I really like Malcolm Gladwell and am getting into his new book "What the Dog Saw" a collection of his articles for the New Yorker.
For those of y'all who don't know. Gladwell basically takes all these sociological mysteries and breaks them down (why Airwalks declined in popularity, birth control, Enron etc.) All his books--Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers--all f***ing brilliant, highly recommend.
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P fan #1
Joined: Jul '07
Posts: 1,415Posted 16 years ago #On the poem tip...
one of my favourite poems is...
OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '09
Posts: 1,659Posted 16 years ago #well, jack kourac, on the road. thats my favourite book. i like some of the terry pratchetts but i never read them, i got them on audio books because tony robinson (baldrick from black adder) read them. he was really good, made the books come to life. i have america surrounded the book about timothy leary, some of the allen ginsburg stuff (im a bit of a beats fan, lol)
also read a fair bit of cannabis literature, jus more reasearching and finding out the deal seeing as the goverment are not giving me the info.
peace -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,874Posted 16 years ago #I really like Malcolm Gladwell and am getting into his new book "What the Dog Saw" a collection of his articles for the New Yorker.
I've heard of this guy. What's his writing like? Is it dumbed down? I'm definitely gonna check him out, seeing as i'm a sociologist by trade. -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '09
Posts: 1,659Posted 16 years ago #hey, jus on amazon, ordered tha malcome gladwell, the tipping point. and four noble truths by Geshe Tashi Tsering looking for another, whats the word? philisopical sorta book, something tha u read slow and think about.
im on amazon atm so any reply soon wud be great.
peace -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,874Posted 16 years ago #some of the best philosophy i've read is descartes (he's the "i think therefore I am" dude), betrand russell ( he looks at a lot of analytical philosophy, epistemology, meta-physics, logic, things like that) and Thomas Hobbes ( his best work is called Leviathan, and is a treatise on the political nature of man. All very good, all very very dense. I would recommend some kind of introductory text unless you've studied a bit of philosophy, because they're pretty meaty. But in the end very rewarding. -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,874Posted 16 years ago #On another note, any of you cats read any Neil Gaiman? I've got a few sandman graphic novels, but never read any of his books. Are they good? Any recommendations? -
P fan #1
Joined: Oct '08
Posts: 3,255Posted 16 years ago #For those not up on the philosophy terminologies:
"epistemology" roughly equals philosophies of knowledge
"metaphysics" roughly equals philosophies of reality/"being"
"axiology" roughly equals philosophies of values
I took a huge philosophy class in high school where we studied a lot of that stuff... The Matrix had just come out on DVD, too, so we watched that and ripped it apart philosophically to look at it from different stances. Interesting.
Recently, I've been reading stuff like "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel C. Dennett (consciousness philosophies). Insanely interesting, but a very difficult read for people that don't routinely read this sort of thing. There was this thing I read by him once called "Brainstorms" that had a brief thought experiment that was like this (I'm heavily paraphrasing here):
A rocket lands deep beneath the earth, and it's emitting a radiation that is only harmful to brain tissue. Scientists have just perfected a new procedure that allows you to remove a brain from a body, stick it in a vat, and wirelessly connect the two, so essentially, the brain still controls the body, but remotely. So a brainless body goes down to fix the buried shuttle, collect parts, etc., but it is crushed by a cave-in.
So the scientists decide to give the disembodied brain a new body to control. It works. They also develop a mechanical brain that perfectly mimics the organic/real brain and contains all of that brain's memories up to that point, and they hook it's wireless connection to the same body. They develop a "switch" to move control of the body between the two brains. It works too, but obviously, the time the body spends under control of the "real" brain is not known to the mechanical one, and vice versa.
So the question is: where is the "person" in all of this? Did the scientists create a new one? What's really "conscious" and what's not? Where does "consciousness" exist in all this?
Crazy stuff. -
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Joined: Apr '09
Posts: 1,137Posted 16 years ago #you smoke dodo? said:
I've heard of this guy. What's his writing like? Is it dumbed down? I'm definitely gonna check him out, seeing as i'm a sociologist by trade.
His stuff isn't really that dumbed down. His latest book is a collection of articles from the New Yorker so you know it's all high fallutin fancy language and densely written essays for Columbia grads, lol. But in all honesty, his first two books were really good, not too simple. His third one, about success, some parts seemed glossed over, like the whole 'why are asians so good at math thing' (answer: discipline). I really like everything he's done, but I'm a biased opinion seeing as I'm a huge fanboy. -
P fan #1
Joined: Sep '09
Posts: 537Posted 16 years ago #YO my P fans! I knew that we were all cool as hell, but well-read as hell too!??! DAMN! Sooner or later, we're gonna take over the world..
I'm so glad a lot of you are readers. It really shows how the P attract great people with their music. Reading is a BIG passion of mine, and I regard someone very highly if they read regularly.
Here are some books EVERYONE ON EARTH should read before they die:
(Take a deep breath y'all)
To be considered a man, you must read:
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
3. Slaughterhouse‐Five by Kurt Vonnegut
4. 1984 by George Orwell
5. The Republic by Plato
6. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Catcher and the Rye by J.D. Salinger
8. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
9. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
10. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
11. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
12. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
13. How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie
14. Call of the Wild by Jack London
15. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
16. Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
17. Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
18. The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer
19. Catch‐22 by Joseph Heller
20. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
To be continued...
Happy readin' yall.
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EP
Joined: Aug '08
Posts: 133Posted 16 years ago #1984 should be compulsory reading for everyone - the tone, the pacing, the mood, it's absolutely penetrating. The progression and its ending is just sublime. -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,874Posted 16 years ago #man, 1984 turned me into the paranoid shifty eyed motherf*cker I am today... but is it still paranoia if they're actually after you?
In all seriousness though, absolutely, 1984 and brave new world should be compulsory reading... they describe our world better then any other book i've come across. Man, everywhere you look there's doublespeak... C R A Z Y...
I'm impressed with you guys, you're hella well read...
Plus, Xellerated, I though "for whom the bell tolls" was by Metallica?
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P fan #1
Joined: Oct '09
Posts: 654Posted 16 years ago #you smoke dodo? said: man, 1984 turned me into the paranoid shifty eyed motherf*cker I am today... but is it still paranoia if they're actually after you?
In all seriousness though, absolutely, 1984 and brave new world should be compulsory reading... they describe our world better then any other book i've come across. Man, everywhere you look there's doublespeak... C R A Z Y...
I'm impressed with you guys, you're hella well read...
Plus, Xellerated, I though "for whom the bell tolls" was by Metallica?
So, I'm in for a treat, since I'm currently reading 1984. -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '08
Posts: 1,874Posted 16 years ago #hmmm, i dunno if i'd say treat. more like your in for an eye opening experience. It's harrowing though. -
P fan #1
Joined: Jun '09
Posts: 1,659Posted 16 years ago #jus finished reading danny wallace- yes man (jim carey was in the film based on the book, i aint cin it yet)
gud book, lightharted and intresting (what would happen if you said yes to EVERYTHING!!!!, think im gna try this for a day soon, see what happens. lol)
jus bou to read the four pillars of buddism.
peace
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