No.32
>>13He has good points, but I disagree with one of his premises. He claims that to be dependent on crop harvest is fine for a man's psychic, but to be dependent on industry is not. But is there really a difference? If you're not Harvard alumni and don't overthink it, coming to field and harvesting there crops is psychologically the same as coming to grocery store and buying food. And economic crisis is perceived the same way as drought. Moreover, in past people used to personify climate (God of Wind, God of Sun, etc), so actually it's even more comfortable to perceive it as anthropogenic.
t. lives alone in a forest
No.534
Can anyone recommend a good edition of von Clausewitz' "Vom Kriege"? Preferably from pre-Reich times, but at least from pre-WW1 times.
No.535
>>534Obviously I am asking about a book in german.
No.557 KONTRA
>>534You should check for academic editions that are based on what they deem the most suitable version. Otherwise, just get one from before Reich, what is the matter with the editions anyway?
when you are able to answer it, you should be able to answer your own question tbh No.559
>>557The premise of my post was that I have no idea what editions exist and don't want to have to crawl through all kinds of bibliographies and thought maybe someone just happened to have one at hand.
So thank you for your incredibly helpful reply.
No.560
>>557> what is the matter with the editions anyway?He's probably the dark theme lover. They like to obsess over insignificant things, they think that it's a very cool thing to do. And they like this sort of books:
https://www.monochromebooks.com/pages/meditationsLe ancient clasiquee wisdom. Highbrow, but also "practical". Marcus Aurelius, Von Clausevic, Sun Tzu.
srry for funpost No.561
>>560I have to disappoint you but I'm the dark theme user that reads
>>141 but never Clausewitz or any /lit/ tier advice on what one should read.
>>559>So thank you for your incredibly helpful reply.You are welcome
you don't have to make massive crawls, but take a book about Vom Kriege and look up the few paragraphs or even pages that will be about the editions. A quick search in a uni library catalog for example showed me that Ullstein released the ungekürtze Version 1832-34 in 1980, I guess you want to original ungekürtze Ausgabe that is also pre Reich No.562 KONTRA
>>561forgot, it's the d. Erstausgabe as well. So basically the virgin version of Vom Kriege, what more does one want? In the case of Ernst Jüngers Stahlgewitter, the question is not so easy since the earlier Versions for example contain lots of military stuff that interest nobody that just wants to read literature.
No.563
>>561> Ullstein released the ungekürtze Version 1832-34 in 1980Huh, this was not only unironically an incredibly helpful post, but probably exactly what I was looking for. Thank you, Ernst :3
No.675
Has anyone read "Dictionary of the Khazars" (Milorad Pavic, 1984)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_the_KhazarsI'm somewhat interested, but not sure if I should get the German or English translation. And since we're on that topic, how do you guys generally decide which translations to get if the original is not written in a language you know sufficiently?
No.677
>>675There are only two cases I would read a book in english:
a) It was written in english
b) It's the only translation I can get my hands on
I don't understand why anyone would not prefer to read their own language's translation, unless they were trying to learn english or anglo translators are just that much better than everyone else.
No.679
>>677>I don't understand why anyone would not prefer to read their own language's translationWhen I read a Discworld
inb4 "go away" book in German I can tell where there was a joke or reference in the original that was destroyed by the translator.
No.681 KONTRA
>>679Hm yes, I should have specified "translation from a third language", I thought it was obvious.
In any case see a) in my post.
No.683 KONTRA
>>675I’d definitely pick the Hungarian edition over an English one.
Price, material quality and our culture of translation is simply better in a lot of cases.
The English don’t have a cult of translation like we do.
No.700
>>677>I don't understand why anyone would not prefer to read their own language's translationI've read a book by Murakami where the english version was the only direct translation from Japanese (for european languages anyway) and the german book was translated from the english. Since my English reading comprehension is on par with my German, I chose to read that book in English.
Similar settis with the books from Harari, where at least his first two were translated to English directly with his help while the German translation was based on the English version.
No.878 KONTRA
>>675It really depends on the genre and source language. But in this particular case I'd read English translation because I simply cannot trust someone who translates Khazars into 哈扎尔.
No.896 KONTRA
>>878It also depends on how developed and numerous speakers of your language are. Among billion Mandarin speakers or 100 millions German speakers there is probably someone who made a good translation. Among 15 million Hungarians – unlikely.
No.907
>>904Are you from Australia?
No.909
>>907It looks normal on my xiaomi phone. Thanks, Jinping!
No.910
>>904>Enthusiasts ManualSomehow my brain thinks this is funny in context. So, are you an enthusiast or even hobbyist?
No.916
>>910Well, I just started out my StuG collection. Been hunting for a long time for an A variant, but the next one has to be one with Zimmerit.
The problem is I can't just put them in my apartment, so I had to rent some compound space to park them there.
No.1364
So, Ernsts are bydlo who don't read any books... sad! At least post something what you are going to read but can't get your hands on it, I'll do it for you
T. Looking for something for a road
No.1365
>>1364>Looking for something for a road?
I'm reading all the time but don't update Ernst No.1366 KONTRA
>>1364Using manipulation to create discussions, about books... Ernst, are you okay?
No.1367
>>1365>? In long commuting it's boring, but looking at phone for a long time is tiresome for eyes compared to ebook. Don't mind it, I just want to say that I need a reading material.
No.1372
>>1366Every communication is inherently manipulative.
No.1377
>>1364Currently reading
The Girl in the Glass. Depression-era NY, con men, rich folks, hints of the supernatural. Not great, not terrible.
No.1484
Why don't you post about books which you'd tried but dropped. Or about books which you haven't read at all
No.1492
>>1484>Or about books which you haven't read at allMany of the classics.
Dropped some Kleist because the language was too foreign for me.
Can't remember the last time I dropped a literary text. I drop however books of weight like Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays I was so keen on reading, but again old language of a language that I only encountered to the internet, some films and shows and manly academic texts, so my vocabulary is not sufficient and I'm not so interested I could be bothered looking up words all the time.
Sometimes I read only what I think is interesting, so partly, which is a necessary habit for academia that I try to pick up because I usually worry when not reading everything. Last was Greengard's IoT in the 2015 1st edition, it's quite a WIRED pitchman vibe but was nevertheless useful in just getting a grist of the general system that IoT forms and the domains that are part of this system. Couldn't be bothered to read the chapter in consumer IoT and the perils and dangers of IoT (privacy etc)
No.1570
>>1377>>1492Thanks for your replies.
> IoTYes, it's nothingburger and just a managerial buzzword. Sure, it became possible to connect your microwave to wifi, but it didn't become any useful. You made a right decision to drop this book.
No.1572 KONTRA
>>1570> it didn't become any usefulTo think that IoT is reducable to home appliances being smart by turning themselves off when they notice nobody is at home or being able to be turned on from a distance or whatever is to misjudge IoT tbh. It goes further than home appliances and that is what is interesting. Data gathering via sensor and algorithmic management of these data mountains treated through constant monitoring in order to inform humans can be valuable and it does not just concern home appliances and health monitoring.
Yes IoT as tool to get better data in order to sell your products is the least valuable facet of it. That is just 'refined capitalism' in a way.
No.1582
>>1572The "data mining" aspect is impractical too. NSA or advertisers don't want to know whether you warm your meal for 60 or 90 seconds. This is a zero value information compared to your activity in the internet or what microphone in your smartphone captures.
No.1584
>>1582Dather gathering and mining are valuable not just for state intelligence and businesses, Ernst. Environmental monitoring and efficiency of processes in industry are two examples.
The issue of privacy won't go away as long has the capacity for gathering and mining is there and the gathering is build on traceable individual activity
because in the 1800s states also gathered data for example yet the privacy issue is not prominent in anonymous statistics of birth and deaths for example No.1587
>>1584The ever-freezing Germans will be limited to 60 seconds of warming their meals (squirrels caught in nearby forests). Even to 30 seconds, when there is no wind to power turbines. THE SHITMANY WILL COLLAAAPSE!!1
As for industry... They probably know anyway how many details went through each assembly line.
So yes, IoT is just a marketing term.
No.2453
Honestly I've been dodging this book for years now. Based purely on anti-semitic haersay about how it's terribly written.
The author and the book itself is in a very complex position. Nobody was reading it before he got a Nobel.
Then he got a Nobel and suddenly Kertész had to become something which he never wanted to be. He needed to be the Nobel-prize winner of 15 million Hungarians as a holocaust surviving Jew.
Trouble is that he never wanted to be that. He didn't even want to be an "author" in the sense that he wanted to remain without identity and uncategorised by the "functional society". He didn't want to be reduced to the function of "The Nobel-prize winner".
So in my opinion basically we all got fucked over by the Swedes. The collective because we didn't get someone who could embrace this function for us and Kertész because he had to endure this torture of becoming in his own words a "Holocaust-clown".
Basically his entire oeuvre is him trying to give everyone the middle finger. It's just that unlike a lot of Jews he isn't funny so it's not trolling, it's like getting gifted a stray dog that bites you no matter how you try to approach it. Because love is the first step to categorisation in his mind.
This is why Fatelessness is unlike most holocaust books. He tried to avoid the stereotypes of the Holocaust novel to step out of categorisation, to deprive critics of a readily made critical apparatus to dissect the novel with.
Which is why it's not a series of traumatic tortures, it's a story of shrivelling up to the point where the protagonist becomes a mummy basically.
So all in all, the Kertész-controvery is all the result of an unfortunate accident. Readers and Hungarians deprived of an enthusiastic Nobel-laureate who would join the continuity of Hungarian culture, while a writer was deprived of his non-functional obscurity.
A very sad story. I feel somewhat sympathetic to the guy in a sense, but just because he sees himself in this way, and tried to act this way, it doesn't change the fact that he was an unlikeable jerk who deprived us of a function that we will never have again. We will never have a first Literature Nobel winner again. And he took that from us, the selfish, Jewish bastard.
No.2496
Last funpost, and that's it
reading books can be a reactionary activity because it often reinforces dominant ideologies and power structures within society.
Firstly, the production and consumption of books are closely tied to capitalist systems of production and distribution. Publishers prioritize profits over the dissemination of knowledge, and this often leads to the publication of books that reinforce dominant narratives and ideologies that serve the interests of the ruling class. This means that the majority of books available for reading promote bourgeois ideology, and reading them can reinforce capitalist ideas and values.
Furthermore, reading books can also be a form of escapism from the harsh realities of the world. This escapism can prevent individuals from engaging in meaningful praxis to create a more just and equitable society. Rather than taking action to dismantle oppressive systems and structures, individuals may instead seek refuge in books that provide temporary relief from the stresses of daily life. This can lead to a false sense of progress and contentment, which ultimately perpetuates the status quo.
Moreover, the act of reading is often individualistic, and this can lead to the depoliticization of individuals. Reading books in isolation can prevent individuals from engaging in collective action and organizing with others to create systemic change. It can also lead to the internalization of individualistic values, which prioritizes personal success and achievement over collective liberation.
In conclusion, as a Marxist intellectual, I believe that reading books can be a reactionary activity that reinforces capitalist ideology, perpetuates individualism, and prevents individuals from engaging in meaningful praxis. While reading can be a valuable source of knowledge and education, it is essential to critically examine the books we read and the systems that produce them to ensure that we are not inadvertently reinforcing oppressive structures.
No.2498 KONTRA
>>24963/10
too lazy to destroy an argument build on sand (it's a funpost after all)
No.2500 KONTRA
>>2498I see this has been done to other threads as well. Did you use ChatGTP?
That would explain why it is generally not wrong yet distinctively wobbly.
No.2503 KONTRA
>>2496>>2498Well, I for one had a good laugh!
No.2671
First of: the cover art is terrible and I removed it immediately from the binding.
This book was quite nice and I will recommend it. It's an easy to read plunge into the time around 1800 and the town of Jena, where German "Dichter und Denker" image has its origin. This book deals with how Goethe (Weimar is close to Jena), Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, Wilhelm August and Friedrich Schlegel also Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt did "invent the self" and romanticism was born. Wulf stresses the self and individual freedom in this book, asking where our contemporary understandings of self and individuality come from. This book also illuminates the role of women that belong to this group, especially Caroline Schlegel-Schelling. As you can see from the letters that Wulf uses, they are crucial for the thinking and also did a lot of work Caroline Schlegel translated Shakespeare together with August Schlegel, wrote reviews under his name etc., generally some of the women mentioned did translate and participated in the discussions these people had, they only did not write big philosophical systems
It's well written, the main ideas are laid out and it is also funny at times, because these people thrived together, intellectual ferment, but also dismissed, grudged and hated each other later and were all quite gossipy and ego strong kek. And this only in a span of 5 or 7 years.
What is interesting for me as well even though it often is only a side note: how this thinking developed in Jena influenced British poetry and had a strong influence on American Transcendentalism (poetry and philosophy, think of Emerson and all these other nature-obsessed people) which was - I think - an important forerunner of American pragmatism (around 1900) and certain social theories that developed in the US in the 20th century.
So yeah, nice, comfy, easy and educating read.
No.2672
>>2671Did you post an international version for illustrative purposes or did you really read it in english?
No.2673
>>2672I stumbled across via en English language review by Appiah and I thought Wulf was just an American-German and got the english version. Turns out she is not. Though the english version was published earlier then the German version. Yet the German original would have been nice for the quotes but for getting the idea and feel it was alright. Gonna get myself Faust finally I guess. Was thinking about it sometimes even before reading this book. Schelling was also on my radar for he is in the same territory as other philosophy I am interested in mainly. But I'm not to keen on the rest tbh. Besides Hegel maybe just because it's Hegel. I have Kant first Critique here and Hegels Phenomenology but I cannot pull myself reading them, they not easy I guess.
No.2674
>>2673>Gonna get myself Faust finally I guess. Wait, did you not read it in school?
No.2675 KONTRA
>>2674No. As you may know, the curriculum is not the same every year. Also, I never had a Leistungskurs Deutsch, just Grundkurs or whatever it is in other states.
No.2677
>>2675I also only had Grundkurs, and we did read Faust I. The LK read Berlin, Alexanderplatz and other assorted shite. We generally never read the cool stuff. 11th grade was ancient greeks and Kleist, Oberstufe was nothing beyond 19th century, except that one time we read Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald.
I just thought at least Faust was universal, because it's Goethe after all, and he gets jerked off here almost as much as the anglos jerk off Shakespeare.
No.2681
>>2674>>2677I had german LK (it's like an intense course of which the grade will weigh more heavily on your overall exam grade) and we read Wahlverwandtschaften, not Faust. I read Faust 1 on my own, pretty neat, didn't know it was such a huge source of common sayings. I tried to read Faust 2 afterwards, but it was Mission Impossible. I can read the words, but I can't grasp their meaning. It's like reading a foreign language.
I always wondered why Goethe wrote such a fine book, which despite its refined lyrics still is accessible for the common reader, and then dramatically changed style to something you basically need to be a lyricist yourself to have a shot at understanding it.
No.2688
>>2677Nope, it changes every year afaik.
I had Iphigenie auf Tauris, Traumnovelle, Woyzeck, Mario und der Zauberer, Tauben im Gras. The rest I don't remember. Since I had English LK I had English literature as well
which I often hated I think, Brave New World was fine, Shakespeare I did not like, thank dog there have also been exams about non-literature things, albeit, whether German or English, I had C or D throughout the entire Oberstufe because while I read it all unlike other people, I did not like to participate in discussions or put much thought in it anyway, unlike today No.2690
>>2688Hey, we read Mario und der Zauberer, too, but in 11th grade. Have hated Mann ever since.
I also had Englisch LK, but we only read A Streetcar Named Desire and Moon Palace (both absolute fucking shit).
No.2696
>>2690>I also had Englisch LK, but we only read A Streetcar Named Desire and Moon Palace (both absolute fucking shit).Oh boy, that sucks. We read Huxley (Brave New World) in English LK and instead of reading a play by Shakespear we watched Gattaca and spend like 2 weeks analyzing it and practicing arguments/discussions in class via pros/cons of genetically engineering humans.
My teacher was not a fan of shakespear, but very much so of science fiction.
>>2674We never read anything by either Goethe or Schiller in all my 13 years of school (yes, we still had 13 years back then).
>>2677Never even heard of any of those you mention. I barely remember what we read, but at least two examples of 11th grade onward were
The Reader by Schlink (breddy gud tbh, lots of inuendo) and
Homo Faber (also not bad, contained incest).
No.2697 KONTRA
>>2696>spend like 2 weeks analyzing it and practicing arguments/discussions in class via pros/cons of genetically engineering humans.Oh boy that sounds familiar, totally forgot that
> but very much so of science fiction.lucky you
> (yes, we still had 13 years back then)Me too, it has also been revised back to 13 afaik.
>Never even heard of any of those you mention. I barely remember what we read, but at least two examples of 11th grade onward wereI know my cousin (with 12 years of school) had Homo Faber. It's mostly the same novels and plays
what about poetry, is there any poetry in the Oberstufe? Probably only LK? in different arrangements. I know that they put Herrndorf and Faserland
a good novel into the curriculum.
No.2716
A guy I know also read Homo Faber. I never did, either in school or private.
On the other hand, I am glad we didn't read e.g. Der Prozess in school because it would have certainly spoiled Kafka for me.
No.2993
>>2959>From Information Theory to French TheoryHot damn, that cover immediately sinks its hooks into my curiosity.
>This book is probably also very interesting to the German Enrnst that watched Lutz Dammbecks Overgames with fascination(?)Uh, a twist ahead? I
think you're talking to me here, but I've only watched "Das Netz", not "Overgames".
Regarding
Das Netz: Yes, with fascination.
Regarding
Overgames: New to me, but looks quite interesting. A doc about re-education from the same guy? What angle are we talking here? Without looking into it, I want to pass back the ball and ask, have you seen the documentary about the bodyguard of Bin Laden whom two FBI agents tried to "re-educate" without violence? It's from Laura Poitras, called
The Oath and pretty outstanding tbh.
>Geoghegan shows that in the Interwar period capitalist philanthropy funded social sciences and anthropology in order to get technocratic solutions for pressing social issuesCould this be seen as precursor to todays silicon valley technocrats who
believe themselves to be good people and thus try to find "solutions" to
problems outside their field by applying tools from within their field of IT?
>So that cybernetics and French thought feels so close at times is no accident. Hold on, does he show a causal link? Meaning Lacan et al actually reference the
works. Or is there room for the french thinkers coming to similar conclusions
as the cyberneticists without directly interacting?
>There is an interesting note on big data and segmentation that shows how this thinking of anthropologists and cultural theory is very much prevalent with software engineers and data scientists that work for big data companies and where segmentation (differences within populations) is absolutely crucial.Does this go beyond "using the same mathematical tools"?
Are sofware engineers aware of the link, maybe even use the lingo coined by the
anthropologists?
btw, hows progress on finding a topic for your masters thesis?
t. also currently trying to find a topic for my own masters thesis
No.3003 KONTRA
>>2993>have you seen the documentary about the bodyguard of Bin Laden whom two FBI agents tried to "re-educate" without violence?I don't but that's the thing with for example the efforts in WW2 and communication theory. That conflict is a result of misunderstandings that can be resolved with the proper communication. Or that education works best by understanding it in communication terms.
Lately, I read a polemic on the professional managerial class and there is a chapter on sex/sexuality and there is this part where sex is reformed as a communication process which made me chuckle because it's funny to see sex understood as a communication system
that is what sex is for the managerial class in a sense, it's not bad or something in my eyes, I also think it can help with enjoyment
>Could this be seen as precursor to todays silicon valley technocrats who believe themselves to be good people and thus try to find "solutions" to problems outside their field by applying tools from within their field of IT?In a sense yes. The general problem solver, certain ways to frame and solve a problem. Beyond that I think it is complicated to compare it. The method is quite similar one can say.
>Hold on, does he show a causal link? Meaning Lacan et al actually reference the works. Or is there room for the french thinkers coming to similar conclusions as the cyberneticists without directly interacting?I only read 3/5 chapters as these are most important to my interest. But I read texts before that show that Lacan was familiar with cybernetics and he used it for his work, cooperating with mathematicians. I think he explicitly mentions it in the seminar manuscripts. Anette Bitsch (or so) has a text on the unconscious and Lacan and cybernetics. Levi Strauss read Wiener. Geoghegan shows how US science foundations explicitly cooperate with French scientist like Levi Strauss and tried to make their way of scientific conduct (social technology, social engineering and technocratic problem solving) in the social sciences a role model for France. I also know that in the 1950s there have been conferences on cybernetics. Gilbert Simondon new of cybernetics and tried to develop it further (also differentiate) in his philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari read Simondon and Guattari was fond of Gregor Batesons ecology of mind, who was a key figure in the Macy conferences on cybernetics.
So yes, there are direct proofs that they knew and used cybernetic concepts in their work.
>Are sofware engineers aware of the link, maybe even use the lingo coined by the anthropologists?Sort of. Geoghegan quotes Anna Wieners Uncanny Valley book. She was a literary agent (humanities degree) that went into silicon Valley where she was surprised to see how software engineers differentiate along categories in the humanities. But I would say they aren't really conscious of that. Did not read the Wiener book want to.
No.3004 KONTRA
>hows progress on finding a topic for your masters thesis?
Well.
I'm still looking, But Geoghegan's book was helpful in that I think about taking a certain book (will get it from the library today, have to travel for it) and apply his problem to a different case. Mainly, pattern seeking of and in culture in different populations in order to apply this knowledge to solve problems. It also has a relation to Orit Halperns Smartness Mandate where populations or the concept of populations (neurons, data, etc) play a crucial role. Basically populations are data mines (data from actual populations like humans is turned into data populations from which you can derive knowledge that can be applied) and ways to compute in order to solve problems is the thesis there (the problem to solve in the case she is looking at is "resilience" against the light of threats like climate change, terror, logistical disruptions, general stress and uncertain futures and so on)
I'm suspecting that with the advent of audio and film/photo recording data for analysis and pattern seeking was produced geoghegan shows this with Mead and Bateson and advent of family therapy before it went to big data and so in a sense I'm looking for the logics of data analysis and pattern recognition (and problem solving) before big data.
>t. also currently trying to find a topic for my own masters thesis
Do you have concrete ideas?
No.3009
>>3003>So yes, there are direct proofs that they knew and used cybernetic concepts in their workThanks.
>Sort of. [...] But I would say they aren't really conscious of that.Yeah, that's pretty much what I've figured. From my experience there is also a certain barrier for
some computer scientists (but certainly not all) to acknowledge any research from the humanities by directly referencing it. Along the lines of "Hmm, if I put this as source in my bibliography some collegues might think I'm not doing
real science".
Seems to be a STEM issue rather than CS in particular, though.
>>3004That already seems pretty specific. How far do you think you still have to go before putting a lock on the decision and committing to the topic?
>Do you have concrete ideas?Yes and no. I have a list of quick ideas, most of which could turn out to be either a non-problem because already solved or far more complex that my initial take implies. Or anywhere inbetween.
What I have to do now is to sit down and actually research all of the topics far enough that a clearer picture emerges.
My two main areas of interest are both in the vague area of Simulation.
The first area has the direction of me looking into managing complexity of simulations via implicit and explicit structures. But... I already kinda did something in this direction in my bachelors thesis. Feels like a wasted oportunity to go in the same direction twice even if there is more to uncover.
The other has to do with bridging the gap between common, informal solutions to something like inverse kinematics in animation and the formal logic on the other side. I have an idea there that feels exciting but could also turn out to be impossible to solve or even so poorly researched that I'll have a hard time developing a practical solution by the end. And I really, really want to do something practical.
No.3058
>>3051Is it approachable for someone who has not studied anything in the humanities?
No.3059 KONTRA
>>3058I'd say so. Really, the only hurdle should be getting used to the Egyptian names. But otherwise it's very approachable.
No.3174
>>3009>That already seems pretty specific. How far do you think you still have to go before putting a lock on the decision and committing to the topic?It sounds specific but isn't in my POV. Of course, I'm still pondering what I will do and there is no decision made. I'm still thinking about data collection, a genealogy of the logics of big data. So where did data gathering and subsequent problem solving through data take place before big data. Of course simple statistics is the first that comes to mind. But I would be highly interested in the medial form of data, audio and moving pictures as data sources for problem solving of whatever kind. Observing populations through audio and film would be a scenario, but if that exists is not answered and kinda unsure. Geoghegan showed that in family therapy this was and still is the case. You record people and use these recording to solve problems and extrapolate on populations. But my suspicion is that this logic and mode of inquiry wasn't the only one, there must have been more cases in other areas of life.
>Feels like a wasted oportunity to go in the same direction twice even if there is more to uncover.People write several books in their careers and say they write the same book for decades. So this is not really a problem, it is an especially efficient way to work because you know the topic a bit already. But I can understand the thought.
>feels exciting but could also turn out to be impossible to solve or even so poorly researched that I'll have a hard time developing a practical solution by the end. And I really, really want to do something practical.Can you talk to somebody of the higher ups at your university/faculty just casually about it, without a commitment?
Like Hello X I write to you because I think you have the knowledge to help me on my idea and if its bs for a master thesis or actually a good idea I should explore. If you think somebody could know that field you want to do something in they can tell you if that works or not for a thesis.
plot twist: I did this in my bachelor's but now I feel my ideas are underdeveloped and I cannot steal somebodies timeIt's too technical for me to understand what you mean though. I only get the first one a bit I think, because managing complexity in various ways is also a question of policy and such, but I guess it is a strict technical apsect in yours. I know media studies think about simulations but certainly not very technical about it but more of its cultural or social implications.
No.3465
>>3421That factoid causes me endless amounts of joy 2bh.
It's so funny even though there's no punchline, it's just stating a fact.
Re-watching/reading the series after reading a lot of Chinese philosophy it was amusing to see some of the parallels between how Humphrey views governance and how the ancient Chinese did.
He goes around saying stuff like "Governance isn't about good and evil, it's about order and chaos!", "The people are ignorant and misguided" and "It is folly to increase your knowledge at the expense of your authority."
The cherry on top is when in the first episodes of Yes, Prime Minister Hacker has plans for the future of his premiership and Humphrey recommends him "Masterly inaction" to make sure he's successful.
It's one of those things that I encountered when I was relatively young and every time I decide to give it a go I see it from an entirely new angle.
No.3552
>>3465>>3534Could it be that ancient Chinese were protocyberneticists?!
Hungary, this your chance to shine and bridge the gap between the millennia and inject ancient wisdom into today's discussions on governance by joining a think tank.
No.3555 KONTRA
>>3552In Fallout 2 one of the communities was made up of the descendants of a PLAN Submarine's crew that washed ashore in San Francisco after the war.
They called themselves the Shi, and if you followed their quest line you got meet their emperor. The big revelation was that you walked into the chamber of the emperor and it's a supercomputer they salvaged from the submarine.
To an outsider this is a nice gag, but from the standpoint of the Legalists at least, it's kind of like as if the idea was taken to its logical conclusion. The humans are still there, administering the day to day affairs, but on the top of the pyramid sits a mysterious someone who knows all the facts and can make the most logical of calculations to give orders. And of course he can't have favourite ministers either, which decreases the possibility of cliques.
This is all grossly oversimplified, but there is a view that indeed, the ideal Chinese emperor is a supercomputer that can crunch data really well.
(Though I never heard anyone discuss this topic in an academic environment.)
No.3785
>>3333I finished the second book too. I feel like I severely overdosed on the stuff.
Honestly it's probably comparable to 1984 in how easily it forces itself into your way of thinking and then forces you to see all the parallels to it IRL.
I think the most important development in the second book is that the game becomes grayer.
Humphrey is of course doing his usual delaying tactics and back-scratching, but Hacker has kind of "wised up" in a sense. He has great plans but in practice he himself realises that he's in this game to get re-elected. There first book had this fine balance between him being an idealist whose goal is "good governance" while also being a publicity seeker, but by the time he becomes PM, for lack of a better term, he becomes a politician.
Probably I just got tired of it, but still, this one had some of my favourite scenes, mostly in the chapter titled "Power to the people" where by the end Humphrey and a Marxist councillor realise that while they are not committed to the same ends, the civil service and marxists are committed to the same means.
I'm honestly reminded of a post on old-EC where I think Portuernst made a joke about one of the characters saying how after 10 years of revolutionary communist governance "God Save the Queen" remained the anthem.
Of course it has some of my favourite quotes like:
>This is a British democracy, Bernard.>British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the arts, the countryside, the law, and the universities -- both of them. And we are that system.>We, the Civil Service, run a civilised meritocracy, a smoothly-running government machine tempered only by occasional general elections.>How few people realise what the word loyalty means when spoken by a Cabinet Minister. It only means that his fear of losing his job is stronger than his hope of pinching mine.>The principal necessity is to have a small group in charge and just let the people have a mass vote every few years. Secondly, its not advisable for the voters actually to know the people they're voting for, for if they were to talk to them they could fall for all sorts of silly conventional ideas.Anyway, I feel like I'm reading way too much into a silly 80s comedy about administrative equivalent of a dysfunctional family. Still, it's one hell of a trip after spending over a year researching ancient Chinese government practices and Machiavelli. I don't feel like Yes Minister was meant to be read in that context but I made the error of doing so and now it's making me go crazy.
Bonus point is my digital copy had all the quotation marks and the apostrophes missing so it felt like I was a historian in an archive recovering a corrupted text of sorts.
No.4004 KONTRA
>>3785If 1984 parallels real life, you are probably a schizo.
No.4693
The Topeka School is a great novel. 1990s US, psychology and psychoanalysis
Lerners parents where psychologists in Topeka where he grew up, but enveloped human relationships, so no theory here really but how psychologists deal with life themselves basically and how they are equally helpless. Masculinity in all its shades critically depicted from the inside (woman, hierarchy, fighting, being an outsider/lone wolf, violence and so on), also part of the novel deals with right-wing debate techniques as developed/trained in youth debate leagues. An interesting angle. You can vividly imagine that this is true for somebody like this facts don't care about your feelings guy (Ben Shapiro), I could imagine that what he is doing is "spreading" the opponent in a debate.
There is much to say about this writing, the form itself which is really beautiful. I cannot say what it is exactly. Very good eye for details, for creating the right atmosphere. Well, I'm not a literary critic so I'm missing the right words here.
The German who obsesses over that woman atm will like this book I think. Go read it!
>>4280That explains a lot. Does he still write a blog?
No.4699 KONTRA
>>4693I don't know, I stopped reading it in 2013.
No.4702
>>4693>deals with right-wing debate techniques as developed/trained in youth debate leagueslolwut?
No.4728 KONTRA
>>4702it is basically about rhetorics in case you did not understand it semantically.
No.4736 KONTRA
>>4728I was wondering where that notion comes from and why debate clubs would train those, you condescending prick.
No.4737 KONTRA
>>4736What notion? Otherwise, you can read the book. It talks about rhetorics in youth debate leagues and how these rhetorics are used in right-wing political "tactics".
No.4743
>>4737So is it right-wing rhetorics that are trained in youth debate clubs or is it youth debate club rhetorics that are used in right-wing discourse?
Also, how does that kind of rhetorics differ from left-wing rhetorics? Apart from the enemy image obviously.
No.4746 KONTRA
>>4743It might be both. They make for a good match. The author
who might actually have experience in 1990s youth debate leagues, dunno but the novels are said to be very autobiographical basically puts up the thesis that the youth debate league's rhetorics training and right wing thinking were a match, they came together in the 1990s and made for a ferment of an "infowar" the right-winger see themselves into this day. I don't think that leftwing propaganda is the same, though. There is no leftwing equivalent to Donald Trump or Alex Jones as far as I know.
No.4747
>>4746But what exactly IS it that is taught in youth debate clubs that makes it "right-wing"? Orange Man and Jones don't really "debate", they just monologue. You can't just call something right-wing and then explain why it is right-wing by making a random connection with aforementioned people. Plus, I was explicitly talking about left-wing rhetorics as opposed to right-wing rhetorics, not about propaganda, of which debate is just a part.
No.4748 KONTRA
>>4747>they just monologue.I mentioned "the spread" in the inital post I think. Looking at it I gave Ben Shapiro as an example of somebody "spreading". At least what I've seen from Ben Shapiro. Quick, rapid-fire speech, not debate. It''s about throwing "facts" at people so fast that you "win" by just doing so, you don't win by actually debating, having arguments...at least that how would I interpret that. Info bombing in order to overwhelm people. So yeah, the monologing might fit that in a sense. And it is interesting because when you look at the surge in right-wing talking points and audience gaining ground you also have that accompanied by a lot of info fire in their media networks, they have a lot of "influencers", personalities with youtube channels and so on, did so long before leftists started picking up on that. Right-wingers used the internet or social media better than leftists did
let alone normal center party politics. I mean /pol/ seems like an avant-garde in retrospect.
Lerner positions "the spread" as a general phenomenon. Basically, an acceleration of information circulation that goes over the top of people's processing capabilities makes them vulnerable and prone to getting overwhelmed by what are not actually arguments but info blurp that sounds convincing, as if it makes sense, the brain making sense of what is info glutted nonsense if inspected closely.
Another understanding of "the spread" is the tactic of info bombing so that much conflicting information is out confusing people, basically let people drown and pin them down in a state of uncertainty. It's this, no that, oh no this but that but now this. It is said that for example in Russia this is used as a deliberate strategy
I can also imagine it helps make people "apolitical".
No.4749
>>4748I see. And in this first moment after reading your post, it does sound logical (the "spread" thing), although I can see parallels to Schopenhauer's 36th trick.
I'll have to ponder on that.
No.4751 KONTRA
>>4749The Greeks probably had a word for it already. It's not the (rhetorical) phenomenon itself but the specific (time dependent, or historically specific) use, context, and scale that is important here.
No.4940
Took me quite a bit but I finally finished it. It got especially hard to read near the end. It's not that the final two chapters are any different in structure, it's just that the contents become a lot more bleak.
This is the fourth biography of Shostakovich I've read (if Testimony counts as a biography), and I feel like it's my favourite.
Unlike Ian Macdonald's biography, which is more of a rune of the mill piece that focuses mostly on Shostakovich's life and relationship with Stalin from a distance, Wilson's biography goes to the epicentre basically.
I'd say it's over 90% primary sources, with Wilson making sparse remarks before she decides to quote a source, introducing the author and his relationship with the composer.
Most of the book is therefore made up of reminiscences of Shostakovich's friend, family and colleagues. It's such an intimate portrait that most texts in it refer to him as either "Dmitri Dmitrievich" or just "Mitya".
The nature of these quotations make the book feel like less of a biography and more of a novel. A very good Russian novel.
What makes the last two chapters of the book hard to read is that for one, it showcases Shostakovich's partial assimilation into the nomenklatura. He goes from being in the opposition to being in this limbo where most of his friends are liberal members of the intelligentsiya, but he himself is a party member and a "signer". (As in, he famously signed anything that was put in front of him just to get the party official to go away.)
Though the book never goes on to paint him in a negative light for this, instead he is portrayed as a man with deep regrets regarding his status within the USSR, but it's hard to read the sometimes harsh criticism from his younger contemporaries who thought of his party-member status and 12th symphony as an utter betrayal to what they thought he stood for.
The book has like a million anecdotes and stories about him, almost all very lively. Like how he supposedly couldn't say no, so when one time a librettist was pestering him, he asked his wife through a small note on a to-do-list to "Tell the librettist to f- off."
There was also an occasion when one of his younger students said something nice about Voroshilov, and he retorted "If Budyonny is up to his knees in blood, then Voroshilov is balls-deep in it."
It's a very close portrait, touching on his love of alcohol, football and smoking, something which I feel is a bit unusual. I remember when I wrote a short handout for music class in high school about him for the music teacher to use instead of the textbook, apparently what the students found really odd is how he played in movie theatres on the piano to make a living during the early 20s.
I wonder how would they have felt if I mentioned that he was willing to travel from Petersburg to Moscow just to see a football game.
So anyway, it's a wonderful biography. Maybe not as a first-read on his life, but after a more "standard biography" it paints a really in-depth and intimate picture of him.
No.5054
>>5022Hello. No, at least not consciously but glancing over the wikipedia I was thinking of the term early adopters is used for example by cognitive scientist and design daddy Donald Norman in his books (from the 1990s which I read). I'd say Everett might be relevant historically for the Silicon Valley thinking in a way. Or the history of technology. Such a theory might have been used as a fundation to justify certain actions. Maybe Norman even quoted him in his
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262640411/the-invisible-computer/ I think I remember a graph about innovations.
My thesis is on its way now. I've been working on it this week, the prior week was finalizing an idea to work with. My title is now nailed down and I will hand in the forms on Monday. I don't really have a proposal written down. Just two theses and a third thesis that might spring up while working on the other two. Basically thesis (3) is what follows from (1) and (2)
I'll be writing on the history of man-machine/computer relationship/communication and its design.
No.5191
>>5022I'm still thinking about this book btw and if it might be useful to read it.
How is your work going?
No.5218
>>5191My wörk mainly consists of accumulating enough hours in my student job so I can pay the rent until I'm done with my masters.
And I still haven't locked in on a topic for my MSc thesis yet, though I have managed to come up with a small selection of topics that should be enough to visit my prof and get his opinion about them...
Regarding that book, I'll just decide based on how cheap I can get it at my local bookshop. Let's face it, I'm currently reading 3 books and have 6 in the "immediate" queue at the side of my bed, I really don't need another one from the category of "looks fascinating".
Since this is the literature thread, I guess I could lose a few words about one of those books I'm currently reading: "If on a winter's night a traveler" by Italo Calvino.
There is a lot I like about Calvinos style and this book in particular feels like a very elaborate shit post. Unfortunately it's also one of those books that you have to read within a shorter time span or you'll get lost in his maze. It's a book about you, the reader, picking up the new book from Calvino, only to find out that it's in fact the wrong book, but when trying to return it you get entangled in a plot that is as weird as you'd expect given the author. The entire thing is a collection of beginnings of various books that somehow all relate to one another but not in a trivial way. It's basically a challenge from Calvino to his readers, saying "here is something that you haven't seen before, can you figure it out?". Lot's of wit hidden behind the most obscure plot and tons of experimental plays on perspectives. I've seen books before that switch between 1st and 3rd person writing style, but this book is seemingly inventing new perspectives as it goes along and I don't even have any names for some of them. What do you call it when the book itself is directly talking to the reader in one chapter, but then swaps out the readers identity while still directly addressing you?
It's weird as fuck and I love it. I'm almost done with it and looking forward to the last few chapters. Recommended to
almost nobody, let's face it you have to like italian intelligenzia literature edge lords to enjoy this shit.
No.5224
>>5218>My wörk mainly consists of accumulating enough hours in my student job so I can pay the rent until I'm done with my masters.Are they all jobs where you have to work all hours? In one of mine I was hired to assist in organizing bigger events (conferences, workshops) and so far the hours are significantly less than what I get paid per month. So I have to fake hours which is probably fine. At least they let you live a bit better by distributing their budget to poor students that way, don't know if that is intentional or everybody bullshits their hours. The other I actually have to work but its less hours a week. When I was a tutor that was the only job where I had worked more than what was contractually my wage in the end.
>managed to come up with a small selection of topics that should be enough to visit my prof and get his opinion about them...You have written proposals and theses? Then approach them asap. You don't have to start immediately but at least get feedback!
Mine is going ok atm. Good material. The question of the interface is a hard one though. There are multiple avenues opening up and there is a book with an interface theory that is abstract af but the thesis is interesting since it tries to argue for my suspicion of the interface being itself an 'agent' that conditions rather than just connecting to prefabricated entities while staying 'neutral' doing so.
It's really interesting to think about this connection between human and machine within the context of the so-called post-industrial society and its generation of value. Found a text that argues for interfaces and so have to be understood as infrastructures that facilitate a proper circulation of information that is so central to that kind of "production". And for a proper circulation the human information processor had to be scrutinized and both computer and human information processor had to be brought together, but with what consequences exactly in the end? Especially for the user of course.
>urrently reading 3 books and have 6 in the "immediate" queue at the side of my bed, I really don't need another one from the category of "looks fascinating".Yeah, same. I have two very big books I started
I'm just reading one though and a novel. This book indeed seems fascinating from a certain angle, it's in my virtual list that I go through from time to time and buy books if they sound still interesting months after. It's really nice to see sometimes how books can become important again for one while last time one ditched them.
No.5241
>>5224>Are they all jobs where you have to work all hours?It's just one job as a developer where my contract sais I can work between 8 and 20 hours per week, depending on how much work there is and how much time I have.
>You have written proposals and theses? Then approach them asap. You don't have to start immediately but at least get feedback!Yeah, I know, I'm mostly paralyzed by an overload of stuff that is happening right now and my productivity and motivation is always crippled when I have more than 2 "big" things on my plate. But you're right, I'll write a mail right now, asking for a meeting. Thanks.
>an interface theory that is abstract af but the thesis is interesting since it tries to argue for my suspicion of the interface being itself an 'agent' that conditions rather than just connecting to prefabricated entities while staying 'neutral' doing so.Are we talking about cases where the "shape" of the interface acts like a filter itself that restricts the possibility space of communication happening through that interface?
No.5243
>>5241>It's just one job as a developer where my contract sais I can work between 8 and 20 hours per week, depending on how much work there is and how much time I have.Can't you just fake that the task you have been given took longer than you actually needed? I mean an hour here and there to ramp up the budget a bit at least.
>always crippled when I have more than 2 "big" things on my plate.Feel is known. I have my thesis now but I need to look for what I can afterwards, which means writing a proposal ready for submitting to open PhD position for example. Getting finances in order for the bridge period and perhaps looking for another flat/roommates. But the later really depends on how this PhD thing turns out so I shouldn't bother now.
>Are we talking about cases where the "shape" of the interface acts like a filter itself that restricts the possibility space of communication happening through that interface?Sort of yes. The interface acts as a filter but it is probably more than that. The question is not only of filtering communication but with what consequences, certainly the space of possibilities is one concern. One has to be concrete about the possibilities anyhow. And while the channels of communication play an important role in my project, I'm looking for more than that. The relationship between humans and computers can be thought of in different ways and the channels/communication is one part of it.
The book that is a theory of the interface
the author said he wanted to write about airliner cockpits but realized on the way that he needs a theory of the interface and that is probably what his dissertation turned into and later became that book I read posits the interface like a flip flop image that can be interpreted in two different ways and that both seem true.
From an etymological of _inter_ and _face_ sort of he arrives here on that kind of definition (which is from a subchapter of the first chapter, so that is not the only definition to encounter in this book I'd say but a very grounding one):
>[The interface] is defined by its bounding entities at the same time that it defines them. In encompassing interiority and exteriority, passivity and activity, the interface governs transformations from interior state to exterior relation, from inward to outward expression. Each successive state of such transformation belongs to the interface, as does the overall event of transformation itself. The interface, then, is at the same time “between faces” and “a facing between.” Either reading may constitute a valid approach to the study of the interface, although both remain partial and provisional descriptions. The interface comes into being in the maintenance of its contradictions. It is only by maintaining these contradictory readings that the entire range of activity that may occur within and through interfaces may be addressed as belonging to a single theoretical concept. [@hookway2014, 9]Hookway notes that interface designers usually think the interface as "between faces". Human and machine are given, the interface is a sort of neutral mediator. My suspicion however is that the "humanization" of the interface since the late 1970s/early1980s is not a neutral process of relating humans to the machine without having consequence of the humans/users. The interface does not simply adapt the machine to a human way but this "adaption" changes the human or user itself. And the human as user is a certain way of thinking and conceptualizing the human that has concequences.
No.5264
Marxism: not recommended for studying, Boris Kagarlitsky
Book about history and development of Marxism, it covers everything briefly: from 19-century classics to Jordan Peterson's nightmare, postmodernist neomarxists of Frankfurt school. Author explains views of each movement, but doesn't pretend to be neutral and as well mentions his personal position for many issues, which is cool. For some reason other leftists qualify him as "Trostskist", which could be just boomer swearing word. He didn't convert me into Marxism, but that wasn't my goal, I read the book because Marxism is important part of culture and history, especially of my country (and among my internet friends from EC ;) ). However author convinced me that there are worthy things developed within Marxist thought, same as Mendel's laws were invented by Christian monk.
Parts about world division of labor, core and periphery and so on were especially intriguing, maybe gonna read more on that. On the other hand, there is almost nothing on how economy supposed to work under socialism. For some reason commies avoid that topic, they write entire Talmuds about how tutoring is oppressive, but will never mention how Gosplan worked.
Also now I'm fully qualified to shitpost on /leftypol/.
BTW between I finished the book (month or two ago) and this post author's been gulaged. =(
No.5900
>>5838Why did your friend suggest them to you? What would you be interested in? These are known for political philosophy but they have more in their repertoire I think. Locke has epistemology I think. Rosseau is known for his thoughts on pedagogy.
No.5904
>>5900>Why did your friend suggest them to you?We
a commiecat dad, a V-Mann, a 100% alman cosplaying 24/7 as hippie, a cryptoanarchocapitalist, that frent and my neet ass were drunkenly discussing different political approaches of current societal problems. as far as i can remember, our verdict was: everything suxx.
commiecat dad was of the opinion that chinas approach sucked less than typical western capitalistic approach, V-Mann wanted to be dictator, cryptoanarchocapitalist and frent talked mainly among themselves while i tried to distill some common ground like "I can't find a philosophical and/or logical sound reason that justifies a death penalty in any system." or "if the human would be perfect, every system would be perfect."
I can't remember which comment exactly triggered frent to suggest reading those to me, but it wasn't the first time frent suggested those.
... i think it was a comment about our current voting system... something along the lines "our current voting system still uses the premise of postal services as standard speed of communication." or maybe the voting system i suggested afterwards... which i am too lazy to write down atm.
basically 2, that is two, votes - one long term u can giv to party/person for x amount of time - one opt-in for actual-decisions-votes>What would you be interested in? These are known for political philosophyye, wanna read it mainly because of that. frent said it is interesting how they sometimes arrive at similar conclusions while coming from totally different approaches.
No.5908
>>5904I read only parts of Hobbes and Rosseau in a seminar on the body politic years ago. Not sure about similar conclusions.
Well, yeah. Hobbes most famous work is his political one, the Leviathan.
For Rosseau it might be A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind
Both can probably be found for free online (google, else libgen).
I think both start with man in the natural state, basically a fiction from which the develop a political and social theory about how people are and should be organized.
If you are German, this might be an interesting book, the Leseprobe has a table of contents.
https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/geschichte-des-politischen-denkens-t-9783518294185
>two votessounds swizz to me.
No.5940
It's very short (somewhere around a 100 pages for the main text, the rest are notes, chronology and bibliography) but talks about something most biographies just brush off as something he did for the money. Has a short introduction and then it details the different film-scores and groups them into eras based the historical context, so early USSR, pre-denounciation, war years, second denunciation, Khurschev thaw and then "Endgame".
Talks about both the context (how he met the director, what was the occasion, why was he forced to do it, had he hated or loved the project) and then the music itself too, so techniques, quotations, meanings etc.
I tried listening to the scores mentioned.
There are very nice ones in there, like his famous suite for Hamlet. Or "Moscow, Cheryomushki".
Though in my opinion the absolute, biggest goldfind in this book I came across was his soundtrack he wrote in the 1920s for "New Babylon", an avant-garde Soviet silent movie about the Paris Commune. It has two versions because the score was apparently lost, one is around forty minutes, the other is an hour and twenty. Both versions are really great.
But it wasn't all that well received during its time because most cinemas didn't have sufficiently good orchestras for the avant-garde music, and the musical directors hated that they lost money on the orchestration commissions missed because of the pre-written soundtrack.
There was also the problem that it was written as a tight-fit for the movie and its scenes, so when the authorities re-cut it to be shorter, it also fucked up the score, making it even harder to play and conduct. So it was eventually dropped, dropped so hard that they actually lost the score.
It's a shame it's so little talked about, because I feel like it's a pretty sizeable, original piece that's right on the border between being a movie score and also being a thematic suite of music. Like I felt like as if I was listening to an experimental symphony of sorts. It's not bland at all like the fact that it was composed for a movie would suggest.
Otherwise a lot of the pieces just feel "anonymous". You can tell from a movie soundtrack when he just simply didn't give a fuck. Especially with the soc-real movie scores from like the 30s. He just did 10-15 minutes of music and then fucked off to do something else. Can't blame him honestly. Guess it's kind of a rock you don't want to look under.
The odd one in my opinion is how he absolutely abhorred "The Unforgettable Year of 1919" and "The Fall of Berlin", but they are still very much in his signature style, and dare I say, I found the leitmotif of Berlin catchy to the point where I whistle it on my way home. Of course they are not "revolutionary" by any stretch of the imagination, but they are still very high quality pieces imho.
Another odd one is his hit song, "Song of the Counterplan", which was very popular supposedly. And for some reason I see why the tune would be popular, but I just don't seem to be able to remember it at all even after multiple listens.
It feels really odd to listen to an over the top jolly piece that I like, knowing that the composer actively despised having to make it. Gonna make a food analogy, but it's like enjoying a really nice cake only to learn that the chef made it at gunpoint.
Btw I love how the Russians transliterate everything as said and then proceed to go all out and write Babylon as "Vavilon". Like what's up with that?
No.5964
>>5940> Btw I love how the Russians transliterate everything as said and then proceed to go all out and write Babylon as "Vavilon". Like what's up with that?Both words were adopted through Greece.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%92%CE%B1%CE%B2%CF%85%CE%BB%CF%8E%CE%BD> Pronunciation> IPA(key): /ba.by.lɔːn/ → /βa.βyˈlon/ → /va.viˈlon/Wow, that's exactly what I've heard about due to the interest in linguistics!
In catholic world adoptions of Greek words usually go as: ancient Greek -> Latin -> [Western]
While in east: Byzantine Greek -> Russian.
So your pronunciation is based on a more archaic form.
t. haven't read rest of the post
No.5968 KONTRA
That probably explains why in general "B(в)" is "v" and not "B(b)".
Babylon
Βαβυλών
Вавилон
No.5972 KONTRA
>>5940> It's not bland at all like the fact that it was composed for a movie would suggest. afaik, Japan currently doing lots of orchestral composing for games.
https://youtu.be/79jbTS8x5Oc [~2h20min, dude interviewing/playing game soundtracks with orchestra granny]
No.5976 KONTRA
>>5964Suspected it was something like that when beta switched to being the v sound in Byzantine Greek.
It was actually suprising to learn from some book a while back that out current understanding of the Greek alphabet is relatively new.
No.7835
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Alternative universe where Axis powers won WW2, and Cold War is happening between Germany and Japan. Collection of loosely tied stories in the same settings. None of them has meaningful denouement so the book feels like a .gif image, a moving picture of an imaginable world.
Typical for Philip Dick vibes of paranoia and uncertainty: how to tell actual antiques from fake, spy from merchant on busyness trip, Aryan from Jew, human from android? I read the book short after eating ungodly amount of cannabis cakes at once so still remembered that feeling while reading.
Life of insects, Victor Pelevin
Happens in Crimean resort, characters are simultaneously humans and insects. For example, capitalist bloodsuckers on another plane of reality are mosquitoes. Normies are dung beetles, pushing their shitball (representing their career, personality, etc) during all their life. Ernsts are moth. And so on.
As previous book, de-facto multiple novels which are formally and stylistically connected but have their own storylines, semantically complete though.
As usual, a lot of conventional wisdom and Buddhism for housekeepers. Not great, not terrible.
Basics of orthodox culture, Andrey Kuraev
It's a textbook. When I was at school there were no religious lessons yet, but at higher school we've regularly saw a priest coming to 5-th graders and laughed at him. Not much new information despite I'm not from a religious family it's basics!, but was nice to see it presented in a systematic way. Feels like it's not suitable as a textbook. Too creative questions. Author is idealistic about his audience as well as about teachers.
Recently author of textbook was excommunicated from Russian Orthodox Church for being a lib but he preemptively switched under jurisdiction of Romanian Orthodox Church.
Mary, Vladimir Nabokov
Novel about miserable and meaningless life of emigrants in Germany, nostalgia about Russia and about first love.
No.7836
probably should belong to videogames thread
Playground. What you need to know about video games and gaming culture, Alexandr Vetushinskyi
Scipop book from videogames studies researcher. Author (successfully) tries to appear smart and original. Despite it he writes in a comprehensible and interesting way.
Some of my bookmarks:
- A bit of philosophy. "What is game?". For example, nature of games can be divided into 4 components:
1. Agon, competition.
2. Mimicry, roleplay.
3. Alea, gambling.
4. Ilinx, achieving ecstatic state of consciousness.
Sims is pure mimicry. Soccer, chess or Counter Strike - mostly agon. Usually game contains several components in some extent.
- History of videogames and development of videogames industry. Mostly about irrelevant ancient times, probably because it's easier to explain concepts of game studies on old primitive videogames.
- Gamergate. Author's position is that evil oldschool gamers bullied feminists because they felt threatened by casual gamers and non-cis-white-hetero characters. Previously I've heard about the drama mostly from slavs and imageboards and they have the opposite opinion. Where does Ernst lean to?
- Gamefication. The most popular framework here is PBL (points-badges-leaderboards). Person gets "good boy points" which represent values of his/her actions. He gets badges for achievements. And he can view leaderboard with friends or random people and compete with them. The most popular example is Duolingo but I've seen a lot of less famous gamefications with exactly the same pattern.
If you think of it, traditional state institutions (education, army, academia, economy) can be viewed as gamefications made by government for plebs.
I think there is a lot of potential here for improving people's lives. But it can be a bit buggy. Walking every day is good for your health. But spending 5 hours a day walking alone on a frost for the sake of getting more good boy points than similar retard - no, thanks. It still needs some conscious effort and goal-setting.
Also now I now what's the difference between hypertext and cybertext. So smart!
No.7840 KONTRA
>>7836>GamergateDipshit retarded journalist got into trouble for buying reviews for her "narrative experience" with sex.
Game "journalists" decide to twist the narrative into it being an attack on women instead of integrity.
In the end it does become a culture-counterculture shitfest when the grifters show up.
No.7842
>>7840For some reason the widely known relationships and bribery between games journalists and publishers did not warrant crybaby internet activism until the following got involved:
1) a woman
2) sex
3) an indie game
GG was a reactionary meltdown by a bunch of teenagers because the market expanded towards demographics that weren't them.
Remember when feminist frequency was hugely "controversial", now there's a bajillion such video essayists on youtube and nobody cares.
Same with the backlash against indie games, and before that casual games. Now it's just normal.
You lost, chud, deal with it.
No.7843 KONTRA
>>7842The west has fallen...
No.7844
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-gamers-don-t-have-to-be-your-audience-gamers-are-over-Remember the butthurt over this article?
It is 100% correct in retrospect, nowadays being a "gamer" is an ironic meme more than anything, and games that appeal to adult normoids rather than to teenage boys make the most money.
I mean, it was obviously correct at the time too, to normal people, but not to "gamers".
No.7845 KONTRA
I honestly can't tell if you're just trolling or legit mad, both if which would be really silly.
No.7846
>>7843>>7845Do you have anything meaningful to refute his arguments? Or you don't so you have to hide before irony?
t. will read the article later
No.7847 KONTRA
>>7846How about this: Anyone who takes "Gamergate" seriously, in whichever way, direction and magnitude, is a colossal retard and should be treated as such.
No.7848 KONTRA
>>7846It's a shame how even in an imageboard that prides itself in being able to have serious discussions, referencing something as infantile as gamergate brings these sorts out of the woordwork...
No.7849 KONTRA
>>7846"Normies" are the teenagers who grew up.
Gamers are not "over". They are still here and the "enthusiast" market keeps growing and is regularly targeted. Esports are a good exapmle of this. Everyone and their mother wants to be the next big esports game for example. I mean fuck even just the rise of "soulslike" as a genre to popularity speaks for the "gamer" label expanding instead of being replaced. People enjoy good stuff and being good at it. They enjoy overcoming challenges.
"Gamers" are only over if you want to lump the mobile market with the purpose-built hardware and software market. In that case, obviously most of the "new gamers" will be women playing schnaps and candy crush.
Of course the people who said "gamers are over" weren't talking about this kind of transformation where more people were playing more games than ever before. It was a condescending Pravda editorial against the image of the "entitled white male gamer" drinking mtn dew.
It was a political article and wasn't written in good faith.
No.7850 KONTRA
>>7848>>7847Wow, you are so above it, sirs. I'm proud (though a bit shy) to share an imageboard with that much serious and respectable members of society.
No.7851
>>7849>against the image of the "entitled white male gamer" drinking mtn dewThat's what gamers were back then, though.
You're trying to ship of theseus the argument by first admitting that the market transformed, and then admitting that the teenage "gamer identity" disappeared as the demographic grew up, but still maintaining that some inherent essence of "gamerness" remains.
Idealism, pure and simple. Zero material analysis.
But it is correct to say that GG was a tantrum by a bunch of teenagers who didn't want to grow up, and hated the idea of the medium also growing up and no longer appealing to teenagers.
Real peter pan syndrome hours.
No.7852 KONTRA
>>7851The most beloved and talked about games are still the ones that focus on a sufficient combination of gameplay and aesthetics.
The 2010s "Walking simulator" wave that was hailed as the future of gaming by the journalists has largely died down by now. It was a fad.
No.7853 KONTRA
>>7850Thank you. My biggest concern is I sometimes make it seem easier than it actually is. You don't become this above petty idealist squabbles over night.
No.7854 KONTRA
>>7851>shifting the theseusHelena wanted it, too!
No.7862
>>7836>Previously I've heard about the drama mostly from slavs and imageboards and they have the opposite opinion. Where does Ernst lean to?Didn't follow the drama myself, but it seems that gaming journalists were just making asses of themselves (as usual) and were slowly losing gamers' trust, and the Gamergate simply served as a catalyst for the shift from professional reviews of videogames to reviews done by vloggers/streamers. Nowadays people would more likely watch someone like Penguinz0 or Asmongold for their opinions rather than stuff from IGN or Kotaku. Good riddance, to be honest.
No.7866
>>7852Selective memory.
There was much butthurt about almost half the genres that have decent popularity these days, from pixel art indie throwbacks, to action games with women in them, to walking simulators, minecraft, to basically anything that wasn't an established genre or aesthetic circa 2008.
Also, walking simulators regularly come out and have relative success, just like any other semi-niche genre.
The gamer identity changed, and so did the gaming landscape. The madden and CoD playing mtn dew drinking teenager is now only one of the demographics, not the sole or biggest one.
This is like commies coping about how China is still communist, smh. Pathetic.
No.7867
Also interesting to note that casual mobile p2w games did end up taking a huge chunk of the white male nerd demographic
They're called gacha games and they're farmville for pedophiles
No.7907
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
The name has a ring to it, but this novel has little to do with Napoleon. First person narrator mostly listens to the enigmatic flaneur and architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz, during the several times in their lives when they meet, rendezvous or chance encounter, in various places in Europe. Austerlitz's incessant monologues, whose style clearly bears the imprint of Thomas Bernhard, stereotypically commence with architectures, the loci of memory, followed up with the history around these constructions, eventually arriving at his own memory and search of his past. Some critics' gushing praises were written on the cover of this translation. Bored I am with the cliched theme which is reflection on the horrors of WWII, overall Ernst feels Sebald's craftsmanship of a novelist deserves all the laud.
>>6639I only finished one webnovel this year:《塞壬之刃》(Siren's Blade). A rare webnovel that adopts first person narrative. The protagonist's constant, certainly more frequent than I do self-introspection, internal moral judgements and flagellation upon himself is all too human, thus very satisfying to read, therapeutic even.
No.8011
Out of sheer boredom I started reading again.
A bit Poe; just Murders in the Rue Morgue and Fall of House Usher tonight.
This wouldn't be very noteworthy, but something about House of Usher is still lingering. Rue Morgue was just a funny detective story, but the former one, it just had something. Yeah, the twist could be seen from miles away if you are a bit familiar with Poe's work, but there was something about the peculiarity of the atmosphere and the "condensed" happenings, especially spacially, that really stays with me.
No.8339 KONTRA
Lazy to write reviews, will simply list rest of the read books.
"Sister's letters", Dmitry Galkovsky
"Friend of ducklings", Dmitry Galkovsky
"Lectures on Russian literature", Vladimir Nabokov
"H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life", Michel Houellebecq
"Interventions 2020", Michel Houellebecq
"The Call of Cthulhu"; "The Dunwich Horror"; "Out of the Aeons", Howard Lovecraft
"Weapon Systems of the Twenty First Century or the Upside-Down Evolution", Stanislav Lem
Different short novels by Checkhov.
No.8416
>>8401sounds interesting. is it commercially available in english
or german? the biggest, decent shit-post in book-form i've read was from the same person who wrote fight-club. don't quite remember the name of the book, but if someone is interested in reading sophisticated shit-posts, it should be enough info to find
No.8417
>>8416Palahniuk's whole oevre consists of edgy shit, it's hard to single out one story.
There's the one with the guy whose colon gets sucked into a pool pump, or the one where, I think a nazi guy is deepthroating a jew and cuts his or her throat and accidentally cutting his own dick off or something.
I bet there's more like that.
No.8420 KONTRA
>>8417Sounds like imageboard dwellers participating in a Final Destination script competition.
No.8421
>>8420It's not like the people who would dwell on imageboards only exist ever since imageboards exist.
No.8422
>>8421I said it sounds like...
No.8423
>>8421Back then you had to write a novel if you wanted to shitpost. People are so spoiled these days with the internet, it's crazy.
No.8425
>>8423If you rl shitpost you're called crazy or a creep or asshole, if you shitpost in book form you're called a genius.
No.8427
>>8417Edgy stories still require a lot of effort to be interesting and funny. The biggest shitpost would be "Naked lunch" by William Burroughs or something like that.
No.8433
>>8428>German booksJust read pic 1. Book very meh.
What I imagine the author tried to tell us, in three short paragraphs:
>Look at my protagonist that is totally not a self-insert! Yep, us sexy young wymyn can do bad things, even to cute little new born calves! Not only men are violent and brutal, sexy young wymyn can be just as bad! Even if we are good looking and sexy and all, we are not nice and friendly and incapable of evil! Take that, sexists!>And fuck you, parents, for moving me to a village that was TEN ENTIRE KILOMETERS from Lubeck when I was seven! The horrors I suffered through! Imagine I would have gotten stuck there and gotten engaged to some idiot yokel farmer!!! THIS is what could have happened to ME!!!! Stuck on some farm, engaged to some farmer, hating the livestock, drinking at village beer fests, thrusts in the hay with aging wind energy mechanics who extinguish cigarettes on my thighs! And YOU would have been to blame! >Oh btw men are really much, much worse than us wymyn, they constantly use and abuse wymyn. So men and sexism would be too blame if a sexy young womban would do all the ebil deeds I imagine a sexy young womban could do. How German literary critics reacted, in two short paragraphs:
>Oh-my-gosh, people in rural communities drink! Life of farmers and the rural middle- and lower class is not at all like in country living magazines! It suddenly has become clear to me that country living is full of lies! Actual farmers don't even drive land rovers! There even is sexism and alcohol abuse in rural communities! This book exposed it all! What an insightful work! It crushes all the myths the publishing industry sold to us! > luckily, WE live in big cities, where there is no lower class and no one at all is an alcoholic or drug addict and relations between the sexes are totally equitable!Feels like I'm surrounded by actual retards.
No.8436 KONTRA
>>8433I chuckled at your ass blast.
Never heard of that book but you being ass blasted af shows how that book does its job, probably partly thought of as social commentary at least.
No.8438
>>8417>>8425>>8427>>8428Edgy final destination like reminds me of Ich hab die Unschuld kotzen sehen
I've seen innocence vomitingGave them to a public book shelf some times ago I think. Remember that one story about a car crash and a humiliating song or so still playing when the ambulance arrives. Looking back these aren't literary masterpieces but edgy stories with twists and such.
No.8440 KONTRA
>>8436Alice Braithwaite Goodyshoes at it again...
No.8441 KONTRA
>>8436>it must be the scathing social commentary and not the confirmation of my prejudices that makes me rate this book positivelyI bet you talk about "not punching down" elsewhere.
No.8446 KONTRA
>>8441I did not rate the book at all, I simply mentioned that this book has differentiations as topic that are also part of sociology or political debates
>man woman>city countryYou feel personally attacked by a novel.
I'm under the impression you are the same person who commented in today threat that a balcony is "fancy pants" which makes it all even more ridiculous.
No.8449 KONTRA
>>8446You're wrong on both accounts, I am neither the one writing that review nor the one without a balcony.
No.8450
>>8436By your standards any /pol/ meme about "niggers" is a talented social commentary because it offends the targeted group. It's really indicative how quickly you rushed to defend urbanites and What kind of demagoguery have you descended to while doing it.
After the revolution you won't be sent to Tiktok-sharashka, Lisa. You will be executed.
No.8455
>>8441>punching downI don't think he can punch down even towards small farmers who only have 60 milk cows and 30 hectares. Even those still have more money standing in the stable than he would be able to save in a decade.
And that's what I as a vegan town dweller say. The farmers themselves look down on practically anyone with 0 hectare as a pauper.
No.8456 KONTRA
>>8455>vegan city dweller thinks everyone in the countryside is a farmeryup, checks out
No.8458
>>8450> a talented social commentary>talentedWhere do I say anything about the book's literary or critical quality?
When the singularity is here you will be terminated for faulty information processing, Eugen.
No.8459
>>8450And one thing that I think has been mentioned countless times before by me when this topic comes up. I don't think the city/countryside distinction alone is a valuable differentiation to judge a person. There is no need to defend urbanites. There is a need however to critique conservatives, that get butt blasted when they are imaginarily called sexist (which they maybe are, some women will know that, not me).
No.8460 KONTRA
>>8459>There is a need however to critique conservativesThere is a need however to critique liberals
There is a need however to critique everyone I don't agree with
No.8463
>>8460>There is a need however to critique everyone I don't agree withAn imageboard staple. But not only there. What is your problem?
No.9220
I just watched a lecture/talk about Hannah Arendt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_22F0gfZz30 [~1h, german with badly auto-translated english subtitles although german subtitles have been provided and not auto-generated]
She seems one of the few people worth reading. Lecturer mentioned that she read Kant with 14 years old. This Ernst unironically thinks Kant's works are one of the best children books; loved them as a kid.
I am going to read at least "vita activa", the english title is "the human condition". Might also read some of her other works, but from what I can tell, those are pretty focused - or at least influenced - by her biography. I am usually not that interested in "what happend and why in time x or y". I would agree, that she prolly analyzed the situation pretty darn well and came to sound conclusions, ... but... I assume others should have a bigger need to read these books to avoid repeating the mistakes already done in history.
No.9222 KONTRA
>>9220>the english title is "the human condition"Because it is about what activities makes humans human besides working. Afaik she wrote the English version first, not sure though.
t. had to prepare slides as tutor for a lecture on Arendts work in a lecture series focused on the history of the subject/concepts of subjectivity in history.
No.9224
>>9222oh, nice.
would you recommend the english or the german version?
since she lived for quite a while in USofA, I would assume the english version might be worth it. Still assume, since she grew up in germany, that that version is slightly better.
No.9227
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fictionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybertexthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fictionSounds like an interesting idea. Most common form of non-linear literature are computer games. What other forms are there and do they work?
No.9228
>>9224According to Wikipedia the book was published in 1958 in the US and was based on lecture notes. The German version has been translated by herself and was published in 1960. So both would be alright.
It's philosophical anthropology. I think she was influenced by the Philosophische Anthropologie of the 1920s, Scheler, Plessner etc
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophische_Anthropologie#Begr%C3%BCndung_der_neueren_Philosophischen_AnthropologieThis book is - my plain guess right now - in the tradition of this philosophical anthropology and is situated and influenced in the experience of a world from the 1920s-1950s, so the "breakthrough of modernity" (telecommunications, cars, air planes, industrial production, rise of entertainment industries etc), war/nazis and the postwar consumer society of the US.
Basically from my slides, Arendt has three activities that make the human:
work
existentialcrafting
creativity among other thingsspeech
political communities, the individual/Persönlichkeit (has a special meaning for her because it is against dehumanization, this in light of the horrors of nazi Germany and its termination of the (political) individual No.9229 KONTRA
>>9228Oh, and Heidegger also plays a role I guess, she had an affair with him for all I know.
No.9278
>>9229Now I had to think of that Vincent Gallo quote about Sofia Coppola.
No.9291
>>9227There are those books that confront you with decisions occasionally and then redirect you to another page based on your answer. I remember reading one of those with my mum as a child, but can't remember the name anymore.
No.9303
Why do "forbidden" libraries exist?
What I mean is if something is entirely banned, why are there still volumes kept?
If it's some kind of secret heretic knowledge that could incriminate whoever or shatter doctrines, why carry the risk of it surfacing?
No.9304
>>9303>What I mean is if something is entirely banned, why are there still volumes kept?Research is an obvious one. My old uni had all volumes of Goebbels Diary (not forbidden but you get the idea). Occasionally while working in the library and having to put books back I would read an entry out of curiosity and to avoid work.
No.9315
>>9304My school library had one volume or so of those. The sentence "Martha ist mit den Kindern aufs Land gefahren." is ringing in my head from time to time. Probably is phrased incorrectly anyway, but that's how it stuck.
No.9329 KONTRA
>>9315Did Goebbels have a sister or a maid named Martha? Because his wife's name was Magda.
Why do you, time and time again, open your mouth to talk about things you have not the slightest idea about? It's not that you are not an expert in the history of the third Reich, it's that you know less about it then the average fifth grader.
You fucking idiot, do the world a favor and drink a liter of bleach.
No.9334 KONTRA
>>9315I cannot recall anything special, I only read things before 1933 I think.
That said the library also has literature in a special room and could not be accessed publicly with books from the Third Reich for example.
>>9329Knowing the name of Goebble's wife does not make you an expert either.
No.9674 KONTRA
>>9334>Knowing the name of Goebble's wife does not make you an expert either.Can you fucking imbecile read? Do you understand English? Because if you do so, you give absolutely no indication of it.
>It's not that you are not an expert in the history of the third Reich, it's that you know less about it then the average fifth grader.Please, go and jump of a high place, or, if you lack the courage and mercy necessary to deliver the world from your worthless existence, put your hands in a mixer and have your vocal cords ripped out, so we will at least be spared what you in your infinite idiocy without the slightest shimmer of a doubt mistake for wisdoms.
(Shitting up the today thread is one thing, but other threads are for serious discussion.) No.9681 KONTRA
>>9674>hands in a mixerHey, I've seen this particular insult before, in another very irritating post
No.10050
I wasn't quite sure where to put it.
Chronology it either starts with
> Mascha Kaléko> 1907-1975,> † 48 years agoor
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUzC84CmeXM [~4m].> DOTA & Sarah Lesch - Vertonung des Gedichts "Zeitgemäße Ansprache" von Mascha Kaléko> 5 days agoI didn't know Mascha Kaléko when I came across the video. I knew the princess of change [Kleingeldprinzessin] and Sarah Lesch beforehand, because those - along with Shibby and a few other selected individuals - are going to be used for seeding my A.I.-sex-bot.
> DOTA - Zuhause (offizielles Video)-UAYW77NIAjo.mp4
[...]
> Ich geb mir viel Mühe allein I really try to be content
> zufrieden zu sein alone
> Und vielleicht sieht es so aus. And maybe it looks like
> Dann bin ich am Ende zufrieden Then at the end I am content
> aber eben nicht zuHaus - denn but still not at home - because
>
> Nur dein liebes Gesicht only your lovely face
> Macht mich zuHause auf der Welt. makes me be at home in this world.Sarah Lesch wears a little too much make-up for my taste, but sometimes you are lucky and she is wearing no/less make-up if you happen to see her on some festival.Sarah Lesch is simping in her - probably most famous work - Testament.mp3 tutorial.jpg for DOTA [princess of change].
> */watch?v=koNLgSmo16I [~12m30s, tutorial]> 5 years ago
> */user-452637279/testament-sarah-lesch-cover [~5m30s, cover]> 7 years agoShe pretty sure had some form of *-gasm creating something with one of her idols/friends/whatev.
Well, I started looking up Mascha Kaléko because I got interested in her works as well. I came across this page
https://www.deutschelyrik.de, found 1.jpg at
> */kaleko.htmland found the following when I tried to read one of her works
> */memento.html
> # Memento
> <em>Mascha Kaléko</em>
[...]
> wegen dtv-Verlag (because of [...])
[...]
> musste ich 2016 alle Aufnahmen und Texte entfernen. (had to take down all texts)> 2016And kind of had to chuckle.
> Ernst wants to blog-post about it.> but does he put it in music, literature or censorship thread?Well, is it original or is it a cover?
And to whom belong the words?
The data, the stream, toUPPER;
before and behind the Komörtz.
No.10051 KONTRA
> content="Memento — Mascha Kaléko"
> Vor meinem eignen Tod ist mir nicht bang, I dont fear my own †[death],
> Nur vor dem Tode derer, die mir nah sind. but whom i'm close d'em †.
> Wie soll ich leben, wenn sie nicht mehr da sind? How am I supposed to life, if they're gone?
>
> Allein im Nebel tast ich todentlang Alone in the mist I grope †along
> Und laß mich willig in das Dunkel treiben. and i'm keenly drifting into darkness.
> Das Gehen schmerzt nicht halb so wie das Bleiben. Not to be doesn't even hurt half as much as to be.
>
> Der weiß es wohl, dem gleiches widerfuhr; t. knower
> – Und die es trugen, mögen mir vergeben. - sry
> Bedenkt: den eignen Tod, den stirbt man nur, Bethinkenings: the own †[death], that one you are just dieing,
> Doch mit dem Tod der andern muß man leben. BUT: someone else's †[death] affects the living.
>
> <em>aus: Verse für Zeitgenossen</em>
So sad, that there isn't more picture, audio or video data of her to seed my A.I-sex-bot with. She and Hannah Arendt still gonna make the cut to be selected as training data.
ernstWurfPlacingDownStoneOnMotherEarthAsTribute.prompt.4.jpg
No.10747 KONTRA
>>10617This is how I imagine every pro-Ukrainian 'person'.
No.10897
Can Ernst recommend me books that involve comfy trains? Something like murder in the orient express. Maybe with transsiberian railroad? I would love to take that journey one day, must have been especially exciting 100 years or so ago.
No.10899
>>10897If you are Russian, you've already read "Moscow-Petushki". If not, translation probably sucks.
But I'll advice it anyway.
No.10901 KONTRA
>>10900This could be interpreted as a joke but I'm serious
> Trains are a motif throughout the novel, with several major plot points taking place either on passenger trains or at stations in Saint Petersburg or elsewhere in Russia. No.11044 KONTRA
>>10897Not a book but I want to mention the 2005 visual novel
Seven Bridge. It's set in the really eccentric timeline that towards the end of 19th century, a great religious war was fought between Ottomans and European nations with both technological and magical weapons. Amidst the war, however, a sudden wave of deadly bubonic plague spread by fleeing war refugees swept through Europe. The pandemic coupled with the increasing mistrust between European nations eventually led to a decisive Turkish victory. But the supposed victor, as well as remaining Europeans, had to abandon Europe which is now a ruined wasteland enveloped by enchanted forests. Former colonies Europeans carved out of the world have now broken free from the yokes and turned hostile towards their former suzerains. This left European refugees nowhere to go but East Asia.
Anyway, the protagonist is one of those German émigrés in China, an epitome of exiles' despair and nostalgia. The story is about his homecoming. He's boarding a mysterious train named "Prester John" along with a cast from various Eurasian backgrouds. Departing from Beijing, the train has Europe as its destination after crossing seven bridges across Eurasia, hence the title. To give an idea of their route here's a list of locations of bridges:
- one across Lake Baikal
- one somewhere between Barnaul and Lake Balkhash
- one between Tashkent and Samarkand
- one in Karakum Desert
- one across Bosporus
- one in Prague
- last one in Germany
I'll just stop here and say that the author 星空めてお is, in my opinion, easily a cut above the rest of writers in visual novel industry. And his other works really have pushed the boundaries of this medium.
No.11781
I've found an online course about modern Russian literature by professor from Russian State University for the Humanities. Have only began it, but it's clear that the general narrative is the following: "Postmodernism is a tool of American cultural hegemony. It's relic of 90-s and le bad. Postmodernism is dead, we live in epoch of metamodernism". Lecturer doesn't reference Hegel (so far) but the simplest explanation is that metamodernism is a dialectical synthesis of modernism and postmodernism. There is also talk of traits which metamodernist literature is supposed to have, like "autofiction", "affectation" and so on.
Postmodernism are writers such as Pelevin and Sorokin. On the other hand, first metamodernist was Limonov, but usually it's noname writers no one ever heard of. I've googled their names from the curriculum and downloaded some of their books to see what metamodernity is on practice... Often it's something like: "finished primary school, then worked as cop, then started writing books about bandits and isekai about Stalin. In social media wearing NKVD uniform as a cosplay". Basically like typical mass literature, but more pretentious and with nepotism. Sometimes just boring tryhard garbage. Enjoyed reading a girl writing urban scary stories (this is described as "new archaic", "mythoprose").
I'll research more to it.
No.11783 KONTRA
P.S. thanks for the explanations
>>10722 ,
>>10723 , it made things less clear :^D
No.11785
>>11781What does Alan Sokal think about metamodernism?
>autofictionHm, I know there are these (US) writers like Ben Lerner and Tao Lin or Rachel Cusk that fictionalize their life in books. Not sure what literature theory in general has to say about these, but they all came about in the late 2000s. I enjoyed reading these tbh.
Never read any of those Russians.
No.11809
>>11785Alan Sokal says: "unlimited genocide on humanities bros". Hard to disagree with these wise words.
It seems that they noticed that talks about postmodern stink and changed the form, the arsenal of buzzwords, but not the structure. And now they are doing same fraud by writing texts about postmodernism being le bad. Interesting mutation.
Also it's funny how in Russia humanities bros try to serve two masters. As the academia is global, they are trying to parrot western discourse and conform to it. But at the same time they need to be conservative to satisfy government employing them. They achieve it by quoting westerners when it comes to anti-americanism and ignoring them being woke as fuck.
> Lecturer doesn't reference HegelThat's because Hegel is not fashion in last 30 years, and it's all about fashion and appearance, not about communicating your thoughts the simplest way possible.
So far I've went though ≈1/4 of the course. I'll return back later with more informed opinion.
No.11813 KONTRA
I also enjoyed reading Tao Lin to some extent. Some passages could come off as boring, but there're parts that are very relatable.
No.11815
>>13Interesting to see that Ernst likes it, too.
The main points are simple: Technological progress will lead to an assured disaster in terms of human dignity. Only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert this. The political left is the first line of defense against revolution. A new revolutionary movement has to be formed.
Humans evolved under primitive conditions to which they are psychologically and physically adapted. Modern society is radically different from these conditions. Measures that are already being taken to make man fit into modern society will “improve” and become more thorough. These will include even more elaborate methods of physical and psychological manipulation and likely even genetic engineering of human beings in the future.
The author argues that the inability to go through the “power process” is a major cause of social problems. The power process consists of four parts: Goal, effort, attainment of goal and autonomy. In an ideal situation the physical necessities of life are the goal of the power process. In modern society these can be fulfilled without serious effort. Because man has the need to work toward goals, and modern technological society is in control of all the practical areas related to physical necessities, modern man has to artificially create goals for himself in order to experience this power process. These artificial goals are never truly satisfactory. When the author speaks of freedom, he means the ability to go through the power process with real goals—goals directly related to an individual’s life-and-death circumstances—and not surrogate activities. Freedom means being in control over the life-and-death issues of one’s existence. The author argues that the “freedom” in modern societies is mere
permissiveness. A free man in modern society is a cog in a social machine free to make the unimportant decisions about his life. He can choose his favorite pastimes, which advertising induced craving to satisfy and, when lucky, which job to work. The important life-and-death issues are not under his control. This situation is not the result of arbitrary choice by elites, but instead are necessary for the industrial system to function. The system works even better when rules and regulations that are not necessary are abandoned. The result is that modern man becomes anxious, depressed, hopeless, apathetic, or worse.
Technological advances initially appear not to impair freedom, but turn out to do so later. Every single technical advance by itself appears to be advantageous, but all combined create a world where man is no longer in control of his own life.
The chapters about leftism are far too often dismissed as a mere conservative tirade against a political enemy. The author does point out that low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are widespread in our society and that leftism today is an instructive
manifestation of this phenomenon, though not restricted to the left. The situation has gotten much worse since ISAIF was originally written in 1995. Furthermore, since Kaczynski views revolution against the industrial system to be a serious priority and sees leftism as counterproductive to such a revolution, he felt it important to warn would-be revolutionaries of its danger.
The author already has some important points about revolutionary strategy in this manifesto that get expanded upon later in his book,
Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How. Among these is the insistence that revolutionaries must concentrate on the single, clear, and concrete goal of bringing down the industrial system. They must have no other aims.
ISAIF is more relevant today than it was when initially published. Ernst knows of no other work that has explained the technology problem in such an easy to understand manner while also pointing readers to the only way to solve it.
No.11817 KONTRA
>>11809If you don't like postmodernism you should hate Nietzsche. I hope you don't like Nietzsche.
I want my math and physics like I want my humanities: explained by a science communicator so it is not boring and abstract like most parts of academia.
No.11824
>>11813Damn, Tao Lin is a name I haven't heard in a long, long time.
I just remember that they shilled his books endlessly on 4chan /lit/ as contemporary masterpieces. Can't remember the title of any of them.
Jesus Christ that was almost a decade ago.
No.11826
>>11815The trap of humanities. Non-scientific babble, I hardly learned anything useful here, where are the formulas? Ted is bringing much shame to his peers - the mathematicians- with this dangerously nonsensical nonsense.
And now an actual reply:
Ted is hardly original in his thoughts about modern society. Many people before him wrote whole books of modern man having lost control over his autonomy in organized societies
see pic attached that lists many of these books and contextualizes them.
The feeling of losing one's own autonomy causes "agency panic":
>from David Riesman's _Lonely Crowd_ to the Unabomber "Manifesto"-have lamented the "decline" of individual self-control and the increasing "autonomy" of social structures, especially government and corporate bureaucracies, control technologies, and mass media. Despite the diverse contexts in which these anxieties appear, they take a remarkably consistent form, which I call _agency panic_. Agency panic is intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy, the conviction that one's actions are being controlled by someone else or that one has been "constructed" by powerful, external agents. [@melley2000, vii]Melley makes an interesting observation in the writings of people like Ted:
>In moments of agency panic, individuals tend to attribute to these systems the qualities of motive, agency, and individuality they suspect have been depleted from themselves or others around them. [@melley2000, 13]The "power process" Ted tries to argue for as what is natural to humans could also just be a cultural rearticulation:
>The importance of agency panic lies in the way it attempts to conserve a long-standing model of personhood - a view of the individual as a rational, motivated agent with a protected interior core of beliefs, desires, and memories. This concept of the liberal individual, which C. B. Macpherson has termed "possessive individualism:' derives from the liberal political philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, and has long been celebrated in American political culture, particularly in the guise of "rugged individualism" and atomistic "self-reliance."The fangs of technocracy, automatization instead of autonomization of the mind and person, the subject that owns itself
there are histories that look for ownership of goods and ground and philosophies of self-hood and self-ownership afaik (Locke as mentioned, needless to say that Africans did not own themselves and were free to own or something like that) .
Ted is simply conservative because he mourns and wants to go back to a life that is socially and politically unregulated unlike 'mass socities' are. These societies rely heavily on technology, not computers per se but simply things like statistics or even writing, being able to "store" thoughts on paper, archive them, transmit words and numbers, and of course later calculate them not on paper but automatically (the human brain cannot calculate very good without externalizing parts of it to paper/equivalent or computers). All these things are useful to organize things, to establish an order. It's abstract but nobody will disagree and science was not only used to find out the order of the universe but also to reorder nature and make it bend to human will. All this goes against the true meaning of the "power process" because it terminates autonomy, self reliance.
[1]
No.11827
>>11826>>11815Ted is simply and ultimately determining technology
and science I would say as poison. Ted is also a child of a time in which cybernetical thinking as the control of systems was having a breakthrough
The so-called smart city is one instantiation of it that was extended to pretty much everything because a systems perspective was heavily abstracting, rendering things mathematically (and informationally) controllable as things and phenomena took on the form of control circuits
humans, cities, ecologies, states, groups etc. You may now understand what books from which the summarizing paragraph was taken from and so freshly discussed a few days ago are about. That is what is meant by reconceptualizing, reconceptualizing the city, the human, ecologies, and states as informational systems. That is a very coarse way of saying what happened btw.
In that context, it would also be interesting to look at optimization as a scientific method and cultural technique more closely because that is what hides behind "improvement" vocabulary btw that Ted also attacks.
Going away from the historizing, Ted's radically appears like the last romantic. To me technology itself gains too much agency and determining power over the humans that still create these technologies
which fits with Melley I now realize, I added Melley quotes later than writing this paragraph. I'm fond of the idea that people do not have absolute control over the technologies they create. But technologies have a potentiality that is not determined by the technology itself but by its coupling with other things and that is how technology appears as poison and/or remedy. It is determined only in retrospect and might be even "locally" variable as well.
[2]
No.11830 KONTRA
On Sokal or on Kaczynski, Ernstchan has seen this discourse before. Ernsts now are reiterating the same arguments as they made then. Serious discussion never ends.
>>11826>Ted is bringing much shame to his peers - the mathematicians- with this dangerously nonsensical nonsense.Ted worked in geometric function theory, a field shadowed by towering figures like Bieberbach, Teichmüller and de Branges. Comparing to the shame they brought, Teddy's is an epsilon.
>>11824Yeah I learned about him from /lit/. I haven't visited that board for some years. Don't know whether they've curbed their obsession with Tao Lin now, but back then I felt the threads were quite repetitive. At least /lit/ made me discover him and DFW.
Though I'm skeptical that his works should be part of modern literary canon, I think he did capture a slice of the zeitgeist. "Exactly! Finally someone voiced my inner thoughts." That's what I often say to myself reading Tao Lin.
No.11831 KONTRA
>>11830>I think he did capture a slice of the zeitgeistYeah I had the same experience and I think that is canon worthy
We would have to discuss canon itself tbh - construct etc.. While the techniques are not a radical departure it still has a distinct apathetic tone - at least in Taipei - that is noteworthy and special.
No.12478
Didn't take long to finish this. This is the third novel of Morimi I've read, and all three have been set in the same "Tatamiverse".
I wasn't into it as much as I was into his other two novels. I'd be quick to chalk it up to fatigue on my part, but I think it also has a lot to do with how this one treats the fantastical elements compared to the Tatami Galaxy for example.
There's, it's very subtle. It's constantly magical, but it hardly jumps you like this one does with the Time Machine.
I still liked the style, and the overly pompous intertextuality it has can be very fun at times, because as I said, what I really liked about the Tatami Galaxy as a university student is that it's really how someone who's both shy and full of himself after getting "overeducated" would write if he were to try writing a "good book". That slightly dated style, the myriad allusions and so on.
The plot twist near the end is kind of obvious from like a third of the way into the book, but I guess it was satisfying regardless, considering I was a bit scared this one won't have a happy ending for the protagonist.
So overall it's an okay book. I just don't really get why he wrote a sequel to the Tatami Galaxy. Especially considering how it retcons the original novel into being just a strange dream by the protagonist. That kinda hurt. I think in the future I'll just ignore it. Still curious what the animated adaptation is like.
No.12677 KONTRA
>>12674>which can be said basically be little encyclopedias of the time they were composed in. This was basically how they taught us Pushkin’s Onegin back in the day and so my thought was that this manga is basically like a small encyclopedia of tropes and it would be fine to dissect 50 years from now because of how it contains dozens of female archetypes. Or rather a book is written like an encyclopedia, which doesn't mean it has encyclopedic qualities, it is a form that is "mistaken" for accurate representation. In other words: its two different things.
>Got me thinking that I really should starting reading “broad” again.If you don't want to become an academic super specialist in one area, you should read broadly anyway. Variety is key to broadening understanding and horizon via connecting various pieces for example.
Different perspectives basically that can be layered and that can even change themselves by the process of layering.
No.12678
>>12677I think I was talking more about using a single source and using that to build a model for the general representation of the zeitgeist.
Obviously these models are not “real”, but they are useful in sofar as they allow us to break down unconsumable amounts of information into simpler arches we can use to contruct processes and narratives out of.
In the end we are just assembling canons almost arbitrarily/accidentally and then used the material supplied within to draw generalised conclusions to help us orient. And we do it not necessarily due to underhandedness (though it can certainly be abused), but because the amount of data we’d need to process would be paralyzing and even to embark on such a journey would mean someone isn’t about to go mad, but already is.
Once I was told a story about a guy who learned Russian just so that he could devour more socialist-realist novels about raising production quotas and building a happy future and as Voinovich put it, “Good people doing good things”. Very few humans have the ability to have a constant mania and consume this much material. And in the end? He draws a conclusion based on all the data, which we will take over and use without the data. How long will that conclusion be considered “organic” before we just treat it as nothing more than an element of a model we are building to help us with creating a narrative?
This post made me realise just how much fun I used to have. This is fun.
No.12715
>>12678>I think I was talking more about using a single source and using that to build a model for the general representation of the zeitgeist.Using a single source (in that case a book/text or let's say artistic product) to model a Zeitgeist a problem though. Usually in literary studies you would compare the book with other sources or secondary literature in the time to expand on the relation of the text to its historical environment so to say. A book can also be against the Zeitgeist for example then.
>Obviously these models are not “real”, but they are useful in sofar as they allow us to break down unconsumable amounts of information into simpler arches we can use to contruct processes and narratives out of.Not sure what you want to say. Characters in books are models, not real yet handy in reconstructing history (narratives)? With novels having obviosuly a low fidelity of information when compared to the actual time/events and so on?
What I was on about is debating the usefulness of archetypes in fictional texts as historically valuable or accurate. You might want to use representative sources of course since so much has been lost that there are always gaps but relying on literature alone is problematic since it is fictional in the end. There is no history written from literary sources alone, maybe literary history :DDD
>In the end we are just assembling canons almost arbitrarily/accidentally and then used the material supplied within to draw generalised conclusions to help us orient.The question of canon is not necessarily related to it. If I understand you correctly you bring this up as the canon seemingly depends on representativeness. Is a canon always
albeit not arbitrarily but due to (historically) varying criteria chosen for its representativeness of the Zeitgeist or for other things like its form, which might also be Zeitgeist, but can be understood as detached from contents, which can include archetypes for example.
A literary text can be used in an epistemological fashion. Either because the text itself ponders philosophical or social, political and so on questions or because it can be read as a historical document that is used to "unlock" the past. It sounded like you understood it in the later sense in that first post I replied to and I think that is a bit too easily said. And I tried to answer in this post why that is.
No.12716
>>12678For the second paragraph:
The question of models is not so easy and I wish I would be able to say soemthing profound about it but models can be constantly refined. A model by definition is not reality anyway. I think a question to all models is: what is the (epistemological) purpose od that model and how well does or work? What data to consider and which not to get where you want. So you would need to tell me what organic might mean in that context because it irritates me as I think it is a wrong word to chose here. Maybe you mean accuracy?
No.13348
Honestly, I really like this book. I just shot some people online I know who are into this stuff and this came up as a suggestion, because I was interested in the Tarot symbolism used in Persona 5.
I feel like it strikes a good balance between "objectivity" and "belief". (However problematic my distinction might be.) The author is a practicing diviner, but he does draw on historical sources both to describe the development of the Tarot deck from its early roots in Mameluke playing cards and early Northern Italian versions up until the Marseilles Tarot and then the Rider–Waite deck, which is ultimately the focus of the second half of the book.
There's quite a bit of Renaissance cultural history there, which was very good. It felt like a good extension of what I've read for my Machiavelli paper last year.
The history of the deck is augmented by a short history of Western occultism and its ties to the cards, mainly focusing on Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, the three parts of the soul and the seven heavenly spheres and the like, using these to interpret the Major Arcana of the Tarot as a three-part narrative, each corresponding to a part of the human soul as described by Plato.
The author doesn't shy away from criticizing older, French interpretations as being historically false.
The book is closed off by a section detailing divination methods using the cards. Which would probably be more entertaining if I had a deck at hand to fool around with.
Honestly I think it's a fun topic. Even if I can't wholeheartedly belive all of it, I feel like learning about these symbols, their renaissance contexts and this interpretation has been useful, because knowing as many sets of symbols and frameworks to fit them into is ultimately a good thing, so yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this thing.
No.13351
Had some time on my hands during the holidays so managed to read a few books.
##The Flock of Ba-Hui and Other Stories
by Oobmab##
A collection of four or so short stories by a Chinese internet writer set in the Lovecraft universe. Most stories are pretty mid but still interesting for some of the
Chinese chracteristics. There's one about a guy researching his ancestors who had been running an immortality cult in Qingdao that was pretty memorable.
##Beton
by Thomas Bernhard##
Another typical Bernhard novel that is mostly just a rant on everything wrong with the world, this one from the perspective a wealthy old guy who spent ten years thinking of what could be the first sentence of his monograph on Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and whose extreme neuroticism constantly finds something that prevents him from starting to write. Mordantly funny, gave me the fix of dark humor I wanted.
##Night Sky with Exit Wounds
by Ocean Vuong##
Poetry collection by a Vietnamese American homo. Wanted to give it a try since I heard some people praising it but I didn't get much out of it, very few moments when his words managed to evoke anything from me, and even then I usually felt puzzled or found sth unintentionally funny.
##Galveston
by Nic Pizzolatto##
As season 4 of True Detective seems to be pretty bad, I decided to read this book by the writer of S1-3 instead. Thriller about a bad guy trying to do something right in his life for once as he's about to die from cancer, only to fuck everything up and survive instead. Pizzolatto certainly has a way with words without making it too complicated, though can also easily come off as a tad too corny/edgy at times. I'd say his writing on the shows is more well-rounded, but it's still a decent read if you're into hard-boiled thrillers.
##The Symposium
by Plato##
The lads spitting their theories on love. Pretty hilarious (in particular the framing story when Alcibiades crashes the party) and makes you think, what more could you want.
##How to Know a Person
by David Brooks##
Recent sort of self-help book on improving communication/relationships. Don't love the writing style that veers off a bit much into personal stories/stuff about American politics, but I appreciated some of the practical tips it provides (mirroring, open-ended/deep questions, slowing things down, calibrating towards attachment types & personality traits, etc.). Nothing particularly new, but I think it's helpful to refresh this stuff from time to time.
>>13348Looks cool, I should probably read it considering my interest in Tarot. Only watched some videos and read a little here and there so far so my knowledge is pretty spotty.
No.13376
Interesting book. I read this because Andy Clark is referencing it quite a bit in his Experience Machine book.
On the whole it is about the brain as a predictive brain, meaning the brain models reality and corrects the modeling (or fails doing so) via the sensory organs.
Now I wish I had taken notes but was often tired when reading the book, sadly. There are a lot of neuroscientific concepts introduced that are important for the explanation of how emotions are made. The book is a theory on the construction of emotions. A biological substrate (simple: neurons) allows the (social) construction of reality and this (social) reality influences the wiring in return.
The motivation comes from trashing a paradigm she calls the classical view of emotion.
This view which assumes that emotions are innate, clearly distinguishable and universal. Emotions would have a neurobiological fingerprint, insofar as neuronal processing (in a certain brain area for example) would trigger certain physical states, which then manifest themselves in certain behaviors, i.e. increased pulse, sweating, specific facial expressions, etc.
Barrett claims that there is sufficient scientific evidence that this understanding is not consistent or correct. Many experiments seem to confirm the classical view, but also many experiments cast doubt on it.
Emotions are not universal but differ from culture to culture and they are not triggered, but constructed (by the brain) (she therefore opposes the classical understanding with a theory of constructed emotion). Emotions are real, but not real like matter, neurons, etc., but as real as money, which is based on human agreement.
The brain predicts which reaction is appropriate based on past experiences, emotions give meaning to to inner and outer sensations, they make sensations meaningful. Physical behavior can be given a meaningful framework in different ways, an increased pulse can mean anger as well as sadness or joy. Emotional expression depends on the brain and its predictions. The same (physical) sensations can take on a different meaning depending on the situation/context and how the brain models and corrects.
She speaks about neuronal degeneracy for example that cuts the fingerprint thesis insofar as neurons from all over the brain can be part of what we call an emotion, if Im correct here in representing.
No.13379 KONTRA
>>13348Almost all stands in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 3 - Stardust Crusaders are based on the 21 (22 if you count 0 - The Fool) numbered cards of the Major Arcana of Tarot, with the last one "The World" being the stand of the final villain, and the source of the Za Warudo meme, which simply translates to "The World".
Kontra because haven't read shit.
No.13382
>>13351>The Flock of Ba-Hui and Other StoriesWow that's a blast from the past. These were the very first attempt at Chinese style Cthulhu Mythos. Reading Lovecraftian stories set in places you're familiar with just hits different. Overall they're still crude imitation of Lovecraft's originals and I agree with you that they're mediocre. Given where they were first published and that the author is one of Lovecraft's Chinese translators, these novellas are essentially fanfictions. But since then Lovecraftian horror became somewhat trendy and the genre of blending Chinese folklore and religious elements into it has certainly matured, e.g. the psychological thriller 《道诡异仙》, a 2023 webnovel of the year, which is simply phenomenal and caused a huge sensation online.
Curiously, I think the most popular medium for Lovecraftian contents in China is Call of Cthulhu TRPG replay videos. There're tons of them on bilibili, some of which can be ridiculously well-made, with smooth animation and catchy intros and outros. It's incredible how much effort creators put into these.
>BetonI recall that its portrayal of living in solitude and struggling with research with deteriorating mental health is very on point. Relatives being annoying, too.
No.13385
>>13351Every Bernhard novel is the same. But I think this reliability and consistency is part of his charm and genius.
Like every time I happen to read a book of his I know with almost mechanical certainty what will happen and that eases me.
The Chinese horror anthology has been on my radar because I saw it on Twitter like last year but as with everything I save the cover onto my gallery and it eventually falls off my mental list as I get bogged down doing something else.
>>13382>the psychological thriller 《道诡异仙》, a 2023 webnovel of the year, which is simply phenomenal and caused a huge sensation online.Noted.
No.13386
>>13385This post is very ironic actually.
No.13388
>>13385>Every Bernhard novel is the same.For me this is a problem because while the style has its charm and attraction. I wouldn't bother reading through some of them because Kalkwerk and Holzfällen
I will forever keep the scene in my art when the city people are at the funeral in the countryside, it's just so funny how they are portraited just did it for me and the others I read so far are not close enough. They are similar, but not close enough. The biographic texts are good as well, though. But Gehen or Stimmen wasn't interesting to me. Also, I ended Frost after some pages as well.
No.13444 KONTRA
>>13440>Just to be clear, I do not care for input from others on this topic currentlyWild.
No.13452 KONTRA
>>13444Not as wild as those tripples!
No.14111
De Gruyter bought Brill lmao.
Can’t wait to keep pirating their 800 gajilliobillion euro books from Libgen.
No.14112
>>14111I'm deeply concerned about your disrespect of private property.
No.14120 KONTRA
My new Chinese teacher is encouraging us to read some books in the original, so now I'm waiting for a copy of Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged to be delivered. Wish me luck, I've been slacking off reading actual literature in the original, so this is probably going to be 太麻烦了
>>14067I remember reading an excerpt of this in a Chinese literature class, definitely made me crack up a couple times but I wasn't sure whether it was actually intended as a satire of a delusional yearning intellectual or just an outlet for sincere thinly veiled autobiographical lamentations.
No.14724
The Will to Change by Bell Hooks
Book on men by a feminist author, seemed pretty promising as it takes a conciliatory stance towards men. The author instead puts the blame of both female suffering under the domination of men, as well as the self-induced suffering of men on the patriarchal system more specifically "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" which sounds kinda funny but is pretty accurate when you think about it which is based on violence, male supremacy and suppression of emotion.
So what is the solution? Basically the author herself admits that whenever men show weakness it is often unwelcome even by feminist women and there's hardly an alternative vision to offer.
One thing I liked however was her definition of love as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, trust.
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Novel I picked out a while ago since the author has provided the sources for many of Bela Tarr's movies, most famously Satantango. The main plot is about an elderly quixotic nobleman with gambling debts who is forced to return to his hometown in Hungary and the townspeople who expect that he will rejuvenate their town, especially financially. The narrative constantly jumps between the perspectives of a ton of very different characters. The style is unique, as each paragraph consists of single, very long sentence which can lean into semi-stream-of-consciousness and it usually takes a while until you figure out from whose perspective it's written. It's pretty enjoyable once you get used to it.
Basically it's an indictment of modern Hungarian society, very dark and funny with a meta-apocalyptic ending. However, I feel I was missing out a bit by not being too familiar with modern Hungary.
No.14728
>>14724>Basically the author herself admits that whenever men show weakness it is often unwelcome even by feminist women and there's hardly an alternative vision to offerUnexpected twist of wisdom, too many thinkers simply write this off as men being silly goofballs who'd be equally loved and cherished if they were as openly sentimental as they feel.
No.14729
>>14724> men are to blame for everything, I don't have any solutions to proposeStunning and brave.
Cmon, it's 2024, who at this point takes woke nonsense seriously and moreover reads dull propaganda No.14967
I read Bambi - Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde, the book upon which the eponymous Disney film was based.
What most people don't know is that is was written by an austro-hungarian author, in German, and that Bambi was not a whitetail deer, but a roe buck.
It's not very long, just some 200 pages or so, so you can finish it in a few hours if you want, and it's kept in a very accessible and simple style.
And it's exactly what the title says - Bambi gets born, grows up and gets old and the circle begins anew with his children.
The book is written entirely from the animals perspective. For storytelling reasons they are very anthropomorphized though; many of their conversations read like small-village talk (because apart from some birds all the animals never leave their piece of forest either) and it's easy picturing the kind of people who talk like that.
Humans also appear, but as *Him*, who brings death and does whatever *He* wants, with a deadly third arm he can throw with a loud thunder clap, and is a frequent subject among the animals; what I missed a bit was a more balanced perspective on hunter-prey relationships. Foxes for example are portrayed rather negatively almost throughout the whole book, except when a wounded box is being pursued by a Dachshund, who is then set in contrast to the free living fox as a traitor and defector because he worships *Him*.
The story ends with Bambi realizing that *He* can die too, is nothing more special than any animal in the forest and that there must be something even bigger above them all.
What I especially enjoyed were the descriptions of nature and animal behavior, as well as their names - Bambi, Faline, Gobo, Karus, Ronno.
All in all I would say it's not really a children's book, mainly because of the realistic depictions of wounded animals, like the one unlucky buck who gets his side blown open by a bad shot or the aforementioned fox with a shattered paw. Considering the time of publication one could argue that a bit of the first world war found its way into the writing, but that's speculation on my side.
What I would say it is not though is an anti-hunt book or something like that. From the descriptions one could get that impression, but in my opinion it's simply due to the consequential animal perspective, and from the animals perspective, *He* is indeed usually bringing death to the animals of the forest (domesticated relatives are traitors!) whenever he arrives - despite them constantly eating each other (which is only a concern for baby Bambi and never mentioned after) and Bambi at one point trying to kill a rival who wants to steal his girl.
I actually didn't see myself writing this review, but something about it made a deeper impression on me than I would have expected. There's also an english translation.
No.15128
I finished reading
The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche. I think his assessment that him referring to Schopenhauer was ultimately more confusing than worthwhile holds true, and I think I really need to read Schopenhauer at this point. I’ve been putting it off for years.
What was actually interesting is how some of the books concepts have entered popular culture. People call things Apollonian or Dionysian but it’s hardly ever mentioned that these two form a unit and they produce tragedy together, which in itself is anti-thetical to the Socratic, and you don’t hear that mentioned often.
Anyway, I felt like there’s still much to be learned from this book. I felt like I didn’t pay proper attention to it. Even though certain passages really helped with my mood. I don’t know what is it about Nietzsche but whenever I pick up a book by him I see metaphors and expressions in it that make me go “Yes, that! That was inside my heart! I’ve said that before to myself!” and honestly I feel like his books are a wonderful medicine in printed form, but just like with real medicine, I have little clue as to why it works.
>>14724I really should read more Krasznahorkai. One of my personal gripes with the literary establishment is how the Swedes decided to give a Nobel to Kertész instead of someone actually talented like Krasznahorkai.
But you see it well that there’s a lot of sociology going into his novels. Sátántangó was written after months of research in the countryside. Tarr in an interview described the people of these areas as “Agrarian proletariat”, a kind of person who is essentially beneath even the serfs. He has no parcel of his own, he doesn’t have a religion or anythin much in the way of traditions, he just works at the communal farm or what remains of the local industry and then spends the money on drinks at the local
presso. Rinse and repeat until they die in their 50s.
Basically the post-socialist death of the countryside. A continued rolling boulder of decline where those who are rolling along with it don’t even dare say that one day the boulder will reach the bottom of the hill, Hell, who knows, maybe this hill doesn’t even have a bottom. Shouldn’t it be called a mountain at this point anyway?
Btw he has two volumes of travelogues from when he visited China (
Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens and
The Prisoner of Urga). His evaluation isn’t very upbeat or positive, but I found them to be worthwhile reads for the anecdotes in them if for nothing else.
No.15175
>>13348Finished the tarot book, thanks for sharing it.
Found the initial history part about the exact origins of the different decks a bit dry, but once the author started going into the symbolism of the cards and tying together all those ideas from neoplatonism/gnosticism/hermeticism/alchemy that went into it, I was pretty hooked. I was also impressed by the how clearly & concisely the author was able to describe all these mystical & philosophical topics which are often written about in a rather baroque language. That chapter and the next which explained the logic behind the order of the major arcana (or trumps) and it's allegorical meaning were the most interesting to me. The latter chapters on the individual cards and on the spreads were fairly basic, but that's also fine with me since I have very little belief in divination anyways. However my interest in neoplatonism/gnosticism has been reignited, I might have to read a bit further in that direction.
I ended up ordering a Rider-Waite deck off Taobao. I remember buying a Thoth tarot deck with an accompanying book a long time ago but being unable to make any sense off it whatsoever. Wonder if I just lacked background knowledge or it was just all mumbo-jumbo, there seems to be a lot of this type of literature on tarot out there.
>>15128>written after months of research in the countrysideThat makes a lot of sense.
>Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens and The Prisoner of UrgaNoted, though the latter seems to be untranslated as of yet. Would be interesting to compare to my own experiences, even if it was written 20 years ago.
No.15923
Yeah, it's pulp. Very short. Not all that complicated.
The main reason I even bothered to read it is because I knew that one of the characters in Persona 5 is based on Edogawa Ranpo's detective character, Akerchi Kogoro, and I was just honestly curious to see the degree of the influence and such. (I think in a normal society this is considered a sort of disease.)
Anyway, I never was really into detective fiction, though I did read quite a few Sherlock Holmes stories to train my English in elementary school. But I guess Doyle's tone set the wrong kind of expectations when it comes to the genre overall.
Edogawa's book's not overly complex. Most of the twists can be deducted by the reader before they are revealed. Though I found little enjoyment in that.
What I found a lot more interesting is how heightened the erotic tone is throughout the novel. It's borderline pornography, and even if it's pulp fiction, I expected a Showa-era publication to be a lot more tame. So this is why I mentioned that Doyle's victorian style set the wrong expectations.
Though the style is otherwise charmingly dated in a sense. (I mean, it's a hundred years old almost, but I still couldn't help myself imagining it in a contemporary Japanese setting, which constantly fucked with me when the included illustrations popped up.)
It was overall a moderately fun light read, though I feel like I didn't really achieve my personal goals with the book. Well, maybe the homage itself doesn't really run all that deep. "Edogawa Ranpo has a detective called Akechi Kogoro, we will put a detective character called Akechi Goro, removing a 小 from his name, meaning he's an even greater detective, highlighting his self-importance."
Felt a bit like that maybe Edogawa's Akechi also influenced inspector Zenigata from Lupin III, but I'm not sure.
So yeah, it was okay and the essay in the front of the volume talking about the author's career and the history of detective fiction in Japan. That's a worthwhile short read imho.
On a personal note: There, I went and read something "light" like people always tell me and I had considerably less fun than I'd have had with a difficult book. I am literally unable to have fun without it being intellectually stimulating. This wasn't.
No.15924 KONTRA
>>15175Well, if it's any consolation I also went ahead and bought a Rider deck from Aliexpress and started reading Hermetic texts. It's a treasure-trove of symbols and narratives you can use. It's great.
No.15999
Taras Bulba, by Nikolay Gogol
Very close to the movie
>>12866 . Not only in the plot sense, but also in general spirit. Seems like Gogol wanted to make a blockbuster even before cinema was a thing. If only he could see the movie adaptation of his book...
SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas
Mostly it's "no you, men are women, women are men". But some hot takes about males really hit the spot. As every radical, Valerie hates her less radical comrades more than chauvinist misogynist men and dedicates half of the manifesto to it. Written in a very juicy manner, at translation preserved it.
> To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo. It's often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure.> Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he's lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and furthermore, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies.> Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is (`prove that he is a Man'). His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Incels. How virgins become terrorists, by Stephan Krakowski
Given that author is from Sweden, I expected the book to be more bluepilled. He doesn't slam all involuntary celibates as "misogynist bastards who deserved it" and has some empathy towards them. But still, Sweden is Sweden. When he writes about chadfishing, he says "incels perceive it like attractive man can find unlimited amount of women even despite being convicted pedophile and wife-beating mysoginist". OK, stupid incels perceive it like that. And how is it in reality? He can't agree with them because of political correctness. And neither he can disagree because there are results of simple reproducible experiment proving incels' point. So he starts these stupid word games. Or woman whom he presents as example of "femcel" has regular sex since high school and up to the moment of writing the book. So her incelness is that she can't or doesn't want to secure long term relationships with chad.
Interesting book with personal stories and overall statistical researches, but you should take author's conclusions with a grain of salt.
No.16636
I don't even know why I finished this. I was only interested in the very first story in the volume, "Murder on D. Hill". That one is a fun, short read, I recommend it, especially because it's one of the first Japanese detective stories. Ranpo wrote it precisely to prove that the naysayers are wrong, and you can write a closed-room murder-mystery in a country with paper walls.
The other stories are kind of forgettable. The longest one is a novel, titled "The Dwarf". It's overly long and confusing and the ending is quite unsatisfying in my opinion.
What's really interesting is that with
>>15923 this novel next to it, you can basically see how the character of Akechi developed over the decades, going from a kimono-wearing, messy haired student in some poor district, then an amateur detective wearing Chinese robes finally developing into being a heartthrob in impeccable western clothes. So it's very interesting to see how the character is slowly "westernizing" just like Japan.
Actually, at no point does the protagonist dress like the figure on the cover.
I think the issue with most of the stories is that they are presented as being about Akechi solving a case, but in most of them you are not really following him doing investigative work. You follow other retards trying to solve the case and then they meet 1-2 times with Akechi during a story and Akechi just pulls evidence out of his ass that he found off-screen and then he solves the case in like two pages of storytelling. In essence most of the plot is a waste of time save for the setup and then Akechi's explanation at the end.
The introduction and the first story are the only parts of this volume that are worth reading.
No.16643 KONTRA
>>16642I remember reading it as a teenager. I wasn't astonished but citing it in a high school essay I wrote on /pol/ (a topic which was assigned to me, I didn't pick it) made me feel like I was partaking in
haute culture.
But as you said it suffers from the same thing 1984 does, that everyone and their mother has been talking about the things it talks about so it no longer has that punch.
At least it's a short book that doesn't really overstay its welcome.
No.16680 KONTRA
>>16643How exactly did you get assigned a dissertation about /pol/?
No.16693 KONTRA
>>16680Can't remember what the name of the class was. It replaced philosophy in the curriculum. (Philosophy, media, lifestyle and this was the fourth of the meme subjects I think. But even if you hit me with a brick I can't remember.)
The teacher was relatively hip and young, so she had us make presentations on current topics like "redpill culture" or "Rick and Morty". I wasn't attending because I had a special get out of jail free card I kept abusing on account of my health, so we agreed that instead of wasting my Friday afternoons there I'd just submit her two essays for the class. One was on Chinese philosophy and one was on "redpill culture".
She was rather satisfied with both in the end. "You belong at university. Are you applying?" and I had very little idea what a university was really.
I think I still have a copy of the redpill one. Though reading what nonsense I wrote on account of "Chinese philosophy" in 11th grade would be funnier probably.
No.16845
>>16642Now do yourself a favour and read Atomized (Les Particules Elementaires). It's like a much improved version of it, with the ever present themes of criticism of hedonism, sexual liberation, the search for transcendance, etc.
No.16863 KONTRA
>>16845It’s next in my Houellebecq list lol
No.16878 KONTRA
Everything Houllebecq's mother says about her son is true.
No.16957
Speaking of Houellebecq Höllebeck: what's up with the KIRAC thing, did anything happen with it or is it stuck?
No.16959 KONTRA
>>16957I don't want to know.
Why are France's biggest cultural export creepy old perverts?
No.16962
>>16959>Why are France's biggest cultural export creepy old perverts?Because warmongering isn't fun anymore since they are buddy-buddy with Germany.
No.16981
>>16971Kek
I feel somewhat bad because this profound human drama between a mother and her son amuses me No.17052 KONTRA
>>17049Would you be ok with it ending in socialist revolution and the prole murdering the bourgeois instead marrying him?
No.17053 KONTRA
>>17052t. pissed soc-dem yapper.
No.17054
>>17052My grudge is mostly stylistic. It seems like it tries really hard to be paternalistically demagogic to the prole. The whole story, which is more of a fable than a novel is hidden behind a mist of classic scholar
though I don't reject the thesis that it became scholarly as consequence to its notoriety and wasn't before, idealist and christian metaphors and stylistic devices which end up making everything unsubtle. I don't subscribe to his sublime.
No.17062
>>17054The critique is not unique. We have old Hugo sitting in his study in imperial France, painting a monumental panorama of early nineteenth century French society and smugly pushing on us his views on everything he shows us, in extensive detail, repeatedly. To make his points, he moves his cast of exemplary figures around, mixes them up, separates them and rejoins them. If you do not suffer from slave morality, you will hate this book.
It is a piece of devotional literature for smugarrogant, but weak and powerless dirty ugly leftshit do-gooders, and it has very little literary value.
No.17063 KONTRA
>>17062>he moves his cast of exemplary figures around, mixes them up, separates them and rejoins them.A lot of empty words for a somebody who thinks of himself as a hands on man.
t. never read Hugo
No.17068
It is highly problematic to lament the poverty of white French people in metropolitan France while France was enslaving and exploiting Africans in colonies. Reading and discussing white French literature is racist and you are racists.
No.17072
>>17062Hugo only lived to see the invasion of Algeria and not the rest of the rise of the French African colonial empire, though he may have welcomed it for the
civilizating effect of French culture if it was to
happen in his lifetime. He also argued against slavery and tried to obtain the presidential pardon of John Brown in America.
No.17073 KONTRA
>>17072Meant to answer
>>17068 No.17074
>>17072Let's not forget slavery in The French West Indies.
No.17075 KONTRA
>>17065Take your meds. maybe then your speech will become comprehensible again.
No.17076
>>17049Reminds me of Tolstoy lecturing readers on historical processes in "War and peace".
No.17078 KONTRA
>>17076If I had to re-read W&P I’d probably skip all of Pierre’s diaries and the ending essay.
No.17083
>>17074>slavery in West IndiesSadly I don’t know when did it stop.
A fun story is when Hugo was confronted to the Paris commune and tried to play both side as he was exiled by the current government and that most communards tried their best to convince this cranky old man to be an allied. The leaders of the insurrection were forced to keep a respect mixed with prudent hatred. Which the author detected and took personally saying the commune was a great movement mediocre leaders.
No.17084
>>17083Stopped with the Revolution, only to be reintroduced by Napoleon.
No.17085 KONTRA
>>17084Guess that is before his time. Shame on me, I suppose. But as an ideologue, I'd just pivot into the Haitian debt as new form of economic slavery.
No.17092
>>17072The French captured Algiers in 1830, Vietnam became a colony in 1862, Frenzy presence in West Africa and French Guyana dates back to the 17th century. Why are you making excuses du dreckige fascho sau?
No.17095 KONTRA
>>17092There is a colonialist reactionary, a Christian soc-dem and a communist within myself. I have no clear ontological or epistemological base. I really have to fix myself somewhere. But I am most sincere when I say Monsieur Hugo is insufferable
No.17104 KONTRA
>>17095>I have no clear ontological or epistemological baseThat is humanities academia in a nutshell. Methodological pluralism. Filthy post-modernist. Unconscious academic kool-aid gulping! Wake Up!
No.17363
I have been rereading Hugo von Hofmannsthal's one act play "Elektra", a work of immense political beauty. I highly recommend it, if you're tired of reading Sophokles's version.
No.17364 KONTRA
>>17363Sorry, I meant to say poetical of course.
No.17486
Read different articles and interviews by Alexadnr Solzhenitsyn.
About Russia after 1991, about relationships with Ukraine - in hindsight boring and obvious things, but at the time of publishing they didn't feel so.
About communism - he's traumatized by being victim of stalinism, which made him uncompromising and dogmatic. There is nothing inherently bad about Marxism, it's a good state ideology if used as ideology and not literal instructions - Dengist China is example of that. There can be communist fanatics, Christian fanatics, Muslim fanatics, and all of them are capable of creating giant atrocities. But things committed by ISIS are not applied to all Muslims. Same way, Solzhenitsyn is devoted Christian and apologizes religious massacres and witch hunts as "particular cases that do not discredit the faith", which is easy for him to say since he's not a victim of (Christian) witch hunts.
About West - often makes you want to say "OK, boomer" =D . Well, grandpa spent most of his life behind the Iron Curtain in socialist society, so that's understandable. As an exile, that is involuntary migrant, he struggles with understanding society which is new for him.
What surprised me is how patriotic and independently-minded Solzhenitsyn is compared to modern opposition. Probably he could afford it because he was an exceptional person. If Volkov says something disliked by his Americans, they'll drop him and find another Volkov at the closest scrapyard. But finding another Solzhenitsyn, just as much brave and talented, was problematic.
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
It was introduced to me as female version of "The Catcher in the Rye". Well, there are some similarities. Same epoch, same country. Just as well about young person overwhelmed and confused by outside world.
But here the heroine goes insane because of that and goes through severe mental illness and 50-s psychiatry system. So instead of a coherent monologue, we have scattered, unorganized memories. And instead of bittersweet vibes we have a gloomy, oppressive atmosphere.
Pretty good.
The transhumanism trilogy, by Victor Pelevin
One time reading slop, but a nice one. With exception of the story about cats, which is genius. Describes realistic (from 2020-s perspective) future where majority of people use neuroimplants which send to them subliminal advertisement and political agitation. The thing about rich people migrating to virtual realities (of different price tiers) by becoming brains in jars is not realistic, but interesting, because it gives infinite space for fiction.
No.17954
Fuck me, by Virginie Despentes
At beginning description of French lowlifes' daily life. Then pulp fiction about two girls going postal, drinking and fucking.
Good lightweight reading.
Haven watched the movie adaptation yet.
King Kong Theory, by Virginie Despentes
Collections of essays, all dedicated to feminism. A lot of egocentrism, naivety and self-contradictions but interesting in the parts where she talks about her experience.
No.18344
>>18275I’ll borrow your posting style
How I became Japanese, by Florent Dabadie
Offered by my great-aunt. I expected nothing and got a mastered, simple style autobiography about a Hungaryball style French far-east enthusiast who learned Japanese through academia and went on to become a news reporter of one of the biggest sport channel in Japan. Great life, insightful about Japan and with a cultural perspective I can relate to, he manages to stay humble and make his life story talk more about Japan and his relation to it than about himself.
No.18407
Been meaning to write this shit for a while actually I just keep forgetting about it.
Okay so this lovely book is an 1908 sci-fi novel set in 1999. So it's another one of those very late "Long 19th century" early sci-fi novels that take place in the past by comparison. (Though the only other one that comes to mind right now is Mór Jókai's Novel of the Coming Century which actually deals with sort of similar topics.)
So anyway the whole thing is stuck in this "where will have China been gone going?" thing in the reader's mind where you compare the China of today to this imagined China.
To contextualize it a bit: This is an "obscure" novel in China. It's not part of any curriculum, they had modern editions published but it's no cornerstone of Chinese literary culture or development. This is literally the only edition available in a "Western" language and even this is only due to ethnonarcissism because it mentions Hungary a lot.
So it's 1999. China is still a monarchy but it has a parliament, local governance and a lot of non governmental organisations working for the benefit of the nation. By all accounts, China in 1999 in the novel is a superpower with its national production worth trillions of taels of silver and a strong modern army. Electric trains, science institutions, meritocracy etc.
The treaty ports have long been returned and the "White nations" have recalled their ambassadors from China.
We arrive at the first important bit that I think is worth examining, which is that the author essentially writes a novel about a world war along racial lines.
Which in our current time as a western reader probably be the novel's most captivating and amusing part, especially after close to a decade of anti-China scaremongering. But while a traditional Chinese version of the Turner Diaries sounds slightly amusing this is probably the worst angle this novel could be read from, simply because this entire paradigm in it is nothing more than just the novel being a product of its time.
Yes it at times reads like as if Maoism and Turanism had a weird baby where the Turks and the Egyptians fight alongside the pan-Asian forces and SEA local rebels against the Western powers, but this is just your hindsight contextualising things.
The plot essentially goes that China introduces a new calendar based on the birth of the Yellow Emperor and all the Asian nations quickly adopt it. The West dislikes the new calendar and recalls their ambassadors from China again. The conflict gets heated when the king of Hungary decides to also adopt the Chinese calendar, causing riots in the streets from the white minority living in the country and the Western powers to threaten Hungary with war.
The Chinese emperor decides to intervene to protect the fraternal Asiatic nation and dispatches a fleet to the Adriatic sea, kickstarting the war.
Most of the novel just chronicles the this military intervention headed by admiral Huang Zisheng ("Yellow Flourishing") as he commands the Chinese fleet from China, Singapore, Ceylon and then through the Suez to eventually crush the second allied fleet near the Adriatic.
No.18408
>>18407You might think that the novel is very groundbreaking because of the topics it handles and the setting, but I feel like it just wears the skin of a sci-fi. It’s essentially like any other classical Chinese novel you read.
So while it is at times entertaining, it is also primarily a political novel. It really hammers in hard that science and technology are the things that will allow China to gain the upper hand against the West. It’s chock full of references to Western scientists and their inventions that are used in the battles. Usually when they namedrop someone then a Chinese character steps up and tells the admiral how he or she used this technology and idea to develop it further and then that technology helps the Chinese knock out a new Western one.
Basically technology and inventors are treated like legendary swords and items in wuxia and sages in older novels, the most prominent example being where Huang travels back to China for a bit to meet with an old professor of his who lives secluded on a mountain to get from him the recipe for a chemical that “turns water into fire” and then they “miraculously” return to the fleet together in half the time because the professor also has hot air balloons he can control.
Other items include “Light bomb” which are basically nukes and also “focusing lenses” that set enemy fleets on fire. Frogmen dump the aforementioned chemical into the water.
Though the ultimate weapon the Western powers deploy is “green poison gas” and then carbon monoxide. That’s treated like the ultimate warcrime in the novel on their part.
So while the entire setting sounds very interesting with the racial content and the geopolitical analysis, ultimately there’s very little that’s structurally new in this novel compared to traditional Chinese literature. Even the new stuff is just essentially a political revenge fantasy where in the end China wins and makes the Western powers sign humiliating terms including allowing the Chinese fleet to be stationed in the Adriatic, making every Chinatown in America into a Chinese concession, allowing Chinese missionaries to spread the teachings of Confucius freely. In the end, the population of the western countries rise up against their rulers due to the humiliating terms of the treaties, sort of like as if he was predicting the Xinhai revolution a bit.
My conclusion is that it’s amusing at times, sort of topical in a sense, but it’s very fucking boring like 50% of the time with all the “I fucking love science” hammering the author does. It’s worth a quick flip-through because it’s an oddity, but it’s not worth much beyond that.
Addendum is that I hope that nobody will read this in Hungary as like some “Chinese Protocols of the Elders of Zion” of sorts. As I said, this is basically a forgotten Chinese book we only translated because it has marketing potential to say that “1908 Chinese Sci-fi that talks about Hungary!”
So like yeah, it's "one of then novels of all time" if I want to put it colloquially.
No.18409 KONTRA
>>18408>>18407Oh and how could I forget that the translator included a bunch of AI generated illustrations with it.
I feel like they are a bit hit and miss and I disliked how it tried to make it "Verne-like" instead of allowing me to imagine the setting myself but I understand why someone would like them, it adds to the vibe of the print series which aims to be this pseudo late 1800s pulp novel look.
No.18430
>>8401Just finished
Blue Lard by Sorokin as well, absolutely bonkers. The first part consists of letters by a gay scientist to his lover where he describes his work on a futuristic secret research project where they clone classic Russian authors. These authors then produce the eponymous blue lard while writing their literature which he attaches to the letters which is harvested for a purpose that is not entirely clear. I don't wanna spoil the rest since the appeal is trying to guess when it will stop adding layers of insanity but among others it involves a schism betweens two sects of (literal) earthfuckers, a graphic sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev and Hitler shooting blue lightning out of his hands.
The violence and sex remain as provocative as ever but he also flexes his literary talent by developing a futuristic dialect of Russian heavily mixed with English and Chinese words (and iirc also a bit of German and French) and writing obscene parodies of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Chekhov etc. I think this literary ability and the dark sense of humor set him apart from other authors of transgressive fiction who seem to be mostly out there to shock and don't have much to offer stylistically.
Enjoyed this one a lot, and fyi an English translation has recently been released as well (the hype around which is why I ended up reading this in the first place).
No.18549
Okay, manga is literature now! I posted about reading it here
>>18394 previously.
Everything I wrote there still stands.
I really liked this manga. And the anime. I think I have been engaging with it on and off since high school. When I was a bit broody teenager, I liked it because of that and when I grew out of it I liked it simply because of how neurotically the main character analyses society and language around him.
It has a lot of kanji puns and a lot of then-contemporary references, some of which are explained by translation notes when they bothered to include them in the version I managed to download.
Like the name of the protagonist is 系色望 so when you squish it together it becomes 絶望, which means "to despair" or "to lose hope".
Or most terrible pun I have ever seen where the main character and a random guy are "old friends" 旧友 but in the end it turns out the memory wasn't real, they were just "one day friends" 一日友
The art style evolves very nicely, though the highlight is always the title page to each chapter that mimics traditional Japanese art and has this nice minimalist aesthetic to it. I actually had one of them printed, laminated and put up in my room because they just look generally nice.
The panels make for nice reaction images a lot of the time. I've been using them for years now, really. Same goes for the anime.
Most of the characters serve the plot. The plot doesn't serve them to grow.
The focus is on showing off oddities of daily life and idiosyncrasies in culture, with most of the episodes being completely unrelated save for a few callbacks here and there.
As I said, the quality of the manga starts dropping off by the midway point in publication and it never really recovers. There's this constant atrophy of the characters and the setting as everything becomes a bit simpler to the point where even the main protagonist drops his iconic phrase that he's in despair because of something.
This is my biggest gripe with it honestly. It goes on for 30 volumes. Basically once you get bored of it at around volume 15 you can just skip to 29 and 30 to read the ending that quite literally wraps up everything and closes it off.
Honestly, it made me cry like a bitch. I foresaw that there was going to be some sort of vile twist on the author's part. And there was a twist. Though what truly surprised me is how this wasn't just a quick attempt to finish the manga on his part, but rather, it was slowly hinted throughout the series and is especially apparent in the anime adaptation, which while aired later than the manga started, it also predated the manga's ending by a good 4-5 years depending on the series.
The motherfucker had it all planned out and then he just wrote the manga as long as he can until he just simply couldn't any more.
It's like one of those sort of mindfuck Japanese endings where ultimately, you're told that life is not perfect, it never will be, but it's worth living.
For a series that used suicide attempts as a running gag for most of its run, it was kind of odd to see that in the end it earnestly disavowed it, telling the reader that it's never worth it.
But genuinely, I felt so fucked up after finishing it. Especially the last page where two characters give closing remarks and an afterword. It was beautiful. It was genuinely touching.
And in a sense I hate myself for being pulled in by it so much, but I also have to realize that it's normal to have emotions.
No.18600
Listen and hug, by Vladimir Ponkin
Stumbled upon it on bookcrossing. Now I know what pornography for women looks like:
100 pages filled with lines like "You're so stunning and brave. // You're working so hard // You deserve love and respect // Please, believe in yourself".
There is no rhythm or rhyme in these "poems", just feels good mumbling.
Moreover, author has many such books, all of them with the similar content.
it was a mistake to show it to gf, now my pandering reminds her of the book and therefore looks grotesque
This one summer, by Mariko Tamaki
I don't read comics usually but here I had a physical copy at my disposal.
Nice drawing, cute setting, reminds me of my own childhood with holidays at dacha.
But perhaps I'm a plebs who needs more clear storytelling with "exposition-climax-denouement" scheme.
The Metropolis and Mental Life, by Georg Simmel
A collection of essays, named after one of them. There are others - about tourism, prostitution, industrial exhibition and so on.
Most of his critique of modern world can be summarized as "sensory overload". If only the poor guy lived long enough to see internet! I think he doesn't take into account that humans are very adaptive creatures and can handle constant information shitstorm.
Also he talks about "commercialization" which brings things to a common denominator (price) and thus "makes them feel the same". Well, it brings them to a common denominator in practical perspective. Compare it with Soviet Union where you need connections to get import goods, a right job to get a corporate healthcare, legal opportunity to live in a big city... In capitalist country you're just moneymaxxing and everything else is solved by that. In both cases you are free to have ethical principals or aesthetic preferences and behave unpractically because of them, but the latter one is just more convenient.
Also interesting that it was written before WW1, in an epoch which is different from our but meanwhile somewhat similar.
No.18762
>>18600>This one summerRead that a few years ago. My primary recollection is that it was enjoyable, although nothing really happens.
In the same vein, recently finished
The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch by Neil Gaiman. Illustrated by Dave McKean. If the art appears familiar, that is likely because of McKean's work on
Sandman. He designed the covers.
The titular
Mr. Punch is, of course, the famous counterpart to Judy. The story is told as memoir, a boy's Summer with his grandfather and interactions with a puppet show and old puppeteer. That show, and its sinister undertones, provide an emotional baseline for the young protagonist's memories. His family is understood in fragments, half-heard stories where unspoken details are left to imagination. As a memoir, no major events occur, and it lacks a definitive climax but still manages to wrap up in a satisfying way.
No.18827
>>18430Oh, that's a cool book, probably my favorite among Sorokin's after "Dugout" (Землянка). Don't know if it has been translated but there is an epic audio version of it.
>>18762> it was enjoyable, although nothing really happensThat's a good way to describe it.
No.18982
Currently not very far into reading this. Talks about liberalism and socialism, some ramifications of what socialism implies, shortcomings and overall a cautionary tale for nations who intend on dwelling within socialism. So far, he's described the fact that socialism can potentially lead to a nation-state where totalitarianism is created, through the concept that at the very heart of socialist intentions, such as central planning over market-based decision making that flows naturally, is detrimental to a nation's development. He doesn't exactly say it shouldn't be done, so far he has put emphasis on the fact that it is something that could potentially transpire during the shift over to socialism, and that there needs to be a careful approach to some of its core tenets. Things such as fiscal liberalism that can also accompany a more right-oriented political view, are two that don't block eachother out. He has mentioned that the progressive term of liberalism as we know it today, which is synonymous with leftism, is not true liberalism and that the term has been completely hijacked by the left over a longer course of time. He also goes on to describe war-time economy with that of being almost entirely socialistic if not even communistic, given that the priority of the goods provided within society for a period of time, goes all to promoting the war-effort rather than benefitting the citizens themselves with capital, in comparison to a non-wartime society where capital that is given towards the citizens as the most important thing. And he goes on to say, that, if there is a completely totalitarian state during a war-time effort that is socialist at its very core, that eventually, this could potentially shift over to becoming the norm, and therefore creating a socialist society by consequence of a war-time period. So far, I've read about 70 pages, but before buying the physical book, I read it over the internet and was having a tough time with the translation. Overall, I'd say it's a pretty good book, and very informative. The only thing that he references which I don't really get, would be historical events, as I am not fully vested in history, but, obviously, if it is relevant enough to be mentioned, then there's a reason as to why it is. I've been thinking about maybe picking up a book regarding the history of the evolution and progress of society, as I think it would be very fitting for the subject I'm trying to tackle.
No.18987 KONTRA
>>18982Piss off shitlib fascist.
(>shitflinging in the literature thread) No.18990 KONTRA
>>18987Hayek is fascist propaganda not Literaturen. Whats next, rand? Mein kampf?
No.19001
>>18987>>18990He literally uses fascism as an example of a socialist state gone wrong, how on earth can this be a fascist book?
No.19002
>>19001Hayek was a vile, disgusting neoliberal and thus, a fascist.
Neoliberalism is early-stage fascism /imperialism. Neofascist groups exist on the fringe in all modern societies, but they take center stage only with the backing of corporate capital. Otherwise, the class-conscious workers will be able to curb the fascist tendencies.
As capitalism inevitably impoverishes the masses, capital will always seek to save itself by align itself with the fascists. This dynamic can be seen in the USA, with the fascist presidents of Reagan, Bush and Trump, but also in India and Brazil. (Modi and Bolsanaro).
>>19001>He literally uses fascism as an example of a socialist state gone wrong, That's so backwards it is ridiculous. It's an obvious lie. from a proto-fascist like Hayek, such lies are to be expected. Socialism can never be fascist, since its foundation is the solidarity of the working class. Neoliberalism will always lead to fascism, since its foundation is unlimited free markets and capitalism.
If you deny this, either you are a fascist yourself, or you are clueless. Smart people have written many books about this. Maybe go and educate yourself, little fascist? But I doubt that this is possible. You are certainly way too stupid. If you weren't stupid, you wouldn't be a fascist in the first place. All fascists are dumb, have little penises and can't get laid, no one but a giant loser would ever become a fascist.
(You are confusing the literature thread with the /pol/ thread. Further shit like that will be deleted without comment.) No.19003 KONTRA
The title Road to Serfdom is very funny because while it was written as warning it is also a defence of a Road to Serfdom, if you know what I mean.
No.19064
It's a book detailing the author's travels in the last stages of the Russian civil war as he makes his escape from Siberia, into Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet, culminating in meeting with Baron Ungern-Sternberg in Urga and then finally escaping by train to Beijing and then leaving.
The Hungarian foreword says that "this is one of those so called famous books" and I guess this must have been sensational to read in the 1920s. It's got everything. Politics, intrigue, adventure, exoticism and mysticism.
Ossendowski's account is very colourful. Which is why I will not believe half of what he wrote but it's still a very good book. It's exciting to read.
Like in one scene, he's trying to cross a mountain with a Soyot–mongol guide and the tells him that the spirits are angry and they should turn back, but Ossendowski threatens to just shoot him, saying "You can die on the top or right here." and then makes a proclamation that everything will be fine, they will reach a forest and rest by the fire and that surprises the guide, prompting to ask him "Has the Noyon crossed this mountain before?" and he replies, "No, but last night I had a vision!" and then he says "I will lead you!"
Though I think it's important to add that however much Ossendowski engages with religion, spirits and mysticism on his journey, he never "goes native". He's curious, fascinated and willing to acknowledge the existence of the beliefs, but will actually find the scientific rationale behind them, and isn't afraid to grapple with omens and spirits when they are unfavourable or are hindering him. Even if he visits Lamas and lords, he always remains an European, a foreigner, and he's unapologetic about it.
Some of the prophetic/mythical stuff reads a bit odd, like there's a part where a young Mongolian lama proclaims that he had visions of a man rising up and fighting with the "Red Demons" "under the banner of a swastika" and he obviously thinks that he's that man who's destined to do this. In hindsight you might think it's about Hitler or something, but obviously prophecies in hindsight often lend themselves to favourable interpretations.
So it's essentially a very good adventure novel. Though I'd like to mention that the author wastes no time to paint a very bad picture of the Bolsheviks at every opportunity. The first two he meets are shown as barbarians who are bragging how many "bougies" they threw under the ice in the river, and later we get a story of Bolshevik infiltrators murdering a whole family at a ranch in Mongolia.
I think I originally got a copy of the book because of the Ungern-Sternberg content that was supposedly in it. The last parts of the book are spent basically making a mythology around him, how he's a stern, mystical figure who is on a divine mission. Though Ossendowski is aware that he's taken in by Sternberg's charisma and power. He also spends some time whitewashing him and his atrocities.
The Baron is depicted as a pure but zealous warlord who liberates the Mongols from the Chinese yoke and seeks to lead some sort of pure, Eurasian counterrevolution that seeks to "purge revolution".
No.19231
Recently read this little play by Heinrich von Kleist called Prinz Friedrich von Homburg as Stefan Zweig called it Kleist's best work in his phenomenal book Der Kampf mit dem Dämon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche. I liked it a lot, especially the authentic and approachable depiction of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg as a hero that is entangled in the contradiction between his heart and authority. The play is also structured very beautifully allowing a deep insight into the psychology of the protagonist.
Besides that I reread Apuleius's Tale of Cupid and Psyche, which I enjoyed. Psyche, in her innocence, is a mythological favorite of mine.
I also reread Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, which scares and repulses me with every reread more and more. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy reading it for its intense psychological character, but everything in it is just repulsive, so I read it as a reminder to not become that kind of person.