(Part 3) Reddit mentions: The best cultural criticism books

I have a mild case of ADD, so I can kinda empathize with you. I would reccomend books by Eric Hoffer. They are nonfiction, but still very fascinating. You can pretty much pick up his books and start on any sentence and enjoy his writing.

I would recommend you start with Reflections on the Human Condition or The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, although Reflections on the Human condition is less structured and more ADD friendly.

The advantage to his books is you don't have to finish them. You read what you want and enjoy it. Daydreaming inspired by his books is something I would encourage.

Hey there!

There are some books referenced in HeathenTalk that are not included, or are included as supplementary reading, in the reading list here. I'm early on in the podcast--I am just behind you, listening to the LGBT* episode--and just ordered A Piece of Horse Liver as it was mentioned in the podcast and sounded interesting. So you might keep a list running as you listen to check out those books/sources later and see if they would be of interest.

There are a couple places you can look for other heathens in your area--on the side bar there is a "Members Location" section, and some of the major heathen organizations in the US have regional breakdowns of groups affiliated with them. I'm not going to link to them here, but a little online searching will bring them up.

I'll leave the wight gift cycle to another user who is more familiar with it--currently I am more focused on ancestor veneration, though I give to the wights as well.

There is absolutely precedent for keeping an ancestral altar in your home. You may remember in the N00bcast (I believe), u/thatsnotgneiss mentioned her ancestor altar being within eye level during the broadcast. It's absolutely encouraged to remember them and offer them gifts, such as food or a drink they enjoyed in life. You can also honor them by telling their stories during sumbel and the like.

Lord Byron:

There are notable examples of the Byronic hero in the verse tale The Giaour, also notable for one of the first descriptions of vampirism in English literature, and the drama Manfred. Beppo is a short humorous later work that in tone and form could be considered a prototype for his masterpiece Don Juan. I also recommend the end of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, starting from Canto IV's stanza CLXXV, which is some of his best poetry.

As for a specific physical book, I like this volume because it has his complete works in a compact form, with Byron's original footnotes. The big drawback is that uses two column formatting and small print to cram everything in. The Oxford World's Classics volume Lord Byron: The Major Works looks like a good selection, that includes all the pieces I recommended, and it will be more readable because it uses one column and larger print.

I agree with triliana that you should pay for a book, like RS MacGregor's Outline of Hindi Grammar. Link to Amazon, but you can probably find it for half the price on AbeBooks or ALibris.

Rupert Snell's Teach Yourself Hindi Dictionary is absolutely indispensable for anyone who wants conversational Hindi -- MacGregor's Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary is far more useful but won't get you anywhere in beginner's Hindi, esp if you can't read Devanagari. Snell's dictionary begins with a very brief introduction to Hindi grammar, which is not comprehensive but is better than no grammar at all.

Speaking of Snell...he is the director of the Hindi-Urdu Flagship at UT-Austin. NO ONE trying to learn Hindi should be without the resources they put online.

As I said, McGregor's Outline of Hindi Grammar is best, but HUF has PDF links for several excellent older textbooks, completely and legally for free.

In terms of anthologies, my best luck so far has been with "The Best American Poetry [year]" I also love the "Best New Poets of [year]" series.

They are absolutely amazing.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-American-Poetry-2013/dp/1476708134


http://www.amazon.com/Best-New-Poets-2011-Emerging/dp/0976629666

I've used the same site for translations for all of my writeups (Mostow). Sometimes I've used Porter's in my Poem of the Day comments if I didn't like how Mostow interpreted them, but yeah never for these ones. The meanings are usually close enough and I don't usually go into great depth explaining the poems beyond face value in these writeups.

I'm actually not 100% sure what the translations are used in the show, but I'm fairly certain that the CR translations are styled to preserve the "same syllables". I believe /u/walking_the_way mentioned that.

Generally, when looking at these poems, I (and /u/combo33) have been going with dedicated professional translations (Mostow, Porter, MacMillan).

Mostow's book can be found here and all the translations are available for free here, if you're curious about some other poems.

Edit: Porter's is here. I think Combo33 has a physical copy of MacMillan's.

The Evolving Self by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had a great impact on how I see the world and my life.

Flesh in the Age of Reason by Roy Porter. A great overview of the evolution of philosophy since the beginning of the Enlightenment. A surprisingly engaging, easy read.

And, I can't believe no one has said this yet - How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It's a classic for a reason, and nowhere near as Machiavellian as it sounds :P

>And presumably you have a least some piece of evidence to back up the idea that the Jews understood the Sumerian creation myth as fiction. Can I see it?

Are you asking me if I personally have evidence of this? No, I don't. My information is second hand from books like this or this. From my understanding all of the cultures in the Middle East retold the myths around them in the context of their own culture. Essentially that these shared myths shaped the elements of their religions from their ceremonies to their ethics.

>Do you think the Romans didn't actually believe in their Gods

you can believe in gods without believing those stories are literal truth. It's not an either/or situation.

>since they were retellings of the Greek myths in the context of the Roman people?

You do realize that the Romans appropriated the religions of the people they conquered? Greece wasn't special in this regard. Also Roman religion was tied to the functions of the Roman government.

>Explain the "function" of a nauseating and detailed genealogy if it is not an actual genealogy.

It establishes the divine right of the Israel kings. It also establishes the origins of the Jewish people through connections with their mythological father.

Personally, I think you're trying too hard. Only for the most deluded fundies, religion does not function as a literal truth. Religion is a lot more than what it says about how the world works. They are often systems of ethics, ceremony, and culture as well and it does a disservice to treat creation myths as the same as a science textbook. It's far more comparable to a parable philosophical text thingermajig.

The Penguin version is not bad by any means and Declan Kiberd's introduction is excellent as well (I highly recommend his book Ulysses and Us).

But the best edition by far is the Oxford World's Classics edition. Johnson's intro and annotations are brilliant.

If you're ordering it from the US it might be easier to get it from the Book Depository

Coworker: I immediately thought she should get a really graphic Batman poster. You could even get it framed if you have enough left over. Here are some from Etsy: 1, 2, 3, 4, this one's a little different.. but it's video game related so.. here! 5
____

Boss: A nice photography book would probably be a safe bet: 1, 2, 3, 4, last one is $5 over budget, but 5
__

Professor: I'm sorry I don't have more original ideas for him but here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
__

GOOD LUCK!!

Everything you describe are the modern political movements of Wahhabism and Salfism, funded almost entirely by Saudi Arabia in an attempt to spread their influence throughout the Islamic world. The ideology they espouse is fascistic and repulsive, but it has very little connection to the actual history of Islam. In fact, they were founded on the premise of sweeping away Islam's history and starting over. One of the first things the Wahhabis did when they took Mecca: destroy the actual tomb of the Prophet.


The people burning people alive count for less than 1 percent of the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. You cannot use the present to make assumptions about history, that's absurd. If you focus on the current state of Baghdad, and make the assumption that it's always been like that, you never learn about the fact that, for a few centuries, it was the richest city in the world and home to a flourishing intellectual culture that hosted people from as far away as China. You never learn about the Islamic golden age, or the libraries of Muslim Spain which collectively held millions of books while the royal library of Paris contained a grand total of 92.

You never learn a damn thing.

And as far as what it does that makes people's lives better? Including producing some of the best poetry ever, written, by humans, Islam has a long tradition of feeding and caring for the poor by paying out Zakat. The real world examples of this far outweigh any violence done in the name of religion.

People misquote Marx on this all the time when they say "religion is the opium of the masses." The full quote is: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"

The book Scots: The Mither Tongue by Billy Kay is a favourite of mine for information on the history,politics and current situation of the Scots language. As for learning the language there are books such as this and grammar guides such as this. There is also the Dictionary of the Scots Language which is an amazingly useful resource for native and learner alike found here. As for the issue of listening to Scots speakers so you can understand pronunciation i have no suggestion however i will have a search and contact you if i find a good solution to this. When brushing up on my own Scots i always found copying passages from English into Scots as being useful for both increasing vocabulary but also making the word choice more natural when i was using it in daily life, i myself ended up completing a good chunk of the KJV in Scots. While an endeavour like the KJV is by no means recommended by me, smaller passages from books/newspapers/back of beans tins copied into Scots daily can be useful practice.

Good question. At the time it was written it was heavily criticized for being wicked and an attack on morality. Which is interesting because not too much happens throughout the story that could be considered outright wicked or amoral and the heart of the story is basically a morality tale.

For a really interesting look at the story find a book titled "Is Heathcliff A Murderer?" http://www.amazon.com/Is-Heathcliff-Murderer-Nineteenth-Century-Classics/dp/019282516X.

The writer examines several stories and considers what it is that makes them interesting or what has been left unsaid that feeds the narrative. Great stuff. TPODG is examined in one of the chapters and the reasons the author finds to support his take on why the story has the effect it does/did is really interesting.

So... I'd say yes, I believe TPODG is indeed a horror story, though certainly not what you'd expect, and it's definitely not a pulp style horror like 'Murders In The Rue Morgue' or a continual mood piece like 'Mask of the Red Death'... It's a wierd little tale, slowly building to the final moment of fantastic horror, which is lovely.

As for the films, I haven't seen any of them so I can't comment on that part.

Read all her tweets and watch some of her interviews on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOS43zILE8w), she is a great historian that has been targeted by the Indian Hindu right wing for supporting the truth. She must be given a high platform to speak the truth louder and wider.

Fluent in Sanskrit and knowledgable in Persian, she is the author of Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit in the Mughal Court, Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth and Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King - Please purchase a copy to read, and share it with everyone who's interested. She MUST be invited to speak in Pakistan and the government must promote her.

To build on that, the Epic of Askia Muhammad (the great king of Songhay, a couple centuries later) is now published in translation as well and is worth a read. If you have a chance to read one edition of Sundiata go for Son-Jara which has different tellings and annotations than Niane's now-half-century-old version. The djelis who convey the story change and highlight different elements depending on the audience, the intended lesson of the telling, and other issues that make it into a useable history. When we teach it, we also view Dani Kouyaté's Keita: L'Heritage du Griot and have the relevant sections of Ibn Battuta's visit to Suleiman ca. 1350 to talk about what the Epic says to us, what it means in the context of an eclectically Islamic society, why it's told and when--basically what the "reality" of the myth really entails. I'd second also the recommendation to explore folklore courses generally--even beyond Africa--but of course that is where my heart is as well.

It’s a great little book, Mark Atherton is a brilliant scholar of Old English (and his work on Tolkien is equally good, if you’re a fan). It starts very easy, then works up through real texts and cultural context. The same is true of Hough & Corbett’s Beginning Old English– lots of original sections of prose and poetry, starting with basics and building enjoyment alongside the language.

If you want something that’s more academic from the start, I’d recommend Peter Baker’s Introduction, which contains a good grounding in grammar more generally, or the more linguistics-based one by the late Richard Hogg. The best overall textbook is undeniably Mitchell & Robinson’s Guide – but it is dense and (despite what the authors claim) not easy to use in independent study. Their sections on syntax are vast and comprehensive, however, so that might be what you’re looking for.

I highly recommend any collections illustrated by Ivan Bilibin, like this Russian Fairy Tales. The stories are pretty well-known, so it should give you the introduction you're looking for, plus the art is really magnificent. There are also collections like this that have a ton of stories in them. If you want some sort of history/analysis/criticism to go with it, you could take a look at this one about the Russian folktale or this one about Baba Yaga specifically.

Due at least in part to his Socratic methodological presuppositions and consequent rhetorical strategies, Kierkegaard frequently presents his philosophical ideas in literary form. Accordingly, when reading his work it is unwise to sharply separate the two.

While Repetition is not among Kierkegaard’s most influential works, neither is it among his least influential. It was certainly a huge influence on Deleuze’s 1968 Différence et Répétition, and has elicited comparisons of Kierkegaard’s category to Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence (see, e.g., Kellenberger 1997). For a book length treatment, see especially Eriksen 2000.

Repetition is, thematically and in terms of publication date, a companion volume to Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard’s fictive dialectician-humorist Johannes Climacus treats them together in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (see Hongs’ trans., pp. 261-68). See also Mark Taylor’s “Ordeal and Repetition in Kierkegaard’s Treatment of Abraham and Job” in Connell and Evans, eds. 1992. And yes, pseudonymity is important, concerning which see the following posts:

Kierkegaard and His Pseudonyms—Part I

Kierkegaard and His Pseudonyms—Part II

Kierkegaard and His Pseudonyms—Part III

A “Who’s Who” of Kierkegaard’s Formidable Army of Pseudonyms

On the Existential Labyrinth of Kierkegaardian Pseudonymity

The Intentional Unreliability of the Kierkegaardian Pseudonyms

In short, Kierkegaard is not Constantius, nor is he the Young Man. (The supplement in the Hongs’ translation has some portions from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers that help greatly clarify Kierkegaard’s own understanding of repetition.)

There really isn't a papertrail for Marlowe - no library, no manuscripts (produce one and I will swoon) and no extant letters. This is not really all that uncommon - the loss of material is one of the biggest impediments to study, and it is hardly surprising considering the length of time which has elapsed. It is certainly not suspicious.

De Vere has far more surviving material by virtue of being an aristocrat, not by virtue of having written Shakespeare's work (things are much more easily kept when you have a large ancestral home).

As for pronunciation - David Crystal has done some really quite interesting work on 'restoring' Shakespeare's accent to his work, I thoroughly recommend you take a look.

I don't find anonymity to be particularly surprising for this period - authorship is not usually the first concern of the early modern reader, unless the author had become known 'in real life' so to speak. Broad examination of frontispieces to printed plays in this period suggests that information like the acting company or theatre where the play was performed took precedence over the author's name in many cases. For example, the first edition of Marlowe's Tamburlaine has no author identified. Especially considering that it is unlikely that the writer themselves who brought the work to print, anonymity is almost expected.

Also: travel writing was totally a thing in early modern England.

I recommend Magick (or Book 4) reminded me of Wilson's writing style even. very accessible.

If you want more of his crazy cool ideas and poetry I recommend Book of Lies

Also this website has everything

He covers so many diverse topics everything is worh checking out!

Book 4 by Aleister Crowley

The Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley

The Vision and the Voice by Aleister Crowley

Liber 777 by Aleister Crowley

The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley

Gems From the Equinox by Aleister Crowley and Israel Regardie

The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order by Israel Regardie

The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic by Israel Regardie

The Goat Foot God by Dion Fortune

The Sea Priestess by Dion Fortune

The Winged Bull by Dion Fortune

Moon Magic by Dion Fortune

Zanoni by Edward Bulwer Lytton

The Golden Ass by Apuleius

The Dream of Scipio by Cicero

Pistis Sophia by G.R.S. Mead

Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians of the 16th and 17th Centuries by "a Brother of the Fraternity"

The Golden Bough by Sir George Frazer

The Voice of the Silence by H.P. Blavatsky

The Kybalion by "Three Initiates"

The Corpus Hermeticum by Hermes Trismegistus

The Book of Abramelin

The Three Magical Books of Solomon

or if you want to kick it up a notch on the occult ladder, may I recommend..

http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Psychology-Brain-Software-Programs/dp/1561840718/

http://www.amazon.com/Not-Two-Peace-Expanded-3rd-Samraj/dp/1570972621/

http://www.amazon.com/Codex-Seraphinianus-Luigi-Serafini/dp/0847842134/

and, goes without saying really,

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Lies-Aleister-Crowley/dp/0877285160/

Burn after reading.