what are you reading now?

I read:

Deuteronomy
Joshua

Reading:

Judges

I also just spent £56 in the Cardiff Oxfam bookshop. They had loads of absolutely pristine old Penguin Classics, so I hoovered up everything I didn't already own, about 16 books in total. It was weird, like somebody died without reading anything on their bookshelf. I almost don't want to read them myself, it seems a shame to damage the spines.

£56, though

I often spend £50-100 in second hand bookshops. You'll never read them but they look good in the house. It's nicel to own them. Enjoying the bible?

luka said:

Enjoying the bible?

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Yeah. You just have to skip all the rules and genealogies, I'm not in a Yeshiva.

I was struggling with American Tabloid - Ellroy. It goes fully in short sentence mode and is hard work. The Black Dahlia was easier.

A few things I've read recently and enjoyed to varying degrees.

Pio Baroja - The Tree of Knowledge -Fan of Baroja. The stuff in English anyway. He's hilarious and the philosophy stands up because of it. All the grotesques and situational comedy he uses.
Jim Thompson - Bad Boy -Digital copy. The kind of book I wish I owned simply because of the pulp cover. Like the Jamie Principle song goes "I'm just a bad boy". Decent autobiography.
William Irish - Marihuana -Nothing too philosophical. Just good hardboiled writing.
Alain Robbe-Grillet - Project For a Revolution in New York -Dark and fragmented. Love it.

Just got A Feast of Snakes - Harry Crews - Bracing myself as OD'd on American Literature recently. Ellroy is enough. Gifford is more than enough.

now that im done w the entrance essay im back and forth between scholem's 'origin of the kabbalah' (newest edition) and engels' 'origin of the family' (edited by leacock). the duality of mandem

CLR James "The Black Jacobins" had to take a break from this for a bit to read other stuff but im in awe of this

Mr. Tea said:

The Iliad. Only just started but it looks promising. I'm picturing the characters (Zeus and all) looking a bit like the GoT cast.

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OK, so this story is pretty much the ur-trash-fantasy novel. Pure sword'n'sorcery, everything is totally over the top - luka compared Beowulf to Conan the Barbarian once, but this is like Conan times 100. It basically consists of fighting, boasting/insults, Zeus being a dick, and more fighting; rinse and repeat.

Now the formula of "...then Dude son of Bloke stabbed Matey, Thingy's son, in the guts, and darkness covered his eyes..." gets repetitive really fast, but what's actually interesting about it is that it gives a window into a world with an ethical system that is rigid, highly codified and almost completely alien to ours. Moral goodness is basically identical with heroism, and heroism, or courage, is identical with physical strength and war-prowess. To be strong is to be brave, and to be brave is to be strong. Cowards are physically as well as morally puny, by definition. So the proposition that a small, weak man attempting to fight a big, strong man is by far the braver of the two, which to us is intuitively obviously, would (I suspect) have struck Homer's original audience as absurd. The well-meaning teacher's old chestnut, that "all bullies are cowards really", would probably have provoked incredulous laughter. In fact I strongly suspect the word "bully" would have been translated as "hero".

Further, the good (i.e. brave) are beautiful, and the beautiful are good. Cowards are not only puny, they are also ugly.

Hereditary nobility and personal nobility are also identical, or nearly so. The "rags to riches" genre, so common in Western culture (and virtually an article of religious faith in the USA) would have seemed perverse, even blasphemous, in this culture. Men of lowly birth are too worthless even to be used as arrow-fodder; men of middling birth make adequate foot soldiers, while the sons of great lords make great warriors. At the top of course are the kings, who are expected to lead the fighting. Not that they always live up to this ideal, but any time one of them exhibits unkingly behaviour - i.e. failing for a moment to demonstrate an absolute and almost idiotic bravery, and an insatiable lust for slaughter and spoils - he will be upbraided by one of his peers, brothers or even a subordinate, and quickly snap out of it.

Finally, it seems very odd to the modern reader that none of the characters, as far as I can remember, considers it at all an 'unfair advantage' when one of the Olympians intervenes by infusing his enemy with superhuman strength or courage to temporarily turn the tide of battle. I suspect that, for this culture, for a hero to be suddenly filled with the spirit of Zeus or Athene or Ares is not a sort of bonus power-up in addition to his native strength and courage; rather, it literally is strength and courage. "Enthusiasm" is "en-theos-ism", to be "filled with (a) god", after all.

Of course all this applies only to the male characters - the women are all present as wives, sisters and mothers of the fighting men, or are there to be fought over as the spoils of war.

So do you like it? Or is it only academically interesting?

Interesting that the Iliad was so inspirational to the Romantics, e.g., given this bleak fascistic ideology you have found. Or was it more the Odyssey than the Iliad?

Now you should read Simone Weil's 'The Iliad, or the Poem of Force'.

Well as I said, I am enjoying it - it's just that, to me, it seems curiously close to modern 'trash' literature.

craner said:

Now you should read Simone Weil's 'The Iliad, or the Poem of Force'.

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Superb essay love the Weil.

craner said:

Now you should read Simone Weil's 'The Iliad, or the Poem of Force'.

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Mr teas did you read this essay? Question for Craner
Were you doing a lot of this kind of secondary reading while you worked your way through the entire western canon? Should I be doing more secondary reading? It can deepen the engagement can't it? I think perhaps I should

Nobody reads philosophy without secondary literature do they? They probably read 4 or 5 secondary texts to each primary one.

A good secondary text can very easily shame you, rub your face in the triteness and laziness of your own reading and response. That's an important lesson to keep learning I think. You are lazy, stupid and trite.

One of the things I keep saying is that reading, like listening, is terrifically hard. The times during which we are equal to the act of reading are few and far between, it hardly ever happens. Hardly ever. It's a kind of grace.

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

How often can you say that?

Speaking of secondary reading, I've just started reading the Penguin History of the World.

The slightly mind-blowing thing I've discovered thus far is that homo sapiens were probably living in a world full of other human-nish species, and interacting with them.

This is probably obvious to most people but I am an ignoramus.

Lots of videos on YouTube pointing out that everyone except Africans are part Neanderthal cave-ape and thus only part human.

luka said:

Nobody reads philosophy without secondary literature do they? They probably read 4 or 5 secondary texts to each primary one.

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I remember having to read some Hegel at uni and it was absolutely torturous.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, is a great read.

Already grinding to a halt with the history book.

But every 'educated' person needs a grasp of it, right?