« Posts under reviews

X-Men: X-Cutioner’s Song

April 27, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

X-Men: X-Cutioner's SongX-Men: X-Cutioner’s Song by Scott Lobdell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

As comic book companies became more and more corporate, sales needed to be key. One of the ways these companies did this, was to have cross-overs. You sell more comics per month, introduce readers who are already familiar with one universe to experience other casts… and thus cross-overs reigned supreme in the 90s.

I haven’t read comics in a while, but used to as a teenager. X-men was one of my favorites. So while I am familiar with most of the cast, I actually don’t know who many in the other groups.

What makes this series a little confusing is that it’s mainly an internal affair. A mystery happens, and the groups ban together to race around trying to figure out who the culprit is. So much of the first half is pretty disorganized, confusing and full of odd twists and many familiar bad guys get introduced into the mix. Finally you get some inking of what’s going on, and then the story ends. Why? Because this series was to be a prelude to introducing another line of comics, this time starring Cable.

So the story is a little uninspired… and the ending not completely satisfying. Cable was already a mysterious character. Now he gets even more mysterious.

The art is pretty good. The dynamic layouts of the panels and some of the dialogue intriguing. Still this is no Genosha island. And the plot could have been better put. At the very end you see some of the more basic struggles of the bad guys, which are basically bad because their egos have run amok… which is different than saying they have no morals. The good guys, however, are the ones who respect others… and want to protect the weak and innocent. So there’s not much else there.

Still, I did enjoy reading it, most of the time.

View all my reviews

The Political Mind

April 22, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century BrainThe Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain by George Lakoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was first introduced to George Lakoff through his work in 2nd language acquisition. His thoughts and work in that area was quite impressive, so when I ran across this book I was eager to look into it.

First let me say that this book isn’t really academic. Yes, it is written by an academic, but it’s also meant for general consumption. I didn’t read the reviews below before reading this book, but in skimming them, I am surprised by how people had to mention how academic it was or how technical it is. Honestly, I wish it was more technical.

Also, I had a hard time starting this book because it sounded too much like a liberal griping about conservatives. The way the book eased into framing really annoyed me, because it read too much like loose rhetorical/discourse analysis. I didn’t care about discourse analysis, since I’ve read much more substantial ones… but then surprise: Lakoff made a claim about cognition in terms of discourse.

Suddenly things were not words anymore. He was talking about not only how we think with regular structures, but how invoking those internal structures through language was how people got to emphasize different aspects of cognition.

There are three takeaways for me.

The first is simply that arranging words in ever new ways allows people to process things differently. Providing substantial framing through the use of culturally familiar metaphors isn’t simply window dressing to invoke stolid logical relations… those metaphors also allow the speaker/writer to slip into other arguments by analogy. Lakoff has obviously first worked this out in more academic ways, which would be very interesting to look at… but then, rhetorical analysis has always taken the approach of analysing metaphors and reoccurring tropes as how writing and communication are structured. And the use of rhetoric in this fashion was well documented since early orators from the beginning of human history. Only because of the age of Enlightenment have we instead thought that somehow pure thought was only relational, devoid of excess entanglements… and that understanding supersedes the actual differences in types of expression or kinds of anything… that the categories themselves are more real than the expressions… but really this can’t be true since anything that is the same as anything else is simply the same thing, unable to be distinguished… from itself. By tossing out information or being reductionist, we lose part of the picture. The question of course, is always what context, which part is itself the operant part?

The second takeaway from this book is itself rhetorical, in a way. Lakoff insists that the beyond of language lies solely within the cognitive structures of our neurons… while he seems to imply that such structures are too difficult to decode (neurons fire too quickly, and are too small and numerous to keep track of) He calls quite often, mostly in the latter third of the book, for a New Enlightenment, one that at first, seeks to find the deeper structures of our minds through the use of framing… that we can get at these deeper cognitive structures through intensive rhetorical analysis, much like Chomsky’s deep structure of grammar. I understand this book is not academic, so I am left understandably, a little vague as to how this would exactly work. He dismissing Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG) project as constrained by “Old Enlightenment” thinking… although he highlights UG’s project structure as a model for a new field of study.

Lakoff is serious about merging discourse analysis with cognitive computation. He cites numerous thinkers like Charles Fillmore and the school of the Neural Theory of Language. With this, Lakoff is, in a way, still working within old Enlightenment aesthetics of thought. If language itself is how we process thoughts (which I think him correct), there can be no real deeper structure to thoughts since they pick the expression that is best suited to being what it is. I am not saying that this area of study isn’t worth studying — it is — but people can think in Math symbols, in body movements, in melodies… in other kinds of directly encoded formula instead of just language. Furthermore, tropes and metaphors are specific to groups. The study of such fields will inevitably change them. As memes come and go, so will the study itself always shadow the area of study. To codify those areas of study with academic jargon, which is also inevitable, will inevitably introduce distortion as frames used to discuss those areas themselves formulate the field of study… this is of course, start of a different discussion: the philosophy of science and justificationism, which is beyond the point of this review.

The third takeaway, which I find very invigorating is that poetry and philosophy, through this field, will be seen again as socially valid. Both of these areas have been somewhat repressed by our current capitalist frame, as neither directly contributes to producing or retaining wealth. Yet the deeper reasons for such repression may very well be that such fields of semiotic slippage are also fields which revolutionize and alter perception ever so slightly… loss of these areas of the language arts amounts to a loss of our ability to step out of much of our framing. People can’t rebel against what they can’t see. And people can’t effectively rebel if they do not realize a way out. I don’t mean to suggest that bands of poets or bands of philosophers rove downtown office buildings across first world nations to “blow people’s minds”. And even if they could, there isn’t any reason to do that. After all, people who do want to see alternatives will eventually find them. It’s just that there’s a reason why much of these two areas is difficult to comprehend. The transformative power of both poetry and philosophy have been well documented throughout history even if today they are often dismissed as being irrelevant by “serious professionals”. Lakoff dismisses classical philosophers as “Old Enlightenment” and perhaps they should be dismissed in that way, but the Cliff Note’s version is only our socially accepted “conclusion” of what amounts to lifetime upon lifetime of work by society’s best and brightest. As one who reads Enlightenment thinkers, I must say that their writing does often leave one to see how they turn around objects, create auxilitary objects and speculate the pure relations between collected bundles in an attempt to make sense of the world… In effect, you can learn from their learning… You can make better sense of the world through watching others attempt the same thing. The lesson here isn’t always the content itself, but how the content is formulated… while not itself a matter of “Framing” very much a matter of the creation of context and structure, roots of framing.

Lakoff’s book can be read as a call to action against stolid ways of thinking, against conventionally tried methods of making sense. How much sense do things make now? We race our cars around polluting the planet, we spend our health and our youth to make wealth, only to spend that wealth to try to regain youth. We make tons of waste every year, from products that historically wouldn’t be looked on as trash. And we bury this stuff in our own backyards. Yes it’s true that Lakoff prizes being a progressive against being a conservative. But even those progressive frames are the products of the very systems that compel us to behave the way we do. I understand, one step at a time. But all the same…

Perhaps it’s time for us to return to such areas, in an attempt to find our own freedom, so we won’t simply be money spending-money making machines.

All in all, you can tell that Lakoff is just getting warmed up. He very obviously intended progressives and progressive strategists to take into account cognition in politics, not as a call to step out of thinking in old familiar frames. Instead, let’s use the ones we have to push forward progress. After all, Lakoff did after all help find the now defunct liberal thinktank Rockridge institute. Even at the end of this book, you can tell that he will write another.

View all my reviews

Existence and Existents

April 16, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Existence and ExistentsExistence and Existents by Emmanuel Levinas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not well versed in Heidigger’s work. And as for Levinas, I’ve avoided him for as long as I have heard of him.

This work however, is one of his first, and well worth the read. Much of it stems from his working closely with Heidigger. Heidigger restarted after the mess Hegel and Kant left, understanding that one cannot think through Being, he instead started to think around Being. This book works in much the same way, as Levinas begins with a critique of Heidigger and ends where it seems, he will work through on his own issues separate from Heidigger.

What was surprising for me, is that Levinas develops the same dialectical twists to talk around being as do other masterful dialecticians, such as Lacan, Zizek and the like. Although Levinas first starts with moods, explains the originary ground of such feelings like fatigue in order to highlight where one ends and the world begins, as a relationship to the world, Levinas quickly establishes being as independent of the world, as the ground of the self that is not incorporatable by the self or the world… ending with the there is, the limit of what can be thought… the same limit that Kant reached poised at the limit of the phenomenological.

This brief excursion (brief in page numbers) then takes a sharper turn as Levinas expands on how the self relates to the world in the last chapter. I’m not certain if hypostasis is a concept he turns towards later on in his career, but this last chapter is again, the respelling of the limits of existent in various axial dimensions, such as space, time and of course, language. His rhetorical device is dialectics without being obviously enamored with negation but he spells out a particular parallel between the I, and the present moment vs the existent and existence as a field. This thought remains the limit of the rest of the book, where the irruption in anonymous being of locationalization itself is best expressed temporally as the engagement in being on the basis of the present, which breaks and then ties back to the thread of infinity, contain a tension and a contracting. It is an event. The evanescence of an instant which makes it able to be a pure present, not to receive its being from a past is not the gratuitous evanescence of a game or a dream. A subject is not free like the wind, but already has a destiny which it does not get from a past or a future, but from its present. If commitment in being thereby escape the weight of the past (the weight that was seen in existence), it involves a weight of its own which its evanescence does not lighten, and against which a solitary subject, who is constituted by the instant is powerless. Time and the other are necessary for the liberation from it.

In other words, not only is each being anonymous, but it is also a unique and indistinct instant, a brief encounter in infinity like all other encounters, only this one is mine. You see that Levinas is suspended between questions of one and infinity, unable, at least in this book, to resolve the very question he succinctly ends with: The event which we have been inquiring after is antecedent to that placing. It concerns the meaning of the very fact that in Being there are beings.

Very nice place to end. But one curious thing he brought up at the very beginning regarding how existence and existents were separated: that the existent and existence are understood as separate because life needs to be struggled for; that existence needs to be earned, be it at the level of 19th century biology or immanent within the economic order. While he set this as the stage for outlining fatigue, I think this young Levinas could have been better served to understand how the order of a priori necessarily arises as a special case of the a posteriori… but that is a different approach, a different school, one of the domain of semiotics and dialecticians of the negative (such as Zizek). It will be interesting to read more Levinas and see how this book fits into his work about transcendence and the encounter with the Other.

View all my reviews

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

April 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four EcologiesLos Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies by Reyner Banham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this stunning work, Reyner Banham breaks out and challenges many of the norms of his time for urban development and how architecture should be considered. The work isn’t academic, because it doesn’t examine other people’s positions, but it does wax poetic about how great Los Angeles is.

When I combined reading this book with his video, “Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles” you get a very different but complementary message. The point of this book was to convince others, his professional peers, that Los Angeles was worth considering. He wants to showcase how this vibrant and oddly made city, the product of its short history and global world economy expansion allows for the sense of freedom and wonderment that LA embodies. His video was much in the same way about the same thing — although through his emphasis of lifestyle I got a more complete picture.

Los Angeles was also talked about by Baudrillard in his book America, as the example of hyperreality. LA got its hyperreality because it was starred in films that were shot here (because of the weather, and the open space). These films attracted stars to live here, and so we get the superficial image of wealth and status, where LA was the place to make it. From there, you have Banham’s observation that LA was a place where anything could happen, architecturally or culturally.

In this way, Banham is, in a synecdoche-analogous way, celebrating capitalism’s fruit as he celebrates LA and explores the social, economic and political pressures that made LA… it’s kind of telling too, that in the film he says how Watts improved (as if to dismiss LA’s inclusion in the history of racial prejudice, yes yes there are poor people, but they get watts towers)… and how in the book I am reviewing, he doesn’t even mention racial tension at all, except in passing. Obviously the fruits, and the technological mastery that is LA should be cherished, enjoyed, although whoever paid for these fruits to be extracted… should not be given much thought at all.

While this definitely scars the book, as Banham did write it to direct us to how LA got to be the way it is. I am thankful for his sections on its local history, and historical politics (which has greed and corruption)… but Banham probably didn’t think so far as to analyze the cultural milieu of Los Angeles and ITS origins… which while arguably just as important as the physicality of Los Angeles, is just out of Banham’s professional range, as he teaches Architecture, he isn’t a philosopher. I do appreciate his insights, however. The range of research involved, travel, the pictures in the book, and his witty and engaging writing make this book easier to read, than it actually may sound. Given the domain of the book, it actually is quite good — and living in Los Angeles — I do note that some of his observations (physical and cultural) are dated.

However, if ecology were to be true to the sense of the word (rather than simply a metaphor he employs to cluster architectural infrastructures), Banham should have talked about the underpinnings of capitalism, its exploitation and the people who suffered, as much as he waxes about the fruits of capitalism as expressed in Los Angeles.

View all my reviews

Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists

April 10, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great PhysicistsQuantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists by Ken Wilber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Around the time when theoretical physics turned increasingly towards mathematical models to predict discoveries about our collective universe, many fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality also changed.

Previous to the discovery of the quantum world, and the revolutions of general and special relativity, Newton’s scientific research program dominated the sciences. The aesthetics of this Newtonian world view specified scientific Truth, a dogma that militantly eschewed religion, mysticism and other “subjective” world views. Much of our ideas about the nature of science and religion still originate from the stranglehold of science, as it dominated the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries until Einstein presented a more exacting order of things… for example, some physicists and atheists alike will claim that religion is outdated, or that science can provide all the mystical answers in a clearer way than religion has.

This book states the opposite. In this wonderful collection, we have “mystical writings of the world’s greatest physicists”, all of which proclaim that science has its place (and limits) and religion with mysticism has its place in our human world. For to be a complete human being, we would need both.. and as more than one physicist wrote, you need faith first and foremost before you can even proceed into the unknown domains that are science’s areas of study.

While the message was a little repetitive, I did get a good sense that these amazing men, who shook the foundations of our world, came away from their search for the real substance, a deeply profound respect for the mysteries of being and the universe. Rather than discarding the work of humans for thousands of years (in areas of religion) they turned back to these areas with a greater respect after tackling basic questions about the nature of reality. The editor, Ken Wilber, did well to end with Sir Arthur Eddington. Eddington’s lucid remarks on how understanding reality through mathematics and how this compares to religion goes at great lengths to demonstrate just how in the search for making sense of the world, we end with equations that nearly make no sense in themselves, leaving more questions than answers.

After all, science is to be the study of what is. That doesn’t necessarily even begin to address how we should be, or what has meaning or how meaning even comes about. We’ve got a long way to go before these two different areas can even begin to rightly address one another in ways that make any consistent sense.

View all my reviews

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

April 5, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual EnlightenmentThe Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The subject of this simply written book is your identity. Eckhart Tolle writes in a question and answer format about the subject that makes the subject — identity, ego, self. You can lose yourself, and you probably should because that isn’t you. But you probably won’t do it (and there’s nothing wrong with not trying to) if you aren’t already unhappy and suffering.

This book won’t change who you are though, at least not from the point of view of everything. You’ll still die. You won’t fly. You won’t gain immortality… although you will be a part of the universe that is a part of itself, as you are. Really, the book won’t change anything except your mind. If it’s true, you will alter your consciousness and lose the trappings of this world. Of course, losing your identity and losing your attachment of the image of yourself that you have as yourself also means losing all the things we struggle for: success, recognition, wealth. What is the difference anyway? On the one hand, you could find happiness, although happiness never lasts forever, because happiness requires conditions that change. Being with the change, or not being at all, as Tolle might write, is what will really give you inner peace. The struggle, he says, is simply that trying to gain inner peace itself will cause you to lose it… as your ideas of inner peace will also disturb true inner peace.

His answer to how is simply the title of this book. Be fully present, not in your dreams, your fantasies… and not in your ideas of what now is… which is what I found so fascinating… much of what he says already coincides yes, with Eastern philosophy, but also Western philosophy, namely through the works of Hegel. The actual function of unrealizing thought is undoing the terms x and it’s negation, which of course is also the root of identity creation (I am X, Others are not-X). But that’s enough mechanics.

You probably also won’t read this book if you are already content. And you won’t pick it up if you think you already know what you will read! And if you identify with the oppositions inherent within thought you probably won’t see the common ground he speaks of because the split between the two will seem so natural, there won’t be any common ground at all. That’s okay though, it’s part of the dialectic before synthesis. If it works for you, in some way, you will like it. If it can’t work for you, you won’t like it.

But then again, all books pretty much work like that.

View all my reviews

Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes

March 23, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research ProgrammesPhilosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes by Imre Lakatos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After the enlightenment, people started to seriously make a distinction that how they distinguished what they really knew from what was really going on around them. The actual knowledge, epistemes, were favored over “opinions” or doxa. The debate that surrounded that amid the turmoil of increasing technology and religious unrest eventually flipped around: doxa became the norm with epistemes being questioned as being attainable. With this flip, after the revolution of special and general relativity, scientific theory became the norm rather than dogmatic scientific truth.

The examination of the flip, and the proper aesthetic form that scientific theory can be generated — namely via scientific method — is the subject of inquiry in this short but very very dense book. Lakatos examines how different critiques determine how the line should be drawn, be the line negative through the lack of connection between phenomenon or should it be drawn through what degree of unfitting the phenomenon before we should consider the distinction wrong? He also asks the question, through scientific inquiry, can we know anything, and if we can, how can we think we know it (or at least feel justified that this is the best we can do)?

In short, this book is pretty packed with terminology and illustrations of those terminologies. To be clear, Lakatos highlights what moves thinkers and scientists made and perhaps why, and what moves they could have made and what meaning they generated distinguished from the meaning they didn’t generate. You can imagine how much thinking, research and effort this must have taken. Lakatos also challenges other thinkers of scientific history, naming how their different explanations of scientific movement falls short, miss-explains theories and massages meanings and histories in service of their pet theory. He also explains how his teacher Popper formulated the scientific method through language rather than classical induction and why we should consider science as being more than formulations in language although Popper disagrees — that scientific theories are only different consistencies in language (surprisingly much like Deleuze and Guattari’s plateaus).

At times, Lakatos also slips into the terminology he uses, applies them to other scientific philosophers, although that is dependent on what other researchers think and find and eventually collaborate as well. Lol.

See, really, how we know things is pretty important, and why we should know one it through one theory vs another theory changes how we can coexist together in the final context, to best get along with one another. This is a sophistication far from what people are taught in school as being what a justifiable belief is. In a way, this book is more philosophical than metaphysics, or doxa or opinions… Lakatos is talking about how we might construct a view of the world around us that is reasonable, the most accurate view. Objects of science are assumed to have an existence and consistency independent of what we observe of them. People are also assumed to have an existence and will independent of what we observe of them. So in a way, this too is applicable to people, although we shouldn’t experiment on them. What I mean to point out is that the forms of this book can be worked through a variety of life situations, as a kind of guide to how to understand what is going on. Simultaneously, this kind of deep examination is kind of a paranoia, where we need to look into every detail and possibility while also being a kind of hysteria, where we don’t know what we are looking at/for… because of course, we deal with the limits of knowability, making it up as we go along… though if Lakatos is right, we only need to follow his general methods.

Really Lakatos falls into the idealist who believes that we can know everything (a positive maybe for Lakatos)… while he can’t do science, or at least doesn’t in this volume, he can help smoothen the irregularities of how scientific truth can be found out… so we don’t waste our time on distinctions that don’t make any knowable difference, such as religion or critical theory… but that’s really his opinion or doxa… although he hopes you’ll find it to be as solid as an episteme. ;).

View all my reviews

The Book on the Living God

March 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Book on the Living GodThe Book on the Living God by Bô Yin Râ
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this because Eckhart Tolle had listed it as being one of the books that so fascinated him. Bo Yin Ra really builds up a case for arguing for a very narrow spiritual path. The basic idea is that such a path does exist — and like many of the esoteric spiritualities, the idea is simply that what is ultimately spiritual is real. And thus, being of the universal sense, it must exist outside of human meaning making.

Over and over he emphasizes how difficult it is to do this. What’s interesting is that spirituality must be about getting outside of your ego. So anything that has to do with ego, or building ego is the opposite of what is spiritual. This includes anyone who leads, or has spiritual followers… which is a very human meaning making activity, and thus not truly spiritual.

So the book has a hard dichotomy in it, which is taken to extremes. I find this work so interesting in that he ends up saying things that you may not think about. But in some of his moves to be “complete” I think he runs up against some very odd points.

If you are interested in spirituality and being spiritual… and want a window into a strange approach to what is an intensely personal experience, I would say go and read it. Of course, if writing such a book, predicated on expressing the path to spirituality while avoiding the “pitfall of human meaning making” seems like a direct contradiction in terms to you, you can bet that it literally is.

He does have some interesting ideas about desires/drives/feelings/chora — whatever you want to call it. The only thing he doesn’t explain is the book itself. But then again, you got to start somewhere right?

I guess this is the second book of this series… I have not read the first book.

View all my reviews

Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture

March 14, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Studies and Further Studies in a Dying CultureStudies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture by Christopher Caudwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Written from the early context of the civil unrest between the two world wars, Caudwell takes a vulgar Marxist view of the end of capitalism for reality. He expands on himself in this two volumes, talking about various structures that center our social reality… from beauty, and reality and consciousness to the arts and the place of psychoanalysis. Caudwell seeks to show us exactly how our culture of capitalism is dying and withering in its own material (and intellectual) excess.

What makes him at times difficult to stomach but also admirable is his very strong view of deterministic relationships between access to resources and every aspect of our culture and being. His range of topics and how he manages to see his line of dialectical materialism conveys his passion for the theory and love and his disgust of people through the separation of what is good in us and what is bad.

It’s a strange thing to see him care so deeply about other people in the abstract (that he took the risk of dying in a war) and yet would condemn his fellow man’s action, being, psychology and identity… if that man had not yet woken up the proletariat truth. His passion takes him deeply also, into thought has he critiques even the most abstract of the sciences, mathematics and philosophy in order to sweep all these topics under the rug of Marxist revolution and explanatory power.

What is strange and odd about him though, and what makes his books also difficult to swallow is how often you catch him agreeing with himself. A good author should also present counter arguments, demonstrate how the dialectical truth twists in its logic to create false poses that must shift into more stable positions in later revolutions. Instead he rushes too quickly to the point, making it obvious that he is railroading us swiftly into the proletariat reality as if writing books, (even keeping journals, or papers) would help usher in the Marxist dream of plenty for all, and the end of suffering.

For example, in talking about the flaw of bourgeois science, Caudwell will make the claim that much of scientific knowledge is swayed, or fragmented by bourgeois decay — the blind hoarding and administration of the ruling class would impede science from making real discoveries, else use science to justify their agenda. Yet Caudwell, decides to tell us what the real discoveries are, the overlooked gems that science has to offer… how does he decide this? By what supports the idea for him of the Marxist paradise — that man must move towards as the absolute stable equilibrium? The question I would have is how does he know what scientific truths are to be valued? And if so, what is it that is reasonable about such criteria? And if not this, then also if every institution or form of human thought is created through class struggle between the class conscious ruling class and the unconscious working class, then is not Reason and Rationality itself also created by this decaying and dying culture?

Of course he does not go so far, as to justify why Reason or even the dialectical materialism provides such answers… he is less a theorist than say, Jameson or Engels but more of a practioner, or applicationist… he heard the call and merely extends their thoughts for himself, to give himself direction and that extends for him as far as his eye can see. And he sees a lot, tries to see everything.

These writings may not have been intended for public eye, but it is refreshing to connect with a mind from so long ago, and get a taste of what he thought to share with someone… although he doesn’t tell you who he thinks you are, he does seek to enlighten you, pull you up from your oppression and unconscious acceptance of your oppression.

He also does not talk about what things will be like when the day will come.

All in all, I felt this was like visiting an old mind, trapped in old photographs of a time when things seemed so much simplier and the answers fathomable. He doesn’t talk about his life — he is being serious though, and for that, I don’t mind he doesn’t break his shield and be more personal. Still, for the vulgarness and the directness, Caudwell seems sometimes like a brick wall, unmoving, uncompromising and unhearing. We sometimes want the other’s stance to acknowledge us as well, so maybe the visiting metaphor was not apt at all. =p

Still, that he doesn’t question his own roots, seems to me to be a big reason why I wouldn’t take what he wants to convey too seriously. He fits the form of a thinker, and has a good heart, but is critically unaware of his own stance. That’s probably okay though, because who of us would want to fall into a pit of despair of not knowing what to value, or how to be, or what should matter? Certainly not Caudwell, although you could maybe take his Marxism as an answer to what seems like a deep despair and loss of person early on in his first volume. So in that sense, maybe this isn’t a Marxist work… but the Marxism takes place as a practice of a deeper philosophy, perhaps an existential one, one in which Caudwell paid the ultimate price for, dying in the Spainish Civil war in the name of la revolución.
.

View all my reviews

Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom

March 4, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild FreedomActive Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom by Robert Moss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The our minds are very complex places, and there’s many ways to approach understanding yourself, and gaining a better balance. This book may work for some people. Moss approaches things through a varied and complex list of techniques, other worldliness, demons, angels, animals, you name it, he’s got it in there. And all through the tapestry of dreaming. I think he’s an interesting man. I’ve heard him speak through a pod-cast and I must say that he’s very convincing. It’s kind of amazing that he too went to so many different dreaming groups, helped so many people out in so many places. In a way, he is respectful, and yet personal. He wants to show you the way to yourself. He wants to complete your inner child and you — to show you the universe is your play ground, and that the further deeper you dive into yourself, the more world you will find, to better yourself and others in increased understanding.

At least, that’s what he says.

He has many techniques on how to help yourself and others in dreaming. Many times, it’s remarkable how personal people get with their dreams. We think of dreams as being solitary activities. But Moss wants us to share them with others, and even dream with them. In a way, the conversations people have in here, is like talking through a cloud. Everyone sees something different and everyone has something to contribute. With love and care, Moss writes that we should all dream together, to heal you and heal them. The vision Moss creates of the world is that we should share our experiences and learn and assure each other that through all the trials in the world, in the end, we are all ok.

View all my reviews

« Older PostsNewer Posts »