what are you reading now?

[vershy versh]

These are the books I've read so far this year; best in bold, worst in red:

Reads

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information - Erik Davis
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations - Christopher Lasch
Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide - Franco "Bifo" Berardi
End Zone - Don DeLillo
Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? - Jean Baudrillard
The System of Objects - Jean Baudrillard
The Agony of Power - Jean Baudrillard
The History of Europe in Bite-sized Chunks - Jacob F. Field
Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment - Philippa Snow
State of Exception - Giorgio Agamben
Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse - Alessandro Sbordoni
The Silence - Don DeLillo
Farewell, My Lovely - Raymond Chandler
The Moro Affair - Leonardo Sciascia
Collected Poems 1909-1962 - T. S. Eliot
Ivory Pearl - Jean-Patrick Manchette
Nada - Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Cybernetic Hypothesis - Tiqqun
The Body Artist - Don DeLillo
Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
Positions - Jacques Derrida
Lost Dimension - Paul Virilio
The Maker: Prose Pieces 1934-1960 - Jorge Luis Borges
Big Blue Train - Paul Zimmer
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Minutes to Go - Sinclair Beiles, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin
Painting and Guns - William S. Burroughs
Selected Poems - Jacques Dupin
The Brittle Age and Returning Upland - René Char
Leaves of Hypnos - René Char
Chicago: City on the Make - Nelson Algren
The Zürau Aphorisms - Franz Kafka
The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark
The Cat Inside - William S. Burroughs
Blade Runner: A Movie - William S. Burroughs
Naked Scientology / Ali's Smile - William S. Burroughs
The Ticket that Exploded - William S. Burroughs
Sarabad - Abdulkareem Kasid
Death Sentence - Maurice Blanchot
Guy Debord - Anselm Jappe
The Spirit of Terrorism - Jean Baudrillard
The Evil Demon of Images - Jean Baudrillard
Telemorphosis - Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories II: 1987-1990 - Jean Baudrillard
All My Pretty Ones - Anne Sexton
The Book of Sand - Jorge Luis Borges
Forget Foucault - Jean Baudrillard
On the Line - Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
Snapshots - Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Intelligence of Evil, or The Lucidity Pact - Jean Baudrillard
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place - Jean Baudrillard
Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss - Claude-Levi Strauss
A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut
Lud Heat - Iain Sinclair

Rereads

Mao II - Don DeLillo
Passwords - Jean Baudrillard

Doubt I'll finish another book by midnight, so these are the last reads of the year:

Suicide Bridge - Iain Sinclair
My Lunches with Orson - Henry Jaglom, Orson Welles, Peter Biskind
Simulacra & Simulation - Jean Baudrillard
“The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution - William S. Burroughs

 

[Clinamenic]

My god versh! Incredible feat of reading, by my standards at least. What have you been doing like 40/50 pages a day?

 

[Clinamenic]

Do you take notes at all? If so, all this could amount to a rather impressive zettelkasten.

 

[vershy versh]

A lot of those books are very short, and nah, I don't take notes.

 

[Clinamenic]

A lot of those books are very short, and nah, I don't take notes.

Have you considered it? Seems like you've built quite the acumen re: postmodern and poststructural philosophy. Its also just helpful for knowledge retention, I've found. Otherwise I'd have a lot more difficulty retaining stuff over months/years.

 

[vershy versh]

Have you considered it? Seems like you've built quite the acumen re: postmodern and poststructural philosophy. Its also just helpful for knowledge retention, I've found. Otherwise I'd have a lot more difficulty retaining stuff over months/years.

Nah, it's not my thing. I'd never look at them. I just keep reading things I find interesting and whatever goes in goes in.

 

[Clinamenic]

Just started Don Quixote, loving it so far. I suspect it could end up being my favorite novel.

 

[luka]

Yeah that's the thing about notes you never look at them so you still end up retaining nothing whatsoever regardless

 

[Corpsey]

Tragically true.

I'm constantly agonising over this. Why am I reading if I can't remember?

Certain things just don't stick, too, like dates. Although with stuff like when rap albums were released I can remember the years quite often.

Why can't I remember the date of Italian unification ffs

 

[Corpsey]

From my current toilet book: "Dr. Adam Smith, than whom few were better judges on this subject, once observed to me that 'Johnson knew more books than any man alive.' He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end. He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote."

 

[luka]

I know all the lyrics of illmatic of by heart but not a single line of poetry.

 

[Corpsey]

I made a deliberate effort years ago to memorise some poems, I think they've evaporated for the most part now

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah that's the thing about notes you never look at them so you still end up retaining nothing whatsoever regardless

Perhaps thats true for you mere layabouts, but I on the other hand meticulously scan my handwritten notes, convert them to markdown files, and index them into a knowledge graph which is backed up to Arweave, a global distributed database.

Note Hub on Keynes' General Theory

...

www.clinamenic.com

 

[luka]

and then forget them

 

[Clinamenic]

and then forget them

Well sure but at least the world will remember!

 

[vershy versh]

The world can just read the books.

 

[Corpsey]

Idea for a spin off thread "why are you reading now? (You prick)"

 

[Clinamenic]

Idea for a spin off thread "why are you reading now? (You prick)"

I’d have plenty to add to that thread!

 

[Clinamenic]

The world can just read the books.

Yeah it’s not so much that my notes are important, but more that I think it would be cool to be able to access other peoples notes on a given book, and there just aren’t really robust practices in place for that (to my knowledge), hence why I’m doing it. It’s all using an open-source framework utilizing prevalent semantic web standards. Like it would be really cool if I could access all of Felix Raab’s notes on Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.

 

[dilbert1]

That’s the nice thing about having a group discussion on a reading because there’s a purpose for the notes you take. When we start keying in on things I feel like they’re all I’ve got and I can pull quotes or have an outline the argument as it goes, put the twists and turns in context. Its the same with writing where the act of doing it helps you think through things and isn’t important as a long term reference