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I’m going to finish it, but it’s not really thrilling. Not that a book needs to be thrilling. It’s satire that tends towards earnestness when it doesn’t have a bead trained on anything in particular. Also conveys some real pathos, I think. It flirts with thrilling elements, which is good. More meditative, though.

Rereading, only listening as an audiobook this time. It’s fun to reread after reading the Three Body Problem. Stephen Baxter also worked with the “humanity is very late to the game of horrifying universal war” trope. Cyberpunk and space opera and hard sf galore.

Also, in my opinion, great plot-work.

Anne is fun. Her writing is both elliptical and precise; it reminds me of a mind where imagination and concept and percept all intertwine in memory. This is my first serious outing into poetry. I'm on the "Canicula di Anna" right now. Reminds me of Italio Calvino. In a good way.

Working on Merton too because he has chapters in here about ideology, anomie, science, and order. Also, as far as I can tell, he's the first Functionalist to seriously attend the fact that disorder is an inevitable fact of social order (hence, his interest in anomie). He seems to have been appropriated by the criminologists. But society is never a well-formed formula.

This is one of my side books in my research on Order and Disintegration. Has a useful introductory essay about Sociology of Knowledge. The first chapter is heavily influenced by Alfred Schutz's phenomenology (I know this because I sunk a lot of energy in working through 'Structure of the Lifeworld'). The hidden keyword in "Sociology of Knowledge" as a discourse is "ideology."

Turner made the argument that, despite 'unfocused encounters' being largely neglected in sociological theorizing, without a weak-tie interactions (like walking by people in Walmart you don't know but are confident won't threaten you), large-scale societies wouldn't be possible (how could anybody get anything done in college if you had to know everybody there personally?).

Turner's prose is so detached and analytical, it makes me feel like I'm in a solarium during spring. I'm familiar with most of his ontological-schema from his "Face to Face" text. I wanted to re-read it, so this reading is fulfilling two functions. To be a true social scientist, will I have to read Goffman, or can I just read this?

Yesterday, I read Von Balthasar assert that even up to the time of St. Augustine, philosophy and theology were never considered separate movements. Also, and as far as I can tell this began with St. Augustine, how can philosophical or theological experience ever be destinguished from the writer writing it or the reader reading it? With St. Stein, I read a modern reprisal: how can I not love her?

Does anybody read my updates? I mean, personally, I use GR as a bibliography tool. I suppose my reading habits are much like my sense of memory: thematic and not very linear.

Frye is swift and insightful. Which means he's bold: he makes his points very neatly, and I have little doubt that in the critical literature, reams have been spent disagreeing with his sentences. But, I believe part of the literary life is, when the stakes are low, selecting the historical anecdotes one finds most illuminating rather than most accurate.

Slow going; but worth it.

I must learn the virtue of controlling the impulse of buying used books off Amissione.

It's as scholarly rigorous as Tainter's "Collapse," which is useful if you're a professional, but critique consumes a large portion of the text. (Don't get me wrong, Tainter's critiques of Spengler and Toynbee were exciting, too see your heroes expunged by an even greater force of reasoning is a thrill I recommend to all). Like eating vitamins. Necessary, but you have to chase it with brandy.

Man, I don't even know where I put this book.

This is the closest I've come to the possibility of a mysticism of academic caliber. This, read beside Tainter's "Collapse of Complex Societies," makes me feel, I don't know how to say it, like, mmm, something along the lines of, like, 'mature', maybe. This is certainly one of the most profound and not pessimistic books I've read this year.

Will by literary-philosophical friends tell me if Kenneth Burke is taken seriously? I just can't tell. He seems like an American counterpart to Derrida, only more purposefully enigmatic and wackily obscurist.

This is my first sincere academic economic text! I'm digging it!

This is a wild ride for anybody interested in the social/human sciences. It seems to offer an underlying explanation for why everything seems to be crumbling (I live in a tax-adverse state with horrifying infrastructure issues, so everything Tainter is saying seems to be accurate about a social organization that is larger than its capacity to support itself).

Tainter is to history the same way an electrical engineer is to a popular music concert.

Philosophical musing on the presentation of history: how does one study history? Books, obviously, if one is not an historian. What's the best way to present historical information? The beauty of Study is that it presents a viable non-linear, systematic method of presenting history, in general, to the reader.

This is more of an intellectual history than it is a military history, btw.

It is because of the traditional expense of color plates and the relative thrift of etchings that antiquity seems black and white and sepia.

I'd like to personally apologize for blowing up everyone's feed with overly long book titles that lack enticing book-cover images. I went on a bibliography-spree, I'm afraid. (And when will goodreads add journal and magazine articles? Wouldn't that be neat?)

Fr. Lonergan's style is related to his method, which is also, I assume, related to his style of thought: it's basically a fleshy Aristotelian outline. It would be dry if it wasn't for the fact it was also so clear and relevant.

Fr. Lonergan just mentioned a few points about civilizational decline that I'd picked up from Quigley's historical methodology, which, in turn, I'm pretty sure they both derived from Toynbee. Unlike Quigley, however, pastoral care swoops in to shed a hopeful light on an otherwise dismal state of affairs: "...as such love can undo the mischief of decline and restore the cumulative process of progress."

This book is going to end up having a profound impact on my work as an intellectual, on the form of my intellect. What Fr. Lonergan is doing is absorbing the recent insights (of his time, before a lot of the continental work was translated into English) of existentialist themes for Scholasticism as an adaptive system of thought. I believe his purpose was to go beyond theology: this is athropologic-ethics.

Perhaps we could call these the "Axioms of Success."