Metal Reviews

Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man for the second time.

Finished Pynchon's Mason and Dixon tonight. Enjoyed it enough to read 770 pages, so yeah. Recommended if you like long sentences, big words, and wacky stuff eg omnipotent mechanical ducks driven insane by loneliness.

Started reading Camus L'Etranger. Having to consult dictionary about five times a page but it's coming along. Might intersperse it with Samuel Beckett's Murphy since not sure if I'll want to do the dictionary grabbing while reading before bed.

Neal Stephenson- Snow Crash

Like they say .. too good to put down. Nothing like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Gives you some idea of what goes on behind the scenes.

Ended up reading the first 70ish pages of Mark Rowlands' The Philosopher and the Wolf last night. It's super easy to read and presents interesting ideas even if it's a bit cheesy at times. Will probably finish it in the next day or two.

Read some of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice. Umm fucked up. Old Black Panthers guy who spent some time in jail doing some auto-biography action. There's this really weird misogynistic streak in it where white women are the problem and even when he admits to how raping white women was wrong he never really drops the targeting of women as the problem rather than just a symptom. He makes really good points and makes lucid the plight of being black in a white society but assimilates to the patriarchial-white supremacist capitalistic culture he seeks to subvert. Kinda sad in a way.

Finished L'Etranger. Loved it. Especially one sentence in the last paragraph that was awfully pretty.

For school:
Descartes - Meditations and some other stuff
Kant - Critique of Pure Reason
some Epictetus and Lucretius jams
Philosophy of Language Anthology
Modal Logic text

For fun:
William James - Varieties of Religious Experience or maybe another French book

looks really interesting, will look into it.

I do not envy your philosophy reading. Descartes was only really interesting to me when he was taught as a philosopher of practical action rather than the standard bollocks of dualism and ontological proofs. Kant is just a bitch but worth reading. I'll be reading the Critique of Judgment this semester. The ancient guys are fine. Ancient materialism is an interesting strand. The language stuff could be really boring like Ayer or kinda cool like Wittgenstein.

Reading some Spivak and Fanon, post-colonial stuff.

Having a look at some Robert Burns.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start with Brendan Behan?

Fascinating stuff.

What's it saying?

It's a pretty brilliant look at New Labour from the inside, the plotting and rivalry between the Blairite and Brownite camps held together by the two men at the top in a pretty strange mini-coalition of their own. More of interest to fans of British politics than anything to do with the wider political sphere, perhaps, but still fascinating for someone like myself who lived through (and believed much of) the spin in more innocent years.

Are you seeing the light?

I haven't been a Labour supporter for years, if that's what you mean. Iraq sent me shrieking in a different direction, and is still a big reason why I will never support them. Ever ever ever.

I was talking about liberalism in general.

The Labour party are the opposite of liberal. Not sure what you're getting at.

Classic liberalism is what I meant. Don't worry about it.

Just finished "Knife of Dreams" by Robert Jordan. Hadn't read any Wheel of Time books in probably three or four years, and it's been five years since I was really obsessed with the series, but this one brought me right back into it. Definitely a return to form after Crossroads of Twilight and leaves me hungering for the next book. And, by all accounts, books 12 and 13 (written by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan passed away in '07) are as good as anything Jordan ever wrote earlier in the series. There's no question that the Wheel of Time dragged a bit in books 7-10, but now that the series is approaching its end, it's getting very exciting again.

Now onto "The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History" by the FreeDarko collective. This book is absolutely essential for NBA fans; quirky and interesting with great writing and great art in the book itself.

Started Kant's Critique of Judgment this afternoon. Also reading Who Knows which is a feminist critique of science through Quine. It's ok but I don't love the philosophy of science details.