Metal Reviews

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. enjoying it but 100 pages in fail to see the awesome people rave about in it.

It is so good. It is very hard to get into though, especially at the beginning before he's joined Glanton's gang. But the Judge... Such a horrifying character

Fuck Lyotard on Kant. Reading a discussion of Deleuze and Foucault, some Alcoff, some Spivak and was reading Howard Zinn's People's History during a movie.

Got The Art of War for free in my iBookstore. Awesome.

Teaching Marx on Thursday in class so I'm reading Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right which is a simple account responding to all the standard myths which are prevalent surrounding Marxism. Very easy reading and funny. I've read it for 40 minutes and am 40 pages into it. Such a rarity in my line of work.

I also read some of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States over the weekend. Reading Lyotard's Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime which is kicking my ass. I wish I understood Kant so much better.

downloaded Heart of Darkness from Project Gutenberg. is it cool?

hells yeah black white dichotomy ftw.

Rereading Hesse's Steppenwolf for the first time in many years. And reminded why this is one of my favourite books ever. I think I'm gonna go on a massive "rereading old favourites" spree. Possibly some We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) next.

We was good. I put it above the other classic dystopians.

Heart of Darkness is amazing. One of my favourite books.

Now reading:

R. Scott Bakker- The White Luck Warrior

Finished Varieties of Religious Experience. It made believing in a higher power sound comforting in a warm and fuzzy kind of way that made me jealous of religious people. On the other hand if you replaced "God" with "feeling happy" and "sin" with "things I feel guilty/ashamed/etc of" then a lot of the religious people James quotes are pretty applicable to my life. In general William James' writing makes me want to cuddle with his brain so I loved the book.

Starting Samuel Beckett's Murphy today. Excited to be reading for fun.

I was always told to check out James' Will to Believe but I just hate pragmatism so much.

Finished Murphy. Beckett does some stuff I love, like the first sentence "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new", but he's also too smart for his own good (unnecessary references to monadology: wtf?) and the way he describes the characters makes them hard to relate to. Too many big words and too much absurdity, not enough empathy.

My plans for the summer:

+Les Miserables in French.

Really want to be reading "A Heartbreaking Work of Extraordinary Genius" by Dave Eggers, and re-reading A Game of Thrones, but schoolwork keeps getting in the way. Poop.

Bonne chance, t'en auras besoin.

One of my favourite books. One of those ones where I started thinking the way he writes for a month or two after reading it



Oui, mon francais est merde.

So is my english, don't worry too much. But Les Misérables is not the easiest. A very good one, obviously, but a bit demanding. Nonetheless, it is worth it. Victor Hugo is one of my favorite french authors. I worship pretty much everything he wrote.

Adorno - Aesthetic Theory (and getting my ass kicked by it for a presentation I have on the ugly tomorrow)
Uma Narayan - Dislocating Cultures
Maria Lugones - Pilgrimmages/Perejinages

I loved his book about a condemned prisoner experiencing his final days of life.

"Le dernier jour d'un condamné" (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), a short and excellent one, indeed.