/lit/ - Literature

i'll throw in a recommendation for this as well, as good a starting point as any for cultivating an interest in nondualism for the general reader. i think it completes my own meme trifecta of Tarnas and Barzun as well.

Space Taoism, of course, endures. i don't really see how it can be any other way. excess sincerity is no less of a danger than excess irony (BTW, how right what DFW: you cannot found a literary culture on irony?). Land is for me the outer limits on what continental philosophy can do in 2019, and Negarestani also. the technical turn is for realsies.

but honestly a humanities department or a really good prof to walk undergrads through what God Is Dead *actually* means...i mean, there's Peterson for this, in a sense, but the problem with JBP is that he shits on Derrida and Foucault without understanding what it was that made those men write what they did. but i definitely like the idea of a Whirlwind Tour that catches you up to Deleuze/Land/Negarestani, and then - just when all seems as though life could not possibly get any darker - you stumble through a wormhole, land in China, and have to make your way back to the site of the disaster (spoiler: it's Marx). and then you have to have a mind-blasting experience, or a sequence of them, with a variety of mystics who will not allow themselves to be mocked, and slowly transform you into being a small monkey awakened to emptiness.

then the course ends and you are ejected over the New Jersey Turnpike to begin trying to salvage the rest of your life. with perhaps 0.0004% more sympathy for the Alex Joneses and other guys shouting at traffic and wearing sandwich boards. the Space Taoists will continue to host psychedelic raves and other things and schizopost, and make weird graffiti in back alleys about the Wild Ride. thus they mystify the world and warp the edges of sanity. hopefully for a good cause. you don't know with those guys.

but seriously. a fucking terrifying, kaleidoscopic theme park for the mind. that is what i would have wanted, i think, from my undergraduate. like The Christmas Carol, except instead of Ebenezer Scrooge, it would be *Scrooge at 20* - cynical, mean, and ultimately *fathomlessly fucking ignorant.* when i was doing my undergrad i think what i wanted, ultimately, was not to be told that i was okay, or that somehow society was wrong. what i would have wanted was the scholarly equivalent of DMT to absolutely fuck my head up completely. as it turns out i had to do that later, on my own, and now here i am. the humanities should be a profoundly disquieting adventure, and also one that makes you believe the hype about literature.

okay, rant over.