689 movies
21 books
12 shows
H

homoeroticjesus

CronenLynch66

UNITED STATES

Filter by:

movies

movies

shows

shows

books

books

Picture of a book: A Short History of Decay
H
Books
A Short History of Decay
Emil M. Cioran
The Poetry of DeathA Short History of Decay is a compendium of pessimistic aphorism, a sort of cosmopolitan collection of Gnostic scripture through the ages. It is entertaining, observationally acute, and compelling - all descriptions that the author would object to strenuously. I think he would accept ‘poetry of death’ much more readily, however. There is little except for death about which Cioran has anything good to say.Cioran begins as a sort of secular Qoholeth from the Old Testament: All is vanity. And Cioran means everything, especially those conceits of faith by religionists who have lost the capacity to doubt: “What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma?” Cioran’s hero is the doubting Hamlet, he who hesitates, who doubts, who questions what he knows incessantly. “The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth”But it is not religion per se that is the source of evil, it is human self-assurance: “Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it... His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse... We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits.” One can almost hear Nietzsche clapping with approval in the distance.So the fundamental problem is idealism. People who have a plan for making things better are the carriers of a deadly mental virus. These small-time peddlers of happiness scam a willing audience into believing that it is possible to reduce the net amount of misery in the world. Thus “Society is an inferno of saviors!” What human beings don’t or won’t recognise is that existence is misery. Schopenhauer has now joined Nietzsche in approbation.The only cure for miserable existence is the termination of existence, suicide. This is the only aspect of existence we can control. Contrary to the dictum of St. Paul that our lives are not our own, Cioran makes the rather more obvious point that they are. It is the only thing we can call entirely our own: “We change ideas like neckties; for every idea, every criterion comes from outside, from the configurations and accidents of time... death is the true criterion, the only one contained within us.” Writing seven years after Camus’s Sisyphus, he managed to radicalise even that paean to control 0ver one’s existence.Philosophy, actually thought in general, is not helpful in the situation. “The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equaled only by their futility.” Philosophies are at best consoling fictions, and at worst reasons to persecute other human beings. “All of life’s evils come from a ‘conception of life’,” Cioran thinks. In this he is not far from Kierkegaard’s distrust of philosophy: “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”In fact Cioran’s real issue is with language itself, with words pretending to be more than grunts and scratches. He thinks “Man is the chatterbox of the universe.” We throw words around as if they had substance. But as Wittgenstein has demonstrated, words refer only to other words. Consequently, Cioran concludes “We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us.” Ludwig would likely agree.The only acceptable use of words, indeed the only ‘reasonable’ activity for a human being is poetry. At least poetry doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. In fact it doesn’t pretend to be anything at all. Poetry is a personal act of construction. “Only the poet takes responsibility for ‘I,’ he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.” T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland seems a model for just this view.Ultimately it is the ancient Gnostic appreciation of the world - shared certainly by the relatively optimistic(!) Thomas Ligotti - which drives Cioran: “Injustice governs the universe. Everything which is done and undone there bears the stamp of a filthy fragility, as if matter were the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness.” This seems to me outstanding poetry, as does his summary of his own life “In Time’s sentence men take their place like commas, while, in order to end it, you have immobilized yourself into a period.”
Picture of a book: Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
H
Books
Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
Dan Joy, Ken Goffman
As long as there has been culture, there has been counterculture. At times it moves deep below the surface of things, a stealth mode of being all but invisible to the dominant paradigm; at other times it’s in plain sight, challenging the status quo; and at still other times it erupts in a fiery burst of creative–or destructive–energy to change the world forever. But until now the countercultural phenomenon has been one of history’s great blind spots. Individual countercultures have been explored, but never before has a book set out to demonstrate the recurring nature of counterculturalism across all times and societies, and to illustrate its dynamic role in the continuous evolution of human values and cultures.Countercultural pundit and cyberguru R. U. Sirius brilliantly sets the record straight in this colorful, anecdotal, and wide-ranging study based on ideas developed by the late Timothy Leary with Dan Joy. With a distinctive mix of scholarly erudition and gonzo passion, Sirius and Joy identify the distinguishing characteristics of countercultures, delving into history and myth to establish beyond doubt that, for all their surface differences, countercultures share important underlying principles: individualism, anti-authoritarianism, and a belief in the possibility of personal and social transformation.Ranging from the Socratic counterculture of ancient Athens and the outsider movements of Judaism, which left indelible marks on Western culture, to the Taoist, Sufi, and Zen Buddhist countercultures, which were equally influential in the East, to the famous countercultural moments of the last century–Paris in the twenties, Haight-Ashbury in the sixties, Tropicalismo, women’s liberation, punk rock–to the cutting-edge countercultures of the twenty-first century, which combine science, art, music, technology, politics, and religion in astonishing (and sometimes disturbing) new ways, Counterculture Through the Ages is an indispensable guidebook to where we’ve been . . . and where we’re going.
Picture of a book: The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
H
Books
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
As a Dick fan, I picked up this book at an obscure book shop that stocks only rarities and valuable first editions. I'm not quite sure whether this was a rarity or a valuable first edition, but I'm much more certain that I'm glad I bought it.This book collects most of Dick's important writings other than his published novels, including assorted essays and speeches as well as some scraps from his unpublished work. For a man whose body of work is so legendary and also so strange, this collection really helps to fill in the gaps and let us better understand the man himself. Only through hearing him tell stories other than the ones he made up can we come to hear the voice behind the words.I would not say this is one of my favourites, or even a very informative book in the educational sense. Instead, its value comes in its ability to help me understand Dick. I think attempting to read VALIS without having first read this would have been impossible. Dick is a complicated figure, both for his own strange experiences and his own strange way of dealing with them. His writing is both fascinating and gripping. It is interesting to see the ways in which this is still true when he is not writing "in his element," so to speak.Within this book there is much repetition, especially in the section on Dick's views of science fiction literature. However, I cannot fault Sutin for that, as his collection is well-edited. It gives us what is needed and no more or less (perhaps just a little less). I cannot even really blame Dick, as many of these are actually delivered speeches or published articles. Hearing him talk about his own experiences with poverty, I definitely do not blame him for not always putting in his all. Even an author has to get paid. Make it rain, y'all.This book is a good resource for anyone fascinated by Dick, the man. Fans of his novels will not find much of the same here, nor will fans of science fiction in general. Dick, however, has much to say and much worth saying (it does well not to confuse the two). This book should adorn the shelves of any scholar on his life and work. Its absence would be quite improper.