EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
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User ID: 78
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
9mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I’m still on The Conquest of Bread and Future Shock.
Picking up Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, a book about the inner universe of a 16th century miller who was executed by the Inquisition. The title is a reference to his belief that the world was created from a chaos “just as cheese is made out of milk” and “worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The man himself sounds like a decent man, not particularly crazy, concerned with the money-making aspects of the Church and the apparent absurdity of its teachings, preferring a simplified, natural religion of doing good deeds.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
10mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Conquest of Bread and Future Shock. Also finished Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, which posits that Wallace was a precursor of intelligent design. The biography was good, though the arguments at the end were sometimes confusing.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
10mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Conquest of Bread. Picking up Toffler’s Future Shock.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
10mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on This Star of England and The Conquest of Bread.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
10mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on This Star of England.
Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread starts off as a surprisingly typical communist screed, but it starts distinguishing itself after it denies the labour theory of value, saying that new forms of production must yield new forms of consumption. An interesting discussion of liberty soon follows. He has a keen eye to underappreciated people, which ameliorates his otherwise combative style.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
So, what are you reading?
I’m still on This Star of England, and picking up Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on The Mysterious William Shakespeare and This Star of England. I wonder if the distinction between orthodox and unorthodox is really between “objective” and “subjective” theories of art.
The orthodox (some of them?) tell us that Shakespeare was apparently an objective artist whose works stand on their own. He was a workaday man who wrote plays for profit and there is no hidden significance to be interpreted. The unorthodox would have us believe that the author’s life and the people he knew strongly influenced the works, to the point where the works themselves can help fill in a missing biography. He was a man who didn’t care about money and whose sensitive nature is visible in the works.
I find the orthodox position (if this is an accurate representation of it- it may be dated) baffling. I cannot believe that Hamlet is devoid of subjective intent. In fairness to the orthodox, the attempt to reduce Shakespeare to a force of nature seems in part a backlash to their own excesses in the past, where scholars painted fanciful biographies for the man from Strafrord. I’ll have to delve into some of their works soon.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on This Star of England and The Mysterious William Shakespeare. My appreciation of Shakespeare is certainly increasing as a side effect.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
This Star of England is a biography Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in light of the theory that he wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
Some of its scholarship seems, for lack of a better word, incestuous, as Ward's biography (he was an Oxfordian) is cited often, and Looney’s (also an Oxfordian) attributions of certain poems to Edward de Vere are also taken as a given.
The narrative itself is much more engaging than I expected. Still the truth is that the Lord Oxford does not always come off as being the sensitive, honest and forthright man who they attempt to portray him as. He seems an awful lot like a man who avoided his wife despite her faithfulness and then accused her of infidelity because he had a personality disorder. But then again the record is not complete, so much is, as the authors say, optional to assume.
Yet I’m enjoying myself immensely; the book reads like a mythology which is pregnant with potential meaning, and such books I deem essential to a complete picture of wisdom. These are the kinds of things which make me upset with our society’s tendency to hide certain books from view: one doesn’t even know where to begin to find a canon of such books. One must rediscover in agonizingly slow steps, in utter confusion, and at his own peril. Ogburn Jr.’s preface (pdf) is well worth reading, if nothing else.
So, what are you reading?
I’m going through This Star of England by the Ogburns, an Oxfordian biography of the man presumed to be the real Shakespeare by the authors. Thoughts below.
Still going through Abundance, Generosity and the State and The Mysterious William Shakespeare.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
11mo ago
I never got around to actually reading Lacan, but the IEP's entry on him was stellar reading.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
1yr ago
So, what are you reading?
I’m still on Hülsmann’s Abundance, Generosity and the State. Also going through Ogburn Jr.’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare, an Oxfordian tract. So far it has been a lot of interesting information well-presented, though occasionally I find his logic odd.
So, what are you reading?
I’m still on Future Shock and The Cheese and the Worms. Also going through Sabatini’s Scaramouche, which seems considerably more interesting than the film.
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