KGrim
Full Member
Coming back to Arktos...for a little while anyways...just to see how things are doing.
Posts: 442
Likes: 238
Country: USA
Region: South East
Location: East Texas
Ancestry: Scotch-Irish
Politics: Conservative
Religion: Eastern Orthodox
Hero: Jesus
Age: 33 soon to be 34
Philosophy: Hesychasm
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Post by KGrim on Jan 8, 2020 0:08:36 GMT
I'm reading a translation from a french historical novel called, God Was Born in Exile. The main character is Ovid (The Roman Poet) who was exiled to a place called Tomi for "corrupting the youth" through his writings. I'm also reading Collapse by Jared Diamond, which is about how societies fail or succeed. I learned a lot about Easter Island from this book.
So what are yall reading?
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Clovis Merovingian
Prestige/VIP
Elder
Posts: 2,673
Likes: 1,757
Meta-Ethnicity: Anglo-American
Ethnicity: Deep Southerner
Country: My State and my Region are my country
Region: The Deep South
Location: South Carolina
Ancestry: Gaelic (patrilineal), English, Ulster Scots/Scots Irish, Scottish, German, Swiss German, Swedish, Manx, Finnish, Norman French/Quebecois (distantly), Dutch (distantly)
Taxonomy: Borreby/Alpine/ Nordid mix
Y-DNA: R-S660/R-DF109
mtDNA: T1a1
Politics: Conservative
Religion: Christian
Hero: Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, James K. Polk
Age: 30
Philosophy: I try to find out what is true as best I can.
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Post by Clovis Merovingian on Jan 8, 2020 2:56:10 GMT
I've been reading books about American Regionalism and American regional cultures, a subject of which I have quite a bit of a collection. Some books I'm reading.
American Nations by Colin Woodard which detail the eleven different regional cultures of Anglo North America, their histories, and their different values.
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer which goes into extreme detail about four of the regional cultures, their folkways, histories, and influence on modern politics.
The Yankee Problem, and American Dilemma by Professor Clyde Wilson, a series of essays where the professor skewers the Greater New England culture of the Northern Tier, an obviously biased book but very useful.
Made in Texas, George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American politics by progressive Michael Lind where Michael Lind talks about the regional cleavages in his home state of Texas and argues that though George W. Bush is a product of Deep Southern eastern Texas explaining many of his baffling (to some) actions.
South Carolina history by Walter Edgar which is a history of my state starting out from its origins as a "colony of a colony" being settled by plantation owners from Barbados who created the state's culture and going into the twentieth century.
Emerging Midwest, the imprint of the Upland Southerner on Midwestern Culture by (his name escapes me at the moment) which talks about the interaction of Scots Irish settlers and New England Yankee settlers in the early midwest.
Deep South, an anthropological study of caste and class by the University of Chicago which studied the culture of Deep Southern Natchez Mississipi and its surrounding rural counties in the 1930s and it's deeply entrenched. class and racial caste systems.
I have a couple of books on colonial barbados and how that culture spread to South Carolina and then went into the deep south creating the oligarchic slave culture there in the antebellum.
Books I want to read are Island at the Center of the World about the Netherlands cultural imprint on New York city and Champlain's Dream, by David Hackett Fischer about the founding of Quebec.
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Post by Eugene 2.0 on Jan 8, 2020 14:16:44 GMT
The brilliant post!
Now I'm holding a book called "The Philosophy of Science" of A. Nikiforov. Just a thin book. It tells the history of positivistic, new-pos..., and post-posit... views on science and also concerns talking about methods of science. I read it because I need some info about the question of "the language of philosophy: differences and similarities with the other languages", and also "do philosophy have its own specific language?"
Also, I've started Slupetzky, Borkovsky "Symbolic Logic and Set Theory" for the same reasons. Also, Tarski "Introduction to Logic...".
Non-fictions: I almost constantly stick to: Lovecraft, - trying to reread something of his tales. For example, I read last time his "Dagon". Poe, - I read last time "The Black Cat" that was filmed, by the way. Baudelaire - I usually read his poems from "Spleen" and the other. (Till this message some of those tales have been started to read by me.) I can advice to read Poe for any time and conditions. His style brings lots of inspiration.
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KGrim
Full Member
Coming back to Arktos...for a little while anyways...just to see how things are doing.
Posts: 442
Likes: 238
Country: USA
Region: South East
Location: East Texas
Ancestry: Scotch-Irish
Politics: Conservative
Religion: Eastern Orthodox
Hero: Jesus
Age: 33 soon to be 34
Philosophy: Hesychasm
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Post by KGrim on Jan 8, 2020 20:23:58 GMT
Clovis Merovingian , Those actually sound pretty interesting. I have a few American history books, but nothing that examines American regionalism. Mostly just books about the American Revolution, Civil War, and certain political figures. Those books and been sitting on my bookshelf for a long while and I have yet to get into them. I live in East Texas so I'm curious if you have learned anything about the region I'm in that I may not know about. eugene , The Philosophy of Science sounds like something I would want to read. I have Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions on my computer but I haven't gotten around to reading it. I actually have hundreds of books on my computer that I've downloaded from the Internet Archive that I have no clue when I'll ever get around to reading. I've had a kind of reading dry spell, but now I'm starting to work on whats on my bookshelves. I'm really enjoying God was born in Exile by Vintila Horia. Its written in the first person and takes you on a personal journey of Ovid's exile and search for inner peace. Here's an exert from the book: "I shut my eyes in order to live, and also to kill. Therein I am the stronger, for he closes his eyes only to sleep and sleep brings him no consolation. For him night is full of the dead who haunt him and the cruelties he has committed. I know that like all the great ones of the earth he does not care for rest. Rest leaves him in solitude, with only conscience and remorse, and regret for having always acted as a man of power, that is as a man terrified by his power. One morning five years ago I met him in the temple at a moment when he was hardly awake. His eyes were red and swollen with fatigue and he lacked the courage to look us in the face for fear we might detect in his eyes the names of features of those who had tormented his dreams." Really hooks ya from the start.
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Post by Eugene 2.0 on Jan 10, 2020 12:57:27 GMT
Clovis Merovingian , Those actually sound pretty interesting. I have a few American history books, but nothing that examines American regionalism. Mostly just books about the American Revolution, Civil War, and certain political figures. Those books and been sitting on my bookshelf for a long while and I have yet to get into them. I live in East Texas so I'm curious if you have learned anything about the region I'm in that I may not know about. eugene , The Philosophy of Science sounds like something I would want to read. I have Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions on my computer but I haven't gotten around to reading it. I actually have hundreds of books on my computer that I've downloaded from the Internet Archive that I have no clue when I'll ever get around to reading. I've had a kind of reading dry spell, but now I'm starting to work on whats on my bookshelves. I'm really enjoying God was born in Exile by Vintila Horia. Its written in the first person and takes you on a personal journey of Ovid's exile and search for inner peace. Here's an exert from the book: "I shut my eyes in order to live, and also to kill. Therein I am the stronger, for he closes his eyes only to sleep and sleep brings him no consolation. For him night is full of the dead who haunt him and the cruelties he has committed. I know that like all the great ones of the earth he does not care for rest. Rest leaves him in solitude, with only conscience and remorse, and regret for having always acted as a man of power, that is as a man terrified by his power. One morning five years ago I met him in the temple at a moment when he was hardly awake. His eyes were red and swollen with fatigue and he lacked the courage to look us in the face for fear we might detect in his eyes the names of features of those who had tormented his dreams." Really hooks ya from the start. (Just a brief note: to mention me Eugene 2.0 'eugene20' is needed to put.) I agree with you that religious books are what must be read by any Christians. Shame on me, but I don't have much time (because of my own laziness and non-organized style) to read even Bible. Surely, I try to address myself to the book, but more often it happens fragmentary. Besides, there are many good books about Bible and about the Traditions which are interesting to read. Some "keenest minds" read the holy fathers. I should say - it's tough for me, because knowing history is required to understand them. My knowledge of history seems to be poor. So, to find the golden middle I'm concentrate myself on some books on "Patrology" which is "science of the holy fathers teachings". As being ukrainian that is - to have much access to ukrainian/russian literature - I read those books. Among them I can recommend P. Sagarda "Patrology". He must be one of the most influental patrologist of his times (early XX century). Also, there's an interesting in any regards book of a protestant who's been investigating the Orthodox Liturgy, and his investigations are renowned by many Christians; this book is Hugh Wybrew's "The Orthodox Liturgy: The Development...". Concerning the Kuhn's famous book, I need to say that it is without doubt an interesting to read while, for my opinion, is not true at all. Feyerabend and Kuhn are typical frauds. Their teachings is the same "Trojan Horse" Einstenian's, Kantor's, Marx's, Freud's, Prigogine's and the others. I mean they all are wanted to revolutionate everything putting some abstracted, undefined, weird and strange notions inside the core of human nature investigation. It was the same to give a rifle to ape or to leave mistakes in missiles trajectory movement research. So, if I were you I wouldn't read that book.
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KGrim
Full Member
Coming back to Arktos...for a little while anyways...just to see how things are doing.
Posts: 442
Likes: 238
Country: USA
Region: South East
Location: East Texas
Ancestry: Scotch-Irish
Politics: Conservative
Religion: Eastern Orthodox
Hero: Jesus
Age: 33 soon to be 34
Philosophy: Hesychasm
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Post by KGrim on Jan 13, 2020 0:19:12 GMT
Eugene 2.0 Don't feel bad. I have loads of free time, but I still neglect my biblical studies. I try to read at least one chapter every night, although its more like one every other night. I added Hugh Wybrew's book to my wishlist. Couldn't find Sagarda's book though. Must only be available in Ukraine. I might still read it. I like to sift the bad from the good in every book I read. A book of lies unwittingly provides the ammunition for its refutation. Also, I recently finished God was Born in Exile. It had a kind of ending that left me feeling melancholy.
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KGrim
Full Member
Coming back to Arktos...for a little while anyways...just to see how things are doing.
Posts: 442
Likes: 238
Country: USA
Region: South East
Location: East Texas
Ancestry: Scotch-Irish
Politics: Conservative
Religion: Eastern Orthodox
Hero: Jesus
Age: 33 soon to be 34
Philosophy: Hesychasm
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Post by KGrim on Jan 26, 2020 22:17:58 GMT
Almost halfway through Jared Diamond's book Collapse and recently started reading a new book by Donald Yates called Old Souls in a New World: The Secret History of the Cherokee Indians. Old Souls in a New World explores the theory that the Cherokee have a Jewish and Eastern Mediterranean heritage.
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Post by Eugene 2.0 on Jan 27, 2020 20:06:50 GMT
I've started Steve Fisher's "Terminator 2" novelization this morning. I've already had his novelization of the first Terminator, and the book wasn't bad, it was pretty interesting reading, because some unusual details were revealed, but I did not like how Fisher evaluated many things during the book. That wouldn't so interesting and worth.
"Terminator 2" seems to be almost as his first book: too many over-theorizing passages, too many expressive adjectives that make this book to be more like one big Terminator's epitaphy. However, I'd recommend it to read to every fans of the series.
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Clovis Merovingian
Prestige/VIP
Elder
Posts: 2,673
Likes: 1,757
Meta-Ethnicity: Anglo-American
Ethnicity: Deep Southerner
Country: My State and my Region are my country
Region: The Deep South
Location: South Carolina
Ancestry: Gaelic (patrilineal), English, Ulster Scots/Scots Irish, Scottish, German, Swiss German, Swedish, Manx, Finnish, Norman French/Quebecois (distantly), Dutch (distantly)
Taxonomy: Borreby/Alpine/ Nordid mix
Y-DNA: R-S660/R-DF109
mtDNA: T1a1
Politics: Conservative
Religion: Christian
Hero: Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, James K. Polk
Age: 30
Philosophy: I try to find out what is true as best I can.
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Post by Clovis Merovingian on Jan 27, 2020 20:12:54 GMT
Clovis Merovingian , Those actually sound pretty interesting. I have a few American history books, but nothing that examines American regionalism. Mostly just books about the American Revolution, Civil War, and certain political figures. Those books and been sitting on my bookshelf for a long while and I have yet to get into them. I live in East Texas so I'm curious if you have learned anything about the region I'm in that I may not know about. eugene , The Philosophy of Science sounds like something I would want to read. I have Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions on my computer but I haven't gotten around to reading it. I actually have hundreds of books on my computer that I've downloaded from the Internet Archive that I have no clue when I'll ever get around to reading. I've had a kind of reading dry spell, but now I'm starting to work on whats on my bookshelves. I'm really enjoying God was born in Exile by Vintila Horia. Its written in the first person and takes you on a personal journey of Ovid's exile and search for inner peace. Here's an exert from the book: "I shut my eyes in order to live, and also to kill. Therein I am the stronger, for he closes his eyes only to sleep and sleep brings him no consolation. For him night is full of the dead who haunt him and the cruelties he has committed. I know that like all the great ones of the earth he does not care for rest. Rest leaves him in solitude, with only conscience and remorse, and regret for having always acted as a man of power, that is as a man terrified by his power. One morning five years ago I met him in the temple at a moment when he was hardly awake. His eyes were red and swollen with fatigue and he lacked the courage to look us in the face for fear we might detect in his eyes the names of features of those who had tormented his dreams." Really hooks ya from the start. East Texas is the westernmost extension culture that Colin Woodard labels as the Deep South. The culture started on the Caribbean island of Barbados. The colony of Barbados started out as a bunch of white British farmers eeking out a living on the small island until the Dutch showed the British how to cultivate sugarcane. Sugar was like the oil of the 17th century, insanely profitable but to grow it you needed large amounts of unskilled labor to work in horrible conditions. The Barbadians solved this problem by importing African slaves which is why Barbados is mostly black today. The Barbadians created what was perhaps the most horrifying society ever to exist in the English speaking world. The colony of Barbados was stratified even more than the mother country of Britain at the time and was dominated by an oligarchy of insanely rich plantation owners/sugar barons ruling over a class of poor whites and a massive army of enslaved blacks. The island was completely deforested with every inch of the island up to the beach and seaside used for cultivating sugarcane. The blacks on the island were worked to death in the sugar fields because the plantation owners made so much money they could just import more blacks from Africa whenever they felt like it. There was a caste system on the island with pure whites on top and anyone of any bit of black blood relegated to the lower caste. To enforce this caste system the Barbadians created a slave code that was unconscionably brutal towards their slaves. Black slaves were considered subhuman property and could be killed by their masters at will. Eventually though the Barbadians ran out of land on their small 21 mile island and thus there was no land for the sugar baron's children to inherit. So Barbadian society expanded to other islands in the lesser Antilles, to Jamaica, and most importantly for us Americans to South Carolina, my state. South Carolina has been called by historians as a "colony of a colony" being a colony of Barbados and was marked on the maps of the 17th century as "Carolina in Ye West Indies". In South Carolina sugar could not be grown, so rice was grown in the coastal swamps as well a indigo and sea island cotton which made the plantation owners richer than anyone in British America except their counterparts in the Caribbean. The plantation lords founded Charleston in South Carolina (a beautiful city, I suggest visiting if you get the chance) which was basically modelled on Bridgetown Barbados. To this day there are black people who speak a Caribbean style creole language in the South Carolina Lowcountry called the Gullah (you often see them selling little baskets they've made in Charleston.) The plantation owners spread their system up and down the coast on similar terrain in Georgia and North Carolina and eventually Florida. Then later on Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin making short staple cotton profitable allowing the Deep Southern culture to break out of the coastal swamps on to dryer ground. With the advent of King Cotton South Carolinians and Georgians moved west into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Eastern Arkansas, all up and down the Mississippi river into Western Tennessee, and as far as East Texas. When the Civil Started the seven states which first seceded from the union South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas were all dominated by the Deep Southern culture that originated in Barbados. The values of the Deep Southern culture have historically been the political and economic order of a one party state in service to a commodity exporting economy controlled by an oligarchy (think of the Texas oil barons for instance). Basically the natural political order of the Deep South (at least until recently say World War 2) is like Latin American Banana Republics. Historically it has been a racially divided society starting out as a caste society where an entire race was enslaved by another. Its where slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings were at their most extreme. Starting out as a traditional aristocracy the Deep South has always been extremely conservative on social issues and after the Civil War it became very religiously protestant and devoutly Christian. The Deep South also has historically been against big government, organized labor, regulations on businesses, high taxes to pay for government services and the like. It has historically prefered states rights over over a centralized government because it doesn't like outsiders meddling in its affairs. It also has been a traditionally violent militaristic culture coming from its heritage as a slave society and the fact that the plantation owners in the colonial days were often descended from Cavaliers in Europe. Anyways, this is my culture and i'm not trying to harsh on it because it has good food, good music, good literature, and good manners and actually some very good conservative values even if they didn't start from a good place. I'm good with the conservatism, christianity, small government, and states rights, and even the violent militaristic aspects of the culture (I think murders should be executed and terrorists should be tortured if they have information we need for example.) I'm not good with the oligarchic tendencies and racist tendencies of the past however. The people in the Deep South are actually pretty decent people especially in the rural areas and have a rich and beautiful culture even if we have a dark history. Despite all the bad history i'm proud to come from here.
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KGrim
Full Member
Coming back to Arktos...for a little while anyways...just to see how things are doing.
Posts: 442
Likes: 238
Country: USA
Region: South East
Location: East Texas
Ancestry: Scotch-Irish
Politics: Conservative
Religion: Eastern Orthodox
Hero: Jesus
Age: 33 soon to be 34
Philosophy: Hesychasm
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Post by KGrim on Feb 14, 2020 1:25:40 GMT
I have put Collapse and Old Souls in a New World on the backburner and started reading three other books titled Angelina: Little Angel of the Tejas by Jack Moore, The Texas Indians by Atkinson, Caddo Indians by Cecile Elkins Carter, and Sophia: The Wisdom of God by Sergei Bulgakov.
Angelina: Little Angel of the Tejas is a collection of 12 historical stories of East Texas. Its a tiny volume and I've already read the whole thing. I may do a separate post for one of the stories.
I'm halfway through Atkinson's book The Texas Indian, which gives a general overview of the beliefs, customs and way of life lived by Indians in Texas. I didn't know that Texas Indians kept perpetual fires which they worshipped along with the sun, or about their purification rituals that included fasting and vomitories.
I've barely put a dent in the Caddo Indians, but it promieses to be an intresting book. I picked it because the Caddo was the earliest recorded Indian tribe that lived in my area.
Sophia: The Wisdom of God was written by theologian Sergei Bulgakov and is somewhat controversial within Orthodoxy because it introduces a theological framework for the feminine aspect of divinity. Might be worth its own separate post if I ever get a grasp on what he's talking about.
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Post by Eugene 2.0 on Feb 14, 2020 23:08:01 GMT
Recently started to read Cave - How to Overcome Aristotle? (2012). The book was translated in four years; I bought it a month ago. I liked it, now I'm in the middle.
This is for ones who want briefly to leap into core philosophy problems. Unfortunately, the author, imho, made book a little confusive. He should be less "using-philosophical-terms-man". Overloaded of foxy philosophical speech isn't what new generations want to.
I started to reread "Call of Cthulhu" and "At Mountains of Madness" by Lovecraft. What should I say? Classics.
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