It is difficult to see whether the radical contraposition of ‘civilization’ and ‘nature’ is more than an expression of the tensions of the ‘civilized’ psyche itself, of a specific imbalance within psychic life produced in the recent stage of Western civilization. At any rate, the psychic life of ‘primitive’ peoples is no less historically (i.e., socially) stamped than that of ‘civilized’ peoples, even if the former are scarcely aware of their own history. There is no zero point in the historicity of human development, just as there is none in the sociality, the social interdependence among people. In both ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ peoples, there are socially induced prohibitions and restrictions, together with their psychological counterparts, socially induced anxieties, pleasure and displeasure, distaste and delight. It is, therefore, at least not entirely clear what is meant when the former standard, that of so-called ‘primitives’, is contrasted simply as ‘natural’ to the historical-social standard of ‘civilized’ people. So far as the psychological functions of humans are concerned, natural and historical processes work indissolubly together.
(via grandejouissance)
Book covers aren’t dead in the Kindle age, we just need to refocus on function.
This is an essay for book lovers and designers curious about where the cover has been, where it’s going, and what the ethos of covers means for digital book design. It’s for those of us dissatisfied with thoughtlessly transferring print assets to digital and closing our eyes.
The cover as we know it really is — gasp — ‘dead.’ But it’s dead because the way we touch digital books is different than the way we touch physical books. And once you acknowledge that, useful corollaries emerge.
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest. We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought… There is always a little thought even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult.
You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.
(via sisyphean-revolt)
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offence, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill — he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offence, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.
Currently Reading: Out by Natsuo Kirino
Nothing in Japanese literature prepares us for the stark, tension-filled, plot-driven realism of Natsuo Kirino’s award-winning literary mystery Out. This mesmerizing novel tells the story of a brutal murder in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches strangles her abusive husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. The coolly intelligent Masako emerges as the plot’s ringleader, but quickly discovers that this killing is merely the beginning, as it leads to a terrifying foray into the violent underbelly of Japanese society. At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.
A gift from Brianna. I don’t usually read crime novels but I’m really enjoying it so far. :)
The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find… that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never traveled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.
(via doubtlr)
In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.
Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you—and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!
Existentialism is a Humanism
It was to correct common misconceptions about his thought that Sartre accepted an invitation to speak on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. The unstated objective of his lecture (“Existentialism Is a Humanism”) was to expound his philosophy as a form of “existentialism”, a term much bandied about at the time. Sartre asserted that existentialism was essentially a doctrine for philosophers, though, ironically, he was about to make it accessible to a general audience. The published text of his lecture quickly became one of the bibles of existentialism and made Sartre an international celebrity. The idea of freedom occupies the center of Sartre’s doctrine. Man, born into an empty, godless universe, is nothing to begin with. He creates his essence—his self, his being—through the choices he freely makes (‘existence precedes essence”). Were it not for the contingency of his death, he would never end. Choosing to be this or that is to affirm the value of what we choose. In choosing, therefore, we commit not only ourselves but all of mankind.
…If you, who adhere to this religion, have the same attitude toward yourselves that you have toward your fellow men; if you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you constantly try to prevent and forestall all possible distress way ahead of time; if you experience suffering and displeasure as evil, hateful, worthy of annihilation, and as a defect of existence, then it is clear that besides your religion of pity you also harbor another religion in your heart that is perhaps the mother of the religion of pity; the religion of comfortableness. How little you know of human happiness, you comfortable and benevolent people, for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together… .
Charles Bukowski on Censorship
In 1985, following a complaint from a local reader, staff at the Public Library in Nijmegen decided to remove Charles Bukowski’s book, Tales of Ordinary Madness, from their shelves whilst declaring it “very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups (including homosexuals).” In the following weeks, a local journalist by the name of Hans van den Broek wrote to Bukowski and asked for his opinion. It soon arrived. Bukowski’s brilliant response can be seen below. It currently hangs in the Open Dicht Bus, a mobile book store based — more often than not — in Eindhoven.
7-22-85
Dear Hans van den Broek:
Thank you for your letter telling me of the removal of one of my books from the Nijmegen library. And that it is accused of discrimination against black people, homosexuals and women. And that it is sadism because of the sadism.
The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.
If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because of these who I met were that. There are many “bads”—bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even “bad” white males. Only when you write about “bad” white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are “good” blacks, “good” homosexuals and “good” women?
In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of “sadism” it is because it exists, I didn’t invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives. I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds. In my writing I do not always agree with what occurs, nor do I linger in the mud for the sheer sake of it. Also, it is curious that the people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the “light” and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar.
Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.
I am not dismayed that one of my books has been hunted down and dislodged from the shelves of a local library. In a sense, I am honored that I have written something that has awakened these from their non-ponderous depths. But I am hurt, yes, when somebody else’s book is censored, for that book, usually is a great book and there are few of those, and throughout the ages that type of book has often generated into a classic, and what was once thought shocking and immoral is now required reading at many of our universities.
I am not saying that my book is one of those, but I am saying that in our time, at this moment when any moment may be the last for many of us, it’s damned galling and impossibly sad that we still have among us the small, bitter people, the witch-hunters and the declaimers against reality. Yet, these too belong with us, they are part of the whole, and if I haven’t written about them, I should, maybe have here, and that’s enough.
May we all get better together,
Yrs,(Signed)
Charles Bukowski
It is precisely that requirement of shared worship that has been the principal source of suffering for individual man and the human race since the beginning of history. In their efforts to impose universal worship, men have unsheathed their swords and killed one another. They have invented gods and challenged each other: “Discard your gods and worship mine or I will destroy both your gods and you!
![Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction
The American Ambassador’s residence in Prague was built in the late nineteen-twenties by Otto Petschek. The Petscheks were among the wealthiest families in Czechoslovakia, and the mansion was lavish: long curving corridors, ornate bathrooms, a swimming pool in the basement. The Petscheks were also German-speaking Jews, wise enough to foresee the horrors that awaited them: they left Prague in 1938. When the Germans occupied the city in 1939, Nazi officers, with their unerring instinct for such things, seized the huge home, and made baleful use of it until the end of the war.
As with many buildings in Europe, the Petschek villa is scored and crossed, like the hide of a whale, with the history of its accidents. Last year, I spent some time in the house as a guest—the current Ambassador’s family and my family once shared an apartment building in Washington, D.C., and we became friends. In Prague, my friend showed me something I will not forget: he got me to lie on my back and peer at the underside of some piece of ambassadorial furniture. There, on the naked wood, was a faded Nazi stamp, with swastika and eagle; and next to it, quietly triumphant in its very functionality, was a bar-code strip, proclaiming the American government’s present ownership.
This is one of those “telling details” which are also loudly allegorical facts: it would be hard to imagine a novelist inventing anything better, and equally hard to imagine the historian who would not covet this perfect concrete emblem. To what extent is the useful vitality of that detail inseparable from its historical reality? If a novelist invented it, would it be somehow worth less—morally speaking, aesthetically speaking—than if a historian authenticated it? I take a special pleasure in recording its actuality, but I can imagine relishing it in a novel, feeling that the writer had created a new reality—while being aware, of course, that an invented reality is not identical with an actual reality. The French writer and academic Laurent Binet, to judge from his novel “HHhH” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Sam Taylor), is sure of his answer: invented facts—invented characters, for that matter—have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally. “This is what I think,” he writes. “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.” There are at least two difficulties with this purism. First, it would abolish most fiction; second, Binet has written a historical novel of sorts, a book that, if not quite full of invented details, certainly uses invention. That Binet’s solution seems obvious is testament to the brilliant ease and fluency of his book: his historical novel makes use of novelistic invention while apologizing for doing so. Binet has his cake and eats it, and gets to cry over the spilt crumbs, too.
“HHhH” is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” As Binet puts it, Heydrich is not the protagonist of this book but its target; almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, “and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there—at the center of everything.” “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” people would say: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.” (Thus “HHhH.”) […] In some respects, “HHhH” is a conventional historical novel about the Europe of the nineteen-thirties and early forties. As we witness Heydrich’s rise in the Nazi system, and the simultaneous preparation of Gabčík and Kubiš in England, we move through the familiar stations of the period—Hitler’s seizing of power, in 1933; the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, in March, 1939; Chamberlain’s appeasement; Wannsee; and so on. Paragraphs begin with cheap exclamations like “A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss,” or end with duff sentences like “It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.” But Binet’s novel has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction. He has threaded his novel with a contemporary story, which is the drama of the book’s own making.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ad247EIN1r42dfro1_r2_1280.jpg)
Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction
The American Ambassador’s residence in Prague was built in the late nineteen-twenties by Otto Petschek. The Petscheks were among the wealthiest families in Czechoslovakia, and the mansion was lavish: long curving corridors, ornate bathrooms, a swimming pool in the basement. The Petscheks were also German-speaking Jews, wise enough to foresee the horrors that awaited them: they left Prague in 1938. When the Germans occupied the city in 1939, Nazi officers, with their unerring instinct for such things, seized the huge home, and made baleful use of it until the end of the war.
As with many buildings in Europe, the Petschek villa is scored and crossed, like the hide of a whale, with the history of its accidents. Last year, I spent some time in the house as a guest—the current Ambassador’s family and my family once shared an apartment building in Washington, D.C., and we became friends. In Prague, my friend showed me something I will not forget: he got me to lie on my back and peer at the underside of some piece of ambassadorial furniture. There, on the naked wood, was a faded Nazi stamp, with swastika and eagle; and next to it, quietly triumphant in its very functionality, was a bar-code strip, proclaiming the American government’s present ownership.
This is one of those “telling details” which are also loudly allegorical facts: it would be hard to imagine a novelist inventing anything better, and equally hard to imagine the historian who would not covet this perfect concrete emblem. To what extent is the useful vitality of that detail inseparable from its historical reality? If a novelist invented it, would it be somehow worth less—morally speaking, aesthetically speaking—than if a historian authenticated it? I take a special pleasure in recording its actuality, but I can imagine relishing it in a novel, feeling that the writer had created a new reality—while being aware, of course, that an invented reality is not identical with an actual reality. The French writer and academic Laurent Binet, to judge from his novel “HHhH” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Sam Taylor), is sure of his answer: invented facts—invented characters, for that matter—have no place in historical fiction, and weaken it both aesthetically and morally. “This is what I think,” he writes. “Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.” There are at least two difficulties with this purism. First, it would abolish most fiction; second, Binet has written a historical novel of sorts, a book that, if not quite full of invented details, certainly uses invention. That Binet’s solution seems obvious is testament to the brilliant ease and fluency of his book: his historical novel makes use of novelistic invention while apologizing for doing so. Binet has his cake and eats it, and gets to cry over the spilt crumbs, too.
“HHhH” is about the rise and fall of Reinhard Heydrich, the monster whom even Hitler called “the man with the iron heart.” As Binet puts it, Heydrich is not the protagonist of this book but its target; almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, “and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there—at the center of everything.” “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” people would say: “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.” (Thus “HHhH.”) […] In some respects, “HHhH” is a conventional historical novel about the Europe of the nineteen-thirties and early forties. As we witness Heydrich’s rise in the Nazi system, and the simultaneous preparation of Gabčík and Kubiš in England, we move through the familiar stations of the period—Hitler’s seizing of power, in 1933; the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, in March, 1939; Chamberlain’s appeasement; Wannsee; and so on. Paragraphs begin with cheap exclamations like “A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss,” or end with duff sentences like “It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.” But Binet’s novel has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction. He has threaded his novel with a contemporary story, which is the drama of the book’s own making.
There is the lurking suspicion that the most attractive feature of mind stuff is its promise of being so mysterious that it keeps science at bay forever. This fundamentally unscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying feature, and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs.It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up.
Hello. I'm Kevin. I'm French and I currently live in Montreal where I study Business and Environmental Science at Concordia University. You'll find here some of the things that I read and find interesting. 
