Frobisher Smith
It's an excellent little sword and planet novella. Brackett showing here why she was considered one of the best by fans and Hollywood alike, deftly weaving economical prose and larger than life characters. Very little actually happens in this story, but nonetheless it feels epic. The Cirsova edition I read with nice bold print and full-page illustrations turns this into a captivating light novel that is just what a boring, hot Summer calls for. And there's two more in the series! Definitely recommended.
This is the story of a 19th century gentleman visiting America who hails from the fictional Christian commonwealth of Altruria, a country which has managed to fully embrace a communitarian way of life in service to building Heaven on Earth. An excellent idea rendered pompously, filled with strawpersons, and which gives the rural poor in the tale an oversized natural-born morality which, overall, makes it a less-than-serious sort of novel. Given Howell's professional insistence on Realism over all other concerns, you'd think he'd be able to paint characters more real than those here. Still, I think he meant well, and there are plenty of enjoyable moments. Only if you are really trying to make a survey of Utopian literature is this a necessary read, however.
Really fantastic poem. Every stanza had something memorable or clever in it, or something that tied into my own memories, which made this emotionally powerful and very evocative for me. I think what the poet did here was inspired and very well-executed. This will stay with me for a long time.
This was a challenging but really engrossing and utterly fascinating book on the philosophy of time and the “production of time” within capitalism. Here, the author describes how the transcendental subjectivation of time is necessarily tied up with the development of capitalism and the modern world, that the invention of the precision mechanical clock revolutionized not only industry, but likely made Kant's conceptualization of time possible in the first place. And from there, the further mutation of our understanding of time is also mediated by technology and capitalism, with Greenspan bringing in the Deleuzean understanding of Aeon and Chronos to discuss the Y2K bug as an Aeonic mutation point signifying an evolution of globally standardized clock-time to a post-global, increasingly decentralized, fully machinic “cyberspace time.”
The introduction from the Miskatonic Virtual University team expands this last point even further, showing how the appearance of Bitcoin's decentralized use of timestamp server networks is proof that cyberspace has mutated the production of time, including the fact that the timestamped blockchain acts as a kind of “timechain,” a purely quantified calendar of sequentially numbered blocks, whose ebbs and flows are determined by a difficulty-adjustment algorithm and totally divorced from cosmic motion and cultural seasonality. Instead, the intensity of mining operations on the bitcoin network is the primary variable for the algorithm: economic activity is the very pulse of the cybernetic calendar (time = money). If you are able to read the whole book without your mind getting blown even once, I'd suggest you didn't understand the contents.
Fascinating and weird. The Ancient Greek theater was full of sex jokes and potty humor, easy pratfall gags, and so on. One can imagine portions of this playing out on late night television tonight. This play features an early version of a “celebrity freestyle battle” between playwriters Aeschylus and Euripides, as well as jokes and commentary on then contemporary military battles and politicians. This is all tied together by the overarching story of Dionysus making a parodical journey to the underworld of Hades.
The edition I read, translated and notated by Peter Meineck, was perhaps not the most traditional or faithful to the original translation, but the footnotes were very informative and helpful, as was the lengthy introduction. All in all, it was a great little read and a fun experience.
Very interesting stuff. At times a pulpy stream of lurid rumors about alchemists and magicians, at times a clear-headed expose of central banking. The real magic trick, as Twyman explains here in depth, is the transformation of time into money. I'm not sure how credible all of the information in this is, some of the claims she makes are quite wild! But she was clearly on to something.
Hoffmann's original is a fascinating read. A little dark, very strange, and yet very full of whimsy. One has to believe that there is something deeper to this little fantasy children's tale, since we see elements of it in so many things that have come after and it has inspired retellings, and then musical suites and ballets based on those retellings, which have taken on a life of their own within Christmas neoclassical rock extravaganzas and Disney films. Perhaps even the children's board game Candy Land has its roots in The Nutcracker's fantasy world of sweets. This has proven to be very influential, indeed, and is still a fun read, although not without some creaks from age.
A very enjoyable collection of Samhain-themed short stories of heroic and dark fantasy and pulpy adventure. Everything is tinged with sinister weirdness, which made it a perfect light read for the Halloween season. Arcane cultists bringing forth unspeakable horrors, cunning men of action wielding steel and iron, and more than one storming of the gates to Hell await the reader! I personally liked every story in the collection, none of them fell flat to me.
Excellent book. Details the players and misbehavers in the UFOlogy and Cattle Mutilation research scenes for over about five decades. This is the story of how much of what we call “UFO lore” today originated not from black ops whistleblowers describing real events, but purely from the imaginations of Air Force and CIA intelligence officers, and how they got these tall tales into circulation as “disclosures” believed by many to be true.
Adam Gorightly writes from lengthy experience within the conspiracy, esoterica, and paranormal research scenes (an overlapping grouping to be sure), and deflates many of the more sensational ideas of underground extraterrestrial-staffed military bases and sci-fi laser battles, while very much pointing to real evidence of counter-intelligence operations against potential Russian assets, top secret medical and technological experimentation on American citizens and their cattle, and the possible assassination of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro. It's a very clear-headed and quite interesting book, I enjoyed it a lot.
A fascinating but challenging book to read. I don't think I can do it justice to try and explain it in a review, it is perhaps one of the densest things I have tackled in recent memory. Schelling moves deftly in an inter-disciplinary and wholistic fashion though seemingly the entirety of the fundamental considerations of Mythology writ large. While today we might see some of his assumptions and determinations as outdated and ultimately unsupported, as a whole it is surely a strong and durable piece of philosophy, one that must be reckoned with by any scholar of mythology and the history of religion looking for philosophical grounding in their studies.
This is a fantastic expose of the infamous director and writer Ed Wood, Jr. Told through bits and pieces of interviews with those who know him, this tragic and frenzied true story of a fringe artist is compelling and fascinating. For all fans of B-Movies, Ed Wood and the “exploitation” genre.
There are some great facts and lore presented here to add to one's knowledge of ancient mysteries and mysticisms. Ultimately, this book is a bit scattershot and seemingly without any kind of main thesis to tie it all together. It is an overview of the dark Chthonic occult arts of Ancient Greece, not meant to be in-depth, though the author starts to run out of steam just as she gets to the most interesting parts. Oh well, to me it was enjoyable and interesting enough, and has enough intriguing little tidbits to make it worth owning.
A short, funny polemic against the “Degrowth Movement” and one of its main proponents, Jason Hickel. Peter Coffin comes at it from an orthodox Marxist perspective, showing how it's the same papering-over of the contradictions of Capitalism that Malthus, Galton, Herbert Spencer, and later the Fascists used to explain why there's never enough to go around.
I think he does a fine job of explaining why we can't degrow ourselves out of the problems we're facing, and why Hickel's worldview is a dissonant mess of contradictory notions. As with most self-published works, however, it could have used a bit more editing. That said, it was an enjoyable little book.
Lefebvre argues here that the modern world we live in is bounded by the philosophies of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. Separately, these philosophies are incomplete and partially applicable to the reality we see today. But, taken together, can be seen as an almost inescapable philosophical penumbra which we all operate under. Today one can see easily that they are the Hegelian subject, the Marxist class identity, and the Nietzschean body, all at once and seemingly unavoidably. This shadow realm is bounded up with the State, with Capital, and with Will. Yet there is light beyond this, Lefebvre insists. Beyond the realm of shadows is the possibility of the production of space, and of a “double breakthrough,” of both the objective and subjective worlds – of a world not as political, as ideational, but as a truly social and poetic space.
This is a deep and deftly woven discussion of, in Lefebvre's estimation, the three most unavoidably important philosophers of our contemporary era. His reading of Nietzsche is regarded as particularly influential, being one of the earliest “leftist” interpretations. He makes a point to note, in this book, his disagreement with Lukács, whose critique of Nietzsche from the left is quite harsh. However, it was his section on Hegel here that I personally found most interesting and informative. All in all this is an amazing and engaging work that I recommend to anyone remotely interested in Philosophy.
I was not a huge fan of this overall. This had moments of brilliance, and quite a few good passages succinctly laying out the thoughts of Deleuze. But often it left me bewildered. We must move beyond “rhizomes,” I can agree there, but Culp goes on to suggest what we need then is the “destruction of the world,” and a “communism that wants to consume the flesh and blood of the entire cosmos.” I know he's not exactly being literal here, but perhaps for me, this Deleuze is too dark.
It is a very strange book. Written apparently for the cartography expert in mind it is a lengthy treatise on the analysis of a set of maps from late antiquity and early modernity which show some interesting features and anomalies. He seems to have uncovered that some ancient maps had been based on maps that had been originally laid out with an “oblate” spherical trigonometry. This spherical geometry is preserved in the errors of longitude and latitude that were created by the later map makers when copying them to a different projection. It suggests that in deep antiquity the maps had reached a point of sophistication not seen until the 17th century of the modern era, and then had declined to the state we understand it to be in during the Classical era of Alexandrian and Greek cartography. And then furthermore, there are geographic anomalies in some of these old maps that suggest they had been made using copies of maps that were first charted from ~4,000-7,000 BCE as source material.
I think there is a lot of intriguing ideas and evidence in this book, but it is extremely difficult to read. I eventually gave up trying to understand all of what he was saying and would skip to passages where he summarizes his findings. However, half of the book is also an extensive appendix of notes, which contain a great deal of interesting reference information. This is certainly a book worth owning and skimming through. Not sure I can recommend reading the whole thing though!
A wonderful set of essays, anyone who enjoys weird fiction and mindf*ck sci-fi movies and wants to think deeper thoughts about them should read this book. His thoughts on the collapse/confusion of ontologies was especially interesting to me. Bringing Freud and Lacan, among many other thinkers, to the discussion, Fisher demonstrates again and again how the weird and the eerie found in fiction is a mirror to weirdness and eeriness present in the human condition. Here in the postmodern age, I believe we have all experienced the “Zenonian condition” of the inability to feel a true progression in any process, and that strange lack of realness to our reality.
This monumental work telegraphed nearly the entirety of the alternative research after it, it is the very definition of influential. The History Channel exists primarily to spin-off material covered in this book. Giants, mutants, ancient mysteries, alchemy, parapsychology, the occult origins of the Nazis – it is an omnibus of the strange, sometimes disturbing, but always compelling world outside of the staid, scientific perspective prevalent in our normal daily lives. It took me a while, I put it down for a bit, because it is so dense and packed with information. Highly recommended! If you have claims of being an alternative researcher yourself, or merely a lover of the arcane, this is an essential item for your library.
A very dense, very intricate, very in-depth discussion and thesis on the real structure of totemic, “primitive” thought and organization of such culture's worldviews. There are a lot of concepts and structures here that Lévi-Strauss employs with a wide range of application in other areas that have since come into use by various other scholars and academics. This in of itself proves that “savage thought” is actually quite systematic, dialectical, and advanced in important ways, although Lévi-Strauss himself demonstrates this continually throughout the book.
This took me a long time to read. I put it down for a while after finishing with the first three chapters. But then, I persevered, and it was quite rewarding actually all the way through (especially the last two chapters), even though it was often quite an exercise to my brain in understanding what he wrote. This book is very important not only because of its perennial relevance to post-structuralist theorists, but on its own it stands as a major work of 20th century philosophical anthropology.
An unsettling and penetrating critique of Neoliberalism and its structures of control. Han argues that under the data-mediated “psychopolitics” of the current Late Capitalist order in the West, the individual person oppresses themselves through gamified, emotional devotion to achievement and self-improvement. We become an “achievement-subject” that self-subjectifies. Unlike the Disciplinary society outlined by Foucault, the Neoliberal society is focused on positive reinforcement and the pleasure principle. The Disciplinary society features biopolitics and physical control, while under Neoliberalism the society operates through psychopolitics and emotional management/exploitation.
Han also brings in notions of horizontality and verticality. He points out that Neoliberalism's most optimistic hopes for Big Data will certainly fail to come to fruition, because Big Data is an entirely horizontal framework. This echoes the use of these terms by Wolfgang Smith. It could be said that Big Data can only deal in horizontal causality: the predictable and observable unfoldment of cause and effect. It cannot foresee what Han calls the event: the unpredicted, unforeseeable occurrence. The event is the result of what Smith would call vertical causality, a causation which preempts and supersedes the horizontal development of situations, which he said was only accessible by Humanity and God. Both Wolfgang Smith and Byung-Chul Han would agree that computers and algorithms have no access to this sense of verticality, and so cannot predict or comprehend the event, or totalize knowledge to the degree that would make it visible through computation.
Finally, Han argues that a possible position to hold in revolt of this psychopolitical regime is that of the philosophical, Socratic “idiot.” For Han, this specific idiot is the one who presumes nothing and doubts more than seems reasonable, such as Socrates and Descartes. The idiot remains outside of the anticipatory cycle of the emotionalized market, and so this philosophical idiot is a radical, whose existence is a problem for the logic of Neoliberalism. Han argues at the end of this work that taking on this position of ‘idiocy' is potential way to reclaim freedom and de-subjectivize oneself.
It's an interesting and very thought-provoking work that I think successfully reframes and clarifies our situation today, moving beyond limited ideological positions and is well worth the read. While it is short, under 100 pages, it is very dense and rewards thorough, engaged reading.
It's pretty good, and I definitely enjoy the MIT Essential Knowledge series and will pick up more of them. Felt a little rushed near the end, Cuonzo takes us from Pythagoras to Kant to current philosophy of science with Popper/Kuhn/etc. in about 50 pages. Also, it surprised me that a book so heavy on discussion of the Liar's Paradox (“This sentence is false.”) and recent developments in Logic as a field of study did not mention Gödel's incompleteness theorem at all. That very paradox lies at its heart and was an important (and explosive!) piece of modern formal logic.
Still, it is very good for what it is meant to be – a thought-provoking introduction for the average reader. It's exploration of Bayesian analysis was especially informative to me, as I was pretty unfamiliar with that.
Lakatos' wit and brilliance shines though in even the most dense and technical sections of this collection of essays written by him on the Philosophy of Science. His main thesis being that specific theories or notions of paradigms do not adequately explain the actual functioning and history of science, and that science can be better understood as a competition between research programmes in various states of degeneration or progression, with scientific progress being tied to an increase in the novel content of scientific theories and what Lakatos refers to as a “progressive problemshift,” or the shifting of a scientific issue towards a higher understanding, without assuming this process will eventually terminate with absolute, unerring Truth.
He is primarily in conversation with Popper and Freyerabend throughout the text, though he cites numerous other philosophers and scientists. It can be said that he deftly moves beyond Popper's falsificationist framework, though it is less certain he adequately answers Freyerabend's critique. It seems to me that Lakatos is generally correct in his reasoning, and his historical and theoretical considerations on Science are of a quality unmatched by anyone else I've read. He has a depth of understanding that should not be ignored, and I highly recommend reading this if you have an interest in the History and/or Philosophy of Science.
This is a very well researched book, Knight and Butler have made some interesting discoveries. There interpretations and conjectures, however, are pretty weak. I suppose they wanted to stay roughly within scientific consensus with this book; however, its not that any “scientist” is going to pay attention to it anyway, so it seems like a lost opportunity to create a stronger thesis than “the megalithic yard is real.” I understand that their research is ongoing, its just a shame because the material in this book would work much better as a scholarly article, but who would publish it? Alternative research is always going to suffer in this manner I think, until the community coalesces in such a way so that alternative scholarly journals can exist and thrive. My advice is to read Knight and Butler's latest works as this one is more of a stepping stone than a monograph.
A series of discourses delivered by Rebezar Tarz, ECK Master and one of Paul Twichell's primary spiritual guides. I'm giving it three stars because it is very dense and full of digressions and aspects of the ECKANKAR teachings are better explained in other books. While I think it was a good read and informative it is not a good place to start if you are new to the path of ECK, the Flute of God and The Key to Secret Worlds are much better if you want an intro to ECK from Paulji.