Just got this, starting this after I finish Dillion's short book — Maw

It's good. It packages contemporary Marxist critique in a clear and accessible way, with an emphasis on education and mental health. A short, depressing, and punchy read.

A short, depressing, and punchy read. — StreetlightX

That's my jam

The Elementary Particles aka Atomized by Houellebecq was fantastic. Reading Submission now.

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk and whatever of Irving Babbitt I can find. Babbitt's translation and the following essay about the Dhammapada by Buddha is nifty.
Santayana is next, I read his Last Puritan as a child, so time to go deeper.

How do you like Krasznahorkai?

Well I read three of his books within a few months and watched the Bela Tarr film Satantango which was over 7 hours long so I guess you can say I adore his work.

Isn't he great? My favorite is War&War which I'm guessing you're close to getting around to - but I haven't read Melancholy (I own it, but I'm on a self-imposed no-dark-or-overly-theoretical-book regimen at the moment. One day.)

War & War is next on my list. Melancholy is excellent, I'm not sure if I enjoy that or Satantango more, but they are two of my favorite books of all time. Seibo There Below was great but a somewhat odd departure.

Re: Seibo, agreed. Reading his China travelogue (tho its more than that), Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens helped me make some sense of it. It was translated after Seibo but was written four years before. His fascination - and deep familiarity with- despair is the flipside of his desire for transcendence, I think (he's a lot like Dostoevsky in that way). And his desire for transcendence is tightly bound up with his respect for craft and discipline. He didn't really find what he was looking for in China. But I feel like part of that was this inertia thing. He kind of didn't want to. He was ambivalent. Seibo lets that part free a little more.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative by Mark Fisher

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics

Whadya think?

Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense -- Scott Crow

I loved it, some essays I re-read again immediately after finishing them. I'm going to buy the Collect Writings that came out recently

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Halfway through this. Definite thumbs up too. The section on education is particularly spot on and gels with my experience (only I never expressed my frustrations as consistently eloquently and effectively as he does his).

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Dante's Comedy

I'm not sure what I think yet. I'm at canto iv. He seems to have a lot of good insight about spiritual progress. but then he'll suddenly declare himself equal to Homer, or use his poem to shit on some other enemy from his personal life. And he constantly flatters Virgil, obsequiously, while still casting judgment on Flatterers. So I don't know.

I really really wanted it to be a good spiritual poem, ala Dark Night of the Soul, but it's seeming more and more like a hugely imaginative poem by a bitter exile, mapping out his psyche with all its inconsistencies.

It's science fiction. They thought hell was underground, and the idea that the earth is spherical was circulating. When they get to the bottom of hell, it's the center of the earth.

Black like me—John Howard Griffin (Reread)
Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative—Walter A. Davis
Rabbit, Run—John Updike
The Conquest of Bread—Peter Kropotkin
Infinite Jest—David Foster Wallace

Dante's Comedy — csalisbury

One of the best things humanity ever made imo

Crime and Punish by Michel Foucault
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson

I'm still very on board. But it's striking to me how strange Dante's thought is. I guess it's easy to assume that High Canonical works are going to be sleek, monumental things. But the Comedy, so far, is bizarre in its assemblage of myths, theologies, esoteric schemas and how easily it shifts from the universal to the particular etc etc. Which I guess is a virtue in itself. I just haven't quite gotten used to it.

Tho I see aspects of myself in every circle of hell so far, the ones I've most related to are the sullen:

'Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;
in the glory of his shining our hearts poured
a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun;

sullen we lie forever in this ditch.'
This litany they gargle in their throats
as if they sang, but lacked the words and pitch.

I think its interesting that the sullen are introduced just after the wrathful, lying beneath the surface of the water that the wrathful endlessly roil. And that they're in the same canto as the hoarders and the wasters, whose punishments mirror one another. Reminds me of the old idea of depression as aggression turned inward. Sort of like the wrathful are anger-spendthrifts, and the sullen are anger-misers.

There is no denying it's an extremely personal poem which is why it's rather "strange" or rough around the edges. It's inseparable from Dante the man. If you read La Vita Nuova, Dante discusses his infatuation with Beatrice, who as well all know dies young, and at the end of La Vita Nuova he basically says that he will not write anything more about her unless it be something truly worth of her; and something that has never been said of any woman.

Then the mad lad goes and writes what I would say is the greatest epic poem ever written. Literally called his shot, what a baller.

There was also a modernized, yet very well done, and entertaining Dante's Inferno indie film that came out 10 years ago. They used paper figures. Used to be on Netflix ages ago but I haven't been able to find a stream in a long time.

Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials by Malcom Harris
Dune by Frank Herbert

The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics by Arthur Schopenhauer
Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Horney

Weekend reading spot :D

you sick bastard I want to be on a beach

Henry Staten - Wittgenstein and Derrida
Giovanni Maddalena - The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution