Am about a hundred pages into Heat 2 and am mostly enjoying it. Am finding this Jon Hassell album I picked up the other day to be fitting accompaniment. You can find reviews that take issue with some of the book's prose and the notion that it works best after having seen the movie, as a supplement (even if the movie is summarized well in the prologue), but so far at least, it's been a good antidote to the tedium of the past several days.

Will admit, Heat 2 is sort of an amusing name for a book. Just trying to enjoy the ride now, not be too picky and see if/how it all comes together.

Second reading of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

The idea here is that an action is to be judged as morally good insofar as it is performed in accordance with a certain maxim. Such a maxim can (the writer hopes to show) be worked out by the use of reason. The objective is to establish something which holds as a principle of a moral action regardless of its empirical content - its practical consequences or the personal inclinations of the one performing the action.

It is only an action performed on the basis of a rationally deduced maxim that can be called a free action, since "free" means "not determined by incidental external events", and actions performed out of a personal inclination or out of consideration for practical consequences clearly are so determined, and thus not free. Free actions are free because the one performing them have excised themselves from the sphere of nature, meaning they have made their will be determined by reason rather than happenstance, giving them a kind of control over it that they do not have over natural phenomena, given that pure reason functions apart from experience, likewise giving that will a permanence and predictability that it would not have were it left to the influence of circumstance. Put differently, they have decided to conform their behaviour to law.

The action has no object except itself. Its object is not even the action per se, but the determination to act in a certain manner. This is what consitutes duty - the plain commitment to principle.

One thing sticks out to me:
An individual's personal attitude to a moral command, which is considered irrelevant, is sorted away as "inclinations", making no attempt to delve into the nature of these inclinations and what origins they might have and what they might say about the different people who actually live in the community. An inclination is an inclination, some might have inclinations that make them content and fulfilled to do their duty, some might have such that it makes them miserable - nothing to do about it.

This might be fine if it concerned strictly the "practical" law - that which the lawmakers and the governors do - but Kant makes no essential distinction between that kind of law and personal, individual morality. The latter is the "subjective principle of volition" and the former the "objective principle", and Kant is explicit that ideally there is no difference between the two. The final aim is to align one's individual conduct fully with what the social order commands, and it would be so, says Kant, if reason had complete control over our desire.

As in Aristotle (which puts the whole field of ethics into perspective), a morally good and right action has a end, which is social. Kant terms them allgemein-zweckmässig - concerning the common and directed toward some purpose. So quit loitering, citizen, and make yourself useful!

"God is in heaven and the tsar is far away", was a saying in old Russia. Kant moves God into your head, along with the cop and the commissar.

My own categorical imperative therefore: Everyone who espouses this philosophy shall be tortured in purgatory by Nietzsche.

And if that sounds too extreme, I just started on Arendt's The Human Condition, which seems much more to my liking.

AdamN wrote: Fri Jul 22, 2022 4:21 pm Extinction by Bernhard. A 325 page diatribe against all things Austrian, Catholic, National Socialist and proletarian/middle class.

Fucking love that guy.

Holy Moly is Sound Within Sound: A Radical History of Composers in the 20th Century by Kate Molleson incredible. Not out in the states yet, but I tracked down a uk copy.

I recently finished Ernest Shackleton’s South. Pretty intense. The guys in that expedition spent an Antarctic winter sheltering in an overturned boat, living on penguins and seals. Unbelievable.

I recently watched No Country For Old Men, which led me to read the book. I hadn’t read it since before the movie came out, and I was surprised to see how well the movie followed the book, with a couple of exceptions toward the end. I’ve never regarded it as one of McCarthy’s best, but it was a helluva fun read this time around, having all of that imagery linked to the movie. Now I’m on a McCarthy tear, reading The Orchard Keeper. Planning on working my way through his Southern novels again, something I do every few years. Suttree is always such a joy to read. A depressing joy.

I have been listening to early Sonic Youth lately and as a result have been revisiting their chapter and some of the other chapters in Our Band Could Be Your Life.

Any recommendations on books that cover similar/related topics you all would recommend?

I was considering reading the Kim Gordon memoir.

Dave N. wrote: Sun Aug 21, 2022 3:01 pm Suttree is always such a joy to read. A depressing joy.

I always forget that this book is as hilarious as it is depressing. The dialogues in the juke joints (“…last time I drank that, I got the drizzlin’ shits, the dry heaves, the cold sweats, and the jakeleg.”), the watermelon fucking episode, Suttree and Harrogate in jail….McCarthy at his most light-hearted and comedic. It’s a wonder the Coen Bros never adapted it to screen.

Finished Heat 2 the other night. Kind of a long one. If you're a big fan of the movie, I'd say give it a go, if you have the time. There are a couple funny pans of it on Amazon, but I largely enjoyed it, sprawling and occasionally graphic in its violence as it was. Regarding gripes about the prose, the thing is...a lot of genre literature, however hard boiled, has some element of "put on," some conceits where language is concerned, to give things flavor. Mann sometimes overdid it but I couldn't help but feel it was mostly consistent with his films.

jfv wrote: Sat Sep 03, 2022 3:55 pm I was considering reading the Kim Gordon memoir.

Don’t, my wife was a superfan, and was ready to be blown away by Kim’s remembrances as icon, groundbreaking musician and feminist thinker. Came away ashamed by the vapid name-dropping starfuckery parts, and sad sack second-guessing of her own self worth due to her idiot husband’s dalliances and ultimate departure.

Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. It's weird and I'm finding it difficult to stay engaged with it.

At the library yesterday I bought a used hardcover edition of Stephen King's It for a dollar. It's in very good shape, and still has the original book jacket. This was one of my favorite novels of his, I'll reread it someday.