Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I had a similar experience with Heidegger when I was an undergraduate

Most of the lecturers never engaged me all that much but this one guy taught a small class of us about Theory - one week I was the only person who turned up. He briefly inspired me to feel excited about books again.

Anyway, for some reason Heidegger really excited me, briefly - and now I can't remember why NOW, whatsoever. I remember Kierkegaard also appealed to me, though that makes more obvious sense to me.

Ultimately, I was too lazy to persist. So I'm with you there luka on the envy thing.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Heidegger often appeals to technologists, strangely enough, I think because his account of the relationships between ourselves, our projects and our tools brings a sort of depth against which things stand in relief. He is (setting aside the Nazism) a good philosopher for Makers, because he places the process of making things within a horizon of meaning beyond pure instrumentality. One of my old techie colleagues read Heidegger and got very seriously into breadmaking, for example, which may seem bathetic but illustrates the kind of need that Heidegger fulfils for such people.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I do worry about all those gaping spiritual voids out there. Nature abhors a vacuum. Demonic forces sniff opportunity, blind tendrils feeling out the dry crevices of distempered minds.
 

luka

Well-known member
I often think in terms of demons. For instance I think that demons get chained by previous generations ('bound') then appeal to politicians etc to unchain them. A deal gets made. When you unchain a demon you release huge quantities of energy. It's how I think of Thatcherism. Trump, same deal.
 

luka

Well-known member
Btw corpsey, Craner, poetix, I'm doing a science project can you please fill in the what is your current vibrational frequency form? There's something I'm trying to get a handle on.
 

luka

Well-known member
It wasn't so much the content of heidegger that I found invigorating it was the experience of finding something impenetrable at first contact and having it yield over time. It gave me a new sense of what was possible.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
When I think of what I see of current left culture - online, in social media - it has this febrile, fizzling quality, it's obviously exhausting and hurting people, an energy-sink rather than an energy-source. What happens when a moment of revolt - the student movement of 2008, for example - enters a period of defeat and exhaustion, too many wounds and not enough tongues to lick them. Corbynism injured but did not kill the Tory beast, and is itself a parched, bleeding animal, far from the promised pasture. The US left continues to spread insane moralism everywhere, mingled with the adolescent counter-moralism of the "dirtbag" left which has somehow made a rallying point of the right to say "retard" in public. It's a bad scene, all round. So it's not surprising that people should set off in search of new oases, or summon demonic forces into their living rooms, just for the sake of feeling something other than weariness and apprehension. Great opportunities for speculators in distress.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So it's not surprising that people should set off in search of new oases, or summon demonic forces into their living rooms...

...or escape a materially comfortable but stultifying suburban existence by booking a one-way ticket to Syria to support the Caliphate.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
The US left continues to spread insane moralism everywhere, mingled with the adolescent counter-moralism of the "dirtbag" left which has somehow made a rallying point of the right to say "retard" in public. It's a bad scene, all round. So it's not surprising that people should set off in search of new oases, or summon demonic forces into their living rooms, just for the sake of feeling something other than weariness and apprehension. Great opportunities for speculators in distress.

Chris Hedges talks about what he calls boutique issues where through social networks and media people get to win these little phyrric victories to feel heroic for a moment which in the end only placates them from making any true societal progress.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've started, will I finish?

Chekhov - Stories - If it has to be one of the many volumes, make it the later stories, 'The Black Monk', 'The Bishop' and 'The Lady with the Little Dog', although 'The Kiss' means most to me. Chekhov's stories are beautiful, painful, unresolved and heavily pregnant with meaning.
Joyce - Ulysses - I'm sticking this on here even though I only got up to 'Sirens' so far - because I know from reading that far that this is a book that contains everything you need from a book, and is one of the only books to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.
Tolstoy - Anna Karenina - Another book I've not finished. I got halfway through, convinced it was the only novel I ever needed to read. Like Final Fantasy 7, which I was convinced was the greatest game ever made, until I stopped playing it because I got stuck. One day!
Milton - Paradise Lost - Staggering blank verse tour de force. Obviously terribly boring in parts but in large part pretty (surprisingly) thrilling. Satan one of the best characters ever created. Book 9 I would suppose to be some of the best poetic drama ever written outside Shakey.
Yeats - Collected Poems - I've not really investigated Blake or Eliot enough to include them, but I've read a fair number of Yeats's, and he's the daddy afaic. Ridiculous, humourless but also DA DADDY. If it came down to one collection I suppose it would be The Tower.
Terry Pratchett - Thief of Time - Bit of a random choice but I remember this being one of my favourite Discworlds. Obviously not 'high' literature but I've always loved Pratchett's Discworld novels. Right up my street, having grown up loving Maid Marian and her Merry Men and Blackadder, and escapism, of course.
Shakespeare - King Henry IV pt. 1 - Could have picked a few Shakeys, obvs, not least Othello, but this is definitely my favourite of those I've read. Amazing blend of 'low' comedy and 'high' history, featuring one of the most entertaining, tender and poignant depictions of friendship ever (Hal and Falstaff).
Swift - Gulliver's Travels - Not read this since uni tbh but it made a big impression on me at the time. Still genuinely funny, bracingly misanthropic, imaginative.
Martin Amis - The War Against Cliché - I'd be dishonest not include this, one of my most well-thumbed books. Aside from the lit crit, very influential on me because it showed me an article about chess could be exciting, given the right writer. (Most of his novels are failures though.)
Philip Larkin - Collected Poems - feel deeply ambiguous about Larkin. In many ways I can see his achievement is quite narrow, even parochial, compared to Eliot, say. Anyway, having been depressed and lonely for great swathes of my life, Larkin's poetry speaks to me in a frankly uncomfortable way. And poems like "An Arundel Tomb" and "The Whitsun Weddings" are so extraordinarily artful. What can I say? I wasn't into poetry. I read Larkin and I was instantly hooked - and speared.

Would like to have included Madame Bovary, The Trial and Gombrich's Story of Art. But no space.
 
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poetix

we murder to dissect
A top-ten off the top of my head:

Speech! Speech! - Geoffrey Hill
The Flight From The Enchanter - Iris Murdoch
The Century - Alain Badiou
The Divided Self - R. D. Laing
Lanark - Alasdair Gray
The Dispossessed - Ursula K. LeGuin
Intercourse - Andrea Dworkin
The Good Terrorist - Doris Lessing
The Post Card - Jacques Derrida
The Glass Essay - Anne Carson
 

version

Well-known member
I always struggle with this sort of thing because when I really think about whether I like something I just end up deciding I'm not that arsed. You could tell me I could never read Gravity's Rainbow again and I probably wouldn't care. This is why I stopped buying music. I would think to myself "Do I really need this?" and the answer was always no.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Tbf I think rereading books is a very rare thing for most people. I went through a short phase of rereading books, but very short books. I read Death in Venice twice, for example. It's a rewarding experience, and I wish I did it more. But there's so many fucking books, and I'm not even capable of reading most of those ONCE.

It's strange really, this thought that "I can't reread Madame Bovary, I HAVE to read Proust!" When the fact is I'll probably forget either a few days after I've finished them, and I'll be dead one day anyway.
 

version

Well-known member
I've read Heart of Darkness three times, The Crying of Lot 49 four times, Naked Lunch three times, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas three or four times, V. twice, American Psycho twice and Inherent Vice twice and I think that's it in terms of rereads.
 
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