/lit/ - Literature

>Authors you suspect were extra-terrestrial, time-traveller, or trans-dimensional wanderer

>>16403297
Exactly 7 books, so roughly 0.00028% of the overall.
I'm working on an 8th (phantom tollbooth by norton juster) and will hopefully be done with it by 2023/2024 (fingers crossed).

some day, anon. some day.

>>16080593

political experts/expertise - public opinion playlist is now live:

https://pykewater.com/politics/2020/8/8/political-expertsexpertise-public-opinion

>>16072641

have you played all those games?

if so, this is by far the most original and interesting shelf in this thread.

>>15547262
then i guess me and my library are made moot for you. good talk.

>>15542676
this is an important thing to respond to, thanks for bringing this up. you could look to this to help define what i do by defining it as the antithesis to my intentions.
i worked in PR, brother, and unfortunately when i was younger and without family and full of loneliness (i have always been happy--but did not understand at the time the difference), i have had a hand in some campaigns that you would recognize and that you would (hopefully) disapprove of. in any case, we might call what youre referring to as the AILES model--disruption, distraction, illusion, pomp, circumstance, festival, lights, camera, action: hit em hard and hit em often with some good ol spectacle/propaganda.
the problem with this, outside a conversation on ethics (which is its own journey, and worth having separately), is two things: 1. it is extremely easy; 2. it doesnt actually as well as you would think.
as to the first: what you think is difficult is really the basic-bitch norm at this point. it is a world that believes that the only thing left is illusion, that the only way out is through optics, through some "presence" online, etc., and that most is unreal. this is what everyone is doing already. everyman has already become all those things you have listed: it's almost a lockean problem, a matter of now separating the judge from the executioner, the AV producer from your propagandist again. lying has never been easier or, for that matter, more lucrative.
and yet here we are, no?
so i, for lack of a better term, now repent. do you know how difficult it is to be something real, something lasting--something that is not just a mere illusion or falsity or a matter of personal whim and fancy--a political wish!--but something true, something that others want to congregate around--not out of illusion, but out of a genuine attempt to find something like meaning in this world? that's where i'm at. i need to find pillars of reality, something true that tethers me more permanently at this point; in part i would like to help build that. hence my conservatism i listed above.
and again, unto 2, from someone who has worked in PR: the things that are most marketable are such because they are actually good. tricking the world, while easy, is also pragmatically infelicitous--it'll fuck you eventually. the world is full of a type of resilient common sense that, ultimately and in the long form, responds only to real things; behind the superficial problems usually stands a profound need, and the people most capable of responding to that need are not the deceptionists and falsifiers, but people who are close to the center of things, who have their fingers on the pule of their era. there is a reason why machiavelli's great models are not history's great liars: they are theseus, cyrus, numa pompilius. men who achieved greatness by doing great things. think jaeger and paideia, the whole discourse of arete.

>>15502035
all right anon, i'll hook you up with those. give me a little to upload them to my website.

you should know about the reading lists: each one is a dynamic resource, so if you have any suggestions for major changes, please feel free to let me know.
each is the concentrated effort of several years worth of work. i consult academics and professionals in respective fields and slowly build/reef recommendations as i work through and filter them myself.
the point is to provide both comprehensiveness/depth while also providing a manageable toolkit. there are millions of books out there--i try to drill through and select the best, most foundational, most cited, etc.
to that extent, each reading list i post will be an amalgamated version of several smaller, more specific lists. these larger amalgamated lists operate as "full spectrum" analyses of a subect/genre--the idea being that one could do anything from teach a freshman writing seminar/provide for freshman apprehension all the way to receiving a PhD or professional degree in a subject.

the plato reading list has taken 5 years and id say is about (estimated) 90% complete.
wittgenstein: 3 years, 75% complete.
nietszche: 2 years, 60% complete.
arendt: 1.5 years, 80%.
war: 8 years. 75%.
music theory (i've studied music, too--what do you play/pursue?): 10 years, probably 30%.

this should give a rough estimate of the time/efforts involved and their propensity to morph and change.

ill let you know when i post.

Why have we no churches in the name of Plato, or Seneca, or Plotinus? The case of Plato deserves special consideration. If ever a philosopher could have succeeded in establishing a divine authority in the world, it was he. Among them that are born of women, there has been no greater philosopher, seldom a more perfect man. Why have we no church, embracing half the earth, in the name of Plato? It is not for want of systematic efforts, on the part of his disciples, to secure the prevalence of his doctrine. As soon as the Christian sect began to look formidable, the attempt was made by the most cultivated and powerful of the earth, to run Platonism against Christianity and to secure to the Pagan religion, seconded and interpretated by that philosophy, the ascendancy over the new and growing faith. All the genius, all the wit, and no small part of the virtue and piety of that time were devoted to the cause. The Emperor Julian gave to it all his learning as a philosopher, all his patronage as Emperor, and all his influence as a man. A Christian by birth, and still, after his conversion to Paganism, a better Christian in his practice than the Christian Emperors who preceded and who came after him; a man of singular abstinence and sobriety, who lived as frugally and as industriously on the throne of the world as the poorest Christian in his dominions; he devoted himself, with all the weight which such a character and such a position could give, to the work of building up Platonic Paganism at the expense of Christianity. History has shown us with what result.

I hope you can rebuild your home library in your imagination--placing one book after another in your mental reconstruction until your whole library has been inwardly constituted with every book in its proper place.

>Partly in response, the far-left Syriza government has sought to downplay the classics by replacing them with more “inclusive” subjects in schools. In 2016, the education minister announced that some texts would be removed from the high-school curriculum, including famous passages of Thucydides and Herodotus, on the grounds that such texts promote the idea of empire and exclude immigrant children in schools. After a public outcry and formal complaints from academic unions, the ban was overturned in 2017, but the government’s anti-classics agenda continues: this month, it was announced that Latin would be replaced by sociology in high schools by June 2020.

https://www.ft.com/content/1fcdc1c2-bb61-11e8-8274-55b72926558f

Perhaps a more interesting question,

Which personal library would you rescue from the ravages of time? Aristotle's? Cicero's? Proclus'?

>Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing? It is this question alone that has differentiated it from the shallow things of the earth. Yet the glory and also the indignity of philosophy is to have sought the end of knowing, and no more.

>Whatever position you set men in, they pile up and arrange themselves by moving and crowding together just as ill-matched objects, put in a bag without order, find of themselves a way to unite and fall into place together, often better than they could have been arranged by art.
>Michel de Montaigne

Heraclitus was right!

>724. The Greeks vs. the Chinese. — The Greeks attained the yin yang too (their names were Parmenides and Heraclitus), but then promptly forgot about it (no one took Zeno's "paradoxes" seriously enough to give up on life and shut themselves up in monasteries, for instance), and set about mastering and conquering everything despite it — they set about conquering the appearances at the bottom of which the yin yang lies — and that's how they conquered the Chinese in the end too, since the Chinese, at the end of the day, are also "mere" appearances of course. What lies at the bottom of appearances, in other words, past even the yin yang — the ultimate visual symbol; the most condensed, and hence most powerful abstraction — is appearances once more; indeed precisely the ones the Chinese sages and Greek philosophers thought they were leaving behind when diving past them into the abysses of abstraction. But only the Greeks realized this and came up for air again, as Nietzsche tells us, "excellent swimmers and divers that they are, the nation of Odysseus".

Houellebecq