Books & Boooks
"I hitched a ride with a vending machine repair man. He said he's been down this road more than twice. He was high on intellectualism. I've never been there, but the brochure looks nice...." ("Every day is a winding road", Sheryl Crow)
Josef Pieper | Leisure: The basis of culture | |
The Nazis in Auschwitz were just caricaturing our credo in the 20th Century: "Arbeit macht frei". Prof. Pieper disagrees with it: Tolle, lege! | ||
Wilfred Bion | A memoir of the future | |
"If psycho-analytic intuition does not provide a stamping ground for wild asses[1], where is a zoo to be found to preserve the species?" (p.5) | ||
Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and ends in phenomenology 1928-1938 | ||
Thinking about Husserl's philosophy and Fink's elaboration of it: The meontic. | ||
Eugen Fink | Play as symbol of the world | |
Husserl's designated philosophical heir's later thoughts about the relation between play and human living. | ||
Martin Heidegger & Eugen Fink | Heraclitus Seminar | |
Discussion of Heraclitus's philosophy, focusing on the image of Fire as a metaphor for the relation between Being and beings. [Northwestern University Press; originally published by University of Alabama Press] | ||
John Sallis and Kenneth Maly, Eds. | Heraclitean Fragments: A companion volume to the Heidegger/Fink seminar on Heraclitus | |
Comments by several philosophy professors on the Heigegger/Fink seminar (above). | ||
Martin Heidegger | Heraclitus (Julia Assiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen, trans.) | |
"The Inception of Occidental Thinking" and "Logic: Heraclitus's Doctrine of the Logos" | ||
Martin Heidegger | The Beginning of Western Philosophy | |
Anaximander and Parmenides. You don't need to agree with everything Heidegger writes here to come to suspect everything you were taught about the Pre-Socratics was at best misguided. Don't drink the | ||
Ludwig Wittgenstein | Philosophical Investigations | |
Philosofun. Wittgenstein had Asperger's syndrome, which means he at least sometimes saw things normal people have been successfully socially conditoinsed to not see. Also, either he did not know philosobabble jargon or chose to not deploy it, so the book is easy reading compared to, say, Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgment". | ||
Norwood Russell Hanson | Perception and Discovery | |
An introduction to scientific inquiry. I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) took Hanson's course as an Yale undergrad. 55 years later, I am trying to learn some of it. I saw in reality a double-reading image, +2022.05.09: the shadow of a corner of the 2nd floor of my nextdoor neighbor's house "read" either as (a) the dark underside of the 2nd floor sticking out beyond the roof of the 1st floor below, or (b) the shadow cast by the edge of the 2nd floor dormer onto the 1st floor roof extending beyond it below. | ||
Dian Hanson | Santillo: La petite mort | |
How women pleasure themselves. Rrose Selavy. | ||
Richard Wilhem / Cary Baynes | The I Ching or The Book of Changes (Bollingen series XIX) | |
Classic Chinese oracle. | ||
Mark Jordan | The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology | |
Study of psycho-sociological management of human sexuality in the Middle Ages by the Roman Catholic Church, with broader applicability.[2] | ||
Hermann Broch | Lost Son: Hermann Broch's letters to his son, 1925-1928 | |
Broch's correspondence with his late teenage son, who was irresponsible and mainly interested in fast automobile and rich boarding school sports. Father tried to talk reason to him but also was an enabler. | ||
Linda Hopkins | False Self: The life of Masud Khan | |
Due to my troubled background with small-minded people in psychoanalytic training, I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) found this book extremely valuable. A lay person might find less interest in some of it. | ||
Timo Miettinen | Husserl and the idea of Europe | |
A partial antidote for wokism. I read it to try to recover from the shock and disgust of a New York Times article about political correctness in New York's expensive private schools, e.g.: Dalton. A disappointing book. | ||
Elizabeth Eisenstein | Divine art, infernal machine: The reception of printing in the west from first impressions to the sense of an ending | |
What a book should be. More food for thought on a single page than 6 years of so-called "prep" school, or even 4 years of Yale. But then maybe also I have learned from bad examples better how to appreciate a good thing in the intervening half-century. If God created the universe, uniform printed editions created the modern world. Why cannot everything be as good as Prof. Eisenstein's writings? | ||
Arnold Hauser | Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the origin of modern art | |
Fascinating study of Renaissance and Mannerist art. I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) read it to learn about what the architect Robert Venturi used very superficially in his disgusting fashionista book: "Complexity and contradiction in architecture". Hauser explores how mannerism at its best is intellectually serious about the paradoxicality of human existence, not just getting off on kitsch. | ||
Carl Schorske | Thinking with history | |
Very good book about the philosophy of historiography, and nuances of 19th century culture. I had previously thought that 19th century culture was only bourgeois prudes (e.g.: Paterfamilias Sigmund Freud[3]) repressing sexuality. | ||
[The Bible] | Ecclesiastes | |
All is vanity saith the Preacher. Reading many books tires the soul. Enjoy the good things in living. | ||
Walter Ong | Fighting for life: Contest, sexuality, and consciousness | |
As always, Ong is highly insightful. One thing this book says is that medieval education was lively rhetorical disputation. not dolt rote memorization like in the Dark Age of my 1950's "prep school". | ||
Patricia Volk | Stuffed | |
Story of a complex, lively, become upscale jewish family in New York. Contrast with the cultural wasteland of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) childrearing and schooling. | ||
Alexander Braun | George Herriman's "Krazy Kat". The Complete Color Sundays 1935–1944 | |
The gospel according to Ignatz Mouse. Better than The Bible and often even more inscrutable. I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) find it puzzling that these cartoons apparently won a wide audience in the land of Bing Crosby and Martin Dies Jr. If all of America was like Krazy Kat it would be a very different and IMO much better place. | ||
Adolf Loos | Ornament and crime | |
Everything that's wrong with Robert Venturi is right with Adolf Loos. Mr. Loos died from syphilis but Mr. Venturi was a degenerate. "Let you light so shine before men tht they may see your good works" (Matt 5:16). Strip away all ornament, including not jut veneer on architecture but also all social ceremonial rites and customs, including such things as birthday parties, women's makeup and lingerie, and, of course, surprise endings in books and in gifting. All of it! | ||
Giorgio Agamben | Means without end | |
Short reflections of political philosophy. The graphical desigh of the book as a book is interesting. Reminds me of the world of "La dolce vita" and Michelangelo Antonioni's Monica Vitti films, a modern (not post-modern) high culture alienated northern Italian milieu which appeals to me (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), unlike the America I metabolize in. | ||
Giorgio Agamben | The man without content | |
What is or should be persons' relation to art? The problem of the spectator (The Society of the Spectacle, etc.) from the perspective of the creation versus the consumption of art. | ||
Giorgio Agamben | The Open | |
Essays concerning human and animal. See WorkBook note for more (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) thinoughts about this author: here | ||
Guy Debord | Comments on The Society of the spectacle | |
He tells it like it is. The medium is the message. From the early 12-channel television sets with rabbit ears of 1950, past MTV and Social Media, up thru the coming Virtual Reality WEB 3 which will not just enhance or integrate with reality but replace it: Life is spectacular, yawn. | ||
Stephen Toulmin | ||
We need to base modernity on 16th century humanistic contextualized reasonableness (Erasmus, Rabelais) not 17th century denatured ratiocinaton (Descartes, Galileo) | ||
Footnotes
- ↑ Where I studied psychoanalysis there were no wild asses but there was an ass: Martin Kossover, LCSW.
- ↑
"The power of reproduction is for the good of the species, and the human legislator acts on behalf of the species in establishing monogamous unions of one man with one woman. Individual genital organs are to be used only for a power of the species. The organs are, as it were, on loan from the species and -- more important -- subject to an exercise of eminent domain by the city." (Mark D. Jordan, "The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology", University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 126) - ↑ Not only was Siggy a busybody nosy intrusive parent psychoanayzing his own daughter -- soul incest? --, but he also discouraged her from masturbating because the clitoris was in his unanalyzed cunt-envy opinion a vestigal male organ and women should not be masculine. Apparently he thought the girl should be a good woman and have penis envy, i.e.: she should be envious of the creep he and his acolytes were. ~ Bumper sticker: "A Woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."
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