Liberal intelligentsia, digesting shitty media.

[Lox]

As you read it, you wonder if there is seriously anything in the universe that is so completely uninteresting that this could actually be a quite effective metaphor.

Baker's The Mezzanine was a more interesting take on a similar subject matter.

[Bug]

I'm reading the deathbed edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I've been working on it for a year now, on and off, and I just got to the post-civil war years (On Ontario's Blue Shores), and still have a 1/4 of the book to go. I hope I finish it by the end of the summer. I can't really recommend it, but there are some fine and deep parts about the immutability of the soul n' shit.

[toivo]

i've been reading aristotle's physics, mostly book 2, since may. slow going. it's a challenge to think of purpose in nature in some sense other than simply as a projection of subjective values onto an indifferent world of stuff.

that and sappho, over and over again also.

and luce irigaray- elemental passions, speculum of the other woman, democracy begins between two, and i love to you. trying to think about love and what it might mean for politics. something along the lines of tina turner, but perhaps with less raw intensity.

oh, and thoreau's last manuscript- faith in a seed. partly because we are literally covered in tree pollen here. trees copulate quietly but in a very messy way.

[jlane]

Swank. July edition.

[elblat]

http://www.amazon.com/Riding-Rockets-Outrageous-Shuttle-Astronaut/dp/0743276825

Lowbrow, crude, sophomoric, deep, insightful, and tremendously entertaining.

[dm]

Currently reading the Boardman/Tasker Omnibus. I like mountaineering literature, but the more I read the less I want to ever do it again.

[skav]

All the year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampots full of the jellied
Specks to range on the window-sills at home,
On shalves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hadges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

[pmahnn]

Almost done with this decent book covering the history of American beer.

The overwhelming theme I'm learning is that while many things in this country have changed, nothing has changed. Newspapers posted slanderous shit about whatever sold copies. People made shit up to try and further their cause. And Savvy speakers took advantage of the "good but gullible" people who go to church. Although the author places the brewers on a pedestal of greatness which may have influenced her writing.

Informative book, if nothing else.

[Bug]

Now I'm reading Paradise Lost, yeah you know, by John fucking Milton. At last I understand where all that crap about Satan and Redemption of Man By Christ's Sacrifice &c came from. God comes off as a self-center dick in charge of a powerful, yet fearful, family business AKA Paranoid King of Everything. Satan is the freedom loving American type.

[Lox]

Paradise Choss'd

[hweight]

Satan is the freedom loving American type.

If you mean selfish and neurotic, then I agree. And regarding heaven: it must have been tricky to write that section, given what Milton had just lived through--the Restoration, etc. He was, after all, bitter and blind by the time he composed PL.

[600#gorilla]

[Sundowner]

The First Idea by Greenspan and Shanker

[skav]

First Idea: FUCK THOSE GUYS!

[600#gorilla]

Howard Zinn, I love that shit!

[skav]

Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Climbers and Nature at Risk

Just got this in the mail yesterday and have spent most of this morning reading it. This book fills a gap in climbing literature and history that's bothered me for a while. If you're into that sort of thing, you'll probably dig it.

[600#gorilla]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936#

The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control Of America.

[pmahnn]

This is what I'm looking for:
- Written by a non-pillaging european invader, someone not actively engaged in the slaughter of the native people
- About the slaughter and plight of the native peoples in present day US
- Written in the 1700s or 1800s.

Suggestions?

[Lox]

Blood Meridian

1/3 on your criteria, but I've heard nothing but good things.

[600#gorilla]

i've been wanting to get this: