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 What Are You Reading Right Now?

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Hrodeberto

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PostSubject: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptySat Dec 13, 2014 6:14 pm

Your primary concentration, as we all probably have a myriad we'd like to consume at once.

I picked up a book last night that I found in a thrift store and aim to get through if not by the end of the weekend then by next week:
Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and The Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath.

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Cold Weasel

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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptySat Dec 27, 2014 2:13 am

The Psychotic Left by Kerry Bolton. cheap on Kindle. looks at leftism as the rationalizations of pathological personalities. some big names from Rousseau to Marx to Lenin and Trotsky, to the New Left figures like Abbie Hoffman. diagnoses them with narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders, sociopathy, etc. based on biographical info.

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"The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already." --Orwell, 1984
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyThu Aug 11, 2022 8:15 pm

What Are The Odds? From Crack Addict To CEO by Mike Lindell.
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyMon Sep 12, 2022 5:27 pm

Old Time Country Wisdom and Lore 1000s Of Traditional Skills For Simple Living by Jerry Mack Johnson

The Vampire LeStat by Anne Rice
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Satyr
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyMon Sep 12, 2022 6:11 pm

WendyDarling wrote:

The Vampire LeStat by Anne Rice
Let me know if it's any good.

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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyTue Sep 13, 2022 4:32 pm

Satyr wrote:
WendyDarling wrote:

The Vampire LeStat by Anne Rice
Let me know if it's any good.

Her writing style is captivating, however the subject matter swings from questionable to
sick and back again. Every definition of erotic is evident without graphic details.


This is a second reading, trying to draw inspiration from her writing style.
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyWed Oct 12, 2022 10:20 pm

The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice
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The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyThu Nov 17, 2022 12:43 pm

The 100 by Kass Morgan
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The 100 Day 21 by Kass Morgan
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The 100 Homecoming by Kass Morgan
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyMon Dec 19, 2022 11:50 pm

The 100 Rebellion by Kass Morgan

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
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Oswald



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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptySat Dec 31, 2022 11:22 am

Darstellung des Menschen in der älteren griechischen Kunst by Julius Lange.
It's a late XIXth c. text on the rupture between archaic and classical Greece as evidenced in sculpture. The gist of his thesis is that bodily torsion and assymetry, which start showing up regularly from the 6 c. BCE manifest a new conception of subjectivity peculiar to the Greek (and later, European) mind.
It suffers from the usual shortcomings of the period (evolutionism, historicism and residual positivism) but it is very wide in scope, comparing Greek sculpture with Oceanian, Mesoamerican, Subsaharan and Siberian carving, with many perceptive insights in those traditions too. The model of subjectivity ascribed to Classical Greece is of course a bit dated (a German cognate of 'liberal humanism') but Lange seems one of the first to suggest artistic styles might influenced the development of the mind, as much as the development of the mind influenced the formation of artistic styles.
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Satyr
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptySat Dec 31, 2022 1:01 pm

Interesting.
I'm inclined to emphasize how art reflects mind, which may, in turn, influence the masses from where the artists emerge.

I use the term "artificial" - contrasting to "natural" - to emphasize how man's interventions upon nature gradually reach a tipping point from where the interventions begin toi affect humanity more than the environments intervened upon.
This shift may be represented artistically - as I consider all technologies a form of art - as a shift from representing nature objectively, to representing man's reaction/response, guided by his subjective objective/ideals.

This is crucial in language - another art form.

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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyTue Jan 03, 2023 7:14 am

Satyr wrote:
Interesting.
I'm inclined to emphasize how art . . . man's interventions upon nature gradually reach a tipping point from where the interventions begin to affect humanity more than the environments intervened upon.
This shift may be represented artistically - as I consider all technologies a form of art - as a shift from representing nature objectively, to representing man's reaction/response, guided by his subjective objective/ideals.

In traditional 'classical' aesthetics (perhaps more prevalent among academic artists than among historians or archaelogists like Lange), good art was understood to reflect not so much the world (i.e. a particular body) as the 'idea' of the body, its Platonic form, so art is conceived as a limited, localised 'realisation' of the ideal (which exists objectively, and independently of the human mind). It transforms the world in the sense of redeeming it, bringing it back to what it is supposed to be. It 'expresses' the human or individual mind only insofar as man is the only creature able to consciously reach the world of Platonic forms. The idea of 'realism', that art should strive to represent the world as it actually is, is actually a fairly late invention: there are traces of it in Dutch and British art writing from the XVIIth c., and debatably we can see traces of it in the 'Norther Renaissance' (i.e. Dürer), but it really picks up only in the XIXth c.

What Lange (and a few others before him) points out is that the earliest art represented this 'ideal' in a very different manner from that of classical civilization :

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('The Venus of Arles', 1.c BCE Roman copy from Praxiteles: a typical 'classical' sculpture)

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(The MET's Kouros, c.a. 6 c. BCE: a typical 'archaic' sculpture)

To simplify a great deal: the Kouros is static, flat and rigid, whereas the Venus is in movement, in 3D space and fluid.
Previous art historians would have chalked up the difference to 'technical progress': the Kouros is like he is because the sculptor didn't know better. According to that logic, the Venus was different because Praxiteles had more skills, and the Accademia's David was different from the Venus because Michelangelo had more skills than Praxiteles, and so.
Alois Riegl and Lange instead argue that, quite aside from skills and technical questions, the static, flat and rigid style of archaic statue reflects a different mindset and different aspirations: the 'ideal' it represent is simply different from that which Praxiteles set out to capture. In a sense, we could say that the Platonic forms in the archaic period were monumental and immovable, whereas by the classical era they were in movement (obv. Plato himself would disagree lol). For Lange, this shift indicates a change in the human mind, basically its liberation from 'the chains of tradition': the classical individual is no longer bound to reproduce the world in which he was born, but recognize himself as capable to transform it.

I think, if you believe in Platonic forms, neither archaic nor classical art constituted an expression or reaction of man, they merely represented the ideas rather than the world. The idea of art as self-expression comes along with Romanticism (or perhaps the Renaissance in the case of 'geniuses', but that's stretching it). But it receives its canonical (and hysterical!) formulation with Expressionism, in the early XXth c., which happens to be somewhat influenced by Julius Lange: there's another German art historian named Wilhelm Worringer, who develops the distinction made by Lange between archaic and classical, but associate it with abstraction and empathy. His general thesis is picked up by people like Franz Marc and Kandinsky in the 1910s, who remix it a little and claim, basically, that access to the 'ideal' is achieved through introspection, through the expression of the hidden contents of the self. By that time, definitely, we have what you called a 'shift from representing nature objectively, to representing man's reaction/response', even though it still justifies itself by claiming that man's reaction has a privileged link with Platonic forms.
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Satyr
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyTue Jan 03, 2023 8:45 am

Existential fluidity is the hardes to artistically represent in the plastic arts - music can and this makes it the most abstract kind of art because of the nature of sound and how organisms evolved to process it, viz., the ear-drum vibrates translating it to neural pulses.
This I also an issue in language which employs verbs to represent fluidity, and metaphors, alluding to a visual reference.

Here are some examples of it in sculptures.
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The talent of the artist is obvious and necessary.
I consider it evidence of human mental evolution, starting from the rigid and moving towards the fluid - in music starting from the beat and moving towards melody.
Linguistically most minds are unable to make the leap from representation to the represented - it is like the mind fabricating a rigid statue unable to understand how it represents an unrigid, fluid existence.



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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyTue Jan 03, 2023 10:54 am

What an interesting choice of sculptures: not what I spontaneously would have associated with fluidity, actually, which goes to show how varied the senses of this word can be! (no wonder, tbh, as if 'architecture is frozen music', then sculpture must be pretty frozen too Laughing )
If you have the time, I'd love to hear what traits in each you find to capture fluidity.
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Satyr
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyTue Jan 03, 2023 11:11 am

The transparency of the veil, garment, as if it were flowing over the body - contrast between garment and flesh...the hand has a tension, as if it were captured while moving or readying to move, to act.

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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyTue Jan 03, 2023 12:02 pm

Satyr wrote:
The transparency of the veil, garment, as if it were flowing over the body - contrast between garment and flesh...the hand has a tension, as if it were captured while moving or readying to move, to act.

Cheers, I think I see it now: diagonal drapery gives it dynamism, the muscles and veins indicate movement as potential. I think your idea of tension is very interesting.
Spontaneously, what comes to my mind when I think of fluidity in sculpture, is projection or movement: and that's probably because, unlike you, I am unfamiliar with modern sculpture. Here are a couple of examples that springs to my mind, both rather 'baroque' examplars of agitated, late-antiquity composition:

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(The 'Toro Farnese' group, 2nd c. CE, Roman copy from a Hellenistic original attributed to Apollonius of Tralles)

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(Laocoön and His Sons, 1st c. CE, possibly a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original)
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PostSubject: Re: What Are You Reading Right Now? What Are You Reading Right Now? EmptyFri Jan 06, 2023 1:16 pm

Beautiful Darkness by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
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Beautiful Chaos by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
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Beautiful Redemption by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
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