Reading, Listening, Watching

For when I don't know what else to blog!

Definitions:

currently reading = I tend to dip in and out of books, it's only novels that I read in a straight line - so the following list may seem like a lot, but it's all stuff I kind of will have off the shelves for a few weeks, will read bits or reread bits, but not read cover to cover. Then at some point they'll go back on the shelves and others will come out.

currently listening to = stuff I have listened to in the last few days.

currently watching: telly = mostly what I watched last night.
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currently reading:
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Wednesday, January 04/2006

**Meditation week by week(David Fontana)
**The Runes of Earth (Steven Donaldson, it's the latest in the 'Lord foul's Bane' series)
**"First Things First (Steven Covey, author of 'The seven habits of highly effective people")
** Test-Driven Design (???)
**"The Linux Cookbook." (O'Reilly)



Friday, January 06/2006

Those listed previously are still 'off the shelves', and some new additions are:

** 'email to the universe and other alterations of consciousness', a fascinating, and highly readable collection of prose articles, interviews, essays, and some haikus by the illimitable Robert Anton Wilson. Topics include byut are not restricted to:

' The Passion of the Antichrist; The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory; Paranoia; Black Magick & Curses; LSD, Dogs & Me; Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective; Sexual Alchemy; Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying; The Relativity of "Reality" '
[from blurb on back]

If you forgot who he is, or didn't know inn the first place, the guy that wrote the Illuminatus Trilogy. Also possibly one of the grand-high poobahs of the /Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric. /Or possibly not. Don't tell them I said anything.

** *Stephen Donaldson, /A Million Jockers, Punks, and Queens, Stop Prisoner Rape: Sex among American Male Prisoners and its Implications for Concepts of Sexual Orientation/, Stop Prisoner Rape, Feb. 4, 1993.

*This article is both heart-wrenching and highly provocative. A must-read for anyone interested in psychology, cultural studies, sociology,
anthropology, gender issues, sexual identity, and so on. An extremely interesting article about sexuality and social roles in male prisons:

The full text of the article can be found online at http://www.spr.org/en/stephendonaldson/doc_01_lecture.html


The author is an academic/activist/counsellor who has himself spent a total of four or five
years in a number of different US prisons. This (probably fairly unusual ) perspective has given rise to a description of a highly specific culture embedded in a highly specific set of circumstances.

But somehow, for all the seeming specificity, the story told here about this particular demographic (Male American Prison Inmates) serves only to reflect back one of the most horrifyingly clear images I have ever seen of the ways in which questions of power and sexuality, law and violence, gender and community can sometimes feed back on one another to mutually create and recreate one another. It is undoubtedly one of the powerful indictments of our own main-stream culture I have read in some time.

I am surprised that this area has not been covered more extensively in the popular post-modern
academic realms of cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, sexuality, gender identity, and so on. The
article seems to be quite old - 1994?, and maybe there has been more study since then - I am not
sure. It is perhaps a mirror into which we would usually prefer not to look.

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currently listening to:
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Wednesday, January 04/2006

**'Love songs' - Aretha Franklin.

This is a new cd I just bought myself for chrissy - I haven't gotten to know most of it yet, but I really like the first song, 'A Rose is Still a Rose'. It's actually written by Lauryn Hill from the Fugees. I always hear it as a song about personal power, and recovering from any kind of a setback, rather than a 'love betrayal' song, although if you take it all literally it's obviously a love-betrayal song. If you substitute ther concept 'Thins that happen to you' for 'He' you'll see what I mean. Of course it wouldn't scan nearly so wass as 'He'!

‘Cause a rose is still a rose
Baby, girl, you’re still a flower
He can’t lead you and then take you
Make you and then break you
Baby, girl, you hold the power"


** Wave sounds for sleep - a thirty minute cd of waves, nice for falling asleep to :)
** Vivaldi's 4 seasons. ageless, always fresh, always wonderful.


Friday, January 06/2006

No change, really
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Watched last night (telly): nothing
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