Virtual book club on Joyce, Nietzsche, Rand, Bly… and "'who knows who' and what" else #bookclub #virtualbookclub #Nietzsche #Rand #Bly
I haven’t lacked for ideas but have rather lacked for time, prioritization (and my books from Europe) to articulate and initiate a beginning
I’ve been thinking for quite some time about adding a sort of “virtual book club“ to the already wide range of topics covered on this blog, newsletter, archive of ideas… I haven’t lacked for ideas but have rather lacked for time and prioritization to articulate and initiate a beginning:
BOOKS: Nietzsche’s everything—most obviously
BOOK: Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead—undoubtedly, importantly, and sarcastically
BOOKS: Robert Bly’s Where have all the parents gone and Sibling Society—most urgently 1
MOVIE: V for Vendetta2 because how could we avoid talking about a movie about a government that creates a weaponized virus and then distributes it to its own population to create a climate of fear while making a few politicians and rich people even more powerful and rich through the sales of quarantines, surveillance, vaccines and drugs
DOCUMENTARY: Zeitgeist 2007
DOCUMENTARY: Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media 3
oh yeah…. Six Pillars by Nathaniel Brandon—this is the best choice for our first book for the virtual book club
Tonight—presumably thankfully to the Google and YouTube algorithms which track my choice of breakfast and brands of toiletries—I was presented with a documentary4 on James Joyce’s famous book Ulysses, regarding which I could only comment as follows:
I am somewhere between amazed and bewildered by this documentary, most notably at minutes 15 and 40, but I think it’s the most brilliant documentary I’ve ever seen on any topic in my life
And I don’t think that I am so impressed simply because I’m relatively exhausted after a busy week that yesterday also included spending several hours cutting wood in freezing temperatures – but of course context always determines content.
For sure, I’ve been carrying that one around for a while:
Context always determines content; to look at content without context is to fool oneself into the selective illusion of understanding. Everything has to be understood—from the molecular to the social and political.
I supposed that I couldn’t very well start a book club without having any books.
I had been thinking about a virtual book club for several months, but at the time I initially thought of it, I was waiting for my books and clothes and furniture to arrive to the United States from Europe after having lived in Spain for almost 9 years. I supposed that I couldn’t very well start a book club without having any books. My “virtual library” of digital books had been stolen by Amazon when my SNAFUed account was canceled and somehow Amazon erased all of the ebooks I had purchased on their Kindle platform (they kept my money) as well as their Audible platform (they kept my money). Recently, the boxes have arrived, but I still haven’t found the books among those boxes—or at least not the books I’m looking for—specifically Reginster’s book The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism so that I could rightly finish part2 of this post on nihilism:
I had previously made a list of books that I’d found impressive; some of these books (and the ones enumerated at the start of this page) are worth revisiting and discussing.
The Joyce/Ulysses documentary is available at the following links:
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103013-000-A/100-years-of-ulysses/
Might you find interest in those books and videos, and/or do you have others that you think are paradigm-shifting and cloud-lifting and veil-piercing?
youtu.be/y12yhnkY0pg