The Reading Challenge
Reading two books at the same time, sorta. I mean, I read one and then put it down for a while and then read the other. I can't imagine anyone actually holding two open books, one in each hand and just reading back and forth from one to the other, although I suppose someone out there does that.
Anyway, still slogging through 2010. A little over halfway through it. Perhaps the math buffs can explain to me the significance of the 1;4;9 quadratic formula of the monoliths? Clark sort of explained it but I didn't get it. Anyone who understands this can walk me through it?
I have a longstanding tradition of occasionally reading a book that I already know I am going to disagree with. I'm not sure how, exactly, to explain why, except insofar as to say that part of me wants to keep my mind somewhat limber on vastly differing perspectives on the world we live in.
So the book I'm reading now is L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. I don't have much to say except that, in attempting to read the book straight through, I encountered one major obstacle: it's really BORING. I kept falling asleep. So I'm cheating by flipping through and reading various chapters that seem more interesting. Right now, I'm at the part where he explains "the analytical mind", after which he will explain "the reactive mind."
It's fascinating, in a way. Most of what he's written is just rehash of previous psychology and philosophy. His analytical vs. reactive mind model seems to parallel Freud's normal vs. neurotic personality model. This is something I already knew about Hubbard. He didn't just make all this shit up from the top of his head. He's well studied in philosophy and psychology so he knows how to steal from the traditional findings and twist it around to make it seem like this is some great new discovery. He justifies all kinds of ideas with totally hypothetical situations...not actual case scenarios, but he presents them as though they were case scenarios and the reader who is not careful may not catch that.
I thought I'd mention now, other books I've read that I knew I would disagree with:
-Andrea Dworkin. I can't remember the name of the book I read anymore, it was so long ago, but we all know that stereotype of the man-hating feminist who wants to chop off our balls and eat them for dinner. Well, there she is. Dworkin's work blames men for absolutely everything and women are nothing but victims. Men are all potential rapists, even the men of the past, like Ghandi and Christ (Robert Anton Wilson makes fun of her in one of his books, explaining how a potential exists only as long as a person is still alive). She's actually very compelling in her writing.
-Machiavelli's The Prince. This is the book on how to rule people and the author who says plainly that the end justifies the means and that it is better to be feared than loved. This is a book that I don't think I finished because the writing was not very compelling to me and I got bored with it.
-Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. I'm beginning to like Rand more and more because I think she's funny. She's someone who I generally disagree with for the most part, yet find myself agreeing every now and then. Her philosophy revolves around taking certain key words, like "sacrifice" and "altruism" and redefining them so that they seem unnatural. She then forges her entire Objectivist theories from that standpoint. They make good sense actually. But ONLY as long as you adhere to her definitions of those certain words. If you look those words up in a standard dictionary, you find a different definition and when applying her views to those definitions, it all falls apart. So much for Objectivism. Also, Rand's support of capitalism is idealistic. I support capitalism, but on a more pragmatic level. That is to say, she sees this golden morality guiding the economic system, based on rugged individualism...very much like social Darwinism. Market competition will cause the best to emerge and provide the most benefit to mankind. In reality, this doesn't always happen. I support capitalism because it is simple and has the fewest and most easily solved problems (you have to compare the various central planning ideas that have been put in motion in the past to understand this).
-Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. I admit, I could not finish this book as it just seemed loonier and loonier as it went along. I was surprised at his tone. I thought he would present his ideas very clearly and calmly, but the book starts out pretty dramatic, in fact, with open declarations against the bourgeoisie. He and Rand agree that there is no God but totally disagree on everything else.
-The Marquis De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. I admit, I did not finish this book either. I must be the only person in the world who actually found it extremely funny. It has to do with the way he wrote it. The villains in the story are so extreme as to be outlandish and ridiculous. When he tries to describe a character with fist sized hemorrhoids hanging out of his ass and a 1 inch thick pad of shit encrusted around his penis...I'm sorry but I can't take that seriously. I'm laughing even now as I write this. Sade's way of writing was so flowery that, to me anyway, it gave an almost Monty Python-like feeling to this stuff.
-Dennis Cooper's Try and then later on My Loose Thread. Now this work is disturbing. Cooper takes you into worlds you really don't want to think about, and don't want to believe exist. Worlds where people do shitty things to each other and then justify it and live in bizarre denial. I experienced real anger and frustration reading his books and, while Try left me feeling depressed at the end, My Loose Thread left me relieved that this was finally over. These worlds he depicts are particularly threatening to gay men. This is the kind of work that you hope the Christian Right never gets wind of, because they could so easily use it for political leveraging. He explores the dark side of homosexuality, the way in which older men exploit younger ones, how closet cases buddy up with the wrong types of friends and express their sexuality in inappropriate ways. Very challenging stuff. Part of me thinks Cooper is just revolting and another part of me appreciates that he would confront us on some ugly things.
-The 48 Laws of Power. I can't remember the author but this book is fairly engaging and fascinating. The author is persuasive in getting you to reexamine your ethics and actually consider giving them up, in favor of raw self determination and expediency. He gives an almost airtight argument against the value of honesty, saying it really doesn't exist as a continuum of behavior, but only as a tool of expediency and that those who claim the loudest to be honest are usually the most dishonest. I insist, however, that anyone who decides to live his life according to those 48 laws will condemn himself to a life of unceasing paranoia. This book, I think, does a better job of describing the psychology of power and how to rule people better than Machiavelli's book does. It is amoral and rather scary.
-Rational Recovery by...Jack Tempsey, I think. I read this book near the tail end of my six months in 12 Step. I was getting a little overloaded with 12 Step propaganda and decided I wanted to hear a different story. Unfortunately, this book is actually MORE fucked up. The author takes every opportunity to grind his axe on 12 Step and then starts illustrating a method this either mimics 12 Step or takes the same bizarre inside-out logic that I'm sort of getting from Dianetics. He's also just flat out rude and obnoxious in many places.
-The Natural Superiority of Women. Again, I cannot remember the author's name but I do recall that it was a man. His book was advertised in Playgirl magazine. The book was all about broad generalizations (pun not intended) with a lot of stuff being rather vague and not much in the way of actual case studies verifying anything in particular. I almost wondered if he was a very calculating womanizer. That by claiming women were physically and intellectually superior to men, he was essentially appealing to their egos and could use that to seduce them.
Also, in my earlier twenties, I read a number of books, including an assassin's manual, a poisoner's manual and a book on physical interrogation techniques. I didn't actually disagree with them at the time, but in retrospect, I find them to be the kind of books that sober you up about who you are. Many people often tend to imagine that, though their bodies be vulnerable, their will power is STRONG and they could not be broken down, conditioned or trained. Those books talk in depth about how vulnerable the human being, as a whole, actually is. Anyone can be trained or conditioned. Those who claim themselves to be the hardest to break are probably the easiest, unfortunately, because they likely do not know what kinds of tricks a determined oppressor can use.
Anyway, still slogging through 2010. A little over halfway through it. Perhaps the math buffs can explain to me the significance of the 1;4;9 quadratic formula of the monoliths? Clark sort of explained it but I didn't get it. Anyone who understands this can walk me through it?
I have a longstanding tradition of occasionally reading a book that I already know I am going to disagree with. I'm not sure how, exactly, to explain why, except insofar as to say that part of me wants to keep my mind somewhat limber on vastly differing perspectives on the world we live in.
So the book I'm reading now is L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. I don't have much to say except that, in attempting to read the book straight through, I encountered one major obstacle: it's really BORING. I kept falling asleep. So I'm cheating by flipping through and reading various chapters that seem more interesting. Right now, I'm at the part where he explains "the analytical mind", after which he will explain "the reactive mind."
It's fascinating, in a way. Most of what he's written is just rehash of previous psychology and philosophy. His analytical vs. reactive mind model seems to parallel Freud's normal vs. neurotic personality model. This is something I already knew about Hubbard. He didn't just make all this shit up from the top of his head. He's well studied in philosophy and psychology so he knows how to steal from the traditional findings and twist it around to make it seem like this is some great new discovery. He justifies all kinds of ideas with totally hypothetical situations...not actual case scenarios, but he presents them as though they were case scenarios and the reader who is not careful may not catch that.
I thought I'd mention now, other books I've read that I knew I would disagree with:
-Andrea Dworkin. I can't remember the name of the book I read anymore, it was so long ago, but we all know that stereotype of the man-hating feminist who wants to chop off our balls and eat them for dinner. Well, there she is. Dworkin's work blames men for absolutely everything and women are nothing but victims. Men are all potential rapists, even the men of the past, like Ghandi and Christ (Robert Anton Wilson makes fun of her in one of his books, explaining how a potential exists only as long as a person is still alive). She's actually very compelling in her writing.
-Machiavelli's The Prince. This is the book on how to rule people and the author who says plainly that the end justifies the means and that it is better to be feared than loved. This is a book that I don't think I finished because the writing was not very compelling to me and I got bored with it.
-Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. I'm beginning to like Rand more and more because I think she's funny. She's someone who I generally disagree with for the most part, yet find myself agreeing every now and then. Her philosophy revolves around taking certain key words, like "sacrifice" and "altruism" and redefining them so that they seem unnatural. She then forges her entire Objectivist theories from that standpoint. They make good sense actually. But ONLY as long as you adhere to her definitions of those certain words. If you look those words up in a standard dictionary, you find a different definition and when applying her views to those definitions, it all falls apart. So much for Objectivism. Also, Rand's support of capitalism is idealistic. I support capitalism, but on a more pragmatic level. That is to say, she sees this golden morality guiding the economic system, based on rugged individualism...very much like social Darwinism. Market competition will cause the best to emerge and provide the most benefit to mankind. In reality, this doesn't always happen. I support capitalism because it is simple and has the fewest and most easily solved problems (you have to compare the various central planning ideas that have been put in motion in the past to understand this).
-Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. I admit, I could not finish this book as it just seemed loonier and loonier as it went along. I was surprised at his tone. I thought he would present his ideas very clearly and calmly, but the book starts out pretty dramatic, in fact, with open declarations against the bourgeoisie. He and Rand agree that there is no God but totally disagree on everything else.
-The Marquis De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. I admit, I did not finish this book either. I must be the only person in the world who actually found it extremely funny. It has to do with the way he wrote it. The villains in the story are so extreme as to be outlandish and ridiculous. When he tries to describe a character with fist sized hemorrhoids hanging out of his ass and a 1 inch thick pad of shit encrusted around his penis...I'm sorry but I can't take that seriously. I'm laughing even now as I write this. Sade's way of writing was so flowery that, to me anyway, it gave an almost Monty Python-like feeling to this stuff.
-Dennis Cooper's Try and then later on My Loose Thread. Now this work is disturbing. Cooper takes you into worlds you really don't want to think about, and don't want to believe exist. Worlds where people do shitty things to each other and then justify it and live in bizarre denial. I experienced real anger and frustration reading his books and, while Try left me feeling depressed at the end, My Loose Thread left me relieved that this was finally over. These worlds he depicts are particularly threatening to gay men. This is the kind of work that you hope the Christian Right never gets wind of, because they could so easily use it for political leveraging. He explores the dark side of homosexuality, the way in which older men exploit younger ones, how closet cases buddy up with the wrong types of friends and express their sexuality in inappropriate ways. Very challenging stuff. Part of me thinks Cooper is just revolting and another part of me appreciates that he would confront us on some ugly things.
-The 48 Laws of Power. I can't remember the author but this book is fairly engaging and fascinating. The author is persuasive in getting you to reexamine your ethics and actually consider giving them up, in favor of raw self determination and expediency. He gives an almost airtight argument against the value of honesty, saying it really doesn't exist as a continuum of behavior, but only as a tool of expediency and that those who claim the loudest to be honest are usually the most dishonest. I insist, however, that anyone who decides to live his life according to those 48 laws will condemn himself to a life of unceasing paranoia. This book, I think, does a better job of describing the psychology of power and how to rule people better than Machiavelli's book does. It is amoral and rather scary.
-Rational Recovery by...Jack Tempsey, I think. I read this book near the tail end of my six months in 12 Step. I was getting a little overloaded with 12 Step propaganda and decided I wanted to hear a different story. Unfortunately, this book is actually MORE fucked up. The author takes every opportunity to grind his axe on 12 Step and then starts illustrating a method this either mimics 12 Step or takes the same bizarre inside-out logic that I'm sort of getting from Dianetics. He's also just flat out rude and obnoxious in many places.
-The Natural Superiority of Women. Again, I cannot remember the author's name but I do recall that it was a man. His book was advertised in Playgirl magazine. The book was all about broad generalizations (pun not intended) with a lot of stuff being rather vague and not much in the way of actual case studies verifying anything in particular. I almost wondered if he was a very calculating womanizer. That by claiming women were physically and intellectually superior to men, he was essentially appealing to their egos and could use that to seduce them.
Also, in my earlier twenties, I read a number of books, including an assassin's manual, a poisoner's manual and a book on physical interrogation techniques. I didn't actually disagree with them at the time, but in retrospect, I find them to be the kind of books that sober you up about who you are. Many people often tend to imagine that, though their bodies be vulnerable, their will power is STRONG and they could not be broken down, conditioned or trained. Those books talk in depth about how vulnerable the human being, as a whole, actually is. Anyone can be trained or conditioned. Those who claim themselves to be the hardest to break are probably the easiest, unfortunately, because they likely do not know what kinds of tricks a determined oppressor can use.