The Sublime & Beautiful vs. Reality

This blog is a record of one man's struggle to search for scientific, philosophical, and religious truth in the face of the limitations imposed on him by economics, psychology, and social conditioning; it is the philosophical outworking of everyday life in contrast to ideals and how it could have been.


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The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God
and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.
--Johannes Kepler

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Monday, April 05, 2010

W: LP: General Reading Projects: Everything

My literary group "gave up the ghost" a month or so ago, so any of my current and future observations on literature will all be in the General Reading Projects (GRP) category.

I have been very busy with the exigencies of life (and the greatest time consumption: negotiation with the dishonorable monkeys on the management side of the Port of Seattle), so I haven't been doing as much reading as I would like. I finally started playing with "Goodreads" and this reminded me of a number of books that I have started and haven't yet completed.

I love history and in the past few years I have been focusing on the nineteenth century (it's literature, histories, biographies, technologies, etc.), which also ties into my interest in the Steampunk Culture. So I have been reading Lafcadio Hearn's "Japan", a collection of his writings on Japan. These writings give a glimpse of nineteenth century Japan just before and as it transitioned into the modern nation-state that it is now.

And in other nineteenth century literature, I have gotten started on some earlier writings of Dostoevsky, to wit, his "Poor Folk" and other stories. These are shorter works that perhaps can fit into my time-poor lifestyle. This novella electrified Nekrasov and Belinsky and encouraged FD to go into writing. More on this book and the Japan book as I have time to set it down here in this blog.

To quote a line from a Beatles song, "I'll be writing more in a week or two...And I want to be a paperback writer..."

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2 comments:

Stu ι™Άζ˜Žη€š said...

I just relocated the copy of Lafcadio Hearn's "Japan" that you had given me and started "bathroom" reading it, nibbling here and there. I was halfway through when I left for Alaska last time but decided to just start over.

Have you used Google Chrome much? there is an extension on Chrome (Google Dictionary) that allows quick searching words, definitions, links etc that is quite useful. This allowed me to locate a link to GoodReads even though you didn't provide one. =]

Mad Russian the Natural Philosopher said...

On the left side of my blog further down under links I have a link to GoodReads.