Things I am Reading III
Jul. 26th, 2021 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anorthitenote --> --> omg I should do this for music except for the fact that I'm a Terrible person when it comes with having a sense of time and remembering to do stuff.
Things I am reading roundup by a things I am reading delinquent.
"The Metamorphosis", Franz Kafka --> I think I need to read this again some time when I'm Well enough to not identify with and clutch onto it like a crazy person. Wow, mental illness feels a lot like waking up one day as a bug and you creep around your room and want to hide from others and at first your family is tolerant and worried but then eventually everyone gets tired of your behavior and you can't explain it to them and then they throw apples at you and you creep across the floor at night to listen to the violin and ... and ... and ... you get the idea. Anyway, I ran into an interesting translation issue with this one: when you search the story up you get a quote which goes, "I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself." PRETTY metal, but I cannot find it in any of the version of the ebook at my disposal. Am I stupid and just missing where the quote is? Is this a difference in translation? Is everyone who writes about this story in their essays without reading it immediately and spectacularly outing themselves?
"When Prophecy Fails", Leon Festinger --> An unavoidably biased and possible unethical study into a UFO cult in the 1950's to prove the theory that, when confronted with critical failure in their beliefs, adherents will ease cognitive dissonance through increased proselytizing. Or in more detail, for adherents to movements with a great deal of commitment, particularly public commitment, to their cause, the failure of a prophecy creates an unbearable degree of dissonance. This can be dealt with in three ways. One can admit to being wrong, which is difficult and painful in terms of personal identity, one can deny the failure of the prophecy, often challenging for those firmly rooted in reality, OR one can attempt to alleviate dissonance by seeking the affirmation of others, e.g. attempting to drawn new followers into the movement or prove to outsiders that they were right all along. Interesting, timely, plainly written, and probably unduplicatable from a scientific perspective.
"On Violence", Hannah Arendt --> STOP USING BRACKETS! STOP IT!
In addition, I think I expected this to be more psychological and less political. The most interesting idea for me is that of the power and violence continuum, with both terms on opposite ends, one being substituted for the other as popular assent (the foundation of any power) wanes. Of course then the bureaucracy, an unspellable word which constitutes essentially a rule of nobody, prevents any kind of accumulation of opinion and indeed discourages it since each individual within the bureaucratic matrix ultimately bears no responsibility, and considers themselves devoid of blame. These settings are ripe for mass violence because there is no course of feasible redress and everyone knows it; there is no incentive to play by the rules.
"That Man is My Brother", Thomas Mann --> :( :/ I don't know how to explain how this contributes to my thesis in a way that doesn't sound absolutely "signaling to UFOs on the roof with a flashlight" batshit insane so I'll just mark that I read it like so and also express my appreciation to Esquire for having it behind a free account and not a paywall as I originally thought, saving me from reading it as a ten character column on someone's Livejournal from the early 00's. :( :/
"Illuminations", Walter Benjamin --> I slogged through the Arendt introduction to this for what felt like years and years of my life only to get to the actual essays and realize that he is a nice well-read professorial man--who knew! What I want to talk about is actually located in that very long introduction, though, and that is the outlook presented by Benjamin on collecting: the ideal work being one created only of freestanding quotations torn out of their original context, Jeffersonian-bible-style, and rearranged into a coherent constellation clear enough that accompanying writing would be only secondary. This dream is the ideal antidote to the Marxist superstructure, because the importance of a quotation, or an object in a collection, is interior to the object and the collector. Rather than a groaning ideological framework imposed on the items in a well-selected collection, the materials themselves reveal their value individually and in concert, without support. For someone with a 120+ screenshot quote folder on my phone this is a beautiful, reassuring, and compelling idea.
Reading:
"The Demon Haunted World", Carl Sagan
"The Field of Blood", Joanne B. Freeman
"The True Believer", Eric Hoffer
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", Hunter S. Thompson
Things I am reading roundup by a things I am reading delinquent.
"The Metamorphosis", Franz Kafka --> I think I need to read this again some time when I'm Well enough to not identify with and clutch onto it like a crazy person. Wow, mental illness feels a lot like waking up one day as a bug and you creep around your room and want to hide from others and at first your family is tolerant and worried but then eventually everyone gets tired of your behavior and you can't explain it to them and then they throw apples at you and you creep across the floor at night to listen to the violin and ... and ... and ... you get the idea. Anyway, I ran into an interesting translation issue with this one: when you search the story up you get a quote which goes, "I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself." PRETTY metal, but I cannot find it in any of the version of the ebook at my disposal. Am I stupid and just missing where the quote is? Is this a difference in translation? Is everyone who writes about this story in their essays without reading it immediately and spectacularly outing themselves?
"When Prophecy Fails", Leon Festinger --> An unavoidably biased and possible unethical study into a UFO cult in the 1950's to prove the theory that, when confronted with critical failure in their beliefs, adherents will ease cognitive dissonance through increased proselytizing. Or in more detail, for adherents to movements with a great deal of commitment, particularly public commitment, to their cause, the failure of a prophecy creates an unbearable degree of dissonance. This can be dealt with in three ways. One can admit to being wrong, which is difficult and painful in terms of personal identity, one can deny the failure of the prophecy, often challenging for those firmly rooted in reality, OR one can attempt to alleviate dissonance by seeking the affirmation of others, e.g. attempting to drawn new followers into the movement or prove to outsiders that they were right all along. Interesting, timely, plainly written, and probably unduplicatable from a scientific perspective.
"On Violence", Hannah Arendt --> STOP USING BRACKETS! STOP IT!
In addition, I think I expected this to be more psychological and less political. The most interesting idea for me is that of the power and violence continuum, with both terms on opposite ends, one being substituted for the other as popular assent (the foundation of any power) wanes. Of course then the bureaucracy, an unspellable word which constitutes essentially a rule of nobody, prevents any kind of accumulation of opinion and indeed discourages it since each individual within the bureaucratic matrix ultimately bears no responsibility, and considers themselves devoid of blame. These settings are ripe for mass violence because there is no course of feasible redress and everyone knows it; there is no incentive to play by the rules.
"That Man is My Brother", Thomas Mann --> :( :/ I don't know how to explain how this contributes to my thesis in a way that doesn't sound absolutely "signaling to UFOs on the roof with a flashlight" batshit insane so I'll just mark that I read it like so and also express my appreciation to Esquire for having it behind a free account and not a paywall as I originally thought, saving me from reading it as a ten character column on someone's Livejournal from the early 00's. :( :/
"Illuminations", Walter Benjamin --> I slogged through the Arendt introduction to this for what felt like years and years of my life only to get to the actual essays and realize that he is a nice well-read professorial man--who knew! What I want to talk about is actually located in that very long introduction, though, and that is the outlook presented by Benjamin on collecting: the ideal work being one created only of freestanding quotations torn out of their original context, Jeffersonian-bible-style, and rearranged into a coherent constellation clear enough that accompanying writing would be only secondary. This dream is the ideal antidote to the Marxist superstructure, because the importance of a quotation, or an object in a collection, is interior to the object and the collector. Rather than a groaning ideological framework imposed on the items in a well-selected collection, the materials themselves reveal their value individually and in concert, without support. For someone with a 120+ screenshot quote folder on my phone this is a beautiful, reassuring, and compelling idea.
Reading:
"The Demon Haunted World", Carl Sagan
"The Field of Blood", Joanne B. Freeman
"The True Believer", Eric Hoffer
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", Hunter S. Thompson
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