romanian; translated as 'Blinding' in English and 'Cegador' in Spanish. Quite good. It is a constant stream of dreams and hallucinations in 1960s Mircea's Bucharest. :flower: :sparkle:
Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism" is excellent, and extremely accessible for a book that is working with the ideas of Zizek, Badiou, Baudrillard, Lacan, and Deleuze and Guattari. I can see why it became such an "instant classic."
Byung-Chul Han's "The Agony of Eros" and "The Burnout Society" is in a somewhat similar vein, and very good, but is written more in the abstruse style of this sort of work. I think he is a rare writer who can make it work though, rather than making it tedious. He's also a big Hegel guy, which I always appreciate.
Taking up similar themes is Patrick Deneen's excellent "Why Liberalism Failed," but it approaches the same topic from the lens of traditional political theory and largely offers a critique of our current era in terms of liberalism's ancient and medieval antecedents. The key theme here is that liberty was once defined in terms of self-governance at the individual level (which had to be cultivated and could not be taken for granted), with the assumption that political liberty required a citizenry possessed of this individual liberty and capacity for self-rule. It reminded me a bit of Axel Honneth's typology of negative, reflexive ("inner"), and social freedom in his "Freedom's Right " Honneth likewise picks up on the way modern thought tends to stress negative freedom to the exclusion of reflexive freedom, while many theorists never make it to the "social freedom" that is the focus on Hegel.
Reading these also led me to return to C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man," a classic on a very similar set of topics.
Here is an example of Fisher:
He writes this in the context of how images of future ecological apocalypse have become a mainstay of the late-capitalist social imagery. As Deneen says, the assumption that looming crises shall all be fixed by "progress" is a faith that borders on the religious.
But, while I was reading these, at night I was also reading Origen's "On Prayer" and "On First Principles," St. Gregory Palamas' selections for the Philokalia and the Triads, St. Maximus the Confessor's "Centuries on Love," and St. Isaac of Nineveh's "Ascetical Homilies". The interesting thing here is how these come off today as in some ways much more radical and transgerssive than the most radical cutting-edge critiques of neo-liberalism from the contemporary left and right. When Han talks about the death of the "Other," and so of Eros, and he and Fisher (and their sources) talk about the reign of cynicism and death of the sacred, it's very interesting to see the ancient counterpoint (also written by citizens of decadent empires in decline—although St. Isaac and Origen were persecuted minorities in their time). But what also comes out is the unabashed optimism and total lack of cynicism and irony in the older works. It's almost transgressive to be this earnest. David Foster Wallace was another figure who spoke on the tyranny of irony in the era of late-capitalism, and I think any student of the nu/alt-Right can pick up on how cynicism and irony absolutely dominates those spaces (and their leftist mirror images).
Fisher talks about how protest has become a permanent part of late-capitalism. Anti-capitalism itself becomes a product to consume. He speaks of the 1960s spirit as being in some ways childlike, built on this image of a greedy, irrational father figure who restricts the young's access to pleasure out of a sort of sterile and dogmatic I'll will. What needs to be liberated is access to pleasure (e.g. the sexual revolution). This goes along with Han's insight that epithumia, sensuous desire, has come to dominate and push out thymos (spirited desire), and logos (intellectual desire). This is why anger—and Trump's movement is very much one of thymos and anger—is so transgressive today. This trend also means the dominance of what Charles Taylor calls the "immanent frame," a focus on immanent, sensible goods, which seems to dominate even religion and religious politics today (which have been swallowed up by the "Culture War (TM)") In this context, St. Isaac's assertion that:
...is quite radical. So is St. Gregory Palamas' contention that the only true death is separation from (lack of focus on) the Divine, and that it is a death the living participate in, making them a sort of "living dead," struggling tooth and nail towards nothingness.
But the thing that really struck me is this:
Han has no recommendations. It's straight critique.
Fisher ends in a hopeful note, but it's very vague.
Deneen likewise has extremely vague advice about "building local communities."
Lewis is the only modern author I mentioned who has a strong sense of "what should be done?" This is in pretty marked contrast to Saint Gregory Palamas, Saint Maximus the Confessor, Origen, and Saint Isaac of Nineveh, who are all very confident about "what is to be done." And the difference is not them living in better times. The former two were subject to military raids and dramatic instability. Origen was born in a flourishing era in a rich city to an elite family, but he was a persecuted minority. He watched his father get executed when he was a teen and he would go on to be tortured to death (without recanting). Maximus likewise had his tongue cut out and writing hand lopped odd when he refused to compromise. And yet... the optimism. And this is an optimism that even drips down into the metaphysics. For Origen, Maximus, and Gregory, the "world" is every bit as ugly as Fisher finds late-capitalism—perhaps moreso—and yet being is almost shockingly beautiful, possessed for soaring symmetries, the whole of "what is" a sign of unfathomable beauty. It is very much a study in contrasts.
Anyhow, I particularly like how Fisher and Han call on literature and film so much; it's a great element in their writing. Fisher in particular had a real gift for tying pop culture to complex theory without making his connections feel contrived; his early death was a terrible loss.
I had the idea for a fantasy novel that would borrow some of the imagery and messaging of the Commedia but put it in more accessible (and action-packed) terms. But then the book would also have a "book within a book" story within a story based on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius now being a powerful sorcerer vizier of course), since the themes of both go well together.
About to start The Sceptical Feminist.
He viewed On the Aesthetic Education of Man as his best work. It really does explore more than mere 'Aesthetics' and looks to approach a means of uniting two distinct parts of human society.
Cool, thanks :up:
I can't forget the madeleines soaked in tea—they were a powerful element for unlocking emotions
Nice pick!
@Alonsoaceves is responding to my ten-year-old OP, which is about In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
Update: I never did get through the whole thing.
Proust is great but I don't expect to go back to him to finish it. As Alonso said, it can be tedious.
I haven't read the big Frenchies either: Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, and Hugo all await me. But like you I'll choose Dostoevsky over Sartre.
Very good, but predominantly technical. Reads mostly like a textbook with lots of taxonomy, working through definitions and logical relations among terms, often involving problematizing other such work like that of Peirce etc. Anyway, if you are interested in semiotics, you should read it.
Cassius Dio - Books 60-70 (Claudius through Hadrian).
Currently Reading:
Josephus - Against Apion (my final Josephus work in Whiston's translation.)
On deck:
Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
Leviticus as Literature - Mary Douglas (a key work on Leviticus.)
As usual, you’re reading too much. You need to stop for a while and watch Benny Hill reruns.
Deuteronomy - The JPS Torah Commentary - by Yahweh Almighty. A retellling of a tale of a people. Questionable fact wise.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. A war fucks everything and everyone sort of story. Point made.
The Art of Experience by John Dewey. A pragmatist"s essays on aesthetics to provide fodder in the Shoutbox. A bit boring.
Plus aliens.
Yeah, I read some Dewey once and found it incredibly boring and didn't finish it. It's a shame because some of his ideas seem very congenial to me.
Beautifully rich writing though a little too rich for my pedestrian tastes, I guess.
I place that book among the most over-rated books of all time.
Sounds interesting. I'd be interested to hear more about these, especially the JPS commentary. I take it that it draws from thinkers like Rashi and Nachmanides, as well as the Talmudic rabbis and others?
I saw it at number one on a "greatest books of all time" list recently, which did puzzle me.
The Pedagogy of Freedom - Paulo Freire. A book of integrity and heart. If you are interested in education, you should read it.
The Plague - Albert Camus. Good so far. The sparse style works.
There are lots of good and great books that I really don’t get. “The Great Gatsby” is certainly one of those. It’s a book full of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to other unpleasant people for unpleasant or indecipherable reasons.
My wife teaches it in High School English and can’t praise it enough. When I commented about the writing she began reciting some of her favorite lines from memory.
I believe that "greatest books of all time" lists are dependent upon the language of the editor or publisher. I have never seen The Great Gatsby ranked number one here because our literary critics are likely to choose Cervantes or Borges. Sinch?sa (a very important Japanese editorial) usually ranks Tanizaki, Kawabata or Kenzaburo Oe as their number ones, and I hardly remember a Western author.
The list was by a well-known organization as far as I remember, but it was awful. Everything in the top 20 was English literature.
As I said, it’s not that I know it’s not good, it’s just that I don’t get it. I wish I could talk with your wife about it.
This part where Gatsby is found in the pool made a lasting impression. Rich like chocolate cheesecake.
“The laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.”
I'd describe the commentary as scholarly and academic, with some references to traditional sources, but no expectation the reader is Orthodox or necessarily a believer. It's not like the Artscroll chumash.
How are you finding the commentary? Who are the major commentators? I've never read Artscrolls or JPS. My primary source on the Tanakh is Robert Alter's translation, which primarily draws on academic biblical scholarship.
I think it's my favourite novel, and every time I read it, it's a different, richer, more elegiac book. For me, the story's enchantment lies in how it's told; the characters and the plot are secondary. Nevertheless, I totally understand the man-child James Gatz, putting on wealth and class in order to catch his girl. FSF's writing for me is a blissful aesthetic experience. I sometimes just read a few paragraphs at random and marvel. Now, I find myself often doing the same with other writers like Bellow, Nabokov , Barth and TC Boyle.
Artscroll is the Orthodox shul version.
Geez, now I’ll have to read it again and find out if I can see what you’re seeing.
Not really, no. I like the way Tom describes his experience, that the story's enchantment lies in how it's told.
Quite persuasive. I might try it again. I don’t feel comfortable on this “Great Gatsby is overrated” bandwagon. Although, even if it’s great, naming it as the greatest novel of all time has got to be an overrating. (I’m referring to the list mentioned by @Baden)
I do like Nabokov and Barth very much.
Is this really a thing? I mean I get how tastes can change over time, but can it happen by persuasion? Like, this wine is delicious now that you point out it has hints of cinnamon.
I suppose if you learned something you didn't know that made the book meaningful (like did you know it had to do with American vacuous excess? No, I didn't realize that, so now I like it because it feeds into my bias about America, or some such (hah!)) you could better appreciate it then.
But that's not what happened here. You agreed to reconsider on his arguments from subjective taste alone.
I'm not going to allow a pro Gatsby rebellion to take place without a fight.
The answer is simple: I read it years ago and my taste has changed, so instead of continuing to say I don't like it I ought to see if maybe I do like it, because Tom is wise.
You're right. I feel like shit now. Just read and hopefully enjoy.
I think what I secretly want is to read it again and have my previous opinion confirmed, but this time backed up by greater knowledge and penetrating analysis.
I have been looking for a book like this to recommend for a while, one that can lay out the philosophical aspects of Eastern thought in a clear and accessible manner. Von Balthasar's Cosmic Liturgy on Maximus is fantastic, but it is quite technical, and at times abstruse, and doesn't do as much to connect the theoretical to the practical as it might. But one of the defining features of Eastern thought is the way the practical deeply informs the theoretical.
Edit: only the introduction of this book is accessible and it is actually quite challenging and presupposes as a depth of knowledge in Orthodox thought and contemporary Continental philosophy to really get it all.
I was recently persuing this thread by @Streetlight : https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/128485
Which involves a very high level debate between @fdrake and @apokrisis that made me very aware of my ignorance of the depths of certain concepts that relate to my research interests. This book is helping to fill that gap.
I do miss @streetlight. Every so often I find myself going back and rereading some of the things he did.
How are you finding The Lonely Man of Faith? Would you recommend it?
Me too.
I very much like Bernard Stiegler's approach to technics and he was highly influenced by Simondon. So, back to the source here.
It's good. It's heavy on Western philosophy which is unusual for a head of an Orthodox yeshiva. It also relies upon biblical metaphor, which gives it greater appeal than more strict literal readings would (although no doubt the Rav is a strict believer).
In sum, the two creation stories reveal two different Adams, the first a scientific acheiver and builder, the second an internally driven person seeking meaning. Man is both Adams, but society values only the former, resulting in lonliness, with meaning given no value.
Interesting.
What is really interesting (more than probably the book you are currently reading) is that this could be the first time I see you posting in this thread; cool! It is good to know what Banno is reading.
Agreed. Expect some forthcoming Davidson threads, which will no doubt be very interesting.
My fourth post here, but not for a while.
But since you showed interest, also reading Norman's The reluctant Beetle, Frankopan's The Earth Transformed, New Scientist How to think about Consciousness (good read, a bit introductory and scientistic), and Pete Brown's coffee table book The ultimate book of blues guitar legends.
I'm using this last as a listening guide, reading a page and listening to the commendations.
Sounds like a Guns, Germs, and Steel kind of thing. I read his books on the Silk Road. Pretty good.
A bit uneven but where's it's good, it's very good.
Short and interesting, but kind of implausible.
Berardi is a cultural critic, particularly focused on technocapitalism. His best known book is "Uprising", but I haven't read that. Anyhow, he provides a useful framework that dovetails with authors like Mark Fisher, Byung Hul Chan, Bernard Stiegler etc. and I particularly like his emphasis on poetry.
:up: :up:
I read on Google that readers appreciate how he deals with the topic of poetry, precisely.
by Norberto Bobbio
The biography of Dewey and American Democracy was a long but excellent read. If you aren't familiar with Dewey, it would be phenomenal as a deep introduction to his thought.
Carl Sagan was a great thinker. I have another book titled 'Cosmos'. I remember it had interesting points, but it was tough to follow as I am not very proficient in science.
Strong critique of utopian thinking throughout post-enlightenment western political thought right up to recent American neocon foreign policy, especially re war on terror etc. Little in the way of solutions though.
The first part of the book was quite impressive, it's been quite a while since I found something new in philosophy which is very interesting. The rest of the book was also quite good, but less so than the first third of it.
Currently reading The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, very very good.
It sounds pretty interesting. Any thoughts on it?
by John Dewey
The last volume of this excellent trilogy. Mircea has become one of the best authors I have read for the past years. I am looking forward to reading other works of his, but I will do a pause after finishing this one.
I wasn’t aware that anyone had ever actually read the preface to any book.
I haven't read any preface ever. I tend to avoid them as much as I avoid introductions; I would rather not get affected by opinions before I start the book. I want to get mine when I finish it.
It's crazy to me that people never read prefaces. There are cases where I don't, when I read the preface afterwards, but I don't skip them completely unless they're obviously just formalities. Otherwise, a preface is often an important part of the work. Reading Don Quixote without the preface is not advised. Reading Pale Fire but skipping the foreword is a catastrophic error.
He wrote a preface to French readers and an epilogue to British readers (or the other way around; I don't quite remember). I think that was clever because the 'mass-man' was focused on a Spanish context, but Gasset was aware that his essay would only have success if it ended up being read by French and British philosophers.
Quoting javi2541997
I’d like to say that my reasons for skipping prefaces are as thoughtful and reasonable as Javi’s. Fact is, I’m just too effing lazy.
I don't read endnotes, but I feel somewhat obligated to read the footnotes. I won't read the footnotes when they start taking up half the bottom of the page because that feels like they're trying to have a side conversation about something else. Not that I'm big on focusing my attention when I talk about things, but I do expect it from others. It's a do as I say and not as I do sort of thing. My issue with endnotes is that you have to search them out by finding the chapter you're in and then finding the corresponding endnote for that chapter. Sometimes you might read the wrong endnote, and you might end up seeing into the future of what is going to happen which will destroy your sense of surprise and your finger might slip and you'll lose your page to where you were in the book proper. You then have to backfill (I'm pretty sure that's the word I'm looking for) from the endnote to find the place you were at pre-finger slipping.
I got a copy of Brothers Karamazov that is in like 6 point font, which is just over standard microfiche size. It's difficult reading because of that. I ordered an oversized version, but now I fear it will be too large and will crush my chest with its weight. It's a weighty book. The weighty book joke is about as funny as the difficult reading joke. They're of the same genre.
I have been reading that for years.
Quoting Hanover
I suppose it's one of those books that grows on you.
Good as a short introduction to Pirsig's thought.
"Event" -Slavoj Zizek. Good start. Relevant to something I've been writing.
Consdering buying:
"The Radical Luhmann" Hans-Georg Moeller
The sample is really good. I'll probably buy the full thing when I've got through reading some other material.
I think the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the most famous part of the book. Also the least accessible, which is really saying something. Apparently it was written in a hurried draft as Napoleon was bearing down on the city.
I wonder how many it has scared away (of course, it's not like the introduction is that much easier). I think a lot of lecturers actually have classes read it last though.
Avoiding reading prefaces represents a character flaw, one of my many. I acknowledge that.
by C. Wright Mills
Dewey's Liberalism and Social Action is an absolutely phenomenal little book on the tension between individualistic liberalism and the embedded-embodied forms and features of socialized intelligence. An optimistic and practical perspective, still very much relevant today as social-commentary.
Interesting read, basically it's a Speculative Realist criticism of the problems of phenomenology. The real clincher is, does phenomenology ultimately end up resorting to idealism, at the end?
With that, just started the next book in the series, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China by Dieter Kuhn
I've got to think it pales in comparison to Motorcycle Maintenance just from me not having heard of it.
I’m no expert in this area but I’ve wondered if the idealism comparison was apt in some contexts.
Finally!
Agreed, along with "Moby Dick", "Red Badge of Courage",that Atticus/Gregory Peck yarn by what's her name..Harper's Crossing? , "My Brother Jack", and Xavier Herbert's "Poor fellow,My Country..or whatever it was called": just to deter the impression of national bias.
Basically, most of the high school "books/author you should read". Blatant brainwashing...as it was called way back then.
cynical smile
by Yuval Noah Harari
Yeah, definitely a classic.
I liked Moby Dick and to Kill a Mocking Bird.
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
I just thought Great Gatsby was greatly over-rated. My favorite hotel though is the Jekyll Island Club, which captures that Great Gatsby wealth thing. I'm going there this weekend to celebrate the independence of my great nation from the oppressive Brits. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Find a metaphorical mountain to climb. You're less likely to die.
Naming and Necessity, by Kripke - Feels like I should get through this.
The Magician of Lublin, by Isaac Bashevis Singer - Half way through it. Still trying to find out how the piece of shit main character Yasha is going to be given some redeeming quality.
Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, By Anna Boncopagni - it's one of the Cambridge "Elements" books where it concisely address a topic five people care about.
The Brothers Karamazov - I think I'll post this everytime because I'll never get through it. The problem is I can't remember what I last read with all the names and stuff. Maybe I'll just enjoy a Wiki read of it.
I've been meaning to read Bauman for years, and I happened upon this one, which happens to work very well in support of the Adorno reading, since it provides a concrete sociological grounding for Adorno’s abstractions.
The nutshell is that the Holocaust was not a break with, or a regression from, modernity, but represented its hitherto unsuspected potential. But Bauman seems significantly more optimistic than Adorno.
EDIT: The suspicion arises that sociology, a paradigmatic product of modernity, was itself in some sense implicated in the Holocaust. Bauman so far hasn’t made that claim explicitly but it seems to be an underlying worry.
A collection of fabulous short stories written with the excellence that Casares was known for.
Jungle Tales by Horacio Quiroga.
A beautiful compilation of fables. Some of them are infantile, but they are pretty good. Quiroga was one of the most important narrators of Uruguay.
"Tsundoku (???) is a Japanese word that describes the act of buying books and letting them pile up without reading them."
Sort of a last word from him. He has played a kind of jester in the past. Not here. A scene upon the agora.
Excellent! I really enjoyed reading this trilogy. I learnt many things about the Austro-Hungarian Empire and why the First World War happened. A great compilation of witnesses from that period of time. :up:
by Adam Smith
A retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s viewpoint. In the first chapter, Jim is on Miss Watson’s porch paying close attention to Tom and Huck’s shenanigans. They believe Jim is asleep but of course he needs to stay woke.
Now nearly finished with Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez, very good.
It doesn’t get any better after 30% so you’re not missing anything.
That was the vibe I was getting too, thanks for confirming it. Too many books to read to finish one you are not enjoying.
:up:
I remember getting very sad and disappointed after finishing the book. He admitted in the book (Tusquets Spanish edition) that the new novel was a "cut and copy" from Crónica del pájaro que da vuelta al mundo.
I haven't read anything again from him since last year...
I think I remembered you saying you liked Los años de peregrinación del chico sin color (Colorless) and La muerte del comendador.(Commendatore)
But the peregrinación book looked to me to be much less "magical realist" than usual, and comendador sounded a lot like Cronica del Pajaro, which was my least favorite book of his - a minority stance.
I loved his Baila, baila, baila (Dance) , El fin del mundo y un despiadado país de las maravillas (Wonderland), Kafka en la orilla, La caza del carnero salvaje (Sheep).
Norwegian Wood was just...ok.
But after 1Q84 (which I though was one book too long - the 3rd volume) it's as if what made him fun for me just kind of vanished.
But I think this latest one is copied from el fin del mundo- it's the exact same town. Minus the extremely interesting connection he made with the other story.
Yes, that's true. I confused the titles of the books, sorry.
Absolutely, I enjoyed reading "comendador" and "crónica". I think "After Dark" is also really nice, and I've never read Norwegian Wood, which is one of his most famous works.
To be honest, I think Murakami is very good at writing short stories and essays. I read "Underground" last year, and it was amazing. He did a great job interviewing all the victims of the 1995 Tokyo Underground terrorist attack. However, when it came to novels, I (sometimes) believed that he wrote solely to please his fans and the Western market.
Maybe, but if what he want to write is stuff like his last book, then I just find it very boring. I might try After Dark someday, looks interesting.
And then there are other books I’m told are very well written, but which don’t move me or draw me in. And I can’t tell you why that is either.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto
(RIpping read.)
The sample is 300 pages long. 'Nuff said.
It's interesting because it's not the standard "language is use," but it's trying to explain the ontology of marriage (or any social event) itself, making it modern day analytic metaphysics far removed from the Cartesian type.
Same Bed Different Deams was phenomenal. :ok:
Is it metaphysics or is it sociology?
They intersect in the field of social ontology, which SEP says can be considered as a branch of metaphysics and which is, I suppose, a philosophy of sociology.
Metaphysica of sociology. As in, what is a society (or subpart) composed of. The "ant trap" (name of his book) is the error (his thesis) of falling into the trap (as he says many social theorists do) of thinking of society as an aggregate of its individuals (i.e. a bunch of ants making a colony).
The SEP was written by this same author.
Quoting Hanover
Thanks for the link Jamal. Interesting. I’m partway through. It still strikes me as kind of a mishmash of sociology, psychology, social criticism, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of science. As is my wont, I find myself wondering how much of it is metaphysics and how much of it is science. As you probably know, I make efforts to keep the two separate.
One thing it does show me is that I need to spend more time understanding how to think about the metaphysics of science and in particular social science.
Thanks.
I'm very sceptical of the approach outlined in the article. But...it's a thing.
Yes, it is a sprawling mess.
I view it as one stop shopping. All of his stuff in one location.
by E.E. "Doc" Smith
William Wallace[/i]
I have no more words to say, because they will be meaningless.
Currently: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, for the second time in way too many years. Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage.
What are the other 4?
The Vietnam War as an example (mine).. Kids sacrificed for a false belief, when what ought have been sacrificed is the belief. The kids were sacrificed, but the ram of pride survived, violating the lesson of the Akedah.
Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer is no.1, hands down. Should be a philosopher's dream. Criminally unknown, imo.
Then in no order: 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James and Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino (This one is significantly narrower than the others, but its left a very strong impression.)
As for Brothers Karamazov being no.5, well, maybe it still is, its reputation is more than well earned. But I just finished The Magus by John Fowles yesterday and it's vying for the top 5 spot - it's astonishing, still reeling from that experience. I've had a good year with novels. :)
So is the French Lieutenant's Woman.
Sure, if you forgot then I'd say go for it.
Oh cool! I've heard about it, but have not read it yet, thanks for the recommendation.
Adorno: The Recovery of Experience by Roger Foster, which is densely analytical but great.
Open Socrates by Agnes Callard, which is also great.
On the list:
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, which will be out in a few days
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai
The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett
Malarkoi and Waterblack by Alex Pheby
Doggerland by Ben Smith
Capital by Karl Marx, the new translation
I wasn't aware that there's a new translation. How new is it?
Last year.
?
That's the one.
I didn’t have my glasses on when I saw your post and I read that as “Naval Explosives.” I thought that was an interesting choice until I reread it, this time wearing them.
Quoting Manuel
I gave that to my daughter for Christmas one year. We share a love for it. Have you read “The French Lieutenant’s Woman?”
I was intrigued by this. Doggerland was an area of dry land between what is now Great Britain and France. It was inundated about 8000 years ago by a mega tsunami caused by the collapse of the continental shelf off of Norway.
Alas, that’s not what the book is about.
Yes, and there's still a shallow area around there, a sandbank called Dogger Bank.
It tracks how Orthodox Judaism has changed dramatically over that past few decades, pushing towards a rigorous text based culture from one that was mimetic previously, largely gathering cultural values and norms from observations of one's family and community's practice.
Not of general interest I suppose, but it did (IMO) offer insight into whether American ideological divisions occur based upon mimetic/text based distinctions, with conservatives leaning heavily upon textual interpretation (either statutory, Constitutional, or even Scriptural) as opposed to learning values by observation, mimicry and reevaluation of norms over time. This seems a reasonable suggestion given the conservative's brittleness to change, demand for textual support for authentication of truth, and skepticism over responsive modification of values based upon evolving social issues.
That can happen!
All this is quite subjective, needless to say. Some may think it's just a bloated mess. I think it's the best book I've read. But that's the interesting thing about art- if we all liked the same things, it would be boring.
Though if you like philosophy, poetry, action, political injustice and ambition, I have a hard time imagining it would not be in appreciated in large part. But if difficult-ish prose is a no-go, then yeah, it's a skip.
Quoting T Clark
Not yet, it was also recommended to me by @frank. Those are two recommendations so I will have to read it.
I have a massive reading library though so, I'll add it to read sometimes next year. Thanks for the heads up. Fowles was a fantastic novelist.
by E.E. "Doc" Smith
https://voiceofconscience.azurewebsites.net/Book
[i]“Beware of the waiting room.”[/I]
by E.E. "Doc" Smith
Dude that books is nutssss.
I’m about half way. Love the writing, and the mystery.
I'm glad you are enjoying it. When you finish shoot me an @, I'd love to get your impressions. There's a lot to it.
Have we dispensed with the restriction on use of videos in posts?
Oh, then don't miss downloading the erratum, if you haven't already.
The thing that surprised me the most in this Kazantzakis novel (which is autobiographical) is how he struggled with spiritual crises or existentialism. He tried to follow Christianism, and he even did a pilgrimage to Desert Sinai. However, he ended up disappointed with religion and particularly Christianism. I liked the book. It was a pleasure to read the personal goals, failures, disappointments, and lessons of such an amazing novelist.
--------------------
Now, currently reading: [i]Spring Flowers, Spring Frost[/I] by Ismail Kadare.
Let's see what the book holds.
Thank you for the link. I was not aware of it.
The Magus by John Fowles is a remarkable book; beautify written and great storytelling. Kept having to revise my ideas about what it's about :grin: but in the very end–which was quite tense–it came together for me.
I’ve given the book to both my daughter and one of my sons. They both like it a lot. We do an annual book club where we read one long book, 100 pages a month. We may do “The Magus” next year. Since it’s shorter than some of the books we’ve read, we’ll fill in a couple of months with something else, maybe “Heart of Darkness.”
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Yep! That was quite a performance - on many levels. Hadn't read a book quite like it ever.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
'If I have the faith to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.'. (1 Corinthians 13:2)
That's the Christian one, although the guy who said it was Jewish
That's the Jewish one, and a Jewish guy just said it.
They must have really small mountains where you live. They're just bumps.
I read that a long time ago. I remember an emphasis upon distinguishing creed, what a person believes, and generations of a community struggling with itself. That does suggest a classification of types applicable to other religions but won't capture the bitterness felt by Buber reading the Letter to the Hebrews.
A post?
I live at the foothills of Mt. Everest and I'm going to level that fucker with a shovel. That is true faith. Belief in yourself.
Amazon is my theological library.
Please commend "guy at work" for his efforts to improve your reading list. Presumably, when he saw you flicking through "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" for the third time, he felt you were in need of an upgrade.
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Richard Wolin
Yes, James is on your wavelength, judging from your previous posts.
I didn’t know anyone was paying attention.
There have been many times when I wondered if I was the only one who retained any kind of institutional memory here.
I try to remember where people are coming from, not always successfully. I appreciate that you did.
by Jürgen Habermas