the people's republic of sole

I'm about halfway through this;



"This summary is a tiny distillation of what is really a huge concoction of different stories told by a multiplicity of narrators, who chop and change namelessly and without warning. The effect can be bewildering, and some readers may experience a degree of travel sickness at the start. But if you give yourself freely to the book, the question of who is speaking becomes less troubling, and you soon find yourself transported by the breathless momentum of the narrative."

It's brilliant.

What are you lot reading?

http://www.amazon.com/Dread-Difference-Gender-Horror-Studies/dp/0292727941

I'm doing a paper on zombie movies to submit to PCA/ACA.

i read the soft machine when i was 15 and had very little idea what i was getting myself into.
loved it.

i actually had been reading this forum yesterday and took the girlfriend to half price books.
while there, i noticed the mammoth of a book Infinite Jest sitting there on the shelf for 8 bucks and said what the hell.

so i'm about 45 pages in and i can feel myself becoming hooked, although i'm still not convinced i'll finish it.
it's huge
and the rent is just too damn high.

(please internet, let that become a meme)

"Gracias por el fuego" by Mario Benedetti

and Gogol's "Peterburg tales", of course. slowly lol.

im thinking about reading lord of the rings.

i just read teh pandora's star series. and although there were cool ideas in it, i dont think i can read any more books that spend entire pages describing what a room looks like.

i want a new sci fi book, but i feel like i've read all the greats and i need to expand my interests for a minute. but nothing else seems to hold my interest....

everything philip k. dick
never got around to it till now.

From Complexity to Creativity by Ben Goertzel is next

i'm almost done with "Atom and Organism" by Elsasser

gotta grip of titles dealing with complex systems science and some along the line of neural quantum computation and just stuff thats quantum and neural

i will kill you with my thoughts right before i give you a brownie

thanks for asking ack!
that book does sound brilliant
somewhat Burroughs~esque

me, i'm still getting through
The Secret Teaching of All Ages by M.P. Hall
also into
The Book of Thoth by A. Crowley

a little back and forth between the two

Already Dead by Denis Johnson

and

Some people find this book annoying because of the crooked language in which the main character speaks but it's one of the most biting satires i've ever read:

The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy


i'm feeling duped, it's shit. not the most erudite criticism i admit.

im still working through a sort of self-imposed class in cyberpunk

I'm on The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson at the moment. 22nd century nanotech in a Victorian English phyle of China

Other than that, I just finished Lacan's XIth Seminar (as a break from cyberpunk) and I'm still trying to get through David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which is great but also im lazy about these things.

and the University of Chicago Press just emailed me about a free version of "The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce" so I started reading that. Nothing gets me hotter than a free procapitalist polemic on ethics.

The Dread of Difference looks neat. I was reading Shaviro's The Cinematic Body semi-recently. He's a pretty interesting dude, in some ways; in others, i can't stand him.

The Tea Ceremony book has a pretty fucking baller title, I want to read that shit.

If this is your first time reading this book I really envy you.

Yeah, it is the 1st time i've picked it up. I can already tell its going to need multiple reads to get the full scope. i really liked his other books, particularly jesus' son, but this book is just on a whole other level.

its cool to see someone on here reading these things... i've got a sizable stack of books by and about Lacan...the interplay between desire and the object and how the desire is impossible to fulfill reminds me of Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem and the title of a lackluster Al Di Meola album i should've hesitated to buy years ago... but yea, if only the rest of the seminars were translated into english I might actually have some kind of understanding of Lacan beyond a fetishized post on a message board.
or if i took the time to read the seminars in french

and david harvey has yet to let me down... i've got a copy of "The Condition of Postmodernity" wasting away on my shelf but for some reason i'm not into politics or culture right now... i'm recovering from a foray into Marxist and Anarchist texts..

now its time to get back to "science"

I'm focusing the bulk of my analysis on the Lacanian Other and empty signifiers. Christ I love Lacan. It sucks that not nearly enough is translated, but there are plenty of secondary resources that help round out an understanding of him. Kojeve's seminars on Hegel are easy enough to plow through and serve as great background for Lacan's mirror stage, which he took almost right from Hegel via Kojeve. Zizek's How to Read Lacan is available online for free, here.