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What'cha Reading?

Lark

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I'm doing this thing at the moment of attempting to be hyper-efficient with my time, including my time reading, so I'm trying to read a chapter a day of the following books, I'm not always able to say its a chapter but its usually pretty close:-

- One of the Teach Yourself books series, this month its Film Studies
- One of the Ben Thompson series, this month its Badass: Birth of a Legend (I read Badass, the first in the series last month, I'm planning on reading Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch, next month)
- A philosophy book, for which I have an interpretative text of Epictetus' Art of Living and Richard Holloway's secular humanist homage Looking In The Distance (I read Fear and Trembling by Kirkegaard and Letters of a Stoic by Seneca already this last two months)
- A "Fun" read, for which I'm reading Geek Widsom by Stephen H Segal, its pretty good, a page of writing about a quote from a film per page pretty much
- A psychology read, for which I've got a book called Make Your Brain Work by Amy Brann, which so far is not proving to be one I like very much, though some of the information is new to me
 

indra

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[MENTION=15392]Cellmold[/MENTION] [MENTION=1592]Gish[/MENTION] [MENTION=22098]Mane[/MENTION] [MENTION=6723]phobik[/MENTION] [MENTION=21883]sunyata[/MENTION] may also be interested in

Gamelife by Michael W. Clune

0865478287.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg


I am enjoying the memoir and the kind of ekphrastic treatment Clune gives each game.


This was featured on Kotaku recently. Cool.
 

Tellenbach

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The Science of AHCC: Japan's Medical Breakthrough in Immunotherapy

A nice intro to the mushroom extract used widely in Japan to treat the side-effects of chemo in cancer patients.
 

Hawthorne

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Starting "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin de Becker over Fall break.
 

Olm the Water King

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I read P.J. Geary's The Myth of Nations. Highly recommended reading.

Geary, P.J.: The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. (Paperback)

The Myth of Nations:
The Medieval Origins of Europe

Patrick J. Geary

Modern-day Europeans by the millions proudly trace back their national identities to the Celts, Franks, Gauls, Goths, Huns, or Serbs--or some combination of the various peoples who inhabited, traversed, or pillaged their continent more than a thousand years ago. According to Patrick Geary, this is historical nonsense. The idea that national character is fixed for all time in a simpler, distant past is groundless, he argues in this unflinching reconsideration of European nationhood. Few of the peoples that many Europeans honor as sharing their sense of ''nation'' had comparably homogeneous identities; even the Huns, he points out, were firmly united only under Attila's ten-year reign.

Geary dismantles the nationalist myths about how the nations of Europe were born. Through rigorous analysis set in lucid prose, he contrasts the myths with the actual history of Europe's transformation between the fourth and ninth centuries--the period of grand migrations that nationalists hold dear. The nationalist sentiments today increasingly taken for granted in Europe emerged, he argues, only in the nineteenth century. Ironically, this phenomenon was kept alive not just by responsive populations--but by complicit scholars.

Ultimately, Geary concludes, the actual formation of European peoples must be seen as an extended process that began in antiquity and continues in the present. The resulting image is a challenge to those who anchor contemporary antagonisms in ancient myths--to those who claim that immigration and tolerance toward minorities despoil ''nationhood.'' As Geary shows, such ideologues--whether Le Pens who champion ''the French people born with the baptism of Clovis in 496'' or Milosevics who cite early Serbian history to claim rebellious regions--know their myths but not their history.

The Myth of Nations will be intensely debated by all who understood that a history that does not change, that reduces the complexities of many centuries to a single, eternal moment, isn't history at all.

...

I also read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. A must-read for anyone interested in nationalism.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Benedict Anderson

What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality--the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to a nation--has not received proportionate attention. In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality.

Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.

This revised edition includes two new chapters, one of which discusses the complex role of the colonialist state's mindset in the develpment of Third World nationalism, while the other analyses the processes by which, all over the world, nations came to imagine themselves as old.
 

Olm the Water King

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The Invention of Tradition
Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality

both by Eric Hobsbawm
 

Olm the Water King

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Also intend to read this one soon:

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=447

Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment.

Mapping Space and Knowledge in Europe

Larry Wolff's book is an excellent example of the genre of interdisciplinary writing being done by historians, anthropologists, economists, cartographers, and sociologists of knowledge in which politico-economic processes are linked with ideological constructions. "Eastern Europe" is not so much an existing geographical region as an intellectual invention of a cultural zone constructed during the Enlightenment through travel diaries and maps, imaginary travelogues, and armchair philosophizing. Thus the book itself is not so much about a place as it is about a process. It may be recommended not only for its information about descriptions of Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century (from the selective descriptions of actual travelers, such as William Coxe, to the vicarious travelogues of armchair philosophers such as Voltaire), but for its critical treatment of the ideas of Said, Wallerstein, Hobsbawm, and others concerned with the establishment of intellectual boundaries and the invention of tradition.

Wolff introduces his discussion of "Eastern Europe" with the speech made by Winston Churchill in 1946 that described an iron curtain dividing the "Continent" into eastern and western parts (p. 1), and then argues that such a division dates to the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, the more prominent division of Europe into north and south (obvious to Mediterranean-encircling Romans, and reinvented during the Renaissance) was overlayed by an east/west axis that began to take on significance in the "north." Northern cities in Western Europe such as Paris, London, and Amsterdam had become economically and politically powerful, whereas northern lands in Eastern Europe (such as Poland and Russia) were places of potential conquest by the West. During the Enlightenment, Western Europe took on the connotations of "civilization" (previously reserved for the Italian Renaissance cities of the "south"), and Eastern Europe took on the characteristics of civilization's antithesis (previously associated with the barbarians of the "north").

The term "map" in Wolff's title reflects the conception of maps not as positivistic descriptors but as social and ideological documents connoting political, economic, and cognitive ownership. Wolff does not quote J. B. Harley, but Harley's "cartographic philosophy" as developed in numerous essays between 1980 and his death in 1991 represents the cartographic equivalent of Michel Foucault's gaze conferring power (see, for example, Harley's essay, "Maps, Knowledge and Power," in The Iconography of Landscape edited by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels [Cambridge, 1988]). Maps are of interest not only for what they represent but also for what they do not represent, the silences. In Wolff's book, the voices and visualizations of "Eastern Europe" are conveyed by travelers and philosophers in the West; local voices and visions are not heard or seen. The questions raised about the "paradoxes" of Eastern Europe (a place of elegance and debris, fire and ice, culture and nature) are imposed, not indigenous.

The "mapping" of Eastern Europe should be seen as part of the mapping and colonization of the world associated with the expansion of Europe outside of Europe, and the expansion of Occidental Europe (those emerging powers along the Atlantic seaboard that combined trade with urban and industrial developments) into a more agricultural and Muslim-influenced Oriental Europe, Western Europe setting out in both cases to identify and make use of unknown or incompletely known lands. The "mapping" of these lands was an extension of the Enlightenment's powerful agenda of coordinating knowledge with control.

...

Probably also this: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1320

Maria Todorova. Imagining the Balkans.

It is difficult to imagine a person more qualified to write a book on how terms related to the concept "Balkan" have entered common usage and achieved a certain meaning than Maria Todorova. Professor Todorova was born and brought up in Bulgaria, received a Ph.D. from Sofia University, lived in Greece, studied extensively in Moscow, Leningrad, Paris, and Oxford, speaks fluent German, and presently lives in the United States, where she works in English. In her book she cites sources in English, German, French, Bulgarian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, and Russian, and perhaps some I missed. In other words, here is a person who has not only a good finger-tip feel for her native Balkans, but the training, linguistic ability, and intellectual firepower to provide a systematic and enlightening study of how the Balkans are imagined.

Contrary to what someone who had not read her previous work on the subject might initially expect, Todorova argues that Balkanism is not another form of Orientalism, as Milica Bakic-Hayden has proposed.[1] Her reasons are that 1) the Balkans are concrete, whereas the notion of "the Orient" is vague and intangible; 2) Orientalism is a refuge from the alienation of industrialization, a metaphor for the forbidden--feminine, sensual, even sexual. Balkanism, on the other hand, is not forbidden or sensual. It is male, primitive, crude, and disheveled; 3) Balkanism is a transitional concept, something not quite non-European, not a final dichotomy; 4) the self-perception of Balkan peoples is not colonial; 5) Orientalism posits Islam as the other, whereas Balkanism deals with Christian peoples; 6) Orientalism is fundamentally racist, categorizing non-white people, whereas Balkanism deals with whites; and 7) Balkan self-identity is itself created against an oriental other.

Having solidly made this point, Todorova goes on to chronicle the emergence of the idea of Balkan, both as a concept of outsiders and as a self-perception of insiders. Her chapters progress in a logical and orderly fashion from the discovery of the Balkans in the early modern period, through varied patterns of perception in the nineteenth century, to the twentieth century invention of "Balkan" and "Balkanization" as negative categories, schimpfwoerter, as she calls them. Along the way she provides numerous insights into the construction of categories. For example, she proposes that the discovery of the Balkan Slavs as an oppressed people in the mid to late nineteenth century by British travelers was related to the Victorian discovery of the poor. This suggestive observation is related to two broad patterns of perception she observes during the nineteenth century, the aristocratic and the bourgeois. The former, held early in the nineteenth century, particularly by British travelers, sympathized with the Ottoman ruling class and the power they represented. The bourgeois view tended to sympathize with the Balkan peoples, who were understood to be perhaps backwards, but having the potential, at least, of entering onto the linear highway of progress.

...
 

ceecee

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I read P.J. Geary's The Myth of Nations. Highly recommended reading.

Geary, P.J.: The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. (Paperback)



I also read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. A must-read for anyone interested in nationalism.

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson — Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists


I'm going to grab the first one right now but they both sound great.

Currently I'm reading - The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. Allen Dulles was a pig of a human, make no mistake but if you want to how how the US went from the OSS to the current ghost wars, NSA and any other covert sinister-ness - he either initiated it or played an enormous role.
 

SearchingforPeace

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I'm going to grab the first one right now but they both sound great.

Currently I'm reading - The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. Allen Dulles was a pig of a human, make no mistake but if you want to how how the US went from the OSS to the current ghost wars, NSA and any other covert sinister-ness - he either initiated it or played an enormous role.

And acted for personal gain and family gain, no less...
 

ceecee

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And acted for personal gain and family gain, no less...

Yeah but he and his brother were Wall St. lawyers, I would expect no less. I'm talking later on, after the war. By then he had grown so powerful he couldn't be eliminated, which was the only option.
 

SearchingforPeace

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Yeah but he and his brother were Wall St. lawyers, I would expect no less. I'm talking later on, after the war. By then he had grown so powerful he couldn't be eliminated, which was the only option.

I was referencing the expanding Cold War, foreign entanglements designed to support investments, reshaping US foreign policy to be more interventionist, etc. Guatemala in 1954 is a fine example, but at least that was in the traditional US sphere of influence. Others were not. And it shaped all other interventions during the Cold War.....
 

cm81

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Profession of Conscience- Robert Sprinkle
 

Olm the Water King

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Added to my reading list: You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos by Robert Arthur

https://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/resources/bibliography/

Rob Arthur defines a taboo as “a topic that a culture prevents its people from discussing freely,” and this book is based around the philosophy that “taboos are a burden on society…[and] hinder progress toward greater happiness.” Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows the truth of that statement: if it weren’t for the general ignorance about sex in general and sex work in particular, an ignorance maintained by sexual taboos, no reasonable person would accept laws against consensual sexual behavior and the ridiculous lies about the harms which supposedly result from sexuality would be widely recognized as the ravings of miserable prudes. Arthur also discusses taboos against drugs and bodily wastes, though the latter doesn’t get nearly as much space as sex and drugs because there is no vast, expensive and oppressive “War on Poo” whose chief result is human misery. In a sense, You Will Die is two books in one; it is written in a pleasant, conversational style and presents fascinating, often obscure facts in such a way as to make it a great pleasure read, but is both exhaustively researched and so extensively footnoted that it will make an important addition to my reference library.

You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos: Robert Arthur: 9781936239436: Amazon.com: Books

A book that vigorously defends heroin users and sex workers? In You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Robert Arthur does that and more to demonstrate that taboos are not relics of primitive societies. America has its own ridiculous phobias and beliefs that cause tedium, suffering, and death. The government and the media use these taboos to lie and mislead. It is not a conspiracy, but by pushing panic for votes and viewers they thwart our pursuit of happiness.

You Will Die exposes the fallacies and the history behind our taboos on excrement, sex, drugs, and death. Arthur uses racy readability and rigorous documentation to raze sacred shrines of political correctness on the left and of conventional wisdom on the right. From the proper way to defecate to how to reach nirvana, anticipate the unexpected. It is not simply a novel exploration of sex and drugs, but also of individuality, liberty, and the meaning of life. You Will Die gives readers a new way of seeing their world and allows them to make a more informed choice about living an authentic life.


Winner of the 2008 Montaigne Medal awarded for most thought-provoking independent book.

“… ya gotta fight back against the Sarah Palin ‘idiot herd’ with something.”
Wayne Coyne, Lead Singer, The Flaming Lips

“… one of my favorite books …”
Mark Frauenfelder, Editor, Boing Boing

“This book is a MUST READ! I loved it.”
Dr. Mark Benn, Psychologist, Colorado State University
 
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