books
currently reading
- Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325
Will Durant
I've been really interested in the Roman Empire of this era as of late, watching a lot of YouTube videos. I picked up this mammoth text in paper and have been reading it at lunch since.
recently read
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Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices
Frank Viola & George Barna
A book that really dismantles the modern "Church" and just how detached it has become from both the original message and original culture of the Christian church. -
The Book of Taliesin
"Taliesin", likely various authors
Bards were basically the middle-ages version of today's battle rappers. Read more about Taliesin on Wikipedia. -
Sun & Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death
Yukio Mishima
Written a few years before Mishima's attempted imperialist coup, one can read into this as the beginning of an edgelord imperial manifesto or, really, at its likely most shallow: someone who, after neglecting his physical body for decades in search of literary escapism, found an addictive viscerality in physical training that mixed with toxically with Mishima's schizoid egocentrism. -
Ccru: Writings 1997-2003
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
A Warwick University-based group of critical theorists and philosophers, including both Mark Fisher and the (now controversial) Nick Land. Fisher's Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction is a good companion to this strange ride in 1990s "accelerationism," which shares basically nothing other than a name with the current alt-right movement or the Andreessen-backed "/e/acc", which is little more than an attempt at reinforcing a VC cult of personality in the wake of crypto's failure and OpenAI's rise.
perennial favourites
- A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
One of the most influential texts on my worldview that I've read in the past fifteen years, it takes a bit of time to digest the thoroughly dense writing style but the concepts that emerge are some of the most important in our hyperreal era. - Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation
Karl Taro Greenfeld
Obsolete today, but a good gonzo read of 1990s delinquent Japanese culture. I originally read this because of my obsession with Gibson's Pattern Recognition, but I find that small vignettes from this book still float into and out of my head every few weeks moreso than even Pattern Recognition does. - Pattern Recognition
William Gibson
I'm not really a fan of Neuromancer-era cyberpunk, but whatever this is, I am. A familiar cold aesthetic that's a little less hallucinatory than Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Much of the book takes place in my two favourite cities, London and Tokyo.