I'm reading Moby Dick, which is actually incredible even though the kind of woke racism is hard to parse and interpret.
I'm also reading "Red Revolution, Green Revolution" about agriculture and science in the early days of the Mao's China. It's also really fucking good.
The Ass Book: Staying on Top of Your Bottom
Everything for a Hot Bottom! Finally a comprehensive guide to a man's second most important sex organ! Designed for practical use, The Ass Book tells you how you and your partner can get more pleasure from your backside. The authors not only provide you with crucial information about anatomy, but give you useful tips to improve your health, fitness, and appearance-and of course for better sex "down under." Easy-to-understand and written with the gay man in mind, this book is rounded out with advice from experts and interesting sections on the ass in art, literature, and psychology.
interesting sections on the ass in art, literature, and psychology.
The section on the ass in psychology better not be about Jordan Peterson.
currently reading Parable of the Sower, I'm about a third of the way in, pretty good shit so far.
I need to read Cesaire. I need to just read more. Fuck. His adaption of the Tempest sounds so dope.
Good choice! Love some Ligotti, The Clown Puppet might be my favorite short horror story.
Have you read his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race?
It looks interesting but no library near me has it so I'd have to buy it.
I started reading it, but couldn't stomach it, particularly not in 2020/21
TCATHR is pretty good but shouldn't be taken too seriously, particularly if you have clinical depression
Ligotti should be read as somewhat tongue-in-cheek, otherwise it will make you self-harm
I am familiar with some of the ideas already but yeah I'm sure it's not a good read for mental health... I thought he was being serious tho?
I mean he's not joking but (1) his work incorporates a lot of humor, hence tongue-in-cheekness (2) he's a self-described leftist but if you don't take his fiction and nonfiction work as horror genre, as in specifically meant to scare you and not to educate you, then the lessons you learn will be reactionary and politically unhelpful.
Just finished Foundryside, it was good shit. Definitely recommend.
The newest one by Paul Preston. If you want to learn about spanish history he is the man.
Blood Meridian
Felt like triggering existential depression idk why
The atmosphere in that book is so bleak and heavy, in some ways it was a harder read than The Road.
Definitely, especially because most of it is true (at least the broad strokes)
Just started Anthony Yu's translation of Journey to the West, overall personal goal is reading the Four Great Classic Novels, also reading Blackshirts & Reds following the announcement of the :hexbear-logo: Book Club
Related to my Grad program, a professor recommended The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs by Elliot W. Eisner,
I'm on the chapter on the Three Curriculums: Explicit (what is taught), Implicit (what students pick up on) and the Null Curriculum (what is purposely left unsaid). It is a bit :LIB: on the presumptions it makes about schools and curriculum's missions to "weaken prejudice" but it has some points on how the use of cognition in the curriculum and part of learning objectives impoverishes its true definition. It also cites this guy Mumford and one of the passages hit hard.
The brute fact of the matter is that our civilization is now weighted in favor of the use of mechanical instruments, because the opportunities for commercial and for the exercise of power lie there: while all the direct human reactions or the personal arts which require a minimum of mechanical paraphernalia are treated as negligible. The habit of producing goods whether they are needed or not, of utilizing inventions where they are useful or not, of applying power whether it is effective or not pervades almost every department of our present civilization. The result is that whole areas of personality have been slighted; the telic, rather than the merely adaptive, spheres of conduct exist on sufferance. This pervasive instrumentalism places a handicap upon vital reactions which cannot be closely tied to the machine, and it magnifies the importance of physical goods as symbols - symbols of intelligence and the ability of farsightedness - even as it tends to characterize their absence as a sign of stupidity and failure. And to the extent that this materialism is purposeless, it becomes final: the means are presently converted into the end. If the material goods need any other justification, they have it in the fact the effort to consume keeps the machines running.
I've been reading At the Existentialist Café. It's a survey of the Existentialist thinkers from kierkegaard to Sartre and De Beauvoir. It's more about their lives and history than necessarily explaining their specific ideas. So it's been good for understanding them in a historical context, but it has me excited to actually dig into their work because I want to learn more about their actual philosophy.
I've been meaning to read Moby Dick for a while! Tbh everyone I've heard talk about it likes it, so I should really get around to it.
It's a really incredible book. I've never had a book that evoked visceral responses from me like this has before. There are profound chapters that give you chills, then there are chapters where they murder whales and the description makes you nauseous. And then chapters where they kill whales that make you incredibly sad. And yet, I would never recommend it to anyone because I know most people would not be able to stomach reading it. It's arduous despite all it's merit.
That sounds so enticing yet also disturbing.... I'd probably like it lol
Yeah I have heard it's not the kinda book to just sit down and read thru. Best consumed in smaller chucks it sounds like.
I'm reading Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges, it's a bit depressing by so is reality.
