Orientation One

Help us find Vio, the missing webmaster, at Ghost Hunt.

It behooves to make a brief remark as to authors.

Some with whom I've spent the most time:

Sigmund Freud

Much more interesting than Pavlov. So I skipped psychology classes, stayed home and read. Buy a work of genius: Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

 

Henry Miller

Since I write what is largely impossible to speech, especially everyday speech, sharing with one and all the ghostly characteristic of being largely mute, it is only natural that I should have been intrigued with an author so fearless and free with simple honesty. Miller had just what he said he had: guts, in the city, gathering place of humankind's endless army of ugly killers, some making it a point to be exactly that, others appearing otherwise, even honest. I also write for the same cause that Miller did: poverty. Unlike Miller, however, poverty also discourages me from writing, for freedom of speech is purchased like anything else. Which makes Miller all the more intriguing in that he dealt so well with the isolating force of not only poverty but writing. Buy Henry Miller.

 

Hermann Hesse

Miller's alter ego. Buy The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), and other titles.

 

William Durant

Gave human glory straight: war. But left out the other part: sex. Which are this worldly realm in a nutshell: passion: agitation. (Millay, however, is not so neglectful in the conversation that occurs between sex and war.) Buy The Story of Civilization. Mind that you won't find Lewis Carroll in the history section of any public library, which is a good reason to forget they exist except one can't avoid it.

 

Carl Jung

Time to go to sleep to wake up. Jung isn't but theory. Buy the Viking Portable Jung.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Writing as Creation. That power, not brutes. The only four-dimensional writer - in depth and height, in imitation of Creation, to surpass unto Such - that I've read. Had no use for poetry and neither have I. The point of almost all poetry is to make being commonly stupid sound intelligent, sensitive, wise or in some way special. An easy way to appear deep, high, hip, a philosopher, one more dumb shit. Read Cleaving anyway. Because, whatever you might do, it's highly likely you have nothing better to do. Buy Nietzsche.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre

And antimatter. But I'm not nauseous except when drinking tea or suffering poetry. Buy Sartre.

 

Ayn Rand   Buy The Virtue of Selfishness.

Nothing's that simple, and Rand, non-capitulating and overcoming, became popular once the simplification and compromise with society and space-time that are writing and publishing occurred - often identified, ironically, with originality. Rand herself acknowledged the essentiality of distance of vision, which is developed more purely, so far as writing is concerned, by writing without concern to publish, the sooner or the later of the human audience being a part of the complexity relative to the writer which each writer works out to his/her own capacities and purposes in writing. In general, once on the track on which publishing places one, the more susceptible to prejudice and less disinterested in truth one becomes. To acquire the limbs which are an audience one must lop off the limbs which are the greater breadth and depth of one's attention to a vast existence. Conspicuous examples of noise replacing hearing in media, as concerns politics alone, are Hannity, Limbaugh and O'Reilly, each having lucked upon a successful, for simplistic, tack and not about to sacrifice the popular squeezed vision which their audiences expect - and which has made them enormously wealthy - toward a more truthful addressing of truths with which they claim to be both concerned and expert. In order make themselves understandable, thus to acquire an audience, they have had to give up a much greater portion of understanding. They've had to give up the ghost, so to speak, to make contact, to be knowable, in a corporeal world where few are interested in the truth of anything to such a degree as, say, to read philosophy, where some truths are so quiet because so true, and can't be greeted in response with anything but a noncomprehending and alienating silence. A less obvious instance of otherwise, is Jacques Derrida, with whom many have a problem because they can't confine him to a tidy little box of easy making, due that actual living and thinking are immeasurably greater and more complex than people generally wish to regard (thus find pretend to be a suitable substitute without, however, calling it that). Just so, one of the greatest examples of missing via finding is no less than Einstein, whose successes with relativity theories led to a quarter century of tunnel and failure to work out a cosmological constant and a unified field theory. (Though not a failure of intuition, for there does now appear to be an antigravitational force, causing the universe to not only expand but accelerate while doing so. As to unifying relativity with quantum mechanics, some speculate that string theory holds promise to that.) So it is that each writer strives (or not) with the equation between what is understood and what is not, and with what portion of the greater with which to take the ball, it being understood, unless one wishes to pretend, that the ball, replaceable by anything, is not the whole game. It is called, essentially, respect for audience, in complex with the ratio between loving others and loving oneself. That be said, Rand was not a glory seeker, and she told a truth that pervades Earth's noosphere as a portion of the phenomenon that is value having no value: that to be good, extraordinary or unique is no way to win a popularity contest. Ask Jesus. (Irreverent but too ridiculous - this isn't Satan ridiculing Jesus, but a cartoonist who thinks to overcome the Satanic heroism of Jesus that was his adversary against his immediately better interests; honoring, instead, truth and those unable be true, amounting to all humankind. See a less amusing crucifixion of innocence that who know not what they do may live deliciously.) Whose crucifixion and rejection reveals that religion can be bad news, and as much evil done in the name of "God" or "good" as anything else. Religion is generally an inconsummate system to which the legitimately good, extraordinary or unique are not always fitted, be it the aristocracy of the common pretending neighborly love, be it the perverse dumb beast that is being acceptable to the herd, be it the boundaries and categories which deliver glory like another tunnel, be it standards established by greed or pretension which conveniently exclude merit that is merit as compared to merit that is self-serving, purchased or exaggerated, be it pride that keeps stupid but safe, be it social conscience wrought of conforming and limiting (un)consciousness, be it law, be it the official, be it the system. All people naturally live in partial contexts. All people naturally covet what others have and mimic what others do. That's why there are millions of Christians, Judaists, Muslims, etc., who if they loved God more than their safe beliefs as to God, or what is acceptable to believe as to God, might come to know God more than their own or others' beliefs. This is not, however, recommended. For one then risks not only realizing the profundity of such as, say, the living Word beneath religious texts, but becoming outcast, indeed, unable to buy or sell. Very few are not afraid of or incompetent before origin-ality. For when is that not a mystery? Thus do we prefer to iteratively concern ourselves with chewed gum, we who are born at what is not so much as a point in space-time, yet prejudiced by century, culture and location on a tiny globe. Thus does knowledge serpentine hinder knowledge serpentine. Thus does "normalcy" become a graven image of God and money the only living water. One can't expect a child of four to comprehend a paragraph recited out of Descartes, and one can't expect those who assign the awards in society to not themselves be bewildered except in pretend. It's easier and more profitable to accept that one already understands the "obvious" than to travel unknown frontier. It is more convenient to deny any greatness only because it is great, or because its greatness is invisible to one's relative lack of development, than to engage such oneself or open one's eyes, just as it is easier to expel any greatness which may seem to threaten blindfolded and blindfolding positions of self-interested advantage, due that the latter not unusually enjoy much company from cliques to gangs to armies to authorities. Meanwhile, who cry, "Satan!" or "Great Satan!" oft fail to recognize what doing so may make of themselves. Well, let's call that confusion for lack of self-knowledge just now, and the egotistical satisfaction of thinking oneself like God, especially in judgment, the latter to which opposition and causing of strife are ever more suitable than wedding feasts and peacemaking. Buy Capitalism. More Rand at Spectral Two.

 

Jacques Derrida (recent death - October 9, 2004)

I came upon Derrida a couple decades later than most. I thought I should become acquainted with the history of philosophy first, and that's how long it took. When I did finally begin to acquaint myself with Derrida I discovered that an indubitable psychic association had already existed for years, a phenomenon that had occurred ever since. I discovered that my intellectual travels apart from Derrida shadowed his own: he had already been there, if not a couple decades, then a week, before. But his mental grasp and ability to write such as caused me great pain to comprehend or express was far superior to my own. His was the ivory tower, mine the street version. Derrida's originality does not occur in the interest of attempting to be unique upon what came before. It occurs of a simple love for truth. Indeed, he's not original, as original usually goes (: clever, novel, cool, hip, wealthy, etc.) at all. Were it possible for there to be a greatest writer of any century, excluding languages such as mathematics, etc., Derrida should be recognized to hold that honor for the twentieth. Which, of course, he is not. Buy Glas, a reading of Genet by way of Hegel. Other Derrida.

 

John

In which writing is revealed an analogy between civilization and the individual, for two. Buy the New Testament in Interlinear English/Greek King James.

 

Moses

I leave this a mystery without preface just now. But, relevantly, when it comes to religion, including atheism, Matthew 24:23, and an unprecipitant and constant spirit of inquiry are wisdom. Buy a King James Bible. Typical to the human flock, religion is often but a convenient manner of chopping you down so that those you're traveled beyond can do, or at least appear to do, better. They become rich. You stay poor. Because you are what they talk. But it doesn't require religion to chirp, which is nigh the entirety of arts and literature. The recognition of this was Dada and, later, the beats.

* iota

Spectral Two

 

---

---

---

 

Browse for Books

 

Best Atlases

 

Best Books on Chess

 

Best Biographies & Histories

 

Best Foreign Language Dictionaries & Learning Texts

 

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

William Shakespeare

 

Browse CDs

 

Browse Documentary DVDs

 

Browse Movie DVDs

 

Doesn't anyone know where Vio is?