Read a lot. A LOT. To start, at least like five poems for every one you read. Obviously this is an arbitrary number, but it is important to read a lot of poetry when you're getting started, because poetry is a very different beast from prose, especially the type of popular fiction that most general readers are familiar with. It requires a lot more attention paid to what's happening even at the word level, as ambiguity and multiple meanings are important to poetry.

 

There are numerous very good resources online and free:
Poetry 180.

Poetry Foundation is a tremendous resource that has tonnnnnns of poems organized by theme, occasion, author etc.

Poets.org is also wonderful.

Poem Hunter is a great resource once you have found poets you think you'd like to read more of—but I have noticed small typographical errors in some of their poems when comparing them to the poems actually in collections, though not that often.


New Pages is a resource that can help you browse publications that are currently publishing, read reviews and interviews. It won't be as important right away, but once you get a decent feel for poetry, and especially once you're writing what you consider polished poems it's a great place to research possible markets for your work (please, please don't just send out to random or big name magazines without researching first. Most magazines have an aesthetic of some sort, so many poems simply don't fit at an individual magazine, and submitting it will only result in clogging the slush pile (unsolicited submissions) and wasting your (and the editor's) time. They can also help you find online magazines where you can read current writing for free. There are hundreds of them, of greatly varying content.

 

Now, by saying read a ton of poems doesn't mean don't write. Do. Especially when you're inspired by something a poem you've read has done. Try it yourself. I highly recommend keeping a writer's notebook (I have actual physical ones, as well as a google drive file for snippets and interesting tidbits I've found that I want to use in a piece sometime).


Time for my little plug here. I run a blog where I post writing exercises/writing prompts every day called Notebooking Daily. The point is to spend some time every day possible actually writing, and by starting with very specific directions it helps jumpstart the creative process even if you don't have anything in particular that you are inspired to write. On my sidebar I have a quote from David Kirby that I love:

>I’d have the young poets maintain a stockpile of linguistic bits: stories, weird words, snatches of conversation they’d overheard, lines from movies they’d seen or books they’d read. Most young poets will say something like, “Well, I have to write a poem now. Let’s see; what can I write about?” And then they end up writing about their own experiences, and, let’s face it, we all have the same experiences. So what all poets need is a savings account they can raid from time to time.

*

If you like the blog please spread the word. There aren't ads or anything on there right now, I'm just doing it as a sort of public service because I think writers can use all the support and opportunity they can get. And I really enjoy writing, haha.

 

/r/writingprompts is another good resource to use. It's quite an active sub and helps you write when not necessarily otherwise inspired. Some of the topics are extremely specific, while others are broad, and open for interpretation.

/r/passtheparagraph is a fun collaborative writing sub where you join other redditors and piece together a story or poem one paragraph or a few lines at a time. This is a great place when you don't want to write a full piece, but feel like writing.

/r/ocpoetry is a good place for beginning poets to publish, but be sure to take a look at the reddit TOS (especially the 'your content' part). But it will likely be some time before your pieces are in any shape that this will be an issue.

 

I hope the links and words are of some service. I can offer some critiques when I have the time, but I have no idea when that is usually, but if you have something specific you need an opinion or advice on you can message me and I'll do my best to get back to you in a timely fashion. Best of luck on your path! And I do highly recommend Poetry 180 to new writers, the poems are all quite accessible but not silly or light verse. Garrison Keillor's Good Poems is also a great resource, and you can buy it used for under $0.40. I found the poem I had read at my wedding in that book—shout out to Steve Scafidi!

I'm not a Faulkner guy, but I love Joyce and posts like yours pop up on Reddit from time to time. First, congrats on making the effort. The world is full of sissies who are too chickenshit to ever make it past the easy stuff. Second, here's my advice on Ulysses. Have a ball!

Everyone should read Ulysses at some point in their life. It's a book unlike any other, a book that knocks you out of your comfort zone. A book that makes your brain strain like you're reaching for something on a high shelf. And it's really, really funny. I've read it a couple of times and here's my advice:

Step 1) RELAX. You're going to miss things. It's okay. Some things are worth missing, some things are boring, some things are references that don't make any sense in today's world, so who cares? Joyce didn't want people to puzzle out his book like the answers to an exam, he wanted to present a slice of life in all its freaky majesty and stupidity. Keep looking up at the stars, not down at your feet.

Step 2) Like a shark, keep moving forward. Reading this book is like trying to drink a waterfall. The point is the overall impression, not so much the individual details. Just keep pushing ahead, don't sit there with a magnifying glass trying to appreciate every single word. Joyce himself said he put in a shit ton of puzzles and tricks and things that don't make sense for literary critics and scholars, just to mess with their heads, so don't get hung up on them.

Step 3) There are no such thing as spoilers. Seriously. Buy yourself the Seidman Annotations. These are your new best friends. The introduction to each chapter will get you oriented, and if you get hung up on a phrase, a detail, a bit of wordplay, they're like the board you stick under the wheels of your jeep when it's stuck in the mud.

Step 4) Remember that Joyce wasn't living in Dublin when he wrote this. He hadn't lived there in a long time. So what Ulysses is to some extent is his attempt to rebuild Dublin in his mind, recreating the sights and smells and mind set and beliefs and feelings and streets and people he remembered, but doing it in an impressionistic way. What the impressionists and modernists did for painting, Joyce is doing for books. That's why it reads like he wrote it on drugs. Keep this in mind, the way you keep the north star in mind when you're navigating a ship (which I'm sure you do a lot, right?). This is why the book is "important," because it's an amazing act of sustained imagination. The same way that Superman has the Kryptonian city of Kandor trapped in a bottle, Joyce has one day in Dublin in 1904 trapped in a book.

Step 5) It's funny. It's really funny. You just have to rewire your brain a little to get the jokes. Joyce always thought of himself as someone who was writing, primarily, a comedy. He's sending up the epic form by using the structure of The Odyssey to talk about people going to the bathroom, and masturbating, and getting drunk and making idiots out of themselves. But by doing this, he's not only elevating everyday life to the level of an epic but he's lowering the epic to the level of everyday life. But also: fart jokes. Everywhere.

Step 6) It's okay to skip. Even the biggest Joyce scholars in the world agree: some chapters in Ulysses suck. Here's my breakdown of the book, chapter by chapter. I'm using the chapter names that Joyce gave the book in another document, not the chapter titles that are in the book:

1- TELEMACHUS - come on, it's the first chapter. You've gotta read it. It's basically two roommates squabbling over money.

2 - NESTOR - a bit of a bore but also relatively short

3 - PROTEUS - this is the first long, boring, skimmable chapter. If you're deep on Joyce it's very "important" but it's also pretty impenetrable.

4 - CALYPSO - now we're in Leopold Bloom's part of the book and this is one of the three most famous chapters in ULYSSES (the other two are "Circe" and "Penelope")

5 - THE LOTUS EATERS - fine chapter, a bit dense, but readable

6 - HADES - one of the best in the book in my opinion, just totally Irish and death obsessed and there's even some plot!

7 - AEOLUS - from this chapter forward to "Cyclops" you're in a dense, unforgiving part of the book. I recommend breezing through these chapters and keep up with what's going on with the annotations.

8 - LAESTRYGONIANS - not so bad, but tough stuff.

9 - SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS - ouch. Even Joyce scholars think this one's like getting hit in the head with a brick. Lots of academic nattering about Shakespeare.

10 - THE WANDERING ROCKS - a neat trick (19 bits, told from around a dozen points of view) but otherwise it's really just a walk around Dublin

11 - THE SIRENS - a sweet, lovely chapter but it's all pretty wordplay

12 - CYCLOPS - alert! alert! The least loved and worst chapter in the book. No one can read and understand this one. Fortunately, it's the end of the worst section of Ulysses.

13 - NAUSICAA - a really perverted, really dense, very funny chapter.

14 - OXEN OF THE SUN - scholars love this chapter and it is fun, but don't take it too seriously. The point is to trace the history of the English language from early speech to 20th Century speech in one chapter. It's very complex and kind of unrewarding, which makes it a bit like "Cyclops" but not nearly so bad.

15 - CIRCE - essential

16, 17, 18 - EUMAEUS, ITHACA, PENELOPE - the last three chapters, and completely lovely, moving and awesome.

So my recommendation is to read about it as you read it so you can know what's going on, and save your strength for the better chapters, while avoiding getting hung up on chapters like AEOLUS (which is a bunch of hot air, like its namesake) PROTEUS and CYCLOPS. Also, this is one of the few novels you can read in almost any order and enjoy. If you just want the highlights, I recommend the following order:

• TELEMACHUS
  
  
• CALYPSO
  
  
• HADES
  
  
• NAUSICAA
  
  
• CIRCE
  
  
• EUMAEUS
  
  
• ITHACA
  
  
• PENELOPE
  
  Then you can go back and read the tougher chapters however you like.

Having read some of the comments below here are some TV and book suggestions if you're interested in exploring some of Mr. Fry's work.

TV

A Bit of Fry and Laurie a sketch comedy show he did with his friend Hugh Laurie (Dr. House on TV's House. Yes, he's English.)

Jeeves and Wooster Television adaptations of P.G. Wodehouse books. (Wodehouse is definitely worth reading.)

Kingdom A typical quaint village TV show that's not particularly exceptional but is entertaining (if you like British TV).

Stephen Fry in America A really great series in which Mr. Fry drives through the United States in a London style cab meeting locals and making observations.

Also worth seeing: Last Chance To See and Black Adder.

BOOKS

The Liar I recommend this if you like clever writing and unusual stories but I read it well over 10 years ago and can't sum up the plot.

Hippopotamus An odd and humorous tale of a not exactly friendly middle aged man who is asked by an old friend to investigate some unusual goings on at a country estate.

Revenge A clever retelling of a classic story. (I won't name the classic as I wasn't aware it was a retelling until a ways into the book I realized the plot was similar to the classic. So, if you're interested in making your own discovery skip the jacket notes and site reviews.)

Moab Is My Washpot The first of Mr. Fry's autobiographies, this one covers his childhood and teen years. He's completely honest about growing up gay and also about the less than ideal fellow he was.

The Fry Chronicles Mr. Fry's second autobiography which covers his college years and the beginning of his professional career.

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within A surprisingly interesting and informative book about writing poetry.

INTERNET

The New Adventures of Mr. Stephen Fry Mr. Fry's website.

Stephen Fry on Twitter

Stephen Fry on Tumblr

And for something really interesting and easy to access, watch (or listen to) a video free-form talk he did for a magazine or website. He makes some great observations and points about modern times, life in general, and how to be a happy and decent person.

Disclaimer:

I enjoy thinking about these kinds of things as well, so I will offer some answers and ask some of my own questions. /r/Philosophy might be a better place to start a conversation if you are looking for discussion rather than debate. I don’t see any blatant fallacies in your original post... it would take a more formally structured argument for them to become apparent. If you want to give that a shot, I am more than willing, but it is a bit more relaxing to engage in this conversational style. A lot of what we have been talking about ultimately comes down to what we mean by ‘truth’, which is a fairly deep question, and is worthy of approaching from a variety of different angles.

An answer to your original post:

In my view, art, poetry, lit., music, and even religious teachings all do have some truth to offer, but it is typically truth about US rather than the rest of the universe. I would recommend the book: The Power of Myth - by Joseph Campbell to further suss out how this works in the case of religion.

For example, when a myth personifies the Sun as a deity, we need not assume that this is a literal truth, but that instead it tangentially tells us something deep about human nature, and how we all seek answers, and how our imagination fills in the gaps in the absence of understanding, and how we project ourselves onto the rest of the universe (by personifying non-human nature).

Regarding your last reply:

My answers may come across as a bit reductionistic/deflationary, so feel free to reject that which does not resonate with you.

When an author uses a particular word (like ‘love’, ‘hope’, or even ‘tree’), it carries the weight of all of their previous experiences with it. Since we haven’t had the same experiences as the author, there will be some disconnect between them and us. We usually do seek to communicate as much as possible from ourselves to another through this process, but there is always some loss of information. Even the original author, when they go back and reread what they have written, may not know exactly what they meant at the time, especially if some time has passed, and their views have changed.

The idea of ‘meaning’ itself requires subjects and is therefore subjective. We all generate meaning quite naturally, it is integral to our humanity. Text doesn’t mean anything on it’s own, but it can mean something to the author, and to the reader.

Those especially moving moments of epiphany that we have all experienced when reading a great piece of literature tend to speak to universal statements about human nature - posed in such a way as to elevate the effect. Sometimes these same truths can be stated outright in a sentence or two, but seems small and trivial without context.

Depending on the medium, this effect falls on a continuum from concrete to elusive/vague. In music for example, the effect cannot always be put into words, as the medium itself is wordless. The messages and truths have to do with our shared experiences as emotional beings, who love patterns, consistency, novelty, and pure sensation (among other things). In this sense, a sonata may not be ‘about’ anything, or ‘mean’ anything, but instead it transmits a feeling or emotion. I would still see this as a kind of ‘truth’, but these are very different than truths about the nature of matter, planets, or galaxies.

Before I go on to describe the differences (of truths), I should mention the similarities. I am reminded of a quote:

-----

All truth is one.

In this light, may science and religion endeavor together for the steady evolution of Mankind:

From darkness to light,

From narrowness to broadmindedness,

From prejudice to tolerance,

It is the voice of life that calls us

To come and learn.

• Anonymous
  
  -----
  
  That being said, it would still be a mistake to use music to try to understand truths about the structure of an atom. Yes, both methods do tell us something about reality, and our relationship to reality, but they have different applications and different domains.
  
  
  Perhaps I have gone on long enough for now. If there is a particular point you would like to pursue further, let me know. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about something near and dear to my heart. : )

Well, it might behoove you to read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man before you dive into Ulysses. Both books are more conventional in style than is Ulysses--therefore easier to read through--and both books have characters in them that appear in Ulysses. Dubliners will set you up for some of the themes regarding the ambivalence of Irish national identity in the bigger book, particularly the section titled "The Dead." Portrait also contains some of these themes, but is more important in that it sets up the character Stephen Dedalus, who is one of the two main protagonists of Ulysses.

There are two companion books that might help you while reading Ulysses that I recommend: Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses, which is a huge collection of glosses and notes explaining obscure references and history. It tends to be slightly more accurate than the other book I'm recommending, but the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming, and some of it is kind of pointlessly digressive.

The New Bloomsday Book is an excellent summary of the plot episode by episode. Blamires makes a point to show the intentional parallels between Ulysses and the Odyssey. Some of the hypotheses Blamires presents seem kind of far-fetched at times, and there are a couple of inaccuracies (at least in the edition I used), but on the whole I referenced this more than Ulysses Annotated.

I would also suggest that you pick a good edition of Ulysses to read. For too many reasons to relate here, Joyce kept revising it throughout his life and many differing editions exist. The Gabler Edition is the best synthesis of Ulysses textual scholarship and is considered the definitive edition in academic circles.

As for approach, I would suggest that you be patient. This is a book that's legendary for rewarding consideration and rereading. If you care to spend the time and effort you'd do well to read each section through without references, then read the synopsis in Blamires, then return to the text and read through while referring to Ulysses Annotated before moving on. You will see things you hadn't noticed before each time you read it, especially if you've read Dubliners and Portrait. However, this can be a bit much for a casual reader as opposed to a scholar, so you could do almost as well simply reading the sections and then comparing your observations and reading with Blamires and moving on.

Best of all would be to find or start a Joyce book club and read it through with them. This will slow you down enough to actually grasp some of the intricacies instead of just robotically scanning pages, and allows you to discuss and hash out ideas and interpretations.

Good luck, and have fun!

The institutes are surprisingly very readable. I read that somewhere in a couple places, and my experience reading them bears out this truth. Try out this article, note this:

>1. The Institutes may be easier to read than you think.
J. I. Packer writes, “The readability of the Institutio, considering its size, is remarkable.”
Level of difficulty should not determine a book’s importance; some simple books are profound; some difficult books are simply muddled. What we want are books that make us think and worship, even if that requires some hard work. As Piper wrote in Future Grace, “When my sons complain that a good book is hard to read, I say, ‘Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.'”

There are few works in history that had the influence the Institutes had, and had the effect of changing the course of history as this work did. One more though, I also own this version of Calvin's Magnum Opus, am about 250 pages in, it's the easiest version to read, I find, because it is shorter than the 1559 version and the headers and other aides makes this translation quite a treat, for me, a Calvinist.

I would definitely start with Machen, you cant go wrong. World Magazine said it's one of the 100 best books of the millennium:

>It was named one of the top 100 books of the millennium by World magazine and one of the top 100 books of the twentieth century by Christianity Today. / “An admirable book. For its acumen, for its saliency, and for its wit, this cool and stringent defense of orthodox Protestantism is, I think, the best popular argument produced [in the controversy between Christianity and liberalism].”

One last to share, I listened (ironically) to Dr. Adler's classic How to read a book which is a great one for whatever level of reader we find ourselves to be. We read and are driven to this endeavor because we seek to grow our minds. I don't mean to pile on, but you asked hehe. A few books to add to your list, believe me, when you start asking and keeping a "to-read list" it always seems to grow. There's lots of good stuff when you know what to look for :-)

Grace and peace.

First off, good on you for taking the initiative.

For introductory books, I'd recommend Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. Now, I haven't read it myself, but it's been mentioned on this sub often enough for me to feel comfortable mentioning it. It might also be a good idea to pick up a miscellaneous collection of poems in order to get an understanding of the variety and depth of the subject matter. A more informal volume might be something edited by Garrison Keiler, like Good Poems. While that specific book is more bent towards Modern American poets, there's still a lot to draw from. A more academic book would be The Norton Anthology of Poetry ot The Norton Introduction to Poetry, which has a lot more to choose from. These two also give you a bit of structure – my copy of the Introduction has clear headings, like "Symbol" or "The Sonnet," with neat little introductory essays and poems chosen to help you understand how these concepts work. That being said, Norton tends to be a little expensive, though if you live in a college town you can probably find a cheaper copy. The benefit of these kinds of collections lies in helping you to find a poet whose style or subject matter you particularly like.

Regarding online sources, there's The Poetry Foundation, which has archives of poems and articles on the poets themselves. Their monthly articles can vary from the interesting to the banal, however, so keep your bullshit detector on. You can probably also find podcasts that deal with the subject. A personal favorite of mine is called "Entitled Opinions," and is run by a professor of Italian Studies over at Stanford by the name of Robert Harrison. Mind you, this particular podcast deals with philosophy and literature as well, so while I'd recommend listening to all their episodes you would have to do a little bit of searching in order to find a particular episode on poetry – though I would reccomend the one on "Dante and Prufrock." I imagine these kind of examinatioms would be useful because they can give you a sense of what poetry 'does' or 'how it means' beyond a surface play with words.

As for the writing of poetry, the first thing I'd recommend is that you read and meditate on a lot of poetry, good and bad, in order to get a sense of how its all done. Learn certain conventions – like, say, that of the sonnet – in order to see how poets follow through with them, or how they play with them. Learn prosody so you can understand how the precise meter, or 'beat,' of each line can affect the reader. I can't really give concrete advice with regards to this, save for a metaphorical "go west, young man!"

Here are some books I've read that I guess you could call "craft" books. I'm not speaking against craft books. They can be helpful, but again I would remind you that the best teacher is poetry itself. Craft books have to be taken for what they are, which is often that poet's own perspective on poetry that may conflict fundamentally with your own. But, there are some things that are helpful, and I know some of them may seem kind of "basic" but trust me they are helpful. You should never think you have poetry figured out. Once you feel that way I think you've already lost.

Anyway here are some books I've read, not always through classes but some are.
A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line- Edited by Emily Rosko & Anton Vander Zee. This is a collection of short essays by poets on the poetic line. Look at it as a way of collecting ideas about what lines can do, because many of these essays will contradict each other. It's not because one is wrong, it's because the line can do a lot of things. https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Thing-Poets-Line/dp/1609380541/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524596709&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=a+broken+thing+preston+the+line

The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland is a great book if you want to study forms more closely. It is an anthology of poetic forms, so it gives you the basic "rules" of the form, and then a ton of old and modern examples of the form. A good way to do a close study of specific forms. https://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524596728&sr=1-1&keywords=making+of+a+poem

Sound:
Two come to mind. One is The Sounds of Poetry: a Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky. This is one that will feel somewhat basic because Pinsky frames it for beginners, but I promise it is helpful to review. He really understands sound better than most. https://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Poetry-Brief-Guide/dp/0374526176/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524596743&sr=1-1&keywords=sounds+of+poetry

Two, if you want to understand meter better, which every poet should, this is the best book on meter: Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell. It's out of print but you can probably find a copy at a local library, or at a university library. You may have to pay for access to it, but it's cheaper than a $100 for a used copy.

Finally, Singing School by Robert Pinsky. Again, going to feel a bit basic. The whole book's purpose is to teach you to write and read poetry by doing imitations. Do not devalue the importance of imitating better poets than yourself. Every poet, even Keats, started by doing imitations. This book is a good guide to starting a practice of imitating. Imitations actually help you discover yourself as a writer better because you realize where you can and can't sound like another poet. Those are good things because often those can't's are what you find to be the things that make you unique. It also just really hones some basic skills every poet should have.
https://www.amazon.com/Singing-School-Learning-Studying-Masters/dp/0393348970/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524596763&sr=1-1&keywords=singing+school

Hope this helps! Best advice I can give you is read actual poetry and write every single day.

YES! I studied Irish mythology in University, so here a few of my favorite texts :)

The Tain is a lovely translation of the Tain Bo Cuailnge ^(sounds like "toy'n bo cool") which is the primary source of written mythology. It's dense.

Over Nine Waves is also, in my opinion, an imperative supplementary text on the myths and legends as well. It feels less academic.

The Lore of Ireland is just that - a book of Irish lore.

As for Samhain ^(I can't figure out how to properly give you a "sounds like" since I don't have little phoneme symbols - but basically like "sahwin") itself, I'm not sure whether holidays are out-right discussed in these texts. I will say, if you do find it - it'll be mostly in lore as opposed to myth or legend. Most Celtic holidays are focused on the changing of the seasons (like all holidays, really) and their connection to the Land of Eternal Youth (Tir na nOg - you can actually pronounce this one like you might expect it to be said) and the Tuatha De Danann ^(sub a "w" for the "th").

If you're looking specifically for myths dealing with faeries, they'll also be in lore. Myths/legends usually refer to the great heroes like Cuchulain ^("cuh-cul-lin") (there's a statue of him in the post office of downtown Dublin in honor of the Easter Uprising during the Irish revolution! Probably one of, if not the, most important myth/legend. In the war between gods and man, he almost single-handidly defeated Madb ^("mave") and her sons in a battle that last weeks/months/yeards depending the variation. He tied himself to a post as he was dying in order to look like he was still alive and held off attacks until crows landed on his shoulders and started eating his body. Basically. It's way better than my telling lol..) and gods and the cycles of power over the land itself.

Okay, fine, I'm done. Sorry for being so long-winded!

Oh! If you're looking for less heady material, I would also recommend Lady Gregory and Yeats. They were mythology nerds and wrote tons of plays/poems/retellings. L.Gregory's Grania is my favorite retelling of Grania and Diarmuid! I actually got a tattoo of one of the lines from the play in Ireland the first time I visited :)

Happy reading!

I like Camus a lot, but his prose is super hard to read sometimes. I don't really like Nietzsche; he's a massive fucking dick. I like Camus leagues more because Camus explains things and leads you to his conclusion while Nietzsche just preaches and rambles on about how much he hates this or that and how stupid this or that is.

Not all of these called themselves philosophers, but here's some I like:

I'm not stoic by any means, but I love Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I think it's interesting how someone could write musings that are relevant millennia later.

John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, but he has a ton of prose too. Here's a book full of it along with annotations and modernized grammar. Milton wasn't the most satisfactory person, but his writing is incredible.

I haven't read this myself, but a friend of mine really liked Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl. Some of his friends called him pretentious for reading the book though (I wasn't one of them).

If you like Camus, you'll probably like Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism. Again, I haven't read it myself, but it was also recommended to me because I like Camus.

Jean-Paul Marat was a journalist during the French Revolution, but his writings sometimes crossed into philosophical territory. He was a huge populist, and I love his work when he's not calling for the deaths of hundreds of people. You can read some of it here.

I'm huge into theology, so I love Thomas Aquinas. He wrote a lot about theology and Christianity and was a major Christian apologist. He also dabbled in theodicy. Smart man.

And to mix it up, here's one I haven't checked out but is top on my list: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Selected Works. She was a writer and a nun from Spain who was self-taught--all qualities you usually don't find in philosophers, so she'll be a unique read.

Every time questions similar to this pop up, people recommend Neil Gaimen. Well, his book is not bad (I own it), but recommending it to a person asking for a detailed recount of the original myths is downright silly. It's a pretty short collection of myths retold into short-stories by Gaimen. They're well written and absolutely closely based on the original myths, but he still invents new stuff, and again, it's a novel-like retelling, not a detailed account of the actual myths. Here are some further suggestions:

Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by H.R. Ellis Davidson is a great and thorough description of Nose myth and religion by an acclaimed specialist in the field. It's also laymen-friendly.

The Poetic Edda is arguably the single most important source of Norse myths. It's a collection of poems, written down in Christian times but many dating to well into the Pagan era. I've linked the new translation by Jackson Crawford (whose channel is great for learning about Norse myth, btw), but there are others.

Then there's the Prose Edda, which is likewise a very important original source. Whereas the Poetic Edda is a collection of poetry, the Prose Edda sees many of them retold into more consistent prose narrative (hence the title). As a source, however, the Prose Edda is less reliable than the Poetic, since the latter is a collection of actual Pagan myths, while the former is a compilation and retelling by an (early medieval Icelandic) Christian.

The Sagas of Icelanders important sources to Norse myth and particularly religious practice. The Sagas are actual prose stories (and good ones, too), written in the first few centuries after conversion. Figures from Norse mythology, particularly Odin, are often prominent, but the narratives tend not to primarily concern the mythology.

A notable exception is the Saga of the Volsungs, which is one of the most important narratives in Norse myth. Wagner's Ring Cycle and Tolkien's works were both heavily influenced by it. The Volsunga Saga features Norse gods, viking raids, dragon-slaying and much more.

There are more good books, but those ought to be a decent start.

>I didn't know continental vs analytical terms are outdated.

Dated perhaps isn't the right term, but just know that they do have certain limits.

As for post-WWII philosophy, there's a lot, but I'm going to let you know that much of it can't be well-understood without a basic understanding of Heidegger, much of whose thought was pre-WWII. His best known work is Being and Time, but it's one of the most challenging texts in the western canon. For an easier introduction to prep you for it, I'd recommend some of his early lecture material, such as The Hermeneutics of Facticity and The History of the Concept of Time. This could just be me, but I've found his lectures to be generally easier than his primary texts. If you want to trace the development of his thought, much of which was post-WWII, the Basic Writings anthology has a number of essays by him. While nothing really eclipsed Being and Time, much of his later thought is still studied. I'd say the most significant work of his later career was his Contributions to Philosophy, which took the form of briefer aphorisms and anecdotes, more similar to Nietzsche in style, but still grounded in much of his own thought and terminology.

If you want to move away from Heidegger, some of the big texts would be Gadamer's Truth and Method (Gadamer was a student of Heidegger's, so the former's thought is very deeply influenced by the latter), Sartre's two texts Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism (note the similarity to Sartre's title with Heidegger's Being and Time, and also note that Heidegger would respond rather critically to Sartre's Existentialism with an essay in the Basic Writings), and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (a key feminist work heavily influenced by Sartre and Heidegger).

Beyond this my knowledge is a bit scattered, as I've only just completed undergrad. I really would recommend David West's text as a decent overview that will guide you in what the key texts are, as well as good secondary sources. I've not brought up Derrida, who was also huge, as well as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor just to name a few. On top of those, there's a ton of pre-WWII stuff that's hugely important for understanding these thinkers, such as the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and the whole field of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung and Lacan). Then there's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the various strands of feminism, and tons more. The more I type, the more I'm just reminding myself how little I know about this area (even though it's the area I'm most interested in).

Let me know if there's anything more you need to know or if you want to know a decent secondary source.

If you're new and really want a good wide sampling, I heartily endorse a well-edited anthology. Not a shitty anthology of the classics, but a good, well-curated, interesting, broad, informative collection of poems. My first was the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, which, though it's country specific and leaves out some good poets, is pretty terrific for the relatively recent, American stuff. A different route in the anthology department is The Making of A Poem, which covers formal aspects of poetry without treating you like an infant or talking over your head, and then gives a spectacular, chronologically organized range of examples of those forms.


I think the best way to find out what you like is to read a few issues of Poetry magazine, everything they do is on their website, and find out what clicks with you.


I like to read individual collections, so I'll list some of my all time favorites here. Obviously there are a lot more than this list, and I'm offering here the stuff I think is a bit more accessible, even the moderns and Whitman are pretty lucid, even if Pound is a bit dense and Williams is a bit flightly.


Contemporary/Recent:

Maurice Manning - Bucolics and Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions

Robert Hass - Praise

Donald Justice - Departures

Louise Gluck - Averno and The Wild Iris


Further Back:

Ezra Pound - Personae

Willian Carlos Williams - Al Que Quiere! and Sour Grapes

HD - Sea Garden

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass


Non-English:

Charles Baudelaire - Fleurs du Mal

Tomas Transtromer - New Collected Poems (tr. Robin Fulton)

I strongly suggest you disregard advice to buy ANY book by David Day. They are not accurate, and are full of stuff he just makes up. Day is the laughingstock of the fandom; he's even been banned by the Tolkien Society from attending their future events.

But don't worry, there's lots of good-quality stuff out there for your husband to treasure!

If he has read only The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy, look for an attractive edition of The Silmarillion (there are many). This is the great backstory to Lord of the Rings, the legendary past that constantly gets referred to in LOTR. If he hasn't read it yet, that's the Next Big Step for a Tolkien fan.

If he's already read the Silmarillion, Check his shelf to see whether he already has a copy of Karen Wynn Fonstad's Atlas of Middle-earth. If not, that's definitely a great gift for him or any Tolkien fan. "A book of maps" doesn't do it justice -- it's not just geography, but changes over time, populations, heroic journeys, and famous battles, all laid out in a way that keeps you turning the page in a way you wouldn't with a real-life atlas. The way the maps are presented also helps the reader visuallize the progression of the Ages of the World, even though there's not a dedicated timeline.

If he has both of these, go for a copy of Unfinished Tales, which contains extra material that didn't make it into the published LOTR and Silmarillion. He'll love the extras about the Palantiri and what Gandalf got up to while Bilbo and the Dwarves were making do without him.

If he has all that, you have choices to make. If he's graphic's oriented, he may like the John Howe decorative map set or the Alan Lee sketchbook or half a dozen options from artists who've tackled Tolkien. If he's a calendar guy, you can pick from at least that many popular options every year.

If he's a hardcore reader who has made it through the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales and still wants more, he may want to take the deep dive into the 12-volume History of Middle-earth, which is very affordable now that it's in good-quality paperback. But you probably want to check with him on that before buying them all; some volumes are, well, pretty hardcore in their density, and some are best read sequentially. One that would be fine as a standalone is Vol. 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth. Lots of good lore and interesting things in that one.

I'm a bit late but I hope you see this.

I was in the same boat (although more into non-fiction) and can strongly recommend two books:

The first is How to Read a Book. When I first saw the title I though: "Pfft, I know how to read a book", but then you start reading it and realise that you don't know shit. This book deals with comprehension mainly, so it seems perfect for your situation.

The second book is less important but one I'd recommend to anyone who does a lot of reading. Breakthrough Rapid Reading talks about "speed reading" and is set out like a six week course. You can do 20 mins every evening to increase your reading speed whilst maintaining (or even improving) comprehension. There are a lot of speed reading resources out there, but I think this is one of the best. Certainly worth a look as you can make pretty rapid gains early on.

My first piece of advice is to get off of Biblaridion. He's an okay resource, but sometimes get's his facts wrong and has the tendency to make his opinions sound like universal consensus. As for other resources, I would highly recommend picking up some books (which are better than YT videos in every way) such as David J. Peterson's The Art of Language Invention. I'd also encourage you to find an intro to linguistics textbook and also find some good language grammars (you can find a lot online for free), as these can give you infinite ideas for your conlangs.

As for what you've shared... I'll be entirely honest, there's nothing very interesting to me about this grammar. Your vowels are pretty neat, though, and I like the idea of lengthening a vowel to indicate distant past. Your verbs seem fairly cookie-cutter - not that it's unnaturalistic, just not interesting. Also, if your goal is naturalism, I would strongly encourage introducing some irregularity to your verbal and nominal morphology, as well as your syntax. E.g., is your word order always VSO? Or are there instances where it switches to SVO or OSV?

I also strongly encourage taking a few days to think about what all these things mean. For example, what does the "simple" verb do? How do the speakers use it? It what contexts would it be appropriate or inappropriate? Same with the future tense - does it only apply to actions the speaker is sure will happen, or can it be applied if the speaker is unsure? What's the difference between habitual and continuous?

Also, check out your parts of speech as well. How are adjectives and adverbs formed? Are they derived from other words? Should they even exist (because some languages don't have one or the other or either.)? What prepositions are there and how are they used (essentially no two languages are alike with preposition usage.)? How do you mark possessor and/or possessee, if at all?

I'm bombarding you with questions here, but there's no pressure to answer them all right away. Just some things to make you think. The big takeaways here is to expand your pool of resources beyond Biblaridion and to ask yourself what each element of your language really is and how it's used by the speakers of the language.

You seem to have the will and desire, which are more important than an education and natural intelligence. Diligence and discipline are everything in writing, not how 'smart' you are.

There are two roads you must take here, both simultaneously. First, you must become a great reader. Start off by reading authors who are 'accessible,' meaning they do not initially make great demands on their audience. In the west, these are authors like:

1.) Mark Twain (Huckleberry Fin)

2.) George Orwell (Any of his books)

3.) Ernest Hemmingway (Check out his short stories)

4.) Jack London (Call of the Wild)

5.) Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice)

Here are the rules of reading:

1.) Read slowly. Imagine each scene in your head. Evoke your memory to make the text come alive.

2.) Read everything twice.

3.) Have a dictionary on hand and look up EVERY word you don't understand.

Here is a book recommending some of the best books in history. Each book has an introduction; flip through it and see what interests you.

Here is a book that provides a guide on how to read anything well.

Second, you must become an addicted writer. You must write everyday, it doesn't matter about what. The only key thing is that you enjoy it. Once you get into the habit of reading+writing, and you enjoy it, start looking into books that help you improve your writing. There are a lot to choose from; here are two examples:

1.) How to Write a Sentence, by Stanly Fish

2.) Elements of Style, by Shrunk and White

If you continue to read and write everyday, pushing yourself into more difficult books and more elaborate writing, you'll start to develop a taste for good reading/writing yourself, and be able to distinguish it in the world around you. From there, it depends on what your goals are. Good luck.

I think we may be looking for the same things. I read a book a few weeks ago called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning that I found really helpful and interesting. Its not too expensive and if you have the money I'd recommend it. Don't be intimidated by the programmer talk, none of it is really relevant.

Last week, I discovered a wiki that gave great advice on learning and memory techniques that seemed like it would have been extremely useful. I've spent the last hour searching for it but I just can't find it. When I come across it, I will let you know.

Another book that I found useful a few months ago was How to Read a Book. Don't let the title undermine the books value; its an awesome book. Definitely worth looking into. I don't follow the advice given in the book very rigidly, but since I've read it, I've found that I approach books much more methodically and absorb the information much more easily.

Its great to see that there is someone else out there looking for the same sort of resources I'm looking for. The way I look at it, learning is a skill that can be developed and mastered. It is an interesting pursuit in and of itself.

I haven't found any single resource for this sort of thing but maybe we can put together a subreddit where we can pool our resources for things that may be particularly helpful.

Here are a few I think are good:

Getting Started

On Writing: This book is great. There are a lot of nice principles you can walk away with and a lot of people on this subreddit agree it's a great starting point!

Lots of Fiction: Nothing beats just reading a lot of good fiction, especially in other genres. It helps you explore how the greats do it and maybe pick up a few tricks along the way.

For Editing

Self-Editing For Fiction Writers: there isn't anything in here that will blow your writing away, land you an agent, and secure a NYT bestseller, but it has a lot of good, practical things to keep an eye out for in your writing. It's a good starting place for when you are learning to love writing (which is mostly rewriting)

A Sense of Style by Steve Pinker: I really loved this book! It isn't exclusively about fiction, but it deals with the importance of clarity in anything that is written.

Garner's Modern American Usage: I just got this about a month ago and have wondered what I was doing before. This is my resource now for when I would normally have gone to Google and typed a question about grammar or usage or a word that I wasn't sure I was using correctly. It's a dictionary, but instead of only words, it is filled with essays and entries about everything a serious word-nut could spend the rest of their^1 life reading.

^1 ^Things ^such ^as ^the ^singular ^their ^vs ^his/hers

Publishing

Writer's Market 2016: There are too many different resources a writer can use to get published, but Writer's Market has a listing for Agents, publishers, magazines, journals, and contests. I think it's a good start once you find your work ready and polished.

There are too many books out there that I haven't read and have heard good things about as well. They will probably be mentioned above in this thread.

Another resource I have learned the most from are books I think are terrible. It allows you to read something, see that it doesn't work, and makes you process exactly what the author did wrong. You can find plenty of bad fiction if you look hard enough! I hope some of this helps!

The best poetry (the arts, really) resource on the web, courtesy of Dan Schneider - no, not of Nickelodeon infamy, another one. Here's the link, and just dive in. Got some very strong perspectives regarding poetry and the arts, that many find off-putting, but he's invaluable, to my estimation.

​

If you find a poem that you like, but can't immediately access intellectually, see if you can find an entry of it on Shmoop. I love Plath and Stevens and Crane, but couldn't tackle them full on as a poetry novice. Shmoop (and others) helped me gain some insight on some of their poems. Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" is a doozy, but Shmoop's analysis helped clarify some difficult passages.

​

And like everyone else has said, keep reading - anything and everything by anyone. The more you passionately pursue the subject, the more you'll find things beginning to make sense. Also, an excellent book for poetry lovers who want to delve into the craft: Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook.

​

Hope this helps!

Sartre presented a lecture called "Existentialism and Humanism," which can now be found in print as Existentialism is a Humanism. It's almost like an Existentialism manefesto, per se. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus is a good treatise on existentialism (Absurdism, really, but it'll do).

I would not hesitate to start reading fiction novels that have Existentialist themes. Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's Nausea, and Dostyevsky's Notes From the Underground are just a few that will find your studies well.

As for secondary literature, the only text I can knowledgeably recommend is Existentialism For Dummies, as I'm currently working my way through it. It's actually not as bad as you might think coming from the "For Dummies" series. It doesn't go too in-depth, and ideas are very concise and oftentimes humorous.

I have also heard good things about David Cogswell's Existentialism For Beginners, though I have never read it myself.

If your niece feels comfortable with this level of writing and philosophical examination, it is almost imperative to read Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, among others. It is good to have some background understanding of Kant and perhaps have a few essays by Schopenhauer under your belt leading up to the more rigorous academics like Heidegger and Hegel.

Good luck, and happy reading!

The CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts) database hosted by UCC hosts transcriptions of many Old Irish texts. There are some English translations, though they can be difficult to dig up. Nonetheless the database contains a wide variety of material the narrative literature section includes mythology.

Ignoring the somewhat dodgy-looking website MaryJones.us contains a wide selection of Irish (and Celtic!) material and more translations. The only real downside to MaryJones is that the sources of translations aren't always provided, so the accuracy cannot be checked against the actual texts the translation is working from. Nonetheless, the majority are good translations.

Irish Literature which includes many of the historical and mythological texts that CELT also has, and some Pre-Christian Inscriptions.

In terms of books, The Táin, early Ireland's great epic is a good one. I've yet to read the latest translation, admittedly, but I do quite enjoy Kinsella's version: he manages to capture the feel of Old Irish, so to speak, and its occasionally choppy narrative style, while making the text legitimately readable. It stays true to the text while still being accessible.

Likewise, Jeffrey Gantz's Early Irish Myths and Sagas is an excellent introduction to some of the more interesting, and important myths of early Ireland. The translations are very readable - though at times he has sacrificed the tone of Old Irish to do so.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Tales of the Elders of Ireland as translated by Ann Dooley and Harry Roe, has retained the Old Irish flavour, and is therefore occasionally difficult to understand.

In terms of secondary material, you'll have to be a little more specific as to what you're looking for. Miranda Green has a pretty good book, but she runs into the same issue that we all run into: we don't know how the myths that we have were perceived by or influenced the people who created them.

All of our stories, all of our information, really, is relayed to us through manuscripts that were created primarily in monasteries (though we have some created by laypeople and not monks, they're younger, and fairly well-removed from whatever paganism may be represented in the texts.) Few (if any) of them provide any commentary, or meta-analysis - and what we do have is pretty spare (ie. a note that the scribe doesn't believe any of what he's just written.)

The texts do tend to uphold the laws that we have, so I suppose you could argue either way: did the myths influence the laws, or the laws influence the myths?

But as I say, as we have no sources, really, from pre-Christian Ireland, only material that has been transmitted through a Christian lens, it's hard to know how the remaining texts were treated. Granted, their preservation does indicate that they were regarded with a certain level of reverence, but their actual influence is unknown. There is some literature that compares the ways in which the Christian authors follow some of the tropes of myth in their own writings of saints lives, but I'm not sure if that's what you're after.

I'd suggest starting with poems that are relatively brief, highly readable, and modern -- really get a taste for how poetry can be relevant to your everyday life. There are a ton of good books out there dedicated to poetry of this type, such as Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, with poems like Mary Oliver's Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Oliver has also written a Poetry Handbook which discusses the technical aspects of poetry like rhythm and form, and illustrates the principles with poems generally considered to be modern classics, if you're looking for something more technical.

Keillor also does the The Writer's Almanac on NPR, and you can go to the Writer's Almanac site for a (usually) good poem each day. Other good starting points include Billy Collin's Poetry 180 and Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.

I'm also a fan of Catherine Bowman, who's a bit obscure (she's the Poetry... um... person for NPR's All Things Considered) and so I'm going to post one of her poems (Broke Song) because I'll probably never have another chance to do so as smoothly as I am clearly working it into this post.

You move through the world broken. Navigating
by the stars encoded on your hearts axis. July
grasses. Rain. How the world breaks us.
Midnight scatters across what’s left
from an evening prayer. The broken
song of the warbler at dawn
on the last day of winter. You move
through the world gathered
together in a pulse. Running your fingers
up and down what is odd and so familiar.
How dazzling the fit. To be remade
by the glue of your oaths and kisses.

Edit: Also, Robert Bly.

I believe form is critical at times. As a HS English teacher with a creative writing background, I see lots of my colleagues doing the awesome work of including poetry writing into their curriculum, but they focus so strongly on free verse and spoken word that the students do not honestly understand the genre tools they are trying to wield.

Form provides structure and context for the writer and the reader. Repetitious forms (villanelles seem to be especially popular in contemporary form poetry) call a readers attention to those repeated lines and phrases. Of course, in keeping with our creatively libertarian times, contemporary writers (and my students I teach form to), are given authority to break some of the rules so long as the structure still remains largely in tact.

Ultimately, I agree with those who have said that it really depends on what you are trying to write. I have tried to jam some poems into forms that didn’t work for the content.

I highly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=mark+poetry+form&qid=1564951877&s=gateway&sr=8-2

It was a required text for a college course I took, I use it with my students now, and even gave my copy to an especially talented young writer in my classroom to keep (I need to use this link to order my new copy!).

Form matters. Free verse is good, too. It has its place. But form matters.

I did the idea a disservice by writing so quickly and rattling it off. My apologies. If you're interested, I suggest going straight to the source with George Lakoff's work. You might be first interested in the section near the bottom, "The Basic Claim." Here's an excerpt:

>...At the center of the conservative worldview is a Strict Father model. This model posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules...

>...The liberal worldview centers on a very different ideal of family life, the Nurturant Parent model: Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and 'self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community...

If you want more on the concept of cognitive metaphor in general, check out Lakoff's book, Metaphors We Live By. At any rate, I'd love to hear what you think about the proper articulation of the idea of government as family. Sorry again for my sloppiness earlier.

A couple quick thoughts:

1> You have to really commit to your story. We're talking marriage level commitment here, none of this half-hearted crap. Treat your characters like they are real. Tell them that their story is worth telling, and promise to tell it for them. This is, of course, only necessary if you're really serious about writing a book. Otherwise it's just silly.

2> Set a daily quota. 1000 words a day. On days that you can't find any new words for your story, write notes about your story. This means writing when you don't feel like writing. This means closing your browser.

3> You can learn how to write a book. Natural talent is important, but your work ethic is much more important. There are more than a few instructional books out there that are very good. I recommend starting with Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. It's exceptional, and the chapter on active voice versus passive voice is critical to effective storytelling.

Best of Luck to you. Looking forward to reading more.

First I would say that your state of confusion is normal at your age. The brain matures around 25 and time should help you find a bit more peace but only then.

I would suggest to find a mentor : someone you respect, can look up to and are confident that they have your best interest at heart. Could be a family member or a counsellor perhaps. Expose your questions and take his or her input seriously.

Also, do not underestimate the power contained in good books. This is the most condensed wisdom one can find. Start with How to read a book and ask your mentor for reading advice as it is easy to drown in the quantity.

There's a few resources out there, none perfect.

This is a short little bit by Gaiman on how to read Wolfe. Not specific to Book of the New Sun, and a little joking, but it's completely accurate. Approach Wolfe in that manner and you may get more from the books.

This is a dictionary/glossary that can be useful to link different parts of the series to eachother, and provides a lot of context as to the real world origins of words he uses. Wolfe invents a lot less words that it seems at first glance, almost every unfamiliar word is either just a really rare/archaic word, or is invented, but pulled from a real life reference. Sadly, it's a book and not freely available, but what can you do.

This is a wiki about Wolfe's works, kind of hit or miss, but the list of obscure words is useful, and some of the analysis/discussion is good.

This is the best regarded in-depth literary analysis of the series, but it's super dense and not a straightforward explanation by any means.

There's also a super long running mailing list about gene wolfe's work, but good luck digging anything useful out of it, it's just way too much with no organization.

I'm a kind of casual reader these days, but Good Poems, selected by Garrison Keillor played a huge part in me getting into poetry ~10 years ago. Keillor grabs a good range of old classics and newer ones (though he kinda seems to favor beat era writers), and sorts the poems vaguely according to themes, like "Failure," "A Day's Work," "Sons and Daughters." I'd bet I've discovered 80% of my favorite writers due to this book. Props to u/JTK102 for also recommending this!



If that's too entry level, my other go-to anthology is The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, but obviously that one sticks to contemporary American writers. I like this anthology because it also gives some background to the career and cultural significance of the featured writers.


Good luck on your hunt!

Not so casual and perhaps not exactly what you're looking for, but definitely read the Linguistics Wars by Randy A Harris. It's enjoyable, extremely rigorous (it came out of Harris's PhD dissertation) and very, very insightful: it digs really deep into one of the most controversial period of linguistics in the United States. The author even went through underground notes. The best part about it is that it doesn't require you to be a linguist but it's even better if you are; a lot of things in there you simply can't get from modern textbooks and you get to learn how linguistic ideas originated and evolved. He has a second edition coming out so you might wanna wait for that.

For something perhaps surprising and illuminating: read Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson. Most people I know were impressed at how pervasive metaphors actually are in language and cognition. It's very intuitive and sensible once you get the gist of it. This one is quite specific though.

Finally, although now I don't quite agree with it, Language Instinct is what lured me into linguistics so definitely check it out.

These books are quite old now and obviously linguists know much more (although not nearly enough) about language today than they did back then. Claims are also often exaggerated (with the exception of the first one, I think) but they're fun to read and will interest you for sure.

I would check out the Icelandic sagas. While most of them focus on families or individuals, they have many of the trappings of legends. A few of my favorites:

The Saga of Egil Skallagrimson: Tales of a semi-historical Norwegian skald (poet) who gets into fights, recites poetry on the fly, engraves runes both to cure and to curse, and swears vengeance upon the King of Norway for daring to exile him to Iceland.

Njal's Saga: A family saga, detailing the family feud between two major Icelandic families, and how easy it was to spiral from petty fighting to outright murder. Also features Gunnarr Hámundarson, a remarkable warrior who, once he was outlawed, refused to leave his home in Iceland and decided to enact a heroic stand against his pursuers.

The Poetic Edda: You mentioned this one above, but it's worth seconding it. The Prose Edda and The Poetic Edda are both great reads and explain so much of how we view Norse mythology.

Heimskringla: One of the greatest sagas known to us, written by Snorri Sturluson. It details the history of Norway from the mythic past up to Snorri's present day in the 13th century. It's very long, but has some amazing legends and stories, especially about Harald Hard-ruler and his adventures working for the Byzantines.

Eyrbyggja Saga: Hard to find, but if you can, there's a section detailing what happens when zombies invade a Viking's home in Iceland. Spoilers: it involves Viking lawyers.

On the Irish side, if you can find the Ulster Cycle, it's worth a read; I think we get a lot of our popular Irish mythologies from that cycle. This one on amazon doesn't look bad, I think it's focused on the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) side of the stories.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is hands down the best book I've read for creative writing.

Stephen King's On Writing is also very good, but about half of it is a biography more than writing lessons; still interesting though!

Otherwise the best things you can do are to write more, read more (think like a writer though - why did they choose the words they did, the order they did, the perspective, etc.), and seek critique for your own work.

For more formal writing, the most important part is keeping it organized. For example, once you get comfortable with the 5-paragraph formula, you just modify it to fit your need each time and you can pound out an essay in no time once you have your research on hand.

First you need to start off making sure you're in good health. Make sure you're eating a good diet, especially one that contains foods that improve cognition (e.g. foods with choline, lecithin, omega-3s, etc.). Make sure you're getting enough quality sleep and exercise (20 min. of aerobic exercise has been shown to improve memory). And stay adequately hydrated (I usually drink 2 1/2 liters of water a day).

Now for digesting and assimilating what you read, look into close reading techniques; taking notes while you read and jotting down questions you have while reading; marking-up text; and, echoing what /u/Firetaffer suggested, reading "How to Read A Book" by Mortimer Adler.
I've also heard good things about "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer.

Also, SuperMemo and Anki might be of interest of you.

Here are some links that might help:

• An overview of "How to read a Book" by Mortimer Adler part one and two
  
• Marking-up text link one and two
  
• How to write beautiful visual notes
  
  
  Edit: /r/Nootropics might also be of interest to you.

I've always found the Norton collections to be a solid starting point for good poetry.

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789/
http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Poetry-4th/dp/0393968200
http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Modern-Contemporary-Poetry
http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Introduction-Poetry-Alison-Booth/dp/0393928578/

are all excellent introductions to reading. Very broadly speaking, classical poetry is more focused on rhyme and imagery that many can comprehend (albeit with some effort), while modern poetry is more focused on free verse and word choices, and tends to use imagery that's more self-referential (that's just my experience, though).

In terms of writing, I'd suggest scanning through /r/OCPoetry to see poetry written from a mostly modern, mostly amateur perspective.

What you're saying so far is basically akin to 'I want to know more about the ocean and everything living in it/relating to it. I know what a tuna, a blue whale, a great white shark, and an octopus are, but I don't know where to go to get information about them and learn about them. Can you guys help me find good sources for everything from marine biology to oceanography and everything in between?'

As such, my suggestion for the Norton's. If you find something that you like, you can help narrow your search field a bit, and it'll be a heckuva lot easier to help (in your reading search, that is).

Writing's a whole different ballgame, and I defer to /u/jessicay and/or /u/ActualNameIsLana for (possibly) helping you out a bit more on that topic, as they've far more experience than me.

Absolutely read Ulysses. I'm not sure I could have done it without a class to guide me, but if you're clever and determined you can do a decent job on your own. If you do, I'd highly recommend keeping two things close at hand: The Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires, which gives you barebones but crucial information about what's literally going on in the narrative, and the Oxford English Dictionary.

The great thing about Joyce is that his writing rewards any amount of work – the more time you spend figuring out why the text does what it does, the better you'll respond to the material. So take a class if you can, but give Ulysses another shot. It'll get under your skin in a serious, lifelong kinda way.

My MFA in Creative Writing is for poetry, so I apologize for the bias here.

One of my favorite books from my MFA program was Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Traveled. I highly recommend it as a primer for poetry. It's very approachable, has great examples, and includes exercises. Plus, it's Stephen Fry, so it has an enthusiasm and charisma that you don't always see in reference books like this.

I'd also recommend having both "free weeks" and structured writing prompts. Especially for people who aren't already comfortable with poetry, having a prompt of some kind can do wonders for getting started. You're likely to have students on both sides of the spectrum, so having a mix of free writing and prompts should be helpful. There are loads of prompts online if you get stumped.

Here are a couple of my favorite exercises:

1. Once they've written a poem (and workshopped it, if you're going that route), have them cut it down to 100 words. Poetry is very much an art form that relies on compression and economy, and this exercise should help them understand just how much they can say in a few words.
   
   
2. This would work for poetry and fiction: When you discuss imagery, pick an object and have them write down as many adjectives as they can for it in a couple of minutes. I usually pick "grass," but any object would work. Then ask what they came up with. In my example, the first words out of their mouths is almost always "green"...and that's the point. This is another compression exercise to a degree, but stress the fact that a reader can supply certain information on their own. Grass is green. Fire trucks are red. The sky is blue. Those adjectives are obvious and therefore not especially interesting.
   
   
3. This would also work for both: Print out a bunch nouns and adjectives (enough that each student can have one set of each), but use "odd" words. Put each group of words in a separate envelope, and then have the students draw one word from each envelope and write a poem or scene with the resulting word pair. They could end up with "forested aardvark" or "celestial palm tree," and hopefully seeing words/concepts combined in new ways will spark some creativity. My poetry "guru" from undergrad said something that always stuck with me: "What you say will not be new, but how you say it should be." It is highly unlikely, nigh impossible, for your students to have an original idea for a poem simply because poetry has a long history...however, they can approach the idea from a different angle, with interesting images and diction, with an apt structure, and convey their ideas in a way that reflects their personalities.
   
   Have fun!

A few? He did the first 88 if I recall. Not the whole thing, but at least it's all of the practical advice section which is best suited for this style anyway.

On a bright note, the author (who shows great skill in translation by being able to accomplish this) is releasing a translation of the whole Elder Edda in modern English later this year.

EDIT: Now that I look again, by later this year I mean in three days. Awesome, now I know where part of my paycheck is going... I needed a new physical copy to supplement my digital anyway. Maybe I'll not give this one away for a while.

I went to one of the best schools in the country for writing and took poetry classes with well-established poets. I've won a few well established poetry awards. I'm not trying to brag, but I'm just trying to show that I'm not pulling the following out of my arse.

You are going to get lots of bad advice. There are lots of really bad poets out there.

I'm not the biggest fan of her poetry, but Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook contains pretty much everything a beginner could want to know about how to write poetry. It's easy to read and short as well.

Some pointers off the top of my head:

Be honest. Don't try to be something you're not.

Imitate your favorite poets. This sounds counterintuitive to the first point, but you're trying to learn how to write. You learn what your own personal style is through reading others'. It is absolutely not a bad idea to start writing imitations of your favorites first.

Avoid purple prose. For the love of god. Also avoid excess adverbs. They do the least for you but everyone throws them in.

Less is more. This is probably the most important point of all. Poetry is poetry and not prose. Every word counts in good writing. It counts even more in poetry. If you have a poem made of eight lines, every fucking word counts. Even the and's, the's, and it's. When you edit, make sure every word there is doing something. Cut absolutely everything out that is unnecessary. It will make your poem WORSE to keep the extras in.

I've found that most famous writers, poets or otherwise, describe writing as a two-fold process: creative outpouring, and then editing. When you want to write a piece, first write down everything you want--everything that feels right. Don't edit yourself too much as you do so. Then, put the writing away for a little while. When you get back to it, then edit. When you edit, you should be in the opposite frame of mind from when you were actively coming up with material. Instead of adding everything you can think of, you need to be cutting out everything that doesn't belong. This is very hard to do and I'm still learning how to do it. It takes humility. Editing is just as important if not more so than the initial steps of writing a poem. Most bad writers do not realize this.

If you want more recommendations for poets to read, or articles about how to write, I'd be glad to provide more.

Note: This comes from my interpretation and quotes from "A Commentary on The Stranger" by Jean-Paul Sartre, which can be found in the book Existentialism is a Humanism also by Jean-Paul Sartre.

> In The Myth of Sisyphus... Camus provided us with a precise commentary on his work: his hero was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. Such categories do not apply to him. He belongs to a very particular species for which the author reserves the name "absurd."

Sartre goes on to explain that "absurd" as used in Camus' work represents both a factual state and the lucid awareness that some people acquire from that state. By this reading, Meursault is Camus' attempt to throw us headfirst into the feeling of the "absurd".

>"For the absurd man, the ideal is the present and the succession of present moments before an ever-conscious spirit." Confronted with this "quantitative ethic," all values collapse. Projected into this world, the absurd man, rebellious and irresponsible, has "nothing to prove."

>And now we fully understand the title of Camus's novel. The stranger he wants to portray is precisely one of those terrible "idiots" who shock a society by not accepting the rules of its game. He lives among strangers, but he is a stranger to them too.


>Meursalt does not seem to be indignant about his death sentence. He was happy, he did as he liked, and his happiness does not seem to have been affected by any inner gnawing so frequently mentioned by Camus in his essay, which stems from the blinding presence of death. His very indifference often seems like indolence, for instance on that Sunday when he stays home out of pure laziness, and admits to having been "a little bored." The character thus remains singularly impenetrable, even from a vantage point of the absurd... He is there before us, he exists, and we can neither understand nor quite judge him. In a word, he is alive, but his fictional density is the only thing that can make him acceptable to us.

I hope some of that helps! I really enjoyed reading Sartre's commentary on The Stranger and I felt as though it made me appreciate Camus's work more than my first reading. Somewhere inside the commentary Sartre explains that Meursalt is much less a key player in the events of the story as an impartial observer and that to truly live the "absurd" is simply to experience it. He likens the events in the book to our looking in on them through a window in which we can see what is happening, but are completely cut off from the context and meaning of such events.

I haven't read The Myth of Sisyphus yet, but Sartre claims that it amounts to Camus's spelling out of his theory of the absurd. The Stranger attempts to expose us to the "feeling" of the absurd, while TMoS attempts to expose us to the "idea" of the absurd in a much more philosophical way. If you're interested in Camus's ideas, I would probably have to second his recommendation.

You might want to use Karen Wynn Fonstad's [Atlas of Middle Earth] (https://www.amazon.ca/Atlas-Middle-earth-Karen-Wynn-Fonstad/dp/0618126996/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510527162&sr=1-1&dpID=51OtLVeyEmL&preST=_SX198_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch) to do your research. Maps of the earlier Ages and of regions outside the Western portions of the continent are sketchier than that of the Third Age, but there is still some good information to be gathered and that book is a major reference in that field. Wish you good luck in your endeavour. Your map is truly gorgeous!

Yes, please join us at /r/jamesjoyce. You'll get lots of tips and can ask questions all day long.

In the meantime, here's what worked for me: get one of those audio book versions, for instance, the version we link and read along. That way, you see the words, feel them as they unfold in the book--but, at the same time, you have a professional voice actor relating mood and tempo and pronouncing those tough words. Also, the listening goes much more quickly than reading--you can finish the book in a matter of days--and the ineluctable pull of somebody reciting keeps your motivation up.

Here's another tip: center yourself with a guide such as Harry Blamires's The New Bloomsday Book...he doesn't get everything right, but it gives you a good sense of what's going on.

...Or, watch the wonderful 1967 film, Ulysses, with Milo O'Shea.

Good luck and hope to see you at /r/jamesjoyce!

While I'm certainly no expert by any means, I believe things that can help include reading and practice.
A friend once told me reading good books helps you learn good writing, and good writing I would imagine also leads to good speaking.

Practice would be helpful too. Even if we don't write well, we get better by just forcing ourselves to write, and similarly with reading and speaking.

A popular book on reading books that I've noticed is ["How to Read a Book" by Morimer Adler.] (http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent-Touchstone/dp/0671212095)

Off the top of my head, I tend to refer to these four the most:

Self-Editing For Fiction Writers -- When it comes to editing, this book is what helped me break things down and showed me how to get the most out of my writing in a way that clicked.

Alan Moore's writing for Comics -- Nifty if you're really into comics or want to write your own. Spotted this in a thrift store. Best $1.00 I ever spent.

On Writing Horror -- Writer's Digest has quite a few of books on writing. And they all have exercises and excerpts, but out of the small collection that I have this one is my favorite. Kind of gave me an idea of what to watch out for. It's like reading bits of advice from different authors.

The negative Trait Thesaurus -- Actually, I love the entire series as a resource. The kindle has to be good for something. (Much cheaper) But it helps keep my traits together and my character's reactions from getting stale. Out of everything I'm always pulling these books out.

*Started with three, but I really had to mention the trait thesauruses.

Sure.

Irish Mythology (as opposed to more recent Irish folklore) is divided into four 'cycles'. Each cycle contains tales dealing with certain subjects or characters.

• The Mythological Cycle deals with the foundation myths of Ireland; the Tuatha De Danann, the Formorians, etc.
  
• The Ulster Cycle deals primarily with the deeds of Cú Chulainn, which are encapsulated also in The Táin - the 'Illiad' of Irish mythology. It also, however, contains tragedies such as Deirdre of the Sorrows.
  
• The Fenian Cycle is like the Ulster Cycle in that it deals with heroes and their deeds, but has a distinctly less epic feel - usually concerning distinct incidents in the lives of heroes such as Fionn Mac Cumhaill or Oisín. It also relates another favourite Irish tragedy, Diarmuid agus Gráinne
  
• Lastly is the Kingly Cycle, short fables that impart the qualities of great kings in the face of difficulty.
  
  Pretty much any and all of these tales are available in academic form online, but it makes it much more enjoyable to find a good prose translation by a good author. You can buy The Táin on paperback here, and Jim Fitzpatrick (the artist behind that famous Che Guevara image) has made a living out of creating fantastically illustrated versions of the Mythological Cycle.
  
  There are literally thousands of collections of Irish folklore, most of which are decent enough. Original collections by W.B.Yeats and Lady Wilde are also available online

When we encounter new phenomena, it's easiest to characterize them in terms of phenomena we already know, thus we give them labels. The new labels will usually be metaphorical extensions of existing words (e.g. a network, a pulse, a current, an atmosphere of pressure), or new words that come from resources already existing in the language. To make new words we can:

• make compounds, which combine two or more words (e.g. plane mirror, transverse wave; there's also a type of compound called the neoclassical compound in which the elements come from Greek or Latin but not in a way that the languages would have used them, like corpus callosum from Latin words meaning 'firm body' or eukaryote which combines Greek and Latin roots meaning 'true kernel')
  
  
• we can derive new words by adding affixes (e.g. acceleration from accelerate)
  
  
• we can coin new words (e.g. ohm named after a scientist and is a unit of resistance, and mho, the inverse of the word ohm and a unit of conductivity -- the inverse of resistance)
  
  
• we can clip words (e.g. gene from genetic, the adjectival form of the noun genesis)
  
  I get the impression that you're more interested in the metaphors of science. If you want an introduction to metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors we live by might be of interest to you. More directly relevant is Making Truth: Metaphor in Science by Theodore L. Brown. I haven't read the second one, and it's not written by a linguist, but it's written by a professor emeritus of chemistry so my guess is that it's probably well-researched from the science perspective and will give you some insight.
  
  EDIT: Missed a bullet point.

Oh, those are great posters. I visited the Bodelian years ago but didn't even think to check and see if they had a gift shop!

My gift recommendation would be The Atlas of Middle Earth, by Karen Wynn Fonstad. It's comprehensive, covering all of the books (I found the Silmarillion maps particularly helpful), and it is large, physically, probably at least 10"x14" so the maps are pretty easy to read. I received it as a gift myself, and it has become the non-Tolkien work I reference most when reading him.

Ok here are a few ideas.

I would suggest this Yale course on Literary Theory as a good introduction from the humanities angle.

The major focus of literary analysis these days usually seems to be some variant of "close reading"

For a general overview of linguistics the wiki page is pretty decent. Martin Hilpert's Introductory Linguistics and Congnitive Linguistics courses on youtube are pretty good.

I don't know how much or what type of grammar is covered in an English degree but I would pick up a book on syntax such as:

Carnie - Syntax

A more traditional take:

Traditional Diagramming

Alerternatively, you can find a free book on Syntax here

Being able to parse a sentence into it's constituent pieces is useful for analysis. After that, major fields to look into are:

• Semiotics
  
• Cognitive Linguistics
  
• Stylistics
  
• Rhetoric
  
  Some books and resources that fall under these catagories in general (I haven't read all of these):
  
  
• Metaphors We Live By
  
• Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students
  
• Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose
  
• Rhetorical Style
  
• Silva Rhetoricae
  
• Rhetoric Timeline
  
• Recommended Rhetoric Resources
  
• Figures of Speech
  
• Literal and Figurative Language
  
  And because we are learning about English, here is a cheesy documentary that's actually pretty decent.
  
  EDIT: Here is the reddit Linguistics wiki for reference.

Lately, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain...I'm sure on this forum it's well known, and I wrote about it on How did you discover MBTI?

I knew I was an introvert, but I didn't know that that meant, like how we process information, how we verbalize, that we NEED our alone time. So I began to embrace all these things, and better understood how to communicate with extroverts, which is really helpful. I think just this bit of self knowledge has sent me on a reading frenzy.

Currently, I'm reading The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell which discusses all the archetypal myths from different cultures and religions, and how they play a part for the individual and society. These stories/myths, which many of us discredit because they are not based in fact, actual serve the purpose of being example of how to live. Campbell argues that the loss of these myths in western society is an explanation for the misguided youth. People are seeking how to live their lives, but don't know where to find the answers...therefor it's taking much longer to learn how to grow up. Very fascinating. We no longer have strong adulthood rituals or rites of passage, so fundamentally, young adults still act like kids.
It also talks about some meaning of life stuff which is changing a lot of perspective for me and too deep to summarize here. I highly recommend it.

Here is my advice to anyone going to college or wanting to learn: Read How to Read a Book. I'm not insulting you, I was 35 when I read it and it's a life changing book.

Ok, if you want to be a programmer, I recommend reading The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It's not a light read but will get you solid understanding to work from. Learn C, work with pointers and get to understand them. If you do graphics this will be invaluable. Oh, and start writing code. There is no substitute for experience, I've seen people with masters degrees in software who couldn't write code. That being said, get a general degree in Computer Science or Electronic Engineering. It's a great fallback and you might enjoy writing code for F-22s more than writing video games. (Just saying)

Oh, write your own game. Write pong and pac-man. If you are good at what you do you will always have a place to do it. The universe is funny like that.

My question for you is why? If you do this, know that your work prospects will go down. If you plan on going into full time ministry that will pay you, great. If not, just be aware. Source? I got my BA in Biblical Studies and was unemployed for two years after graduating. Didn't get much employment help from the school either. Now to your questiom.

It depends. History classes study....history. Ethics classes study.... ethics. I know it sounds like it's a whole specialized field unto itself but you will study the same topics you would at most other school. With one exception. If it's a good school, it will teach these things from a decided and unashamed Christian worldview. A good intro to that would be the book The Univers Next Door by James Sire. Read a lot and make sure you read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler as well as a good Systematic theology (like Wayne Grudem's or Millard Erickson's) to get grounded in the basics. You're going to do a lot of reading and writing so be ready for that.

There's not really one consolidated spot for all of that. Some things will become clear as you continue reading. Wolfe's puzzles often have many pieces though, and it's not even clear how many mysteries are in this book.

As far as figuring out major mysteries that aren't revealed by reading the book through once, there's a "sequel" called Urth of the New Sun. Apparently Gene thought he was sufficiently clear, but his editor disagreed and pushed him to write out events that he only implied in the main four books. I continue to reread BotNS, but I only read UotNS once to get those extra threads tied up.

Another helpful resource is Lexicon Urthus, a dictionary/encyclopedia for the books which gives you the context for major mysteries, theories, and events.

And then finally, just come back and read all the cool conversations people have on here. Once you've read all the material, there's a lot of awesome theories you can wrestle with. I've had some of my biggest epiphanies years after finishing the books. People point out a subtle allusion or reference, propose an elegant theory, and it completely changes some part of my understanding of the books.

See, this is why I love this shit. It's so rewarding.

You know what? I have an awful memory. My SO gets mad at me all the time because she'll tell me things and I'll inevitably forget them.

Which is to say that your memory isn't holding you back. It's the way you interact with information you want to retain that is the problem here, much like it was for me.

My background is that I wanted to "become smarter". Didn't know wtf that meant but I figured reading book was important to that goal so that's what I did. I've read some really awesome books and I can tell you that I don't remember a lot of them.

However, there is a book that you should absolutely read to learn to how correctly interact with the information you're trying to retain: How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler. The book is an instruction manual on how to read books effectively, so as to learn from them and really really understand them.

Nowadays, I can't say that I remember specific parts of books that I read, but I absolutely can recall the general idea of a book (which is often helpful in conversation) and whereabouts in the book I read something so I can look it up again if I need to.

And this information can be applied to literally anything you read.

As far as learning in general, Make It Stick was alright. Would recommend, but it's pretty basic.

Only if it suits your goals.

How is your health? How is your routine? What is your idealistic lifestyle? 5-years? 10-years? 20-years?

What influences have driven you without your knowledge (parents, teachers, impulses)?

Write a 10-page paper on the benefits of college. A 10-page paper on its opportunity costs. And a 10-page paper on what lifestyle you want to build. Or a 20-page paper. Hell, just go for a book, and sell that. The bottom line is the more you put in now, the better off you will be in your "choice" (which is basically a rationalization of whatever limited information you currently have in a given moment).

Think of your ideal goals or just general thoughts of life:

Will it involve kinky foreign sex at 18?

Will it involve biking?

Will it involve long work hours?

Do you wish to fix things in your life? Work out, exercise, interact with people more often?

Did you know hypnosis is real? Especially the erotic type.

Did you know most people cannot properly read a book? Here is a good starting introduction.

Honestly I would wait and delay it until you find the best college for your needs. Plus right now your frontal lobe is still developing until 23-25 which makes long-term planning a little difficult to perceive at times. And you are getting the spam of "GO TO COLLEGE" non-stop which is priming your own cognitive choices to be "well should I go to college or " instead of "this is what I have, my goals, what should I do to meet them?"


In the meantime, the independence, work experience, and savings rate at your age (with compounding interest) is critical to your own future education. By self-discovering and molding your thinking, you will be ahead of your peers that just go to college without the experience.


Can you make $50,000 now per year? Can you save a significant portion? Do you have a goal outside of work/school? A lifestyle you want to build?



You could go to college now or go to college with experience, more maturity, and a higher net-worth. Which translates to less pressure and more education for your own understanding. You get better choices and better results. You could go travel for the knowledge, meet experts in the field, and overall understand yourself on a higher level.


Check out /r/financialindependence, /r/leanfire, and you probably alright know about /r/cscareerquestions


And then there is /r/simpleliving (for happiness), /r/digitalnomad (for options), /r/Flipping (for turning waste into profit), /r/churning (travel rewards) /r/Entrepreneur (business expansion)

> Unfortunately, since that last class, I've fallen out of it and I'm not entirely sure how to get back in. I'm not very good at teaching myself things.

I think that self-studying is a skill. And just like any other skill, you become better at it the more and the better you practice it. If you aren't very good at it yet, then you probably just haven't done it much, or perhaps you haven't done it properly.

If you don't know where to start developing the skill, I highly recommend reading the article The Making of an Expert (PDF) by K. Anders Ericsson, published in the Harvard Business Review. It is a concise introduction to Ericsson's research on acquiring expertise, full of valuable insights. Some of the more useful and relevant ones are the importance of deliberate practice in acquiring expertise, how long it actually takes to become proficient in a field of expertise, and the fact that the final stage in acquiring expertise involves no instructors (i.e. it is characterized by self-studying).

I also believe How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler to be useful in developing this skill. This book describes the difference between present teachers, like the ones you can interact with in an educational institution, and absent ones, such as the authors of books. It then lists a number of very useful general guidelines on how to approach learning from these absent teachers, followed by some more specific ones describing how to approach different kinds of reading matters. It is essentially a self-studying guide.

And since this is /r/logic and you expressed an interest in getting back into the subject, my final recommendation is A First Course in Mathematical Logic by Patrick Suppes and Shirley Hill, which is an exceedingly lucid, accessible, elementary and rigorous introduction to logic. It is very well-suited for self-studying and might be a useful refresher, although depending on the courses you've taken and how much you recall from them, it may be too elementary for you. I posted a more detailed description of the book in a different thread on here a few days ago.

I did a word search in this thread for the titles of these books but I did not see them. If they've somehow been mentioned already, sorry.

How to Read a Book

Yeah yeah, a book called how to read a book. This book has a lot of information to help you filter out the crap you don't want to read from the crap you do, and in the back it has a huge list of good books to read. This book is a good place to start.

Remember Everything You Read

If you google speed reading, Evelyn Wood's face appears. This is a book about speed reading with a focus on education, and it reads like one of those "the secret" type success gimmick books, but even if you don't care about reading faster, get this for the all-important retention techniques.

There is a lot more to the skill of reading than knowing the language in which the book was written. These two books are like keys to locked doors.

SO MANY!

["Lies my Teacher Told Me"] (http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything/dp/0743296281) by James Loewen. This is about how the world really works, basically. It's all about history and politics and economics and how world powers interact with each other and their own population. It's incredibly eye-opening and will make you understand why everything is the way it is today! It's also ridiculously fun to read :D

["The Quantum and the Lotus by"] (http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Lotus-Journey-Frontiers-Buddhism/dp/1400080797/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383171898&sr=1-1&keywords=the+quantum+and+the+lotus) by Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan. This is a super fascinating read! It's actually a transcribed conversation between a Buddhist who became a quantum physicist and a physicist who left science and became a Buddhist! It's this AMAZING look into complicated science and it's explained in such simple terms anyone can understand it. But beyond that, it's this really fascinating glimpse into a world where science and spirituality can co-exist. It's like science explaining spirituality, or spirituality giving a wholesome quality to science. It's just so unique and amazing!

["The Power of Myth"] (http://www.amazon.com/Power-Myth-Joseph-Campbell/dp/0385418868/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1383172215&sr=1-3&keywords=joseph+campbell) by Joseph Campbell. If you can, read EVERYTHING by this guy that you can get your hands on! This book is especially poignant because it's addressing all of the aspects of our modern day society, from religion to gangs to marriage, even education. It is incredibly powerful and eye-opening and explains so much about the way we work as humans and the way the individual interacts with society. Plus, you'll learn a shit ton about mythology that you never knew before! And you'll be looking at mythology from a ridiculously profound perspective that I've never seen anyone else address before.

I can give you more if you tell me what you're interested in learning more about :)

EDIT: Typos.

Well, here are a list of sources that talk about 'cultural marxism' from academics that have literally nothing to do with conspiracies, or nazis that I found while looking into it:

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artefacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   
6. The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
7. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
8. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

Welcome!

A Practical Heathen's Guide to Asatru is a great beginner book. Probably essential for new heathens.

If you want to start reading about the gods, the Poetic Edda is our main source for Norse mythology. I recommend Jackson Crawford's translation. I have it, and it is a simple English translation. Crawford also has a great Youtube channel about Old Norse language and mythology. Heathen Talk, the mods' Youtube podcast, is pretty good as well for getting a feel for everything.

Looks like I'll be starting with Jung! I have Modern Man In Search of A Soul and The Essential Jung - picked that one up randomly so I hope it's valuable.

As much as I'd love the guide that it seems MoM gives (I'm considering going back to school for philosophy, despite the risk, and would love some extra encouragement to "aim properly"), I can put it aside for now. If tackling Jung and Hegel gives me a critical eye to MoM, all the more reason to hold off.

I respect Peterson a lot, and I'm a big fan, but I always want to be able to look at ideas critically and judge them on their full merits.

Is your knowledge of Hegel and Jung self-taught? I'm currently reading Mortimer Adler's How To Read A Book in order to prepare myself to tackle these texts.

Interesting quote you pulled from the Philosophy subreddit. My interest in Hegel stems from my Christian background. I can't help but feel that Hegel, Jung, and (by extension) Peterson, are touching on a way to bring Christianity into the 21st Century.

It's hard to suggest a single text, but there are many histories of the different strands of literary criticism available. There are some written by practicing specialists, and others by historians of literature. There is a multi volume work published by Cambridge UP that deals with the history of lit-crit that is very valuable, but not easily accessible, or very concise.

My suggestion would be to break down your time-frame to maybe 50 year chunks and read some of the seminal works on the major movements in lit crit during those times. This is one that's used a lot in Universities, though I must admit it wouldn't be one of my favourites (though I can absolutely support it as an introductory work). http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginning-theory-third-introduction-Beginnings/dp/0719079276/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1410136722&sr=8-8&keywords=literary+criticism

Otherwise, there's the text based approach--where you read different texts from the history of lit crit, using an anthology. The uber-bible of this sort is the http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Norton-Anthology-Theory-Criticism/dp/0393932923/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1410136722&sr=8-4&keywords=literary+criticism. There are smaller, more specific (and probably overall more helpful in a non-reference way) ones too, like this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Criticism-Theory-A-Reader/dp/0582784549/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1410136722&sr=8-11&keywords=literary+criticism.

Hope that might be of some help.
M_G

Some of it just recognition - if you see something in a book that reminds you of something you read about in another book, or something you know about the world, or history, or religion, then your mind may make the leap to say "Oh, this is a symbolic reference to trench warfare in France during WWI" or whatever. So the more "stuff" you know about, the more equipped you are to recognize references. So studying history, religion, economics, world news, various natural sciences, etc., etc. will help you with this And the more you know about the author you're reading, the time he/she lived and wrote in, etc., the more you can pick up on.

Note though that a lot of this symblic stuff is indirect / abstract... they are vague allusions using analogy or metaphor, and not necessarily explicit. So the more you develop your capacity for abstract thinking, thinking in metaphors, etc., the better. To that end, you might consider reading Metaphors We Live By, Surfaces and Essences, and similar books.

Also, a lot of "symbolism" is rooted in the thinking of Freud and Jung, even to this day. A lot of Freud's stuff has been discredited now, but from a "cultural literacy" standpoint, it wouldn't hurt to read his book on dream interpretation, as well as some of Jung's stuff. The stuff about archetypes and the "collective unconscious" would be good.

Also, a lot of symbolism may be rooted in, or linked by metaphor, to existing mythology. Some ideas from myth are tropes that appear again and again. With that in mind, I'd suggest reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. If you're really interested, any and all of his other books would probably be useful as well.

One last final note: It's entirely possible that all of most of this "symbolism in literature" stuff is total bullshit. What I mean is, you (or I, or whoever) can "find" all sorts of symbolic links in a work, and find arguments to support that link. But unless the author is still alive, and willing to confirm or deny his intent, you never really know if the "link" you've found is really "a thing" put there by the author, or just your own overactive imagination running wild.

Howard Hendricks' Living by the Book is a great place to start, or the classic How to Read a Book is quite useful also.

Using the reading techniques from the books above and some basic notes for insight into the culture and other translator's issues can get you pretty far. The .NET translators' notes are probably the best free resource, along with the many different translations available online.

You will probably eventually want to at least learn enough Greek grammar to be able to muddle through with a good lexicon, perhaps with Logos or Accordance.

If you want really excellent intro books then I definitely recommend Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today. This has all the really important schools that are important right now, except eco-criticism, which is kind of a bummer. But I think the latter edition hits a little bit on it under postcolonial theory. This is a good intro text that has overview of what's going on.

Norton Anthology of Critical Theory was mentioned, and while this is an excellent anthology, it's huge and can be a bit complicated to read the actual source material without knowing about it before hand, but it's pretty nice being able to read the actual texts of different theorists. Similar to this is Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology. While Norton's goes chronologically all the way back to Plato, Rivkin's text groups all the texts under the major schools so you get a comprehensive view of each one. It's worth mentioning though that Norton does have a secondary Table of Contents where they group the readings under school as well.

You mentioned wanting to know postmodernism, and that's another thing that Tyson's text doesn't include, as it's more of a movement instead of a criticism. An intro text similar to Tyson's that does include eco-criticism and postmodernism though is Peter Barry's Beginning Theory.

If you have very little knowledge of theory and criticism, I'd really recommend picking up Tyson's book and reading that so you get an overview of the text before moving on to an anthology. Like I said, the texts can be incredibly dense and difficult to read, and if you've never been exposed to them before it'll just make it even more difficult. Tyson's text also has suggested readings under each school as well to expand what you're reading.

I recommend reading it with a Schema in hand, highlight or make note of every time a corresponding item is mentioned in the chapter (color grey in Nausicaa, tumescence by firework exploding) or even read along with a guide book, which I personally found extremely helpful, along with websites like Robot Wisdom (which I guess is now obsolete, unfortunately) or shmoop.

I definitely recommend you doing it with a Gilbert or Linati Schema at first try, finding things out on your own, and then using the other methods when you really want to fully discover a chapter. There is always more to appreciate and find when reading Ulysses, and the deeper you dig in the internet, the more you'll appreciate it.

Just beware the horrors of 'Oxen of the Sun' aka Chapter 14.

Awesome. I hope you enjoy it.

When you take the plunge, consider picking up a copy of Lexicon Urthus, it is an encyclopedia of words, characters and terms used in the Urth Cycle.

Most of what you encounter is easy to find with a simple google search but the reference book collects it all in one place and puts things in context for you. It can be a little spoilery if you look-up characters and read the full entry but if you stick to looking-up words I think it will be a great help.

The Urth List is a valuable resource as well. When you're done (or while reading) if you have theories or questions -- as you undoubtedly will -- you can search there and find a lot of old discussions and thoughts.


Still, now that I've written all of that I am not sure...looking back some of my enjoyment was not knowing what the hell was going on half the time.

I actually found that reading the pertinent sections of the Ulysses guide before each chapter helped.

I liked the Molly section of the book. But otherwise Ulysses really seemed to me to be essentially a written collage or mix tape, in that Joyce strung together so much of what he'd studied and called it a book. Which I don't mean as a slur against mix tapes or collages.

Did reading Ulysses give me insights into existence, as any great work of art should? Hard to say, though that last section was pretty good--not because of what all Joyce did, but because of the sheer disconnect between Bloom and Molly.

Probably I'd recommend reading at least half a dozen other books instead. Heck, Shantaram was more important to me than Ulysses.

The combination of Shantaram, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and A Fan's Notes taught me a lot more than did Ulysses, and they were far more fun, interesting, and quick to read.

This book is generally considered to be the Ulysses bible - the end all guide to understanding all the references, jokes, minutiae, etc. I think it's better to have a guidebook that you can reference occasionally, rather than blunder blindly through what is known as one of the most difficult novels in the English language. That's just what I would do, but of course you have to be careful not to get too obsessed and just to enjoy it as well. Good luck and have fun!

You're in over your head. You've been mislead.

Am I right in assuming that you also believe "Cultural Marxism" is fake news, a fabrication by the "alt right"?

Let's look at some literature:

• Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
  
  
• Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
  
  Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
  
  
• "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
  
  Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
  
  
• "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
  "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that
  
  "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. https://www.readings.com.au/products/6300010/cultural-marxism
  
  
• The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
  
  Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
  
  For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/index/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", described as "long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
  
  You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
  
  I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies

If you're into reading critically, I'd join a book club so you can discuss the book afterwards. That should help you recreate some of the classroom feel, that you're missing out on. Here's one on reddit if you're interested. I haven't participated in it, so I don't know the quality of discussion, but it seems to have a lot of members.

You could try reading sitting up, slower, at a desk, and taking notes with a pen. That might help you pay attention and develop thoughts about the book.

I remember a book being talked about here a while ago called how to read a book that might be worth looking into. I personally haven't gotten around to reading it, but it seems to be highly recommended and is supposed to help with intelligent reading.

Sorry for a jumbled response, but I hope that gives you some ideas about where to start.

I mean, you really need to be reading anthologies to get a basis of the poetic tradition and then move on to individual books. While individual books of poetry help you get a sense of each writer, getting a taste of many poets throughout many periods is the only way to really become well versed (pun-intended). Also, part of the way to learn how to read poetry more critically is learn how to write poetry, or at least what goes into writing poetry. And my personal advice is to purposefully read poetry that is hard for you to grasp or find interest in, whether that be due to understanding or content (e.g. Yeats and his faeries don’t interest me in the slightest).

Theory/Reading Critically:

• A Poetry Handbook (super basic approach)
  
• How to Read Poetry Like a Professor
  
• Why Poetry?
  
• The Poetry Handbook
  
  American:
  
• Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American
  
• The Oxford Book of American (my personal favorite)
  
• Any of The Best American Poetry collections, to read the most contemporary poems.
  
  Other:
  
• The Norton Anthology
  
• Six Centuries of Great Poetry
  
  Source: Have a Master’s Degree in poetry and currently working on my MFA. My expertise is in 20th & 21st Century American Poetry, particularly post-War/post-45.

Cheers. Honestly, I really recommend reading the actual source material of the Norse sagas where all of these originate from - the Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, Heimskringla, Ynglinga saga, Völsunga saga, Egil's saga, etc. I grew up hearing these stories here in Scandinavia (added: hadn't heard of Ratatoskr until now though) but there are still a lot to discover and appreciate anew even for me. There's a new translation of the Poetic Edda by Jackson Crawford that is supposed to have a much more natural flow to our modern language sensibilities. Often these materials seem translated to sound old, with a rather stale language which makes the wonder and magic of the stories harder to soak up. This new one should be much more natural and possibly more entertaining to read.

Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying. Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014 Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
3. "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144 Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   -Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology. I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies
   
   http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

That's a deep rabbit hole, if you allow it.

There are different books for different parts of writing. Some focus on plot [Story Engineering], others talk you out of blocks [Bird by Bird]. Some deal with immersion [Wired for Story], others warn you of newbie errors [edit yourself]. Some only talk about the first page. [Hooked]

If you specify what you want the most, I can probably get more specific. The best way to deal with grammar, other than the dry "Elements of Style", is to take a free Cousera course, or OWLs online and test yourself. I also love this blog for crazy awesome advice both current and in her backlog.


Edit: Also too: Might as well hang out at /r/writing and pop in from time to time at /r/grammar

> Cultural marxism in my experience is a most definitely right-wing term.

No it isn't. Below is a quote from this twitlonger http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

**
Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

)1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450

)2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg

)3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144

)4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".

)5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd

The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.

)6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."

)7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

***

Cultural Marxism is a real academic term, Orwellian efforts of Wikipedia admins to redefine it notwithstanding.

The Making of A Poem http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology/dp/0393321789/ref=pd_sim_b_4

And Camille Paglia's Break Blow Burn http://www.amazon.com/Break-Blow-Burn-Camille-Forty-three/dp/0375725393/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341117050&sr=1-1&keywords=break+blow+burn

Are two great books that can serve as references to really unraveling the structure of poetry. Despite what people might say about "enjoying it on its own", I guarantee there is a world of poetry that one needs to study before it can be fully enjoyed. The most important structure or "lack of structure" in poetry is the use of emphasis and unless one understands how emphasis is being used by a poet, a truly beautiful poem can sound like absolute nonsense to an untrained reader.

Joseph Campbell.


One key thing to remember: Campbell's work is descriptive, not prescriptive. What I mean is that he was describing and interpreting the trends that he found in mostly ancient folklore, myths, and legends. He had no intention of creating a formula for storytellers to refer to, although this is now common practice.


Also, "Star Wars closely follows the monomyth" is really not a topic. You need to answer the "So what?" question. Why did Lucas do that? Where does he deviate from the monomyth? How does he use these common trends to tell a unique story? How does it reflect the time in which it was produced? You don't have to answer all of these questions, but you do need to address something beyond simply plugging in Star Wars characters and situations where appropriate.


You should probably seek out the Joseph Campbell-Bill Moyers collaboration The Power of Myth*. Lots of libraries have a copy. It is much, much easier to digest than Campbell's original work, unless you are already familiar with a great number of myths and extensive academic terminology. The tv series by the same name is pretty good, as well. For a book that uses Campbell's monomyth but updates it with examples from modern media (and a prescriptive purpose), pick this up.


Source: Wrote master's thesis using Campbell scholarship as a resource.

I can't recomend or say this enough.

You need to read three books:

1. Save The Cat. This book will give you the basics of how to write a script, and what points to follow.
   
   
2. Here With A Thousand Faces. This is the same information you would get in Save The Cat, however, it's way more involved. This book isn't about screenwriting, it's about story/myth and how we tell them. READ THIS BOOK!
   
   
3. The Power of Myth. Another book by Joseph Cambell, which explains why we tell stories the way we do, and why you should write your stories using the 'Hero's Journey' (see Hero With A Thousand Faces).
   
   It is important to learn these basics, as you need to learn to walk, before you can fly a fighter jet.
   
   Happy to answer any and all questions for you!!! But these books are a must!!! I read them all, and still have Hero & Power of Myth on my desk.

Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
   
   I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

(I realize this post is a little bit of a non-sequitur, kinda, but wanted to respond anyway)

You may find a lot of fun and interest in The Power of Myth. It sounds like you'd really enjoy it considering you have such an open mind, so-to-speak.

I want to also plug an awesome pagan religious work; the Nordic “Bible”: the Poetic Edda.

You reminded me of it when you said the ‘thirukkural’ was written like psalms; the Edda is a collection of poems telling many stories that is like that too, with parts giving words of wisdom accredited to Odin himself. A recent 2015 translation by Dr. Jackson Crawford is very good.

It depends on the subject matter and what you need to do with it. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading has great advice for the different purposes. Don’t just trudge through each reading from page one. Scan, skim. Be careful what you decide to give a close reading of.

Keep a journal of your readings and make notes. That will help review the insights you pick up and remember where important references are from.

Instead of one notebook per class I personally recommend keeping all your reading notes in one book. Save the first four pages as a table of contents. Number the rest of the pages. That way when you get a new reading assignment you can add it to the TOC list and next to it note what page it starts on. That way you can skim it quickly to find it again. These tips are from the Bullet Journal method.

If you are interested in Watts' idea of nothingness you might be interested in the philosophy of Existentialism. If you want this idea put in layman's terms Existentialism is a Humanism is a great place to start. Honestly though, I would steer away from Alan Watts, although he is interesting, after reading a few of his books his philosophy seems rather empty and repetitive... Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre are all very interesting reads. Despite our resentful convo you should check them out.

My friend got me The Art of Language Invention by the guy that invented Dothraki. It's all about inventing constructed languages. It's written for nonlinguists so some parts are boring to me, but I still really like it.

Would she be interested in a more kitschy gift? I've always liked loose lips make bilabial trills in whatever item she might need. Maybe a crocheted wug?

In general, academic philosophy of religion is dominated by theistic philosophers, so there aren't many works defending atheism and atheistic arguments in the professional literature.

But there are still a few notable books:

• J.L Mackie's The Miracle of Theism is considered a classic, but it's a bit outdated by now. Although Mackie focuses more on critiquing the arguments for God's existence rather than outright defending atheism, he is no doubt coming from an atheistic point of view.
  
• Michael Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification is a lengthy book with the ambitious goal of showing atheism is the justified and rational philosophical position, while theism is not.
  
• Nicholas Everitt's The Non-existence of God is maybe one of the most accessible books in the "case for atheism" genre written by a professional philosopher. He even presents a new argument against god's existence.
  
• If you're more into debates, God?: A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist is a written debate between atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and famous Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig. It's far better than any debate WLC had with any of the New Atheists in my humble opinion.
  
• On the more Continental side of things, there a few works that could be mentioned. There's Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (although I must admit I didn't read it myself, so I can't attest to how good it is) and of course any work by the atheist existentialists, a good place to start will by Jean-paul Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism.
  
  I didn't add him because others have already mentioned him, but everything written by Graham Oppy is fantastic IMO. He is maybe the leading atheist philosopher in the field of philosophy of religion. A good place to start with his writings is his 2013 paper on arguments for atheism.

Start off reading about linguistics and some things which interest you in language.

Learn the international phonetic alphabet ^optional ^but ^it ^makes ^things ^much ^easier

Super useful videos for learning it

In that playlist there are also videos on how to actually start your language, DON'T DO THEM YET.

First you need to decide what your language will be for

Now use either the artifexian video in the earlier playlist or this video which is a bit more in depth to start making a phonetic inventory for your language.

The next things you need develop are:

• Phonotactic rules
  
• A writing system
  
• A grammar system
  
• A vocabulary
  
  You can find resources for those yourself
  
  I would highly recommend getting a book like the art of language invention or the language construction kit. I can't speak for the latter but the former was an excellent guide for me through parts of linguistics which I was totally unaware of and how to use them in a language ^the ^author's ^youtube ^channel ^is ^not ^a ^substitute ^for ^the ^book ^more ^an ^expansion
  
  I hope that helps

How to read a book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

Packed with full of insights and guidelines to make one a better reader. Reading leads to information, information leads to knowledge, knowledge leads to understanding, and understanding leads to wisdom.

A better reader, a smarter person. Happy reading ;)

A much less serious but still worthy book is The Ode Less Traveled.
https://www.amazon.com/Ode-Less-Travelled-Unlocking-Within/dp/1592403115

It only really covers meter and classic forms, but it's very fun, has great examples and exercises to try at the end of every chapter. Plus you can get it for less than 10usd.

Here's the explanation of Alexander Macris (@archon on twitter) on why that's bullshit:


Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
   
   I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.
   
   
   
   credit: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

Where do you live (State / Country)?
Indiana

Male, female, other?
Female

How long have you been writing?
If you count the really weird book my friend and I typed up on WordPad back in 1999, it's been 18 years.

What is your writing motivation?
I would love to one day find an agent who can get a book with my name on the cover in physical bookstores across the world.

What programs do you use to write?
Microsoft Word... and also a really battered journal.

How fast can you type?
77 WPM (4 errors, adjusted to 73)

Want to share a photo?
It's up, at the very bottome :D

Promotions

r/whimsywrites

My favorite author

My favorite writing book

My other favorite writing book

None of those are affiliate links. And if you can, buy them in print from an actual bookstore!

[A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver] (http://www.amazon.com/A-Poetry-Handbook-Mary-Oliver/dp/0156724006/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=1KW7NXQKV7AS70CM419V)

I'm not a big fan of Mary Oliver's work but this book is growing on me. There are things I agree with like studying poetry more than writing poetry, and hearing the words of a poem being important.

But I don't agree with the whole "poets are born but need training" idea. I do think anyone could be a good poet with enough willpower and practice. At least that's what I'm hoping for in my case.

> impressive

Aw shucks, I don't know about that.

I'd been thinking a lot about Greek afterlife recently (because I've been thinking about the temple a lot and there are some really, really compelling parallels there).

I liked mythology when I was a kid. And when I was an undergrad I went back and read the 'classics' because I wanted to understand those myths - which gave me a great list of questions because beyond those myths and the popular culture I'd absorbed I had zero context for understanding the language and culture. So when I go back over a concept in Mormonism (or Judaism or Christianity or Islam) that doesn't make a lot of sense I look at the etymology of the words involved, read about it on Wikipedia, and ask questions.

Also here are some people who's work undergirds my own understanding

• Jospeh Campbell
  
  
• Carol Pearson
  
  
• E.A. Wallis Budge
  
  
• and Hugh Nibley (right?)

Source: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

----

Sorry, But Cultural Marxism is Not an Invention of Right Wing Paranoids.

Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
   
   I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

Practice is paramount for philosophizing, more you read, discuss, and learn the more efficient you will get at it. It never gets easy, its always a lot of work, but you more or less learn the motions to it. Honestly one of the best books i have ever read was http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/0671212095 How to read a book. Best damn 15 i spent!

Hello! I am not OSP but figure I might be able to help a little bit (at least with the first question). For me, at least, when I hear "Fae folk" the first thing I think of is what became of the Irish's "Tuatha Dé Danann". This is not to say that other countries don't have their own "fae" or "spirit" beings (domovoi, hobgoblins, etc), but if I were you I'd start by reading up on Irish mythology. So you could probably check out books like, Tales of the Elders of Ireland or The Tain. If not that, then there are more general books like Fairies: A Dangerous History (I've never read it, but did a quick check on the author and they're a lecturer of Renaissance Literature so it at least sounds decently founded). Besides that, if you're in school and have access to a scholarly database or library you could always try looking up journals/articles relating to them within history or religion and culture. Hope that assists you. :)

I just looked it up (I was in bed last night when I posted the previous message) and it seems Birthday Girl is in the Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman collection. So if you want more short fiction that's probably the best route to go.

If you're interested in jumping right into a novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of his most generally well received novels and a good place to start for some of the signature Murakami weirdness. Kafka on the Shore would be a great choice as well, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is many Murakami readers' favorite novel of his, but I haven't read either of those yet so I'm more hesitant to recommend them.

I'd suggest reading the blurb of each and picking the story that sounds like it'd appeal to you most.

Thank you for sharing this.

Dr. Peterson said this in abbreviated form during one of his Q&A sessions. He emphasizes setting aside the reading after encountering a significant idea and then re-synthesizing it by writing your thoughts on it and how it relates to your existing body of knowledge (i.e. adding memory "hooks" to the new information).

Also, the book How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler dispels the assumption that all reading is equal. Essentially, there are different forms of reading which are suited for different types of material and goals. The passive form of reading most people do is best suited for recreational reading (i.e. magazines or novels) where retention of information is not the primary goal. This form is less taxing, thereby promoting the relaxation/recreation goal. The deeper forms of reading where retention (and more importantly, understanding) is the goal, require a form of reading much different than the "start at the beginning and read sequentially" form to which most are familiar.

The concept of "chunking" is interrelated to all these sources: Waterloo, Dr. Peterson, Adler, et. al. - which is the concept of actively relating new information to existing information. This helps by literally increasing the number and strength of neural connections to the physical site of the new memory, as well as structuring the new memory in such a way as to assign meaning to it. Chunking is also how brains become capable of dealing with concepts of increasing complexity. The vast majority of those who are regarded as super-intelligent in some field do not process more chunks of information than the average person. As an example, Bobby Fisher didn't rely on an extraordinary short-term memory to think so many moves ahead in his chess games; instead, he had synthesized his knowledge of chess so extensively to be able to think of entire sections of the board and entire sequences of moves through time as single chunks of information, whereas a beginner would think about individual pieces during the current turn as chunks. So each are dealing with the same number of chunks, more or less, but if information were ice - one is chunking in terms of ice cubes and the other is chunking in terms of ice bergs, with corresponding "weights" of ability.

Definitley Wind-Up Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami. Its about a dude who's wife leaves him and he has to find her. There is even a talking cat and some dream state scenes. some of it is a retelling of different histories and it has a lot of branching narratives. Kafka On The Shore is another great one by Murakami.

For Vonnegut,you're likely looking for Sirens of Titan, a retelling of Jonah and the Whale through an Alice and Wonderland lens. It's got a character who is very much representative of the Cheshire Cat. He has three different phases. His early books are the best. After (or even during) Breakfast of Champions he start writing a little more autobiographically (Slapstick is about his late sister and Hocus Pocus is about his brief tenure at Rollins college) and it's not as poignant (I don't think). And then later with stuff like Galapagos, he goes back to more philosophical lit, but it doesn't pack the same punch as his first phase.

Finally, House of Leaves is an amazing haunted house book that dramatically alters how you read a book. His other work is good too, but I haven't given any of it enough attention.

Edit: If you want to get meta, check out Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth or If On a Winter's Night a Traveler... by Italo Calvino.

Not in medical school so I suppose I'm "normal".
My best advise would be to skip the Ainulindalë and Valaquenta, the first part of the book. This is the section that reads like The Bible, and move onto The Quenta Silmarillion. After the Quenta Silmarillion, you may find Ainulindalë and Valaquenta easier to follow. As well as the encyclopedia that coolaswhitebread recommended, I found The Atlas of Middle-Earth to be both fascinating and essential to understanding where everything was taking place.

You could use awkwords.

Though if you want to do it well, I'd recommend, as others have, visiting r/conlangs. Also, check out the work of seasoned conlangers, like the Language Construction Kit, or David J. Peterson's The Art of Language Invention. I used David's book mostly, and found it really helpful. He's also super responsive to emails and has a supplementary video series on his youtube.

Get him into philosophy, niestche, Wittgenstein, Plato, especially socrates, you should read this wikipedia article on socrates here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus

An amazing book to help you think more clearly about everything... an amazing read

Metaphors we live by

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

Title: Where does mathematics come from...

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/

Check out the standard encyclopedia of philosophy to find things you might think he would like:

http://plato.stanford.edu/

Most book summaries are bad in that they don't connect the different themes in an intelligent way to actually allow your brain to comprehend the important details correctly and quickly - which is the point of a summary. The summaries in this sub are quite good, but only because there are committed people who did the really deep digging and can bring up the gems to show you in a comprehensible way.

Reading the book is always, always more beneficial than reading the summary (unless time is a factor, like cramming for a test). You won't get less content from reading the book versus reading the summary, but 99% of the time you will lose content from the summary.

If you are struggling with reading comprehension and retention, I absolutely recommend Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. Read it all the way through, deliberately, carefully, then read it again a year later using its own tips. It has helped me get 40-50% more juice from each book since. It's a tremendous capital investment in your reading ability (which will serve you well here and in life).

I happen to like Lexicon Urthus, which helps organize the material. I happen to hate the Solar Labyrinth, which I think is a lot of silly imagining of things that aren't there.

The truth is that there aren't a lot of straight-forward answers with Gene Wolfe. We want there to be; we want Dr. Talos's play to make perfect sense, if only we had the answer key. But Wolfe's work thrives in ambiguity, and while there are some clues hidden, I think there are far fewer clues, and far fewer real answers, than most people do. The point isn't to understand in a conventional sense; I think it's to experience a kind of wonder.

As for your spoiler question: [Spoiler](/s "The woman wasn't actually ever harmed during the festival, and there's no evidence she was a robot. Actually, this is one of the rare places where Wolfe leaves some pretty credible clues: there's good evidence that that lady is Severian's mother.")

It depends on your goals with the project. It is okay to do literally nothing for creating a fictional language, beyond saying that some people in your world speak it; or you can go all out and design a language according to linguistic principles. There is a real art to this. This book is a pretty cool entry point into the art of conlangs (constructed languages).

If it's something you're interested in, definitely do some more reading on conlangs, but recognize that it is a huge time commitment to do it well. For most stories, you can get away with a superficial gloss of constructed languages. But once you have signaled to your reader that you are taking it seriously, they will expect you to do it well.

From the perspective of overall story execution, this is an issue of managing reader expectations. Readers will not expect writers to craft full functional languages with their own linguistic rules and etymological history. But if you promise them that you are going to--by presenting your book in such a way that gives rise to this expectation--then you either deliver or you disappoint.

Realize that it was written during a certain period, for certain readers.

The person who was interested in this book in 1922 would have likely read Joyce's earlier works and been familiar with Stephen Dedalus. He/she would likely have been familiar with some Latin (the Mass was still conducted in Latin then). ...would have understood the history of Irish and English conflict. Ideally (and Joyce did not expect this) he/she would have been familiar with Dublin.

All of this means that Joyce basically skips the entire common (and expected -by-the-reader) concept and writer's device of exposition.

Which makes for a confusing ride if you aren't an Irish catholic living in Dublin born at the turn of the 19th century and who has read all of Joyce's previous works. And especially because most of us come at this book due to its reputation and being lauded as a Modern Masterpiece. ...we don't usually choose to read it because we have read his other books and loved them, but because it is required reading, or because we have heard so much about it, that we give it a shot. This means we come to it unprepared.

But sheesh... who ever prepares to read a book? Well, we would prepare ourselves if it were a foreign language, or in a technical field we knew little about, or was perhaps Shakespeare in the original English, or Beowulf in Old English, or the Canterbury Tales, etc. etc.

Lots of books require a little more effort than we are often prepared for. The reward is in reading them in their original sense rather than in a sanitized easy-access version. This is one of those books, that's all.

Sure, I'm exaggerating a bit. But let's look at merely the FIRST PAGE (This is the page that convinced me I really wasn't quite the reader that I thought I was, when I picked this book off the shelf for the first time with false bravado).

What the hell is Buck Mulligan doing and saying? What's with the frigging Latin, and can I buy a footnote clarifying it? Well, no, you can't. You're supposed to know it's basically the Catholic Mass, in Latin. Hell. My mother, who had no desired to read Joyce, basically laughed at me when I showed her and she plucked it all out. "It's the Mass!" she said, whacking me in the back of the head.

Where are they? what the hell is this gunrest crap? Barbicans? Towr? WTF? ...well. Martello Tower. What other tower is there on the bay in Dublin? sheesh. everybody knows that

Why's he wearing black, and saying he can't wear grey pants? Jesus. I'm two paragraphs in and sinking fast. ...well, his mother died. When someone was wearing black then, it wasn't a fashion choice. You automatically assumed the person was in mourning.

And so (to beat this to death), Joyce doesn't trip over himself explaining this stuff. The characters do not think to themselves for the purposes of letting us in on things, or for explanation's sake, they simply think the way you do, to yourself. You don't use full sentnces, or explain to yourself what you already know.

So you aren't going to get a line from Joyce that says:

"Buck Mulligan, a guy who is kinda fun on the surface but is really just a blowhard ass, and who is taking from Stephen what he can get (lodging, beer money, and intelligence-cred, among other things), comes from the stairwell getting ready to shave, but first goofs around by pretending he's a priest and so (blasphemously) holds up the shaving cream in a bowl like the sacraments held aloft by a priest, and says "Coming to the altar of God", only in Latin."

This is why the book benefits from a little view behind the curtains. Because as u/danuscript says, except for Joyce, no real all-knowing reader exists. There's also no reliable narrator running consistently throughout who can hold our hand.

It's essentially unfolding in little vignettes seen though others' eyes, or from an uninterested narrator (objective as possible).

So, grab the Gifford annotated volume (the bigger thicker one HERE ). But realize you don't need EVERY notation here to understand it. And some are speculative. really, does the yellow color of the dressing gown warrant three paragraphs? A lot of folks have read in more than joyce may have intended.

Also, try the "New BloomsDay Book". It is is an excellent synopsis, with as much exposition as is needed to understand the meat, and what is happening.

Last... the book is NOT meant to be a one hit wonder. It's not a beginning/middle/end thing, which is read once, and whose 'climax' is some great revelation or surprise. It's meant to be re-read. You would then understand the subtle unsaid things (e.g. which occur in interactions between people, which hinge on these), and you'll understand what's happening which you will have missed the first time through.

And skip.

There. I said it. Bogging down? Eyes glazing over? Try skipping a bit, or reading the first and last line of the medium-sized paragraphs. No shame in it.

If you find that you like the language, are getting the story (with help), and are glad you waded in, then you'll likely be back for a second read, and that can be the one where you focus, and delve, and read each line.

Took me three times, frankly, to make it through.

But I was aware that it wasn't Joyce's failings. but mine, which kept stopping me.

There really is a there there.

The following suggestion is by no means condescending or even insulting at the least bit but How to Read A Book is a pretty useful resource in learning how to properly read, absorb and be engaged with any piece of literature that comes your way. Hope this helps!

There is an element of truth to this. Abilities are built upon previously learned abilities. Even thinking abilities are tied to "embodied metaphors" learned at a young age (originally researched by Lakoff & Johnson' "Metaphors We Live By"). The only aspect of this is that no form of knowledge has perfectly symmetric learnability with any other. If you can squeeze the concept into a metaphor you know you can learn it more easily but sometimes the metaphor will take you to wrong conclusions.

In terms of "intrinsically physiologically easy" things that can be learned, in the extreme we are constrained by our mesoscopic existence to learn only embodied metaphors that resemble the mesoscopic world we live in. This is why Newtonian physics is easier than quantum physics (microscopic) or relativistic physics (macroscopic). This is what Dawkings is talking about in this Ted video.

We form embodied metaphors based on how we physically interact with our world as children. This is also the basis of the GOMS model for user interfaces to machines and computers (the basis of mouse-window operating systems - first at Xerox Alto, then Apple Lisa & Macintosh, then Microsoft, et al.).

You learn time arrows by experiencing them. You learn basic math by filling containers and seeing the addition and subtraction. You do not see quantum or relativistic effects so you never have a proper intuition for how them work. You only learn about them abstractly and if very lucky you develop an "alternate universe" intuition for them through abstraction. It never becomes "purely intuitive" though. It will always surprise.

Karen Wynn Fonstad's The Atlas of Middle-Earth is a great companion read to the Silmarillion. It covers much of the history as well and is a great read for anyone who loves maps.

https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Revised-Karen-Fonstad/dp/0618126996

There's no shortage of both paid and free resources.

​

I would recommend:

​

1. Robert Mckee's "Dialogue". The definitive tome on writing dialogue.
   
   https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1455591912/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1
   
   ​
   
   
2. "Self -editing for fiction writers". All-round comprehensive book on craft. Covers all aspects of writing, with clear straightforward advice.
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=self+editing+for+writers&qid=1563126077&s=books&sr=1-1
   
   ​
   
   
3. "Helping writers become authors" podcast. Heavily focused on craft and technique.
   
   Listen for free here:
   
   ​
   
   https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/podcasts/

David Copperfield will teach you just how long a sentence can be; The Old Man and the Sea will teach you just how short. A seven- or eight-word description can be just as vivid as a flowery paragraph, while a long sequence can be just as emotionally hard-hitting as a blunt fragment.

Something like Gulliver's Travels or Don Quixote will introduce you to archaic syntax and idioms, while Catch-22 and The Sound and the Fury will introduce you to non-linear and stream-of-consciousness structures. All of this will expand your appreciation of what can be done with the language.

Some novels have messages: 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, etc. These can be good for familiarizing yourself with the origin of many references in popular culture, such as allusions to Big Brother.

Explore beyond the novel as well: read Shakespeare and go see it performed, read poetry and have a go at writing some, and read in-depth essays.

I see we have both separately discovered the importance and practical value of George Lakoff's work :-)

His book with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By was a revelation for me, it completely changed my understanding of how we use language. I now consciously look for metaphors to describe things that highlight the important aspects of a situation. It is impossible to choose a name/metaphor for something that describes that thing perfectly, so

I hope that people will see your post and read some of his work, as his ideas make it much simpler to see how people are using language in a way that draws attention to some aspects (often, like you say, to their benefit) and downplays others.

Regarding a name for (Full-) RBF, the most significant part for me is that not only can the fee be raised to increase the chance of a miner including it, but the outputs can be changed(!), and so what is being "replaced" can be the most important part of the transaction, the person who receives the payment. I am trying to think of something that better captures the sinister, undermining behaviour of Full RBF. Some ideas I have are "Pay To Redirect", "Pay To Rewrite" and "Pay To Divert" (PTD), although I think PTD better captures the risk of accepting a transaction ("redirect" sounds like an innocuous postal service).

> For clarification, are you recommending/would you recommend that I listen to Delany concurrent to reading each chapter

Yeah he literally breaks it down page buy page. Sometimes an episode will be fifteen minutes on one paragraph. It is amazing.

Yeah and if you have any questions I can do my best to answer them.

This is the edition I have. It is the 1922 text as reset in 64? or something like that. Make sure you get a copy that is not trying to peddle the 'original' 1922 printing as it is full of errors.

http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Modern-Library-Reprint-Hardcover/dp/B00C7F057E/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458323096&sr=1-1&keywords=ulysses+modern+library

Get this book. It makes the framing of Joyce's Dublin really easy to understand.

http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Annotated-Notes-James-Joyces/dp/0520253973/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458323069&sr=1-1&keywords=ulysses+annotated

>Also, I appreciate the invitation to share a chat about it, I may indeed take you up on that. Thanks.

Any time. Any question. It wont just help you but it will also help me understand the book more.

You might want to also read Hamlet and be failure with the odyssey seeing as Joyce used those works for the basic outline of the book.

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell.

It changed my intellectual landscape at a young age. It's about comparative mythology, but it will open your world to the intellectual curiosities of art, religion, sociology, anthropology, mysticism, metaphysics and much more. A beautiful, eye-opening read.

David Peterson, who makes the conlangs for Game of Thrones and a number of other movies and TV shows, just published a really great book called The Art of Language Invention – it's really entertaining, and a great introduction to how to start making a conlang. Also, he has a tumblr.

I agree with what a lot of people have said about just reading it for the language, and letting go of understanding every sentence. However, if you're curious about the connections to The Odyssey, and also want to know as much as possible about every reference in the novel, I recommend Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. I liked having it on hand to use if I felt like referencing a place, name, or slang word, or when I just was trying to figure out what the hell is going on at certain points.

It's a little dry but you might check out The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. It covers a lot of ground, talks about the common themes in all of the worlds religions. Very enlightening stuff.

There's also a video version out there somewhere which covers most of the major stuff. We got to watch it in HS & it's pretty cool.

I would recommend the work of Haruki Murakami. Some of his work has elements of speculative fiction, surrealism, and metaphysics but it is also very grounded with real emotional weight. That, and his prose is sparklingly clear and filled with empathy and wonder. A good entry point is his novel Kafka On The Shore.

Morthy demands:

old posh Englishman: old posh Englishmen like to write, right? (Writing Stuff)

Never seen in public: these slippers would look ridiculous in public (Other Stuff)

Most phallic: this is the best I've got(Other Stuff)

Akeleie demands:

Most geeky: probably my Adipose toy (Other Stuff)

Achieve a goal: I would love to be a writer (Writing Stuff)

Deserted island: who doesn't need a ukulele on and island? (Other Stuff)

Thanks for the contest!! :D

>I meant collecting things with a similar suit outside the most popular books is simply impossible because publishing is not uniform across Tolkien's work.

Ah, yes that's true, new material is being published every so often, and old material is sometimes reprinted, but no there isn't a uniform style, format, binding (or even publisher in some cases), but I suppose it does make the collectors market more interesting...

>While I would not pass the chance to get it if I found it at an affordable price...

...I think the cheapest I've seen a purported copy offered for sale at, was $30,000...

>Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlas_of_Middle-earth -> According to that wikipedia link, a final revision came out in 2001!

I don't have my copy to hand so I can't check the copyright/publication dates, but I have this edition:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Atlas-Middle-Earth-Karen-Fonstad/dp/0618126996/

if 2002 is correct then yes looks like it is a 3rd edition.

I think it is getting re-released again later this year anyway...

Just start. You read mass quantities as broadly as possible, you read as much in your genre--or genres--of choice as possible, and you write as often as possible. You finish what you start, you revise what you've finished, and you read the final result with a critical eye in the hopes of improving your craft. It's simple. The shit just ain't easy.

Start simple. Pick your favorite genre. Write some short stories in that genre. Use either first person ("I shot the sheriff") or third person ("He shot the sheriff"). And use past tense ("He shot the sheriff") instead of present tense ("He shoots the sheriff"). You can branch out from there once you get the basics down.

Grab a few of the best how to books in your genre(s) of choice, but don't stop writing as often as possible, and don't just keep on reading every how to book ever published.

One of the best books is a general reference, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.

But really, it comes down to read, read, read, and write, write, write.

My favorite poetry book that I take everywhere is The Making of a Poem. It's a Norton Anthology and it's amazing. Honestly recommend reading it cover to cover if you want a foundation in traditional forms.

It's currently 15 bucks on Amazon!

It's from Karen Wynn Fonstad's wonderful The Atlas of Middle-earth. Highly recommended! It's not strictly canon, but very faithful and almost entirely free of conjecture.

No problem! It certainly is ambitious for a first-time attempt, but for what it's worth I think you're doing great so far!

For a quick-and-dirty guide you can check out this quick meter explanation. If you've got a little bit of spending money, I highly reccomend The Ode Less Travelled by the disgustingly talented Stephen Fry. Again, poetry isn't really my forte, but hopefully these will give you enough information to know what to google!

I have three of them. Meditations, Tao Te Ching, and Man's Search for Meaning.

I read Tao Te Ching many years ago. I think it was above my reading level at the time as I can't recall much about it. I wasn't really paying attention to what I was reading or properly digesting it.

I have the Gregory Hays' version of Meditations. It's up next after I'm done Flow. So far Flow mentions quite a few things I recognize from Stoicism. Directly mentions Diogenes in the first chapter.

Man's Search for Meaning will probably follow shortly after Meditations.

I've only heard of the Bhagavad Gita, so that's as familiar as I am with it. I assume it's a book of wisdom or something like that from India.

I do make notes of the books I read, so if you'd like I can forward them to you when they're ready. Currently putting together some for How to Read a Book, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, and Atomic Habits.

Wolfe claims that he only uses obscure English words, but his definition of the English language is very broad. I love language and word play and really liked leafing through Lexicon Urthus, which is a dictionary that was specifically made for The Book of the New Sun. My library happened to have a copy, so I used it, but it was by no means necessary.

If you believe your words are gospel, then just accept the feedback and move on with your life. If you want to start down the road of legitimately writing poetry that someone who actually reads poetry can appreciate, it's time to get to fucking work.

Of course, you think your "words" are special, but they aren't. This is the same thing every beginner churns out. It's cliché abstraction and it's not worth sharing with anyone. You can call it "poetry" and say it's your "art" and that poetry can't be "defined" -- whatever.

But anyone who actually reads poetry will recognize your "words" immediately for what they are and turn the page.

Read some poetry, man. Read some books about writing poetry and the tools poets use to craft their poems. If you need recommendations, I can give you some, but you'll have to do some fucking work. You might have missed the memo, but writing poetry is hard work.

***

Edit: Here some recommendations to get you started.

• A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
  
• The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser
  
• In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
  
• The Poet's Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux
  
  And if you insist on trying to use end rhymes:
  
  
• Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver
  
  And please, please pick up a good book of poems from multiple authors so you can get some exposure, such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry or the compilation Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. One of my favorites is A Book of Luminous Things by Czeslaw Milosz.

How many times have you read the books?

You could be falsely assuming the cause is your quick reading and not that you've only read the available literature once instead of three times.

I think understanding that there's more to be found and a desire to look for it should be enough to slow you down. If you find yourself zoning out and reading in a more skim-like manner, go back a few paragraphs to what you remember reading last and start over.

Or if you really want a good resource, get How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. It's about reading and reading closely and when the two are appropriate and whatnot. Adler was a great man. He's the one who also spearheaded/managed the Great Books of the Western World organization/movement. Not everything he recommends needs to be applied but it's good to know how to (as someone learned thinks you should) properly read closely when you want to.

I don't think it's a question of whether or not you can think deeply.

When seeing layers of meaning in something, like a book, it usually helps if someone has a lot of the foundational information that the author draws upon in order to craft his/her stories.

Books don't form in a vacuum. They are derived from a lot of influences in the writer's life. Those influences, in turn, are affected by the history of the culture in which the person is living as well as current happenings.

Have you ever read any Joseph Campbell?

http://www.jcf.org/new/index.php

Many of his works on the Archtypes found in story telling and history can really help you understand the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of most human art.


http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Myth-Joseph-Campbell/dp/0385418868

David Peterson, who develops conlangs for TV shows like Game of Thrones, has a youtube series that I find really interesting and helpful. It's made as a companion to his book. I haven't read the book yet, but if it's anything like the video series, I'm sure it's worth a buy.

Post a pasta, recieve a pasta, shill. Educate yourself:

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4
Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.
Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
"Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
"Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
"Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.

For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."

You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

Frankfurt School Cultural Marxism is Based in Jewish Mysticism
https://murderbymedia2.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/1417900885468.png

The Frankfurt School and Its Legacy
http://www.morveninstituteoffreedom.com/FrankfurtSchool.pdf

Critical Theory (Cultural Marxism) and Jewish Thought
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/theology/events/2013/critical-theory-and-jewish-thought.aspx

Satan's Secret Agents: the Frankfurt School and Their Evil Agenda
http://www.darkmoon.me/2013/satants-secret-agents-the-frankfurt-school-and-their-evil-agenda/

Fallen Jews, Critical Theory, and Cultural Marxism
https://originsofleftism.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/notes-fallen-jews-critical-theory-and-cultural-marxism/

Bill Whittle on the Narrative: Political Correctness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrt6msZmU7Y

The Spread of Cultural Marxism to Latin America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Reb9wvTzg

The Triumph of Cultural Marxism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk9CWm0W4Q4

Cultural Marxism
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism

Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIdBuK7_g3M

Erich Fromm, Judaism and the Frankfurt School
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell24.htm

Freud, The Frankfurt School, and the Kabbalah
http://www.conspiracyschool.com/blog/holiness-sin-freud-frankfurt-school-and-kabbalah#.VGsgXIeRk7B

Frankfurt School
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

Frankfurt School of Social Research
http://jettandjahn.com/2010/10/frankfurt-school-of-social-research/

The Frankfurt School & Cultural Marxism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghx3d1GiAc0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkcy7256tBM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG6TcYfpQOg

The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/chap5.pdf

Frankfurt School - Satanic Judaism in Action
http://www.henrymakow.com/frankfurt-school-satanic-judaism-in-action.html

The History of Political Correctness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acjIw7cVc2k

How a Handfull of Marxist Jews Turned Western and U.S. Culture Upside Down
http://davidduke.com/how-a-handfull-of-marxist-jews-turned-western-and-us-culture-upside-down/

The Jewish Frankfurt School and the End of Western Civilization
http://www.dailystormer.com/the-jewish-frankfurt-school-and-the-end-of-western-civilization/

The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and "Political Correctness"
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html

Who Stole Our Culture?
http://www.wnd.com/2007/05/41737/

Sabbatean-Frankist Roots of the Frankfurt School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBfT0pi0cMs

You could start with a book like this: E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy or Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book or How to Think About the Great Ideas.

Or you can, like you've said, gather some info. about certain historical periods or cultural eras and decide to learn more about them. It's not easy, but you're living in a time where you can easily and freely access a lot of information.

I second The Longship.

​

Asatru is a type of Heathenry. Heathenry is an umbrella term for religions, philosophies, piety, lifestyles that are based in Germanic Paganism and/or Germanic Pagan culture.

A good place to start is reading books.

Here are the ones I recommend:

A Beginner's book: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Heathens-Guide-Asatru/dp/0738733873/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542673929&sr=8-1&keywords=heathenry

​

And the Poetic Edda translated by Jackson Crawford: https://www.amazon.com/Poetic-Edda-Stories-Hackett-Classics/dp/1624663567/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542673980&sr=8-1&keywords=jackson+crawford

​

Also, for some spiritual music to meditate to, I recommend starting with

Wardruna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fnPwj1AMpo

And this song by Heilung: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqdk34f210w

​

Ancestors are very important to Heathenry, so I would meditate on some of your ancestors that have passed on, if you don't already.

​

Connect with the energies of your local land and woods. Some Heathens think these energies are literal beings called Land Wights. Some see them a bit more fluid and amorphous but still relational energies tied to the local land.

​

I also recommend learning a bit about the three major ritual forms: Blots, Sumbels, and Fainings.

​

At least, these are the places I would begin.

Be sure to check out some of the volumes (yes volumes) of literary review written about A Book of the New Sun.

I recommend Lexicon Urthus and Solar Labyrinth.

The essays therein really helped me reach a new appreciation for Wolfe's work and let me enjoy them on a new level.

> Außerhalb der Rechten Argumentation hat dieser Begriff keine Verwendung

Weshalb die Linken den Begriff so sehr fürchten, dass sie ihn mit allen Quellen aus Wikipedia gelöscht haben und nun auf einen Artikel der sich mit Verschwörungstheorien befasst verweisen.

Kultureller Marxismus ist real.

Dazu ein Text aus dem Anfang der GamerGate Zeit. 26 Sept 2014 https://twitter.com/archon/status/515729906521890817

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

> # Sorry, But Cultural Marxism is Not an Invention of Right Wing Paranoids.

> Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

> Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

> 1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450

> 2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

> Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg

> 3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144

> 4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

> Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".

> 5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd

> The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

> Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.

> 6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."

> 7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

> I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

Online Great Books is a paid community that reads and discusses the great books together. Jordan Peterson appeared as a guest on their podcast in this episode. Enrollment is currently closed but you can sign up to be notified when it opens again.

They basically follow the reading list from Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book, minus the Bible and some of the scientific and mathematical works. You can find the list on Wikipedia too.

Any Great Books reading list is going to take years to complete. Don't be intimidated and don't feel like you need to rush.

Ok, I am being completely serious. I am not trying to insult you. I was floored by this book, and I use it still. It is one of the greatest books I have ever read and teaches people how to LEARN!

I thought I knew, I'm a college graduate, I program for a living. I can read and learn already, right?

No...

Please, please, please, consider reading this book and don't be turned off by the title.

How to Read a Book

[EDIT] Also, you since you like comics, I highly recommend Understanding Comics, it's a mind-blowing view of how comics work.

If you're interested in an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and the role of mythology in the development of Judeo-Christian faiths, I recommend you look into reading anything and everything you can ever get your hands on by Joseph Campbell. I specifically recommend The Power of Myth and The Masks of God series.

Joseph Campbell was himself very spiritual and has a very unique and insightful way of thinking about religion.

The Silmarillion Primer is an excellent blog that summarizes each chapter in a humorous way and puts everything in context with what you learned in other chapters.

The Atlas of Middle-Earth has great maps that show the movement of characters.

Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is chock full of interesting tidbits, although Penguin's Ulysses: Annotated Student Edition is also good for someone who doesn't want to go as deeply as Gifford will take you.

That being said, I completely agree that you don't "need" the notes, especially since they can mislead readers into thinking that they can get a total picture of the world Joyce is creating. More to the point, it is missing the forest for the trees: the point is that Joyce is recreating the world he lived in; it isn't expected (or possible) that you relive it as well. The first time I read it, I got fixated on references. Now, I just refer to the notes when my studies or interests necessitate more information.

This one and this atlas are really good. The atlas would easily be worth it as a read on its own. The guide is kind of an encyclopedia with pretty much every name or place you could want to look up.

Eavon Boland and Mark Strand's anthology 'The Making of a Poem' may be the perfect resource for you. The editors arranged the collection according to poetic form with each chapter containing brief histories, descriptions, and exemplar works to illustrate the many ways in which they can behave. Blank verse, sonnet, villanelle, sestina--it's a trove of wonderful models to work from, a truly invaluable resource for someone writing their first (or thousandth) poem. Link below: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789

I'm a little late but I would also like to say that reading Ulysses in a group is very rewarding, especially if lead by someone who has read and studied the text. I read it in college and our professor was a bit of a Joyce scholar and it made everything so much easier to get the context of. Additionally, the companion book that has all of the contextual explanation and references is a must buy if you are going to undertake it (http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Annotated-Notes-James-Joyces/dp/0520253973). Also, it wouldn't hurt to read The Odyssey first either.

I would recommend The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry. It might not strike you as college level but it works through all the techniques used by poets and serves as a solid intro while remaining accessible.

I believe the poster 0HAO is referring to this course from Open Yale: Modern Poetry. I would recommend this as a good intro to the modern period along with many of the key poets, though the video lectures alone teach you little about how poems are made up. Langdon Hammer is also great at reading poetry IMO.

I would suggest to do 3 things before you dive into any philosophy books.

The first is enroll and take the Coursera Learning to Learn course(it's free). The second is to read Mortimer J. Adler's How to read a book, and the third is to read Susan Wise Bauer's The Well Educated Mind.

After finishing those, pick up a general history of philosophy book, and dive into the primary sources, starting with the early philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, and branching off into any branch of philosophy that interest you.

The /r philosophy subreddit can be a useful tool in learning where to go once you start, I suggest a couple 'where to begin' searches to get a reading list.

I'm not sure about what questions you could ask a coach, but any information i'd ever want to learn about writing can be found in the following books:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1444723251

Stein on Writing
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0312254210

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Renni Browne
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0060545690

Maybe some questions you can answer for us? Why have you sought out a writing coach? What kind of writing do you do? How long have you been writing and at what level?

You may get some better responses after these questions. :)

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690 A lot of it might seem a bit obvious if you already have editing knowledge, but as an editing beginner I found this book to be super helpful.

I can give you three books that I recommend without reservation. The first is the easiest to read and a solid introduction to fiction editing. The second goes into more depth, with an excellent workflow for the revising process in the latter chapters. The third is the most dense, like a college class in fiction editing with a focus on how the 19th and 20th century masters actually revised their works, but it is also the most thorough.

Self-editing for Fiction Writers (written by two editors)

Stein on Writing (written by an accomplished editor)

Revising Fiction (written by an college professor, writer and editor)

/r/conlangs !!!

Here's a good podcast.

Book from the guy that created Dothraki (he's also on the podcast every now and then) about constructing languages

The language construction kit. Gives you a general overview of how languages do things and how you construct languages

Second part of the LCK. Highly optional

After you're done with either the podcast or the fist LCK, you might as well get into the grammar of other languages instead of using language construction things.

Don't do auxlangs, though.

Edit: There's also a planet construction kit in case you want to get straight into world building as well

I would recommend you purchase the Bloomsday Book. It was very helpful for me to read this while I was reading Ulysses. The book doesn't tell you how to interpret Ulysses, but it helps you to notice more of the references/inspirations/jokes in the story. Google books has a brief preview that you can use to see if it seems useful for you.