What I Just Read

Uninsightful and dull, with regurgitated US regime-compliant geopolitical narratives throughout. This author sounds more like a PR flack for the CIA (more on this in a moment) than an academic freely expressing her opinions. Thus there is very little in this book worth considering.  However, books like this can lead us to certain meta-ideas. Consider, for example the gatekeeping institutions that either permit, or forbid, books to reach the marketplace. Books like this one, which are blatantly regime-compliant and satisfy all current goodthink requirements, slide right through! Thus, as a potential reader, it is worth asking: will an "approved" book like this offer insights? Will such a book be predictive? Will it actually help you understand what's going on? Or will it simply complete the propaganda process, thereby making you think just like you're supposed to? This takes us to an important intellectual heuristic: avoid all books written within the last fifty years....

The first few centuries of Christianity offer an opportunity to learn about another period of great upheaval, an era when political, philosophical--and in this particular case, religious doctrinal differences--pulled society apart. As always, the past gives us guidance for navigating the upheaval of today. Athanasius' biography (actually hagiography) of Antony is on one level an extended Holy Desert Fathers reading. Antony was a desert OG, and there are wonderful discussions here on the beautiful early Christian ideals of prudence, justice, hospitality, temperance, courage, asceticism, on concern for the poor, on developing freedom from anger. In today's increasingly irreligious era, as the State becomes our "deity," these ideals are in steady decline. On another level, this work is also a piece of propaganda, using the life of a saint to make a doctrinal argument. Athanasius uses Atony as a mouthpiece to defend the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity, and attack the hete...

This masturbatory and nearly unreadable proto-modern novel is easily the strangest book I've read all year, a sort of expressionist long poem in prosody form, jumping from place to place and scene to scene in a surreal style that deliberately makes little sense. Recommended for literary history geeks only--and even then tentatively. If you give the author a tremendous amount of rope and patience, you might  see here the literary progenitor of authors like Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; at the same time, unfortunately, you'll also see the inspiration for a lot of crappy 20th century absurdist French plays.   Again, you have to give it a lot of rope, but the book also has a certain witty nihilism as Maldoror laughs at life's cruelty even while he partakes of it. We can think of Maldoror as a Satan figure, violating people, harming people, being basically an all around asshole in random, pointlessly cruel ways. It makes clear that evil exists in the world (as if modernity ...