Walter Logeman: Journal
One of the books that gripped me and introduced me to Archetypal Psychology was Ginette Paris’ Pagan Grace (Seem to not have a post about that book — maybe soon?) – I loved it and it was like clicking a hyperlink into a new world. So happy today to have a newish book as a sample on the kindle.
Been posting a few items about books here. Very casual. Hardly posted a thing this year, and see post on Evernote below re that. Feel some motivation coming on.
The motivation is to post book covers and snippets because I am loving my ebooks – have for years. I don’t really want the paper books anymore. But I miss the affordance of the stacks of books lying around unread. They are now just a line of links on a screen and sometimes I can’t even recall why I have the book sample or who recommended it. There are so many samples, just a list! So I’ll post unread books here, awaiting reviews.
Once paper books are read they can go on a shelf somewhere. Even the pile in the garage. I can look at them when I tidy up, and think, oh yes I remember that.
OK, so there is a purpose for the blog, to notice what I have in my ebook library in some sort of meaningful way. So out with Evernote for books – and onto the blog with them. Expect more flimsy post with cover pictures.
I will update posts too, I often do that here, they need edits and additions as they go up very rough.
I tried Goodreads for this purpose, however for some reason I am more attracted to my own blog, at least first. Social media can come later, if at all.
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There is already plenty here in the blog to stir reminiscences. There are references to books back to 1999. As I went back to look I found a dead link to this item
Malcolm Gladwell on Blockbusters and books. Collaborative filtering!
web.archive.org/web/20000301085403/http://www.gladwell.com/1999_10_04_a_sleeper.htm
Just six authors–John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz, and Danielle Steel–account for sixty-three of the books on the list. In a world more dependent on collaborative filtering, Grisham, Clancy, King, and Steel would still sell a lot of books. But you’d expect to see many more books like “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”–many more new writers–make their way onto the best- seller list. And the gap between the very best selling books and those in the middle would narrow. Collaborative filtering, Hagel says, “favors the smaller, the more talented, more quality products that may have a hard time getting visibility because they are not particularly good at marketing.”
It seems he was wrong though.
Must revisit, interesting. What has happened 15 years later to those lists?
I’m gripped at about 20% into the book.
This Item puts me off a bit, though it also provides extra food for thought.
So far I think the author presents the world a world animated with the spirit of life in a sympathetic way and the Catholic view to the contrary is almost mocked, thus so far so good.
Enjoyed the CBC video about writing the novel, here:
Later – upon finishing the book — Thursday, 18 December 2014
It was horrendously violent – and it is hard to believe that such cruelty is possible. However I don’t agree with the article linked to above that is biased towards the priests or the against the Iroquois.
I finished it a few days ago and the book is still with me, it had an impact, not just the violence, but the characters, and particularly the sense of the soul of things and people – the orenda – that gives the book its title.
I just heard there was a new William Gibson book out, and pre ordered it on Amazon
In the meantime I’ve enjoyed this interview in The Guardian by Ned Beauman here are the last two paragraphs:
I understood perfectly well before reading The Peripheral that our planet is beginning to roll down a very steep slope. And yet there was something terrifying about finding it here, perhaps because I’ve been absorbed in Gibson for most of my lifetime. His previous dystopias, with their overflowing slums, feel jolly by comparison; here, even Gibson’s hackers and mercenaries and television personalities are bereaved by climate change. It’s as if Gibson’s work is a city, and I have lived in that city since I was a teenager, and now that city is being drowned before my eyes. Before I left, Gibson admitted that his own story “surprised me with its grim matter-of-factness. I wasn’t fully aware of the implications, at the start. Though in my personal model of writing fiction, one never really is.”
All the same, this shouldn’t discourage anyone from reading The Peripheral, which is not, in fact, a remotely grim book. First of all, books that are as frantic with imagination as Gibson’s books, as frantic with the appetite to see what happens to us next, cannot be grim; second, Gibson’s famous weakness for happy endings has not been entirely suppressed here; and third, the details of our fate are mostly confined to that one scene towards the end, when Netherton, our descendant, explains what happened before he was born. As we read it, we ought to be like Flynne, who sits under the oak in her front yard and listens without hysterics as she hears the story of a world in which “everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new.”
Archetypal Psychology by James Hillman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Loved the book, learned so much. Finished up disliking him more. Never liked him, always awed by his genius, and impacted. His attitude to his affair and his relationship with women is not just of its time – it is callous and a-psychological, out of touch and this is so disappointing. It shows a flaw in his professional as well as personal life, not one that I can forgive. I sort of knew this but here it is laid out – blatant. Even though the author seems to be sympathetic, colludes.
So I rate the book 5 for illumination and remove stars for an ultimate disdain for the character.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
I’m now about 20% into the book. I like it because have lived some of this life she describes. Middle class intellectuals in some colony. I see other reviewers don’t like hearing the privileged ruminate about their agonies. But we are a select bunch! For everyone one of us who entertain marxist ideals of a change in the system there are hundreds who don’t. It takes a modicum of privilege to even read stuff. So to hear how thes commies and fellow travellers carried on in the fifties is of interest to me. But I can see you had to be there perhaps to get it.
But then I was not there. I’m a generation older. It may not be common knowledge but there was a small wave of Marxist revival in the late sixties and early 70s. I imagine all round the world. It grew out of the vietnam war protests and the countercultural movement. It dawned on some of us liberals that we did not just want Peace. We want the Viet Cong to win. The imperialists needed to be defeated, and they were. It became clear too that national liberation was a viable and worthwhile step in the march of progress. Maybe that was not so clear to Lessing in her time? And the communes and alternative endeavours did not really work, not as a way of changing the system. It may sound crazy but I, along with many thought the “Times were a’ changin”. But really, no. And then China was in a stage before the cultural revolution disasters. It was easy to see there was something to be learned from the communists.
And there was! And then there was not!
Why did she get a Nobel Prise for her work? I think of Obama getting the peace prize – do you have to be a phoney to get it? I don’t think Lessing is a phoney. However she may have been mistaken for someone who is anti communist. It is very different to be a disillusioned to being anti. Jesuit priests apparently do not need to believe in god, they need to be searching for god. I wish there was some sort of world order of people searching for the marxist line of out time. And a Doris Lessing of our time – or at least one for baby boomers. Perhaps Marge Piercy? Is there anyone like her today, filling that niche she filled in 62?
I used to write more in this blog than I do now. I always said I was just writing for myself, that it was a sort of note taking.
I have become an avid user of Evernote – and it is all private. Notes to myself. This has taken the driving force out of my motivation, which, I’m sorry to say, dear reader, was not to inform or please you but more about me.
Of course blogging has lost its pride of place as a form of communication with the advent of social media. I don’t do much of that, but some, and that will have had an impact as well.
The other thing that never worked well in this blog is that I am a multiple personality. I have six.
Which one is writing this blog? The psychophile, the technophile… those two do ok here, after all the blog is on the cusp of these two interests, but I also do art, and I am a bushwalker and then there is a passion for specifically psychodrama and imago. And movies and books! And I used to be a communist so there is that whole interest in politics. I use the tag World for that.
No unified focus. Does that matter?
My Evernote account is more than capable of containing wild diversity. Tags.
There are tags here too. And “notebooks” This one has the notebook Journal. And a bunch of tags, but who would ever use them? I do, Psyberspace is a resource with all my ramblings for a couple of decades.
Turning the Paradox by Michael Harvey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I liked it! This is written by a good friend. I read it about a year ago, and at the time I thought I could hear a bit much of mike’s philosophy of life being thrust at me. A good philosophy it is, but in a novel I want to be shown not told. Yet a year later I recall the feel of the place and enjoyment of the story and the characters.
I’d recommend it if you like a novel of ideas, about communes and the west coast of New Zealand, with a touch of the thriller thrown in.
I am starting on his next novel with positive anticipation. Dog Harbour
Dog%20Harbour
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