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there's no book thread! so i thought i'd make one..

i recently started northanger abbey on the recommendation of my friend. we were talking a few days prior, and i said the only 18th-early19th century british book that i'd really enjoyed was jane eyre, which led to this rec. i'm only 40 or so pages in now but i find it pleasurable enough. i think as far as novels go i can read a lot of types of things and enjoy them relatively ok, as long as its around 300 pages or so.. i think it's when things get longer that i start feeling like i have to really enjoy them to stay motivated. my other fiction reads lately were serious weakness by porpentine, which totally uprooted the way i think about relationships, being brain damaged, and relationships between brain damaged people. beyond those things it's also just a really really well written "near future" setting. i cannot recommend that book enough. before that i read all of monogatari (at least all that's been translated), and the first few books of the zaregoto series. i really like nisioisin's writing, i find it to be the perfect balance between engaging/thought provoking and being light enough to totally buzz through. i guess i read the lathe of heaven (by ursula k le guin) too, which was pleasant enough but didnt have any strong effect on me.

i've been on more of a fiction kick lately but i usually am more of a nonfiction reader. i'm especially always interested in buddhist and daoist philosophy, and the commonalities that i've found between guys like zhuangzi , zhiyi and nagarjuna and ppl like pyrrho and deleuze. i'm not really a philosophy head i just like reading the books because i feel like they help me be better at life.

manga is fun too, although i really don't have much of a developed taste. recently i read both of gregorius yamada's manga, and in particular really enjoyed ryuu to yuusha to haitatsunin. i think it had a really fresh take on fantasy that totally blended all the dumb tropes of the genre with the author's love for medieval history to create a world that was unique in a very .. familiar? way. it made me think a lot about how to develop concepts in stories in ways that isn't necessarily "deeper". i think a lot of manga especially tends to just add complexity and "hidden machinations" to the plot as the work goes on, and in doing so loses the spark that made it really appealing initially. like for example i really felt this way about frieren and dead dead demons dedededestruction where the later chapters lose the sense of "flying" that the first few volumes had. more and more things become definite, or part of the stories world, and these additions naturally introduce constraints to the scope of the world that i think end up bogging things down instead of intensifying them. i really appreciated how in ryuu to.. the author was able to retain the lightheartedness of the early chapters throughout the stories development. i think girls last tour is another manga that develops perfectly without adding weight to itself.

anyway i'd love to hear about what you all have been reading, what you like to read, your favorite books, reading habits, etc...!
mara

I go through phases with different types of media. Sometimes it's all video games. Sometimes it's all books. I think the last book I read a few months ago was Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which is an interesting sort of queer Christian apologia claiming that there were rituals up to the year 1000 or whatever, when marriage became a sacrament in its own life, to unite people as brothers, or as sisters — and that commonly, to be someone's "brother" was a common euphemism for being their gay lover. I found it quite a captivating read, though it seems to just piss everyone off.

But anyway, then a fucking meme changed my life.



I found myself captivated by this. Activated. I wondered, like, "what does this refer to? What does it represent?" and so I asked Seraphine for a reading list. She sent me a bunch of books and I put it in my notes as my reading list for the year. I had already read Daniel Dennett and kept it in mind — his Consciousness Explained was a really interesting depiction of the mind as a decentralised system creating an emergent "meme" of a self at the controls, communicated from parent to child. And this ties in super well into Buddhism, I think, where the self is a sort of illusion, an attachment to the world that ignores that there is no distinction between you and the world. The senses of I and Other needs to be treated with a bit of irreverence, a false idea, but a useful one.

mara wrote:

i've been on more of a fiction kick lately but i usually am more of a nonfiction reader. i'm especially always interested in buddhist and daoist philosophy, and the commonalities that i've found between guys like zhuangzi , zhiyi and nagarjuna and ppl like pyrrho and deleuze. i'm not really a philosophy head i just like reading the books because i feel like they help me be better at life.

That brings me to this. I've gotten really into Buddhist talks and lectures, after four years of exclusively reading Christian stuff (Sources of Christian Ethics, Augustine's Confessions, etc). I listened to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind lately and now I want to read it from scratch. There's a book by Thomas Merton trying to talk about Zen's commonalities with Christianity that's been super nice to read as an introduction from my current knowledge base (Zen and the Birds of Appetite), but I'm open to taking tons of recommendations here.

I finished reading 'Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet' and it was great. I picked it up because I had no clue how old networks were set up or even came to be. It goes over prehistory of ARPA, and the arc of development of the ARPANET from the planning stage to the last IMPs being shut down. And it touches on little things, of an interpersonal nature, like the culture of BBN and of the 'IMP guys', and their particular personalities and/or weirdness. That type of thing stuck with me most, besides the technical details it mentions that I noted down. Like trying to wrangle the nerds to wear something other than sneakers when they go meet with three-star generals.

The account of the cultures of the MsgGroup and Header group was very funny. They were early mailing lists or chat systems I forget which, the former moderated and the latter unmoderated and flame-heavy. The book mentions some users fretting about the lossiness of pure text communication, proposing new symbols to denote emotions. It hit me in such a particular way, yet again confirming to me that network communication has always been the same, since the very beginning, into BBS and regional networks, USENET and NSFNET, and continues to be the same.

I am on a big OO kick and I was given a long list of books and articles to read about the subject which I hope to post about when I've plowed through more of it.

I picked up 'Eye of the Chickenhawk' out of morbid curiosity, which I opened up but I am nervous to continue reading. The first chapter is grim, arguing the case of the definite existence and production of snuff films and practical examples of murders related to snuff film production, reports of private showings in circles of rich people and artists across the US, until it ends on the discovery of a mass grave in Texas in 1973.

maru wrote:

... the mind as a decentralised system creating an emergent "meme" of a self at the controls, communicated from parent to child. And this ties in super well into Buddhism, I think, where the self is a sort of illusion, an attachment to the world that ignores that there is no distinction between you and the world. The senses of I and Other needs to be treated with a bit of irreverence, a false idea, but a useful one.

this notion was was sort of the core seed of what seized me when i first started reading buddhist/daoist stuff. i think i first encountered the idea basically in parallel because i was reading zhuangzi and sutras from the pali canon at the same time.. zhuangzi talks a lot about changes or transformations in the world. seeds change to trees, days change to night, yesterday to today. but the self also passes through these changes - being alive to being dead. coming to like something you had previously disliked. i think the argument is that seizing to any definite self or identity is functionally trying to freeze these changes at some hypothetical familiar or 'preferred' point, and acts contrary to the dao (way, guide, path) that flows through human life, the cosmos, anything else. the dao itself is of course unnamed, unknowable, and undefinable, and may itself be constituted of nothing more than these processes of transformation.

the pali canon reaches similar ideas through a different view. i was interested in theraveda buddhism (not because of any real proclivity, but rather because i wanted to learn the most 'level 0' buddhist thought first before i proceded along the historical path), so i wrote a monastery and they sent me a huge amount of the canon in print for free, and i would read selections from it a lot, as well as some included philosophical essays by the monks. the concept of dependent origination of dharmas (and assoc. concepts like the links of twelve nidanas) were really influential in that they prompted me to basically consider whether the things i thought or saw or expeirenced where dependent, or if they had their own self nature. i would play this little game where i would chase the links of dependence :

the apple is red
-> "redness" depends on my sense perception (and also on my linguistic and cultural identification of "redness"/ opposition from other "color-ness")
-> sense perception and intellectual understanding depends on my notions of conciousness/ of possessing knowledge
-> consciousness depends on my idea that i can discern one thing from another (and also the biological existence of my living body)
-> etc

the point of this game being to realize that everything i percieve or identify (including myself, and my mind/identity) is basically conditional given a set of choices, which aren't "universal" or "rooted" in any underlying ultimate truth, but of course can be useful in conducting day to day life.

this basically introduced me to the concept of emptiness, which i was really curious about so i read a bit of nagarjuna and also brook ziporyn's book emptiness and omnipresence, which i would wholeheartedly recommend as a introduction to the philosophical toolbook of mahayana buddhism, and especially tiantai/the lotus sutra.

maru wrote:

That brings me to this. I've gotten really into Buddhist talks and lectures, after four years of exclusively reading Christian stuff (Sources of Christian Ethics, Augustine's Confessions, etc). I listened to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind lately and now I want to read it from scratch.

i've never actually read very much christian philosophy (got into nietzsche at too young an age) but i'd be really interested in learning more about how you see this stuff from your angle,/ the commonalities as you percieve them. or if there's anything short i could read i'm all ears!

sinku wrote:

I picked up 'Eye of the Chickenhawk' out of morbid curiosity, which I opened up but I am nervous to continue reading. The first chapter is grim, arguing the case of the definite existence and production of snuff films and practical examples of murders related to snuff film production, reports of private showings in circles of rich people and artists across the US, until it ends on the discovery of a mass grave in Texas in 1973.

this sounds totally fascinating and i might try to get around to that.. the dennis cooper fan in me would love this i think

mara wrote:

i've never actually read very much christian philosophy (got into nietzsche at too young an age) but i'd be really interested in learning more about how you see this stuff from your angle,/ the commonalities as you percieve them. or if there's anything short i could read i'm all ears!

It's complicated. For me I dislike talking to other people about Christianity because it's personal — I was raised in it, and late in life while integrating my previous life experience I brought it back into me. I also felt very aware of God, and didn't know how to talk to Him again, and integrating myself within that, finding a place where my existence was welcome, and made sense, was a long, long healing process.

For people who didn't grow up in it, it's different. Christianity is currently the de facto arm of the misanthropy party for anyone who has a bone to pick with modernity, but that's not what it's about. It's about God being love, that compassion is our highest calling to others, and that full, embodied life is beautiful. This last part is, to me, very anti-Buddhist and what I struggle with. I see suffering as meaningful and beautiful and not as something I necessarily want to transcend.

I started wondering about Buddhism because I felt lately like my relationship with myself needed to be improved, and my relationship to the divine was pretty good.

I have to head outside but for now I'll say if you have any esoteric leanings, The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune is a nice book that sees Jesus as a "Master of Compassion" in a broader relationship with the universe, basically anything to do with Cosmic Christianity is also interesting here because it opens the door to reincarnation as an idea. Meditations on the Tarot also helped me a lot because he talks a ton about reincarnation and about how Mahayana is like the flip side of the Word of God, that it's all from one Truth so to speak.

Otherwise, in sum I'll say for me Buddhism is about "doing", and I'm interested in works that get me outside my head, and in my full body, here, now. For anything more, we may need to have an "inter-faith dialogue" thread.

Any text can be a spiritual text, recently picked up a study bible to read along with a new friend. Been reading that and rereading some Greek plays, and books of poetry, and a book about someone oscillating between 24 hours of TV and 24 hours of Wildlife.

Fundamental principle in Buddhism is no purpose. Purposelessness. When you drop fart, you dont say “at 9 o’clock I drop fart” it happens of itself.

We can read whatever books we like, and we will, and a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

“ Poetry is being, not doing.
If you wish to follow,
even at a distance,
the poet’s callling,
You’ve got to come out of the
meaurable doing universe into
the immeasuable house of being.

Nobdy else can be alive for you –
Nor can you be alive for anyone else.

If you can take it – take it and be.

If you can’t – cheer up and go about
other people’s business and do or undo
til you drop.”


t. Confirmed Catholic & Ordained Zen Priest

p.s. you are the divine

here are some dharma talks I revisit:

https://www.upaya.org/2017/02/halifax-exploring-love-compassion/

https://themoth.org/stories/the-junkie-and-the-monk

Chef’s Table Jeong Kwan: (season 3, episode 1)


Intend to meet Joan Halifax before one of us dies. Powerful energy.

@mara How did you discover 莊子 & 老子?

I picked up The Church of the Dead, which is a somewhat dry history about how the pretty brutal death rate of an ongoing pandemic really impact the Catholic church in Spain's territorial holdings, and how much the aftermath of it influenced the sort of church it is. I don't know a lot of Latin American history or theology but this is interesting. It comes from a critical studies/de-colonial background but it also makes the point of discussing how many Indigenous people (the book continuously calls them Indios to be very particular to how the ethnicities were viewed at the time). I feel like the more interesting parts are probably going to be the later chapters, I'm partway through chapter 2/6 -- something I hadn't really noticed before about how academic books are written is each chapter could be it's own standalone printed out article, and I realized that in my coursework teachers would do this and in general those worked pretty well!

Also first time I used my library card which was exciting! :D

Sometimes I like to do editing passes with AI assistants on my blog — a recent entry I wrote on my general belief system was responded to with "this sounds reminiscent of Catholic personalism," a philosophy of which I've never really looked at. It turns out to be associated with the nonconformists of the 1930s, and inflected itself very greatly on Pope John Paul II, making it a current of Vatican II Catholicism.

So, I picked up Personalism by Emmanuel Mounier and it's been a nonstop spree of beliefs ... I already had, about a more communitarian lens in the wake of collectivism and individualism strangling the human as a person, as a being with freedoms and expressions and hopes and instrinsic worth, all facing an entropic depersonalisation process, the constant abstraction away where they fit into the world as a capitalist consumer or a cog in a technocratic machine.

Thus, if the first condition of individualism is the centralization of the individual in himself, the first condition of personalism is his decentralization, in order to set him in the open perspectives of personal life.
[...]

This development is founded upon a series of original actions, to which there is no equivalent elsewhere in the whole universe:

(1) Going out of the self. The person being capable of detachment from itself, of self-dispossession, of decentralizing itself in order to become available for others. In the personalist tradition (in Christianity especially) the ascetic of self-dispossession is the central ascetic of the personal life. Only those who are thus liberated can ever liberate others or the world. The ancients used to talk of the overcoming of self-love: nowadays we call self-love ego-centricity, narcissism, or individualism.

(2) Understanding. This is ceasing to see myself from my own point of view, and looking at myself from the standpoint of others. Not looking for myself in someone else chosen for his likeness to me, nor seeking to know another according to some general knowledge (a taste for psychology is not an interest in other persons) but accepting his singularity with my own, in an action that welcomes him, and in an effort that re-centres myself. It is to be all things to all men, but without ceasing to be, or to be myself. For there is a manner of understanding everyone which is equivalent to loving nothing and ceasing to be anything a merging of oneself with others that is not a comprehension of them.

(3) Taking upon oneself sharing the destiny, the troubles, the joy or the task of another; taking him 'upon one's heart'.

(4) Giving. The vitality of the personal impulse is to be found neither in self-defence (as in petty-bourgeois individualism) nor in life-and-death struggle (as with existentialism) but in generosity or self-bestowal ultimately, in giving without measure and without hope of reward. The economic of personality is an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation. Generosity dissolves the opacity and annuls the solitude of the subject, even when it calls forth no response: but its impact upon the serried ranks of opposing instincts, interests and reasonings can be truly irresistible. It disarms refusal by offering to another what is of eminent value in his own estimation, at the very moment when he might expect to be over-ridden as an obstacle, and he is himself caught in its contagion: hence the great liberating value of forgiveness, and of confidence. Generosity fails only in the face of certain resentments more mysterious than those of contrary interest, hatreds which seem to be directed against disinterestedness itself.

(5) Faithfulness. The adventure of the person is one that is continuous from birth to death. Devotion to the person, therefore, love or friendship, cannot be perfect except in continuity. This continuity is not a mere prolongation or repetition of the same thing, like that of a material or logical generalization: it is a perpetual renewal. Personal faithfulness is creative faithfulness.

I think it's very beautiful and short and walks a balanced line — it fits the "how do we participate in the world virtuously?" that MacIntyre wrote about in After Virtue — but I think it also strengthens and helps me articulate beliefs I subconsciously had.

Besides this, I've been going through Spinal Catastrophism, which, like all Urbanomic, is more like "philosophy leisure-reading" than grounds for self-examination for me.

It turns out -- in the past six months that I've bracketed with a syllabus and a goal to complete my game — that I read ~22 books, so an average of 3 and a half a month. That's kind of bonkers?

I've written a bit about each one, starting with Cybertext onward to Vatican II sexual morality (they kicked him out for liking gay ppl, RIP), Steiner lectures etc. etc.

I will note a shorter read that I really enjoyed lately was Anarchy and Christianity by Jacques Ellul who both seems to mourn the bootlicking from what should be a the Word of a fundamentally anti-Earthly power; but also talks about the impossibility of a purely anarchist society and yet the need to build new institutions because of the paradoxical, totalitarian nothingness of the present:

In sum, I have no faith in a pure anarchist society, but I do believe in the possibility of creating a new social model. The only thing is that we now have to begin afresh. The unions, the labor halls, decentralization, the federative system — all are gone. The perverse use that has been made of them has destroyed them. The matter is all the more urgent because all our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary’ and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state.

I think a lot about how violent the political oscillations have become; each person who takes the throne will be increasingly abrupt, increasingly harsh with its ability to make a world, and I think in turn it will become more apparent how blunt a tool it is to make a world for any actual shared goals. (In Shin Megami Tensei V this is just considered to be like a high-level form of samsara for any deity figure; take the throne and shape the world and new gods will come to kill you and do it again.) We constantly make an enormous amount of enemies trying to enforce what society should look like for a short period of time; and so I think it is true that the worlds between us, from human to human, will become more important.

This tied in well to a previous reading of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta because it shows what that looks like: a bloc becomes radicalised and abandons its own ideals to join with a worldshaping champion in informal coalitions of power. "For whosoever will save his life shall lose it..."

I've been going through one hell of a theology arc, but my partner tends to converse with me about a combination of Torah, scripture and sutras (she's been bringing up Nagarjuna a lot lately, like this 20-verse prayer from the Precious Garland) so it tends to be stuff I investigate more. I sort of miss science fiction, but when I look at my books to read ... uhh. Christian ecology, Teilhard de Chardin, maybe some of these books? (the lead one has an RFK testimonial? Confusing) ...

Though right now I'm currently going through this Introduction to Japanese Society via patio11 so who knows.

We'll see, right?

I have a tsundoku problem - picking one to-read book over another feels like betrayal... So I decided I won't start anything new until I read everything written by Virginia Woolf and Ottessa Moshfegh. So far, I've read Orlando (1928) and Eileen (2015). Here's a quote from Orlando

He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre.

I love how Woolf radically claims that "words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind", so she simply doesn't care if green is a color, and invites you to interpret it as freely as you want. In a way, you mentally co-write with her, which is fun. Also, she has an essay on reading. I've found the ideal state for reading her when you're a bit tired and can't think properly, so you can suspend all your judgement and get into a flow state. In one way or another, you have to find a way to daydream while reading the text, which sometimes is very difficult, but achievable given the right conditions. At first, I was trying to perceive everything she wrote, but very quickly became overwhelmed, but then read somewhere that you have to treat it like someone talking about how their day, so you can be fine with getting zoned out for brief moments.

Now on Eileen. It is abjectly disgusting. It is intended to be so. I don't want to quote anything. It's presented in first-person narrative: working at a juvenile correctional facility, living in the middle of nowhere with a paranoiac father, in misery, dirt, despair, surrounded by toxic hostility. But it's presented in a very direct way so you can't just feel sorry for her from a comfortable distance, so you just become her. Yet, it is a story of salvation (there are other details I'll not divulge). I was certainly not ready for it, and I've never seen anyone writing such a thing with such uncompromising detail. It has a very femcelcore vibe to it, and it reminds me of the movie Dogville, and Kristen Steward's recent interview on her directorial debut, where she says something along the lines of "being a woman is a very violent experience. you have secrets you're not expected to tell anyone; you're expected to be present without the ugly parts". So, Eileen is like the ugly parts (or past experiences) of one's identity one is supposed to keep silent on.