what are you reading now?

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
luka said:
Lots of videos on YouTube pointing out that everyone except Africans are part Neanderthal cave-ape and thus only part human.
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Yeah there's this whole strain of black-supremacist fringe thought that's adopted wholesale the 'race realist' position from white supremacists and just reversed the value judgement.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"his genetic inheritance not only enables Homo sapiens to make conscious change, to undertake an unprecedented kind of evolution, but also controls and limits him. The irrationalities of the twentieth century show the narrow limits of our capacity for conscious control of our destiny. To this extent, we are still determined, still unfree, still a part of a nature which produced our unique qualities in the first place only by evolutionary selection. It is not easy to separate this part of our inheritance, either, from the emotional shaping the human psyche has received from the processes through which it has evolved. That shaping still lies deep at the heart of all our aesthetic and affective life. Man must live with an in-built dualism. To deal with it has been the aim of most of the great philosophies and religions and mythologies by which we still live, but they are themselves moulded by it."

Thoughts on this?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I had a bit of a 'woah dude' moment last night, stoned, realising that

I don't really know my dad. He didn't really know his. Let alone me knowing his dad. Or his dad's dad. And so on.

Nobody has ever really known anybody. Or ever will.

(Of course this depends on what 'know' implies.)
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Yeah! It's sort of obvious, but so strange too.

I was interested in history at primary school and secondary school, but not in the way that it might seem natural to be - what happened before I turned up? How did this society I live in turn out like this?

I think for a lot of people this stuff becomes more interesting as you get older.
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i have this realization often when i do something stupid, or irresponsible, or experimental, however you wanna call it. then i wonder if my parents did that kind of stuff as well: my first instinct is to thnk they didn't, because i have this image of them as the people who raised me but then i realize, well they were probably doing the same stupid things as well before having me and my siblings. tho of course some parents are more quiet then other, and between the mother and father i think fathers are usually very silent and don't say much emotional or personal.

but maybe now that everything is documented on social media, your future kids will have a perfect image of you.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
"his genetic inheritance not only enables Homo sapiens to make conscious change, to undertake an unprecedented kind of evolution, but also controls and limits him. The irrationalities of the twentieth century show the narrow limits of our capacity for conscious control of our destiny. To this extent, we are still determined, still unfree, still a part of a nature which produced our unique qualities in the first place only by evolutionary selection. It is not easy to separate this part of our inheritance, either, from the emotional shaping the human psyche has received from the processes through which it has evolved. That shaping still lies deep at the heart of all our aesthetic and affective life. Man must live with an in-built dualism. To deal with it has been the aim of most of the great philosophies and religions and mythologies by which we still live, but they are themselves moulded by it."

Thoughts on this?
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I think it's long overdue time for the recognition that any politics that's going to be workable in the long run needs to accept that there are important limitations to what we're capable of, either en masse or individually, and even for the most outstanding individuals. And there have been all sorts of ideologies, often in otherwise total contradiction to each other, that have failed in part because they've denied this. Everything from Nazism, with its (mis)appropriation of Nietzsche's 'superman' ideal, to the more Promethean-Faustian aspects of both capitalism and state-socialism in the last century, to the po-mo academic-left's insistence that every human is born a tabula rasa and culture is everything, for whom the idea of 'human nature' is anathema.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
I think it's long overdue time for the recognition that any politics that's going to be workable in the long run needs to accept that there are important limitations to what we're capable of, either en masse or individually, and even for the most outstanding individuals. And there have been all sorts of ideologies, often in otherwise total contradiction to each other, that have failed in part because they've denied this. Everything from Nazism, with its (mis)appropriation of Nietzsche's 'superman' ideal, to the more Promethean-Faustian aspects of both capitalism and state-socialism in the last century, to the po-mo academic-left's insistence that every human is born a tabula rasa and culture is everything, for whom the idea of 'human nature' is anathema.
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Yes, that's called conservatism.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
craner said:
Must've misread you then.
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OK, well I think part of the problem is that it's an idea that's so amorphous (as befits my miasmic nature) that it could just as easily be read as an argument in favour of, or against, traditionalism. Which itself is a bit of a weasel word, because it doesn't take that long for something to become 'traditional'*, so that what's new and perhaps radical today is 'traditional' for the next generation, while a revived idea that was traditional long ago can look radical.

The nuclear family is a good example. It's traditional in the sense of having been the accepted norm in our part of the world for a few hundred years, but is a fairly recent social innovation in the scheme of things.

* I like Randall 'xkcd' Monroe's maxim that "'An American tradition' is anything that happened to a baby-boomer twice".
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I think what would be very useful for progressive politics now is a popular academic figure arguing from some of the same scientific starting positions as Jordan Peterson but without using them to justify a flatly reactionary social agenda or wrapping them up in garbage pseudo-mysticism (or preferably any kind of mysticism at all).
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
I wasn't using the term conservative as a pejorative or as a synonym for a flatly reactionary social agenda.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Back on the audiobook of The Underground History of American Education. I think it's turning into my manual for the world and how we got to where we are. It's the one book I wish everyone would read. A relentless onslaught detailing just how planned every aspect of society is to keep the things and especially us working in the favour of 'them.'
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
craner said:
I wasn't using the term conservative as a pejorative or as a synonym for a flatly reactionary social agenda.
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Well in that case you may be at least partly correct.

I suppose I'm talking about a change in worldview rather than a position that can be categorised as 'conservative' or 'progressive' per se.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Got three books on my bedside table lined up to read next. Had to pick out of

Pfitz by Andrew Crumey
"Pfitz manifests the same healthy disdain for realism that made his first novel, Music in a Foreign Language, such a pleasant surprise. His borrowings from Borges, Calvino and Pavic are here just as shameless. But at this rate Crumey may yet become a hero to fans of the postmodern Euro-novel who wonder why we Brits seldom produce a homegrown variety." Jonathan Coe in The Guardian " "In the manner of Flann O'Brien's classic At-Swim-Two Birds, Pfitz is a hilariously mind-boggling story within a story within a story, all of whose characters eventually intrude on one another as plot lines converge. Sf fans will want to join the literati in laughing over former theoretical physicists Crumey's brainy romp." Ray Olson in Booklist "Andrew Crumey's novel is a clever, dazzling puzzle, intricately crafted..."
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Cows by Matthew Stokoe (which for some reason I have been putting off for a while)
"I challenge thee to find a bloodier, greasier, shittier (absolute literal meaning intended) book than Cows. Peppered with gratuitous uses of the word “c-nt”, obscene amounts of violence, and unbearable nihilism, Cows is the most vile novel I have ever read. I regret being so curious as to make it through the entirety of this book (I stopped about 25% of the way through because I almost puked, but picked it back up again a few days later because I thought I needed to know how it ended). I wouldn’t trust the moral compass of whomever has finished book - yes, myself included - and would run far, far away from those who say they enjoyed it. Cows is a hedonistic vomitorium that takes bestiality, voyeurism, gore, and depravity to a whole new fucking level."
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An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
"We are in England in the 1660s. Charles II has been restored to the throne following years of civil war and Cromwell's short-lived republic. Oxford is the intellectual seat of the country, a place of great scientific, religious, and political ferment. A fellow of New College is found dead in suspicious circumstances. A young woman is accused of his murder. We hear the story of the death from four witnesses: an Italian physician intent on claiming credit for the invention of blood transfusion; the son of an alleged Royalist traitor; a master cryptographer who has worked for both Cromwell and the king; and a renowned Oxford antiquarian. Each tells his own version of what happened. Only one reveals the extraordinary truth.
With rights sold for record-breaking sums around the world, An Instance of the Fingerpost is destined to become a major international publishing event. Deserving of comparison to the works of John Fowles and Umberto Eco, Iain Pears's novel is an ingenious tour de force: an utterly compelling historical mystery with a plot that twists and turns and keeps the reader guessing until the very last page."
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Opted for the last one cos I've meant to get round to it since it was first recommended to me some ten or fifteen years ago. I ordered it off Amazon once only to have the order cancelled for some reason. I was quite pleased to find it a month or so back in the second hand English bookstore in Lisbon. In fact, I got it for free (effectively) cos I off-loaded a pile of books I'd read and they gave us credit for them.
 
C

catalog

Well-known member
Just finished rings of Saturn, wg sebald. Pretty good. Some bits very good, like the Joseph Conrad section, weird how that one just broke off far earlier than I thought it should have done, but I suppose that's his thing.

Also read 'do everything wrong' by jarett kobek, about xxxtentacion. Very good, more a long article than a book tho. I listened to '17', it's ok.
 
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