Metal Reviews

That is correct. Tales of Ordinary Madness is amazing if you like gritty, vulgar, rude stories.

Hemingway writes some good ones. Chekhov is good if you like Russian literature like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

Where should I start with Norman Mailer?

I started with The Gospel According to the Son. You'll probably like that; it's not anti-theistic but it's interesting. The Naked and the Dead is the obvious choice though.

Just heard about this 1200 page collection of JG Ballard's work which is a bunch of scifi that might interest you. The one book I read of his,Crash, was about a cult of people who wreck cars in order to scar and mutilate their bodies, reforming the human body as a weird mechanical humanoid shape held together by screws and splints, with new horizons for sexuality, attraction to scars and new holes in the body to fuck. Weird shit, 1200 pages of short stories might be interesting.

I'm so pissed today. I just realized I should have a firm grasp of Weber if I want to understand Horkheimer and Adorno. It never fucking ends.

what if it actually did end

I know you're just being rhetorical but if it actually did end, with every book I read I would actually being get somewhere close to understanding some of this shit rather than finding out I need to read two books for every one I am able to read in between schoolwork.

Yeah, I guess the Frankfurt dudes have quite a lot in common with a more critical form of Weberianism.

Weber is kind of tricky, but if you can get Adorno you shouldn't have that much trouble getting Weber. And Weber is kind of a cornerstone of the modern world, anyway.

Have you read Vic Allen's chapter on Weber in Social Analysis? Should help a lot.

I skipped through the Vic Allen and focused on the intro stuff and then the end on dialectic. I wasn't concerned too much with the criticism of sociology. I'll check it out though. Thanks.

I guess a lot of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment draws on the rationality part of Weber and how nothing is going to get any better and there is no hope for a better world, kicking to the curb any Enlightenment notion of progress or Hegelian teleology.

Yeah, I think the thing that confuses me with Weber is that in some ways his writing is extremely conservative- that is Vic's critique of him, anyway. Basically Weber spent his entire career justifying authority and the status quo. But then at the same time I think a lot of people use Weberian perspectives to come up with quite radical conclusions. Like Adorno/Horkheimer, obv.

Vic has this really interesting dichotomy of dominant ideology vs. alternative dominant ideology, and turns it into this really cool discussion of trade unions. Unions are supposed to be embodiments of the alternative dominant ideology (i.e. egalitarianism as opposed to individualism), but in order to actually function they are compelled to adopt these Weberian rationalised bureaucracies, which are in fact entirely self-defeating because they are a "dominant ideology" construct growing out of something which in its nature is opposed to the dominant ideology. Classic marxian contraditcion, heh.

I don't know if Weber sought to affirm the status quo; he definitely didn't trust any mass social movement to bring about true change though. I think he's just so bleak, which is what the radicals pick up on, that he see no other alternative than to what we have.

Allen was always cool because I feel like I've flirted or thought of some of his ideas sporadically in my studies and he actually wrote it and fleshed it out. He deserves more credit than given.

Yeah I guess he's not going to get much credit because of the things he did (which really were pretty shitty), but his writings on analytical method are superb.

I think the thing about Weber defending the status quo is that he envisioned this process of continual stratification as a necessity of modern life. He legitimates the whole process of separating conception and execution that marxists took issue with so much, and he also legitimates an entire priveleged class of bureaucrats. So like you say, he was really contemptuous of concepts like worker control which were gaining a lot of traction at his time of writing.

My only problem is his elaboration on the dialectic wasn't as detailed as I was hoping it would be.
I don't know if he saw stratification as necessary, he definitely saw authority as a necessity and stratification as simply the outcome of society be it good or bad. He also didn't want to reduce stratification to just the economic so saying someone is stratified would mean they'd have to be politically, economically and socially stratified which we can now recognize but I think in early 1900s Germany he may have been a little too conservative to recognize.

I also don't know if he thought bureaucrats had privilege. If anything, he saw bureaucrats as needing checks which he saw capitalists as being able to do that. His beef with socialism is that it would create a class of bureaucrats without any entity powerful enough to counter it.

True, but he also objected to the very principle of egalitarian control structures because he thought they were irrational and therefore had no place (afaik).

But yeah, bureaucrats I suppose are priveleged in the sense that they occupy a higher status position with probably better remuneration, but he also saw them as being constrictedand straitjacketed by modern society.

Weber's association with all those marginalist Austrians is kinda interesting, too and I suppose a quite conservative influence. Seeing everything from the perspective of the rationally self-interested subject, and I guess that's what his thought ultimately comes down to.

Re: Vic and dialectics; I dunno. Perhaps from a more philosophical perspective his description is quite underdeveloped (he doesn't really discuss its philosophical roots at all, I guess) but I found it to be the most comprehensive outline I've found of what a dialectical method means from the point of view of an empirical look at society. But that book is definitely more geared towards sociologists or organisational theorists than a more hardcore philosophical approach, for sure.

It seems we should be as vultures to Weber's work.

I guess what I wanted from Allen in terms of the dialectic is a sort of scientific method for dialectics. And I guess it did provide that in a way, I might just be a little too critical looking back on it.

Just finished The Stand by Stephen King, one of my favourites King's books along with IT.

It's a long fucking read, though innit?
Favorite King are, in order:
the Bachman Books
The Shining
Night Shift
Firestarter
The Dead Zone
'salem's Lot
Thinner
The Stand
Carrie
Different Seasons
The Dark Half
Pet Sematary
Christine
Misery
The Talisman
It
Cujo

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

for the hundredth time.

It's one of those books I never tire of, pages well worn and well thumbed over the years

Started on The Master And Margarita. Excellent stuff so far.

Just started Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground.

You won't be disappointed. I'm pretty sure it had a huge influence on Taxi Driver but I've never heard it explicitly stated.