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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3724 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I’m still on Hülsmann’s Abundance, Generosity and the State. Also going through Ogburn Jr.’s The Mysterious William Shakespeare, an Oxfordian tract. So far it has been a lot of interesting information well-presented, though occasionally I find his logic odd.

Still on a Lacan kick, now reading Jacques Lacan himself after finishing a primer on Freud and a clinical intro by Bruce Fink. I have some thoughts on my first forays into Lacan proper, as well as some on the Fink book (which Scott Alexander also read and reviewed).

Initially the recommendation was to absolutely avoid Ecrits, read supplementary material like Fink, and read Lacan's seminars starting at 11 and 7, then going back to 1. I tried 11 and it's a bit too hard to understand; too mired in previous work, I think. The recommendation stems from it being a turning point in his work, but I'd rather have the context to know what it is turning from.

I'm reading Lacan's first seminar now, which seems to ask more coherent questions. It is a direct offshoot from Freud and so far is commenting on Freud's writing directly, while throwing shade at other offshoots (ego psychology). The primary questions seem to be things like, what actually is the unconscious, what is the goal of analysis, what is the process of analysis, what is the position of the analyst, how should the analyst approach analysis...? These all seem to stem from the fact that Freud's actual methods are veiled and only communicated in a limited scope (i.e. what Freud actually wrote down). I'm still very early in the book, though.

I feel that I can actually grasp some of what Lacan is saying here, which is a nice change of pace. I'm sure that will change, but before this I wasn't sure there was a foundation to turn away from, so I'm feeling confident in my decision to divert from the suggested starting place and go chronologically.

A bit of commentary on the Fink book after finishing:

I feel like it was a good intro that avoided a lot of the roundabout references that permeate Lacanian commentary. At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks, it was perhaps too grounded, in the sense that the examples, case studies, and commentary by Fink were the biggest issues. The gist I have picked up from other third parties is that Lacan is all about abstracting and structuring Freudian analysis, moving away from the particulars in the abstract sense so that the actual particulars of any given case can be dealt with. Some of Fink's comments seemed closer to symptomizing than structuralizing, more cause -> effect proselytizing than observational.

In general it provides an overview of key concepts, and is a good jumping off point for anyone who is curious about Lacan. Extremely readable and engrossing at points. Very different from Lacan's own work, which is probably a big plus for some.

I never got around to actually reading Lacan, but the IEP's entry on him was stellar reading.

Just finished Nothing to Envy, about life in North Korea as told by defectors. It's remarkable how the Kim dynasty managed to keep things going despite such drastic mismanagement. The craziest example, I think, when it became necessary to use human feces as farm fertilizer - you're probably assuming they just had the sewage treatment plants compost it, or had feces composted wherever it was being collected previously, or something else sane and reasonable, but no! That is not the North Korean way! Instead, citizens were commanded to bring feces in themselves, with not only a quota to fill but an unreasonably high quota at that, such that feces-theft became an actual thing.

Just finished reading the Raven's Mark Trilogy. It was pretty good fantasy.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the last years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson. This all started because I recently met a California girl (woman) who looked to me very much like Sharon Tate. I told her this, which went over about as well as you'd expect. In any case I then did a deep dive and ended up with this book, which is not directly about Tate, but is quite well written and paints an interesting picture of the late 60s early 70s Hollywood. I also rewatched Chinatown, which is in my view a nearly perfect film, if such terms can be used.

I just finished the 4th Culture novel, "The State of the Art".

Easily the worst entry so far, and it's not close. It started with a couple of vignettes that shifted both tone and setting from the previous novels, and then the back half was back to a more typical entry.

It just wasn't interesting. Basically, yet another screed about how communism would work if it wasn't for those capitalist dirty tricks. How awful the earth would seem to an advanced, egalitarian race in a post-scarcity economy. Ian Bank's superiority complex barely shrouded through fiction. The only connection to other books was a one-character cameo.

Despite its shortness compared to the other entries, I'm frustrated because it seems like it was a waste of time. So far, the fifth book is starting off much better.

That’s my next one. Use of Weapons was great, as was Player, unsurprisingly. Phlebas didn’t do it for me. I still read Look to Windward out of order, though, and it was perhaps my favorite. So there’s hope.

I was actually planning to skip Excession after hearing the Mind-Mind interactions were better offscreen than as chatrooms. But I understand mileage may vary.

Question though - after UoW and Player, did Phlebas grow on you a little?

In particular, I think having the main character be an avowed enemy of the "main character" of the rest of the series is just such an excellent expository vantage point. The world was built around The Culture before you started seeing things from its point of view. It was a multi-hundred-page prologue.

I'm not going to read the spoiler because I'm 10% into Excession but... now I'm nervous. Damnit.

Don’t worry, it’s not a serious concern. More of an aesthetic preference.

I read Phlebas second, having heard Player was a better starting point. So the comparison was always going to be biased. But I’d say my problems with the book were more about structure than vantage.

It’s a series of set pieces. Some of them were pretty neat, but they really don’t go anywhere until the finale. In hindsight, it sort of reminds me of The Last Jedi, adding destinations more for visuals than for advancing the plot or characters. The characters live on top of the setting rather than in it. In contrast, the other novels have a better linkage between place and purpose.

I was stuck at the mall with my wife, so in between pulling out my credit card, I went on LibGen and downloaded the NYT #1 book of the twentyfirst century Elena Ferrante My Brilliant Friend.

While I disagreed with a lot of the list choices, very political and very effeminate, this one is literary gold. I see why it won.

Getting back into Kissinger's Diplomacy after taking a break from it to read Goethe’s Faust.

Kissinger is fairly critical of the containment policy of the Cold War. Committing to fight the expansion of the communist states everywhere meant that the ball was in the Soviets’ court to pick the most inconvenient places possible to start crises which America would be morally obligated to intervene in. The book is just about to start on the Vietnam war and what’s interesting is that the Soviets have not yet purposefully exploited this supposed weak point (he has given hints that Khrushchev was very good at creating difficult situations for the Americans but equally bad at finishing them, there’s an echo to an earlier chapter about Napoleon III here).

Kissinger repeatedly says that the Soviets are simply confused by America’s universal moral declarations and they refuse to take anything other than realpolitik seriously. Stalin gives lukewarm support to the Korean War not because it’s an inconvenient place for the US to defend but because he thinks it just won’t be a big deal. The Americans have said as much when discussing core strategic areas, yet when the war breaks out it becomes a place worth fighting for purely because America is bound by the implications of its stated moral principles.

The core investigation of the book seems to be about how Wilson caused Western leaders to question the old balance of power model in favour of a model based on universal declarations of rights, personal goodwill between leaders, collective security organisations and alliances concerned just as much with agreeable domestic institutions as military advantage. Despite the initial failures of the League of Nations and the misplaced trust in Stalin the Wilsonian style of diplomacy never really went away, and the next decades show Britain being won over by this vision (with Churchill being a solidly old-school exception), America learning hard lessons which temper its idealism and the Soviets being terribly confused at what America is actually willing to start a war over. Kissinger is very critical of the Wilsonian vision but he does give it one piece of high praise: to sustain the kind of long term commitment that fighting the Cold War required the American public needed an ideal which could motivate them.

tried reading Lovecraft, failed to start

What stopped you? Just not your thing? I really dug almost everything I read in the compendium I read back in high school.

maybe by attention span ruined and/or Lovecraft being tedious and boring, as I am being said. Honestly I find reading wikis about Lovecraft more rewarding

Picked up a random short book meant for a teenage audience about the conquest of the Incas. Mainly for language learning purposes but also the subject is just so insane. The “plot” of capture of Atahualpa is so infeasible that it feels like reading a book about the last season of game of thrones.

I just finished Jon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. I’ve bought three copies and I’m going to try to give them to the right people.

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