It's not so peculiar that he hasn't read Crusoe. I've been reading since I was 5 and the only reason I'm familiar with it is because my mom read it to me when I was little, and I didn't much like it then. I don't remember ever wanting to read it or anything.

Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues were great, though I wouldn't call 20,000 Leagues a kids book. I hated it when I read it--I think I was 15?--but now I think I would enjoy it.

crusoe makes more sense when you are older. as a kid it is slow.

so do you think he got freaky with friday? or the goats?

I finished the Poisonwood Bible a few nights ago, and it was really excellent. (I last posted about it on the 9th, for clarification it didn't take me 20 days to read it)

Now I'm reading Heart of Darkness.

I'm currently reading Norwegian Wood, the Amber Spyglass, the Bell Jar, the Raw Shark Texts, and Tropic of Capricorn all at the same time because I'm high on crack.

Tell me how the Bell Jar is. I wanted to read it, but I don't want to buy it, and last time I checked, it wasn't at my local library (where the suburban gangsters apparently check their myspace).

It's my favorite book. It's rather depressing but very thought inducing. If that makes sense. Anyway, if you read it and like it, definitely check out Norwegian Wood. Brilliantly written.

Will do. Thanks.

(most hilarious quote yet: "people used to do acid and go to the park and argue with the trees; and sometimes, the trees would win the argument!".)

Badiou, Infinite Thought. Mathematics is ontology, apparently, although I'm yet unclear as to how this isn't a reactionary response to poststructuralism's absencing (in turn a reaction fo Foucault/ Heidegger). It'll all end in Fichte, you mark my words.

Anyway - I like that Lemmy's referenced Merle Haggard, and may pick up that book as a result.

I'm halfway through The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams. Next in the queue is 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.

Still on Ulysses I WILL finish it before the summer's over.

Haha. I finished the Oxen in the Sun chapter a couple weeks ago, finally. The play section is going a lot faster, but it's still hard to motivate myself.

I'm 3/4 or so thru Ithaca. The question/response is tedious and I've been unmotivated. I've read maybe 20 pages since May.

just finished a biography of Fikret Moualla - an avantgarde painter from 1950s..

continuing:
neal stephenson - cryptonomicon
kathy acker - pussy king of pirates

Finished Toby Litt's Hospital - satanists, voodoo, cows, a rubber nurse, some yellow mist... after some slow pages, it gained pace and was completely unpredictable... healing wounds and body parts, a tree growing in a boy's belly... a nurse in love with a talented young doctor - the parody of a genre in which features Cherry Ames' Dude Ranch Nurse perhaps? Nuts.




I've started Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park

These were the very last books I ever bought at my favorite city bookshop; the librarian had to call it quits, and he was the only one in town who had young authors books and out-of-fashion goodies like Leonid Andreiev on his shelves.

in the last 3 weeks i've read... shadow of the wind, history of love, lunar park, love in the time of cholera and dandy in the underworld. i'm going to start on one years of solitude tonight. i've loved everything i've read lately (with the exception of lunar park which was iffy). i'd recommend them all.

i read it when i was 13 and i fucking loved it. it was for a book report and i had to make a diorama. ha.

That's OG Emo.

So, it turns out he's siding with the linguistic turn inferring a subordination of philosophy in general, and ontology in particular, against the classic (and 'sick', in his words) notion of Platonic truth/ Cartesian metaphysics.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that anyone who's frustrated with the [lay] interpretation of postmodernism as a critical practise will probably enjoy this particular book.

Having said that, you'd best avoid it if you're sold on hermeneutics or post-Kierkegaardian 'existentialism'.

give up the prehistoric wank, read some neuroscience.

That's precisely the sort of thing Badiou is arguing.

I do ocassionally read properly 'scientific' things, but I always just want to jump to the abstract. It behooves me none to know the particulars of a field I'm not likely to operate in.

go gazzaniga go

anyway, try this?

http://books.google.com/books?id=FB5cDa05U8cC&printsec=frontcover&vq=%22Ph ilosophy+and+Neuroscience%22&dq=philosophy+of+neur oscience

un autre

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZS0eo39XOs8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=philo sophy+of+neuroscience&sig=ACfU3U0y1m2pAZecoQ_1j-biknzjIjd4RA&source=gbs_similarbooks_r&cad=2_2#PPP 1,M1

Heliogabalus or the crowned anarchist by Artaud. It might be a litte bit too phallic, but it's nevertheless very interesting. Heliogabalus replaced Nero as my favourite Roman Emperor anyway.

Will give the first a bash, unlikely I'll read something as insipid as the second.

not something i would have suggested but you asked for deep abstraction.

something as popular as gazzaniga's the ethical brain should suffice to blow up everything you knew until today (i.e. "morality comes from god").

it's here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=R0ICFQ16h0YC&dq=the+ethical+brain&pg=PP1& ots=jR1BDdnHNS&sig=g9aSvfR9FbE11PBuM_J4qq73F1k&hl= en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

I hope this is the pejorative 'you'. This is the problem I have with a lot of what you might call 'philosophico-science', that it rather gleefully and smugly pronounces things that a decent sceptic could've forseen several thousand years ago.

i would post in this thread but it would get lost in the general wankery

Science is the Yngwie Malmsteen of knowledge. Incredible, yes, but no one really wants to hear it.

yes it's true-- but look at this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html

that man you see is an utter twat. but still-- the implications of the science are ready to kill the soul--socially that is. oh yeah. i couldn't be happier myself. why people need scientific proof of the obvious i don't know, but there!

The problem with that sort of article is that you get into this epistemic loop that's pretty pointless, as pointless as religions antagonists claim religion to be - assuming that any notions of 'faith' or 'religion' are 'false' constructs, and any belief in those is a consequence of empirical chemistry/ physics, how can the brain trangress beyond its own (empirically defined) limits? This might seem pessimistic, but if it produces endorphins in some people to intuit ('falsely') the existence of God, religion [etc], then does that make the notion 'false', the 'outside' of God 'false', or does it make God true within the empirically defined parameters of the brain? And ultimately, does science propose to make people's lives any different (positively or negatively) or does it propose to merely observe?

See? It's a big loop of pointless cock.

I'll finish reading it next time I go into barnes and noble. I'm not gonna actually buy it.

I finished reading Watchmen recently. Pretty great.

bought William Gibson's Neuromancer and Bukowski's Factotum. can't wait to read them!

I found it at some thrift store for 25 cents! Along with Dante's Inferno, and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

But first I must read Hardball by Christ Matthews for AP Government.

Win. I got my first copy for free when my library was throwing out books.

you know hardball is good, dontcha?

Neuromancer is fucking great. I didn't expect it to be as good as it was, but it was my favorite book for a really long time. Gibson is one of the best describers in literature.

I hadn't heard anything about it until now. All my friends in the same class procrastinate so much that none of them even have it yet. Actually their irresponsibility annoys me sometimes because I have to be the one to make copies of assignments or whatever for all of them.

But it's good you say? I haven't read any non-fiction for a while, so it'll be a nice read.