Re: What are you reading?
361I’m about to finish all of Poe Ballentine’s non-fiction. As someone who has done a good amount of moving and job-hopping, I had a great time reading his stuff.
Re: What are you reading?
362Just finished Joyce Carol Oates' My Sister, My Love
What a deathmarch.
What a deathmarch.
Re: What are you reading?
363I took a peek at Martin Hägglund's This Life.
I'm on board with the aim of accepting the finitude of life, as I'm uncomfortable with how many people treat the prospect of immortality, the possibility of extending life through technology. There is some underlying impulse there that disturbs me, a kind of desperation, a desire not to die rather than a desire to live.
However, Hägglund starts off with a framing that I cannot accept. This attempt to come to terms with the finitude of life is born out of precisely the fact that life happens to be finite, and that you're aware of this fact. It is then starting from, and oriented around this fact that the value of life can be discovered, as is the intent of this book.
But this fact is provisional. From what I know, there is no inherent biological obstacle to prolonging life indefinitely. Hägglund on the other hand takes it as necessary that life must end. Surely, if you're faced with the reality that your life as it is lived right now will end, you might be compelled to find some way of coming to terms with and be at peace with this fact, and find some way of affirming your own life within this reality. The resultant attitude will in other words be a product of necessity - the particular way you find of making sense of and valuing your life is engendered by your awareness that your time is limited, and the kind of conception you form of what makes that life meaningful makes sense within that specific reality. But Hägglund asserts that only given such a limit can life have meaning and value. It's not just that our life happens to be finite, and you are forced to find value in it given those constraints, but that our life MUST be finite in order for it to have value.
If, hypothetically, you were to have an indefinite lifespan, then your entire relationship with life and death and time would change, they would take on new meanings, and therefore also the value that could be found in them.
So Hägglund seems to proceed from the idea that there has to be some absolute limit, which raises some worries given that the perspective of this book will relate partly to environmental concerns. There lies here close at hand the notion that we screwed up the climate because we were too greedy and didn't know our proper place. This is me extrapolating quite a bit though.
I'm on board with the aim of accepting the finitude of life, as I'm uncomfortable with how many people treat the prospect of immortality, the possibility of extending life through technology. There is some underlying impulse there that disturbs me, a kind of desperation, a desire not to die rather than a desire to live.
However, Hägglund starts off with a framing that I cannot accept. This attempt to come to terms with the finitude of life is born out of precisely the fact that life happens to be finite, and that you're aware of this fact. It is then starting from, and oriented around this fact that the value of life can be discovered, as is the intent of this book.
But this fact is provisional. From what I know, there is no inherent biological obstacle to prolonging life indefinitely. Hägglund on the other hand takes it as necessary that life must end. Surely, if you're faced with the reality that your life as it is lived right now will end, you might be compelled to find some way of coming to terms with and be at peace with this fact, and find some way of affirming your own life within this reality. The resultant attitude will in other words be a product of necessity - the particular way you find of making sense of and valuing your life is engendered by your awareness that your time is limited, and the kind of conception you form of what makes that life meaningful makes sense within that specific reality. But Hägglund asserts that only given such a limit can life have meaning and value. It's not just that our life happens to be finite, and you are forced to find value in it given those constraints, but that our life MUST be finite in order for it to have value.
If, hypothetically, you were to have an indefinite lifespan, then your entire relationship with life and death and time would change, they would take on new meanings, and therefore also the value that could be found in them.
So Hägglund seems to proceed from the idea that there has to be some absolute limit, which raises some worries given that the perspective of this book will relate partly to environmental concerns. There lies here close at hand the notion that we screwed up the climate because we were too greedy and didn't know our proper place. This is me extrapolating quite a bit though.
born to give
Re: What are you reading?
364I just finished up a Graham Greene anthology, books ranged from entertaining (at the least) to brilliant.
The Heart of the Matter - 8/10
Orient Express - 6/10
A Burnt Out Case - 10/10 (probably my favorite of his so far, along with The Quiet American)
The Third Man - 9/10
Loser Takes All - 7/10
The Power and The Glory - 8/10
On to Our Man in Havana Now which is good so far.
The Heart of the Matter - 8/10
Orient Express - 6/10
A Burnt Out Case - 10/10 (probably my favorite of his so far, along with The Quiet American)
The Third Man - 9/10
Loser Takes All - 7/10
The Power and The Glory - 8/10
On to Our Man in Havana Now which is good so far.
Re: What are you reading?
366I've read a couple, and they were shit. Fair play to the network he's cultivated though. If I want psychedelic literature stretched to its very end, I'll always go for Krasznahorkai.jimmy spako wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 4:52 am This made me want to read some David Keenan:
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fw ... vid-keenan
at war with bellends
Re: What are you reading?
367Speaking of Keenan, I was thinking of ordering a copy of the updated, revised edition of England’s Hidden Reverse when it's released this summer. Has anyone here read it? I like Coil and Current 93 and read that there's a passage where someone shits on Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Color me intrigued.
Re: What are you reading?
368Yeah, it’s good if you’re interested in that sort of music. I read in a Nurse With Wound interview that Keenan spent loads of hours interviewing Current 93 and then supposedly based the rest of it mostly off of archival stuff. Who knows how accurate my recollection of that is, or if that was really the case, but I enjoyed the book.AdamN wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 2:34 pm Speaking of Keenan, I was thinking of ordering a copy of the updated, revised edition of England’s Hidden Reverse when it's released this summer. Has anyone here read it? I like Coil and Current 93 and read that there's a passage where someone shits on Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Color me intrigued.
Re: What are you reading?
370One of the weirdest, most disturbing movies I've seen. Should read the book.
born to give