Grand unified books thread

[Razgovory]

Then you've learned the ancient Greek approach to sexuality and gender: powerful men can fuck what they want, and women are worthless.

Thanks Sherlock, I wouldn't have guessed. 

I want to see the complexity and detail of it all.

I can link you some pictures, but it's NSFW.

[Ideologue]

Greeks of a socially inferior status would rage greatly when their rape chattel was taken by Greeks of socially superior status, and the Muses would sing of it.  But they'd be even more angry when their homosexual partners died, because men are actual people.

Also, it's important to kill your rape chattel's existing children at or around the same time you kill their previous owner.

While you certainly have a way with words, this is not a scholarly dissertation.

I think there's a lot you can infer from Greek fiction.  All rape, all the time.  Also, more intrinsically interesting than some monograph by a guy living off student loans, that's probably basing his research on the same thing, albeit in addition the writings of a proto-fascist and a power bottom too dumb to figure out what organ his thoughts are occurring in.

Yeah, I'm gonna go see if Youtube or google has a presentation of The Trojan Women.  Copyright violation, probably, but how the hell else am I supposed to watch a play?

P.S. if you do find something, mention it, I'll probably read it.

[BuddhaRhubarb]

Whipping Girl - Julia Serrano. One of the best, most up to date books on the whole "trans" thing. She raves (sometimes but not always effectively)  a lot about sexism, patriarchy, fear mongering, but at the same time manages to find a gentler, less "constructed" view of the spectrum of Gender identities that people live out. Her main point though is that Trans-women aren't ever going to get respect as women in western and other cultures, until women get respect as women.

[Sheilbh]

Just finished 'The Black Jacobins' by C.L.R. James. 

It's a brilliant history of the Haitian revolution and war of independence written in 1938.  The book places what happened in San Domingo at the heart of the French Revolution and, in James's Marxist analysis, as assuming more general importance.  He's convincing.  It's also pleasant to read an unashamedly Marxist perspective on the French Revolution.  He admires Robespierre though he sees him as ultimately betraying his left-wing, as is to be expected, he is a bourgeois revolutionary.  Or the line asking when did property ever listen to reason except when cowed?

His added essay at the end 'From Toussaint to Castro' is a brilliant, brilliant piece on the West Indies in general and in particular on the culturally unique identity.  The indigenous were wiped out, the slaves were divorced from Africa, the planters vulgarised Europeans and the Mulattoes entirely of the West Indies.  He tells the story of the abolition of slavery in the rest of the West Indies through the 19th century, tying that with Naipaul's writing and Castro's revolution.  It's very good.

The best thing though is James's writing.  It is, like Wedgwood's Thirty Years War a history worth reading for the style with which it's written.  Here's the end to the preface of the First Edition, from 1938:

The analysis is the science and the demonstration the art which is history. The violent conflicts of our age enable our practiced vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than heretofore. Yet for that very reason it is impossible to recollect historical emotions in that tranquility which a great English writer, too narrowly, associated with poetry alone.
   Tranquility today is either innate (the philistine) or to be acquired only by a deliberate doping of the personality. It was in the stillness of a seaside suburb that could be heard most clearly and insistently the booming of Franco's heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin's firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. Such is our age and this book is of it, with something of the fever and the fret. Nor does the writer regret it. The book is the history of a revolution and written under different circumstances it would have been a different but not necessarily a better book.

There are wonderful sentences and explanations throughout.  It's an incredible work and really very inspiring to look more into especially Haitian history and Toussaint.  Very worth reading.

I've just started 'Snowdrops'.  It's a thriller that was short-listed for the Booker Prize last year.  Written by the Economist's former Moscow correspondent its starting point is a body found in spring as the snow melts away.  Apparently a 'snowdrop' in Muscovite slang.

[jimmy olsen]

Greeks of a socially inferior status would rage greatly when their rape chattel was taken by Greeks of socially superior status, and the Muses would sing of it.  But they'd be even more angry when their homosexual partners died, because men are actual people.

Also, it's important to kill your rape chattel's existing children at or around the same time you kill their previous owner.

While you certainly have a way with words, this is not a scholarly dissertation.

I think there's a lot you can infer from Greek fiction.  All rape, all the time.  Also, more intrinsically interesting than some monograph by a guy living off student loans, that's probably basing his research on the same thing, albeit in addition the writings of a proto-fascist and a power bottom too dumb to figure out what organ his thoughts are occurring in.

Yeah, I'm gonna go see if Youtube or google has a presentation of The Trojan Women.  Copyright violation, probably, but how the hell else am I supposed to watch a play?

P.S. if you do find something, mention it, I'll probably read it.

Here you go

Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE-200 CE
http://www.amazon.com/Prostitutes-Mediterranean-Wisconsin-Classics-ebook/dp/B00752HKWW/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1328657576&sr=1-2

I've only read the sample and have already learned an incredibly degrading new word. 
Chamaitype, a word for a common whore, especially a streetwalker that literally means "thing pounded in the dirt"

[Ideologue]

That's fucking hot.

[jimmy olsen]

That's fucking hot.

In theory, but in reality I think I'd prefer to use one of those couch things the Greeks used.

[Ideologue]

That's fucking hot.

In theory, but in reality I think I'd prefer to use one of those couch things the Greeks used.

You've been in Asia too long.

[jimmy olsen]

That's fucking hot.

In theory, but in reality I think I'd prefer to use one of those couch things the Greeks used.

You've been in Asia too long.

Maybe in S. Carolina they still prefer to fuck on a dirt floor rather than a couch, but in New England I'm pretty sure my view prevails.

[Sheilbh]

That's fucking hot.

In theory, but in reality I think I'd prefer to use one of those couch things the Greeks used.

You've been in Asia too long.

Yeah.  Talk about the decadent East.  Herodotus would have much to say about Tim

[jimmy olsen]

Look I could see it in a fit of passion if you're out with your girl in the park or something, but as a regular thing?  No.

[jimmy olsen]

Also, "The reign of the phallus: sexual politics in ancient Athens" which is on Google books in part seems interesting.

Athens was an even more incredibly fucked up and brutal society than I imagined.

[Ideologue]

I misunderstood the statement.  But it was a funny joke about Asians and their pillow girlfriends.  Live with it.

[jimmy olsen]

I misunderstood the statement.  But it was a funny joke about Asians and their pillow girlfriends.  Live with it.

Seriously?

[Ideologue]

They exist.