Metal Reviews

Finished Another Country. Wasn't really a fan, there was some beautiful writing but too much soap opera. Everyone needed to calm down and stop throwing the word "love" around so easily. Now on to Ursula Leguin's Left Hand of Darkness and Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, Solidarity.

Fuck Rorty. I have no idea why but it was the general feeling that was instilled in me by authorities.

Just started

kind of a slow start but it's taking up after 50 pages or so... And now it's getting better with every chapter.
Did anyone here read the trilogy? What did you think of it?

Tell me how that is.

Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada" or "Chronicle of a Pre-announced Death"...bad translation whatev

Summer of Night-Dan SImmons

I've been reading a lot of him 'cause he'll be involved for two of my term papers this semester. Not sure how I feel.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

You're welcome.

it's cool. think a song of ice and fire with less depth in the intrigue and quite a bit more grit. very fun read. the last book was the coolest, imo.

Ahh. Yeah, I really know nothing about him and really don't care for the sorta Analytic starting point that he is coming from so will probably never touch him.

It's making me feel like I have very little knowledge of non-analytic philosophy since they're all "Rorty's influenced by such and such continental dudes" and I'm all "what the fuck did they say?"

Rorty claims to have done an analytic reading of Heidegger that sounded stupid when it was summarized to me, as if he just latched on to one of the sixty some sections in Being and Time and was like "derp heidi is a pragmatist because he talks about hammers". I don't know who else he would be influenced by though. The funny thing is that both the analytic dept I started in and my current continental one were both kinda outspoken about their dislike for him.

Continental philosophy is seriously where it's at with people like Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Fanon, Butler, Žižek and a bunch of others.

First book is definitely the weakest (though still a good book)- second book is pretty amazing, third is fantastic and his two books after the trilogy have both been excellent as well. Abercrombie is definitely worth reading, and some of his characters (Logen Ninefingers, Glokta, Shivers in Best Served Cold) are among the best in fantasy.

Now I'm starting to feel like despite having spent 4.5 years studying philosophy there's a huge chunk of it that I am not at all aware of D:

Anyways I brought my idea of applying Rorty's idea of being content with high levels of ambiguity, no neutral/certain beliefs/values, to Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. He liked it, then asked where responsibility would come in for Pynchon/Rorty. The novel doesn't really discuss it so I'm not sure how to address that issue without turning it into a philosophy paper. Hmm.

finished The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. it's a good crime thriller thing, but given the hype i expected a bit more. not going to follow the rest of the trilogy.

going to go back to The Bonfire of the Vanities, and then pick up A Farewell to Arms or José Saramago's Memorial do Convento.

Turn it into a philosophy paper. English peeps love it. I wish I knew more Rorty because I kinda love Crying of Lot 49 after initially disliking it when I read it.

Yeah, philosophy is ridiculous when it comes to how wide the scope is of people to get interested in. I would totally be up to suggesting things to read if you have particular interests.

Read the last chapter of A Clockwork Orange to get into the thought process for my costume and love that chapter. Fuck the movie for cutting it. The last chapter is what makes the book so quintessential to youth development a la Catcher in the Rye. Also reading Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology for the umpteenth time, but this time to finish a paper I started a year ago and is my writing sample for Phd programs.

I dunno, I kinda love the way the movie cut the last chapter

(spoilers)
The movie implies he's about to go on being just as much a bastard as he was at the start, but working within the system instead of against it. The book has a nice return to square one but dunno if it's as poignant. Either way I think that it's cool how totally changed the "post-story" course of Alex's character by taking out the one scene.

SPOILERS:
What do you mean by work within the system? He returns back to his ability to contemplate sex and debauchery without disgust but his responses to the psychiatrist show that he's still kinda a dick, which is honestly what he is the whole film. The book shows that he is moving past that and is actually maturing. It comes full circle to he's back at the Korova Milkbar but it's why he leaves there and when he leaves Duke of New York that he comes face-to-face with the life after delinquency which is much more fulfilling than "oh, the anti-hero is back to his anti-normative behavior. story over" It is cool that the moral of entire story can change by a single chapter albeit an important one, i.e., the conclusion.

*fingers in throat*

NR: Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One by Fredric Jameson. Kinda too dense in its Hegel for me to love but solid.

Ecological Thought by Timothy Morton. Ecology shouldn't be about us and nature since we're always in nature via Deleuze and evolutionary theory.

Still doing CPR by Kant and some Marx and tons of things for seminar papers.

Figures since i love the movies i should read the actual books lol.