Market and Violence: The Functioning of Capitalism in History by Heide Gerstenberger

A Death in the Family. My Struggle 1. by Karl Ove Knausgård.

After Ove's father drank to death, this Norwegian author decided to write a set of novels called 'My Struggle'.

The collection is formed by six novels, but you can start with the one you want. They are not necessarily sorted.
Mostly, the first novel focuses on childhood, the acceptance of the death of his father, family problems, etc.

A great author that I discovered thanks to Jon Fosse.

What kind of things are you into? Maybe I could suggest one or two to you if you want.

I'm reading a lot of ancient Greek stuff at the moment. So a good book on the pre-socratics would be appreciated. What books have you been reading on mnemonics?

Recently, Lynne Kelly's work. In the past, Francis Yates' work on Giordano Bruno, The Art of Memory. The former is a decent practical and modern investigation, whilst the latter is a raw scholarly work. Have also browsed through translations of Bruno's Statues.

I have been reading a very good source book for Presocratics. It is a good reference. The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists, by Robin Waterfield. Probably the most solid resource I have for the presocratics. No nonsense scholarship.

This might be up your street too:
Diogenes Laertius
Lives of Eminent Philosophers
an edited translation
edited and translated by Stephen White

Was written sometime in the 3rfd Century CE. Of course, not exactly accurate but being closer to the actual time period it offers some insights into how these early philosophers were regarded at this time.

Thanks for the recommendations. I am going to get myself a copy of Waterfield. It looks great. The Yates book looks interesting too. I definitely want to read, but it looks pretty heavy, so I might save it for later. What do you think of Kelly's Memorycraft?

Pretty basic. I honestly think it is better to read The Memory Code to understand the power of mnemonics and the traditions in non-literate societies - especially if you are interested in the development of civilization and how knowledge has been passed down over the millennia. Especially interesting if you are interested in the origins of religion too!

The Yates one is fairly dry. Bruno is hard to read too. If you read what I suggested first it will either give your the fortitude to read the others or not. Yates was more interested in the history of occultism so it is more or less a historical account of the different systems employed and there relations to more esoteric uses.

A Death in the Family. My Struggle 1. by Karl Ove Knausgård. — javi2541997

I could not get along with this one. Knausgård has the most Norwegian man's narrative voice imaginable. He represents the ancestral urge to escape loneliness by living in the family's country hut in complete isolation.

I quick review of Memory Theatre a novella by Simon Critchley

It is true that Knausgård wants to get into the deepest point of sadness and loneliness, but it is something I am looking for right now. Authors who are older than me, and they express with a great narrative the sense of loss and melancholy.
It is a 500-page book, and I guess I will be able to finish it -- on the other hand, it reminds me of Fosse and the Norwegian type of narrative. I think it took him 10 years to finish this first novel. Wow...

Then I'll stick with Lynne Kelly for now. I'm honestly also really interested in learning the mnemonic techniques themselves hahaha.

Just started the Iliad! It's very fun to read it aloud.

It's very fun to read it aloud. — Jafar

You mean reciting it loudly in Greek? :smile:

I wish! I have to make do with English :cry:

It is true that Knausgård wants to get into the deepest point of sadness and loneliness, but it is something I am looking for right now — javi2541997

Lemme know what you think when you're done please!

I wish! I have to make do with English — Jafar

I wish it too! I read Greek authors in Spanish. My school taught Greek, but I decided to study geography instead. One of my biggest mistakes in my teenage era.

Lemme know what you think when you're done please! — fdrake

Righto, mate! :smile:

Hahaha, my school never even offered Greek nor Latin. It was too new and too understaffed. I'm pretty sure even then I wouldn't have picked it though.

I read the Republic in German, and sometimes I wonder how German translations of Greek texts compare to the English ones. How is it in Spanish?

I've been on a Cybernetic Culture Research Institute kick the last few months. I read:

Nihil Unbound by Ray Brassier through fully for the first time.
I went back to his dissertation Alien Theory. I didn't finish it because it would require a lot of further study for me to understand. Though I was surprised by how Brassier writes in it! He's usually very sardonic, and when he attacks a position you feel as though that position has been put firmly in its place, in this one there's a sense of catharsis in his critique. The dissertation just bulges with utter frustration at the navel gazing hermeneutic meta-game of continental philosophy and social science at the time.

Currently going through - I stress going through, not reading - Nick Land's Thirst For Annihilation, it's quite a book. The prose has a prophetic and thoroughly debased quality to it, though its coke fuelled rambling is marked by great self awareness:

What I offer is a web of half-choked ravings that vaunts its incompetence, exploiting the meticulous conceptual fabrications of positive knowledge as a resource for delirium, appealing only to the indolent, the maladapted, and the psychologically diseased. I would like to think that if due to some collective spiritual seism the natural sciences were to become strictly unintelligible to us, and were read instead as a poetics of the sacred, the consequence would resonate with the text that follows. At least disorder grows. — Thirst for Annihilation

and often there are fecund critical insights:

Kant’s great discovery—but one that he never admitted to—was that apodictic reason is incompatible with knowledge. Such reason must be ‘transcendental’. This is a word that has been propagated with enthusiasm, but only because Kant simultaneously provided a method of misreading it. To be transcendental is to be ‘free’ of reality. This is surely the most elegant euphemism in the history of Western philosophy.

The critical philosophy exposes the ‘truths of reason’ as fictions, but cunning ones, for they can never be exposed. They are ‘big lies’ to the scale of infinity; stories about an irreal world beyond all possibility of sensation, one which is absolutely incapable of entering into material communication with the human nervous system, however indirectly, a separated realm, a divine kingdom. This is the ghost landscape of metaphysics, crowded with divinities, souls, agents, perdurant subjectivities, entities with a zero potentiality for triggering excitations, and then the whole gothic confessional of guilt, responsibility, moral judgement, punishments and rewards...the sprawling priestly apparatus of psychological manipulation and subterranean power. The only problem for the metaphysicians is that this web of gloomy fictions is unco-ordinated, and comes into conflict with itself. Once the fervent irrationalism of inquisition and the stake begins to crumble, and the dogmatic authority of the church weakens to the point that it can no longer wholly constrain philosophy within the mould of theology, violent disputes— antinomies—begin to flourish. Due to the ‘internecine strife of the metaphysicians’ polyglot forces begin to be sucked into conflict, at first mobilized against particular systems of reason, fighting under the banner of another. But eventually a more generalized antagonism begins to emerge, various elements begin to throw off the authority of metaphysics as such, scepticism spreads, and the nomads begin to drift back, with renewed élan. — Thirst for Annihilation

the style of argument in it isn't what you would expect though. There are no syllogisms. There are no premises. There are scarcely conclusions. Where there is is a sustained and thorough attempt to get you to imagine everything around you differently. The book operates at the level of ideology without being propaganda, a surgery upon worldviews. It wrestles with intuitions that would make anyone imagine the world and its history of ideas in any way at all. All in the style of a candyflipper asking you to hold his snuffbox before running at a wall.

How is it in Spanish? — Jafar

I think it is pretty good, actually. The books I have are edited and translated directly from Greek. There are some notes by the responsible of the edition. They are nice to study. At least, these were that my teacher of philosophy recommended me in school, and I never found a better edition in Spanish.

I read the Republic in German — Jafar

Wow, if you are able to read complex books in German, then you sure could read original texts of Nietzsche or Kant!

The Memory Code is by Lynne Kelly too btw if you did not realise that.

Funnily enough, if you are reading the Iliad you can probably see how it was originally a story passed down via oral tradition. If you get that presocratic book I mentioned you will also notice how many of the presocratics shifted form more oral traditions based on mythology to more modern conceptions of philosophical discourse (Thales), and others not mentioned in the book extensively such as Pherecydes, Xenophanes and Hermotimus.

German's my second language so while I understand what's being said I still lack the intimacy with words that natives have. I try to not let it stop me though. Nietzsche is a joy to read, Kant is still pretty tough!

I realized! I get the impression her Memory craft is a bit more practically-minded while the Memory Code is more historical-anthropological.

I'll be getting the book on the pre-socratics. It looks like a lot of fun and it will be good to read with Homer.

(Also could someone show me how to quote?)

I've been on a Cybernetic Culture Research Institute kick the last few months. — fdrake

I had never heard of the Institute, so I looked it up. I also downloaded "Alien Theory." I can't imagine I'll read it all, but I at least wanted to check it out, not so much out of specific interest, but more because I wanted to see what a mild-mannered statistician saw in such a goofy unusual subject.

but more because I wanted to see what a mild-mannered statistician saw in such a goofy unusual subject. — T Clark

Projects like that give you entire other ways of imagining everything. There isn't too much evidence for how we see the world at a base level, so it's nice to be able to view it from a remarkably alien perspective.

But at some point works like that became closer to how I see the world, in terms of worldview and metaphysics, than the everyday pretheoretical intuitions I live in. If whenever I open my mouth fairytales fall out, I may as well learn as many as possible.

But at some point works like that became closer to how I see the world, in terms of worldview and metaphysics, than the everyday pretheoretical intuitions I live in. If whenever I open my mouth fairytales fall out, I may as well learn as many as possible. — fdrake

As I noted, if something this unusual catches your attention, I'm interested to see what it has to say.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism
by Oscar Wilde

The Revolt of the Masses
by José Ortega y Gasset

The Way Things Are (De Rerum Natura)
by Lucretius,

"On A Knife's Edge: The Ukraine November 1942 to March 1943" — bit of a change for me because normally if I read hyper detailed military history doorstoppers it's about WWI (aside from all the insurgency Cold War/GWOT stuff I read back when I worked on that sort of stuff). Instead of focusing on the Stalingrad pocket and the stranded Sixth Army, as many books do, it focuses on the broader and more important context of Uranus and the counter push by Winter Storm to re-establish contact with the Sixth (which came closer to working then might often be realized and, if not helping to win the war for the Germans, success might at least have extended it significantly—thankfully Hitler was a terrible military strategist and had stuck his hands in by this point). It also gets into the preparations for Operation Mars, where the Wermacht got the upper hand. And, not to give to much credit to the morally bankrupt Wermacht, but it is somewhat astounding the degree to which to cut off and woefully under supplied forces were at least initially able to keep inflicting heavy attritional losses on the Soviet enveloping formations.

It does a good job mixing high level details about planning at Stavka and with Stalin and planning at OKW and Hitler's involvement in the decision to forestall a breakout from Stalingrad when it was still likely achievable (although perhaps with dire losses).But, like all detailed histories, it uses divisional journals and orders and personal journals extensively and focuses a lot on the orders of battle, logistics, and individual movements/engagements (including the Soviet's firefight with other Soviet formations when the pincers of Uranus met).

The most astounding thing is how 1940s Russia, reeling from a massive invasion and relying on uneducated peasants and what were essentially often slave soldiers, and using horses and camels for supply lines, could carry out elaborate corps and field army level maneuvers, whereas now you barely see coordination above the level of the BCT. To be sure, drones and satellite imagery have made force concentration harder, but the Kursk offensive (2024) shows it is far from impossible.

Also dipped into the later parts of Herman's "The Cave and the Light," a survey of Western intellectual history through the lens of Plato and Aristotle. Actually seems quite good as far as surveys go.

The book also covers the use of "anti-tank dogs," which seems emblematic of how Stalin's leadership tickled down in the war. Lacking material to make radio detonators, the Soviets simply trained dogs to run at tanks and lit fuses on their explosives before releasing them. But of course in the chaos of actual fighting the dogs became confused and ran back to their own lines and handlers, then exploding. So, you have the mix of useless cruelty that appalled even hardened Soviet infantrymen, with actions that actually hurt the war effort, combined with the decisions to "keep doing it anyway," which is sort of a metaphor for how Stalin's entire military often worked.

Given that Russian conscripts own term for their leaderships tactics in Ukraine today is "meat offensives," it seems that this has not totally improved.