"Like him, I fought against the phantoms of the past, and like him, the battle took place entirely in my own mind. We each mistook the present for the past and the past for the present."
Male
30 years old
Milwaukee's OTHER East Side, Wisconsin
United States
Movies of 2007 I Saw and Generally Liked After the Wedding American Gangster Atonement Away from Her Before the Devil Knows You're Dead Black Book Black Snake Moan The Bourne Ultimatum Brand Upon the Brain Broken English Charlie Wilson's War Control The Counterfeiters The Darjeeling Limited The Diving Bell and the Butterfly The 11th Hour Elizabeth: The Golden Age (for the most part) Enchanted (until susan sarandon showed up it was better than i expected) Gone Baby Gone Hot Fuzz I'm Not There (except the parts with richard gere and the little boy) Inland Empire Into the Wild Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains Juno La vie en rose (despite that it's a total mess. it's like your crazy drunken aunt who delights and simultaneously disturbs.) Lars and the Real Girl Lives of Others Margot at the Wedding Michael Clayton A Mighty Heart The Namesake No Country for Old Men No End in Sight Once The Orphanage Paris, je t'aime Persepolis Ratatouille Sunshine Sweeney Todd There Will Be Blood Waitress Year of the Dog Zodiac
I also went to this Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective at UWM. I saw seven of his films and loved all of them, though perhaps Life of Oharu most of all.
Alan Kaufman- Jew Boy Salman Rushdie- The Satanic Verses Vladimir Nabokov- Bend Sinister
My favorite book is probably The Brothers Karamazov.
The Most Recent Books I've Read, Starting with the Most Recent
Kazuo Ishiguro- Never Let Me Go Nathanael West- A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell David Mitchell- Cloud Atlas Edward Albee- Three Tall Women The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 The New Journalism (ed. & w/ intro. by Tom Wolfe) Camille Paglia- Vamps & Tramps: New Essays Joan Didion- Run River Susan Sontag- At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches Joan Didion- A Book of Common Prayer Milan Kundera- The Unbearable Lightness of Being Bret Easton Ellis- Less Than Zero Joan Didion- The Last Thing He Wanted Joan Didion- Play It As It Lays Joan Didion- Political Fictions Leonard Cohen- Beautiful Losers Al Gore- The Assault on Reason Barack Obama- The Audacity of Hope Elie Wiesel- Night Camille Paglia- The Birds Thomas Pynchon- The Crying of Lot 49 E. Annie Proulx- Brokeback Mountain Margaret Atwood- The Handmaid's Tale Helene Hanff- 84 Charing Cross Road Jeffrey Eugenides- Middlesex Jonathan Franzen- How to Be Alone: Essays Sylvia Plath- The Bell Jar Hermann Hesse- Demian Hermann Hesse- Beneath the Wheel Charles Dickens- A Tale of Two Cities Hermann Hesse- Siddhartha—Eine indische Dichtung Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughterhouse Five Henrik Ibsen- A Doll's House Robert O. Friedel- Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified: An Essential Guide for Understanding and Living with BPD Eric Berne- Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships Karel Capek- R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) Arthur Miller- Death of a Salesman Cormac McCarthy- The Road Joan Didion- Slouching Towards Bethlehem Vladimir Nabokov- Laughter in the Dark Edward Albee- The Zoo Story/The American Dream Barry Heermann- Noble Purpose Gregory Maguire- Wicked Joan Didion- The Year of Magical Thinking Horace McCoy- They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Tennessee Williams- Suddenly, Last Summer Edward Albee- Tiny Alice Feodor Dostoevsky- Crime and Punishment Erik Larson- The Devil in the White City Gore Vidal- The City and the Pillar (Revised) Gore Vidal- Myra Breckinridge Abraham Maslow- Toward a Psychology of Being Erich Fromm- The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Erich Fromm- The Art of Loving Fyodor Dostoyevsky- The Brothers Karamazov Thomas Mann- Death in Venice and Tonio Kroeger Vladimir Nabokov- Lolita Gore Vidal- Kalki Joseph Heller- Catch-22 Neil Gaiman- American Gods
Heroes
Gore Vidal, Al Gore, Catherine Deneuve, and Tania.
i mean, the stuff about women being stupid and never being able to be geniuses and all. all this stuff i didn't post to you. that stuff isn't relevent anymore.
but the stuff about what women like in a man, the stuff i posted to you earlier, i don't think thats really changed at all.
philosophy is supposed to be fun. cynical people are supposed to challenge you to prove them wrong. what they're saying with their cynicism is "I'm smart, and I see the picture, and I'm very very worried, and I'm going to continue to sit in a state of misery and draw these observations until people pay attention to me" Its like an immature way of getting people to listen, you just need to recognize it as that. also, aren't you the one who is always saying "the world is heading in the worst possible direction?" he never was quite that cynical.
the stuff he says about women was no longer relvent, and a lot of things, but i was suprised how little the basic pattern of man had changed since his era. it kind of amazed me how much the things he wrote are still on target. so i posted them. the idea is that they're supposed to piss people off, since people don't like to feel like humanity is zeroed in on, and hence inspire change. its kind of like how stuffwhitepeoplelike. com said white people like vintage t-shirts, the thinner the better, and has thus inspired the hipsters to come up with something more evasive of man's vintage t-shirt-obsessed primitive nature.
i don't know if Schopenhauer saw himself as the equivalent of stuffwhitepeoplelike. com, but at 28 i've certainly figured out how human beings work by now.
of course, i don't see anything important changing nearly as rapidly as those hipsters change their wardrobes.
from A Very Short Introduction (that little series thats big at Borders, at any rate, these days) to Schopenhauer:
in talking so bluntly about sexuality, and in making it such a conerstone of his philosophy, he is again unusually forward-looking for his day. Sex is ever-present in our minds, according to Schopenhauer, 'the public secret which must never be distinctly mentioned anywhere, but is always and everywhere understood to be the main thing'. 'It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort; it has an unfavourable influence on the most important affairs, interrupts every hour the most serious occuptations'.
Schopenhauer writes that women look for 'the right age, strength, and courage' in a man. in that order.
He thinks we inherit our intellect from our mothers and our will from our fathers.
