Tom Towers Reads Again, Again
Volume Two, the Best and the Worst
The Best:
Worlds Apart by Branko Milanovic
The most depressing book written in the past 100 years, and a much more devastating critique of liberalism than Carl Schmitt’s limp dick lit.
300 by Frank Miller
Makes me want to fuck a Spartan in the ass who is in turn spit-roasting Frank Miller with an effeminate Persian man bedecked in gaudy jewellery before we each ejaculate into the author’s trademark fedora, out of which he will drink the sort of frothy male vitality with which this was written.
It’s gay erotica, right?
Also demonstrates nicely that if you can’t draw for peanuts but can still compose a decent image your artwork will be dope.
They Still Draw Pictures! 60 illustrations by children during the Spanish Civil War
Some legitimately good drawings here, and some not so good ones, too; but a fascinating visual depiction of war regardless of the quality of the art.
Levana and Our Lady of Sorrorws by Thomas Dequincy
If depression were a sex act, this is what that sex act would be: prose poetry is a sex act, right?
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Catholic writing is usually repressed masochistic erotica; unless it’s American: then it’s unrepressed sadistic pornography.
Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro
Draughtsmanship up there with Herge; so beautiful!
Call of Cthulu by H.P. Lovecraft
Perhaps the best post-modern novel ever written: the horror is, quite literally, miscegenation as expressed in the inter-cultural promiscuity of modernist art.
Takin’ Over By Imposing the Positive by Brandon B. McCartney
Perhaps the only self-help book which is aware that, by definition, the act of reading a self-help book written by someone else is not the act of helping oneself but the act of asking someone else for help.
Waltz Cute and Happiness by Oshimi Shuzo
The former:
It’s nice when perversion brings people together: I can’t think of anything more human than that.
The latter:
What more joyful depiction of illness (or any form of alienation) and normative expectation is there than the mother’s statement—after all her own hopes, not her son’s, have been destroyed—that it is wrong for her to assume that her son is not living a happy life.
There is, perhaps, a certain insight in how the disabled are lumped into the same category as degenerates by the paranoid stocktakers of history.
The Red book by Jung
Undoubtedly the best thing by any psychologist, ever. Even better than Wilhelm Reich’s full-book rant against mediocrity! So beautiful.
The Plague by Albert Camus
I can’t help but like Camus. The dude wasn’t a complete poser in his philosophy, either, unlike Sartre who (god knows how) was also an incredible writer of fiction (better, in fact, than Camus), but a complete and utter fraud in his philosophy; albeit not one in his life, which Camus was—or was he?
I think I’ve confused myself, here.
Anyway, I’d put Being and Nothingness in the worst list if I could have forced myself to read more than the first half of the first page, but I couldn’t—it was that bad.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
What is it with women enjoying cruel men dominating women in their literature?
Songs and Ballads by Charles Algernon Swinburne
What is it with men enjoying cruel women dominating men in their literature?
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois
Funny how now that class had been excised from discussions on race, all we’re left with in American (read: world) discourse are two supposedly contrasting, yet inherently racist, positions. Probably not coincidentally: America has over the last few decades voluntarily segregated itself (in education and housing, at least) to Jim Crowe levels.
And not just in the states where Jim Crowe laws once existed!
I’m not sure this is what people mean when they refer to systemic racism, but if you ever had any doubt that America, as a system, is pretty racist (not the most, nor the least racist: my point here is not American Exceptionalism: Race Edition), the voluntary self-segregation of the races and the fact that the two mainstream responses to racism both believe wholeheartedly in the insolubility of race is surely evidence enough—better evidence, in fact, than Jim Crowe laws which required everyone to be racist, or else!
Thus it is somehow possible for a Lenin-style vanguardist (or eugenicist depending on your interpretation) to be less gross than the likes of Coates and co., even if this stale nationalist message of racial purity is refreshed today only in so far as Coates encourages blacks to self-segregate themselves so they may wallow in their uniquely authentic stupidity, and DuBois encourages blacks to self-segregate themselves (in terms of breeding) so they may educate themselves into civilised people.
This is a very unfair reading of DuBois, but I found it a mildly amusing way of interpreting him.
Anyway, his biographical passages are as moving and beautiful as his political commentary is interesting, and he merges the two seamlessly.
So many sociologists try and fail to do this; DuBois is one of the very few to succeed.
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Failed to convince me that natural selection is the sole or even the most important factor in evolution (other than arbitrarily, in the sense that whatever is reproduced is reproduced, and whatever is not reproduced is not reproduced and arguing backwards from this banal conclusion), but what an awe-inspiring way of collating empirical evidence and then presenting it in a rhetorically coherent theory.
My Daughters, My Sisters by Karen Gershon
I found this incredibly disturbing. Father doesn’t exist, and the children are an extension of the mother’s body and soul.
As a child my sister conceived of our parents as being an extension of her body—and only in the utilitarian sense: as unsentimental tools to be used until her own body was as competent as theirs.
As a child I conceived of our parents as comical, inhuman beings to be tolerated and indulged, in the same way that I might interact with a wild animal who is just as curious about interacting with a wild animal as I was; my sister, her cat and her dog, on the other hand, were humans with whom I could interact with on a more rational plane of existence—and with whom I shared some feeling of familial affinity that the breastfeeding of my mother and the enraptured attention of my father failed to arouse in me and were, ultimately, purely utilitarian in the same way that my sister conceived of our parents, in spite of the intimacy and sensual pleasure of the devotion of the body and the mind for the nourishment of another.
In Gershon’s poems, while she is hopelessly in love with her children, she is nevertheless aware that they cannot—nor that they should—love her back in the same way, even if they feed on her mind and her body more intimately and hungrily than a lover: a significantly more interesting, and practically true, position than the Freudian interpretation of such things.
She also knows more about them than anyone else: yet nothing about them at all.
That the people with whom we are, in the literal sense, most intimately involved conceive of each other in totally alien and incomprehensible ways is as terrifying as it is fascinating; as hideous as it is beautiful.
A Key to uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
What a fucking badarse. Shitting all over her critics in a hilariously ironical style, without diminishing the depravity of the society she is describing.
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
It turns out there’s only one decent Beat writer. But he also happens to be one of the best writers ever, and certainly the best American poet since the dude who fucked the earth, so kudos to the Beats anyway.
At least something good came out of The Decline of the West.
(Ginsberg is okay, too.)
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
That the woman who wrote this incredible paean to the joy and tragedy of life killed herself is the most convincing argument for clinical depression being an anti-rational chemical imbalance in the brain.
It’s also the best of the modernist epics, though I will always love A Portrait of the Artist best; which is, in turn, much better than Ulysses—ultimately little more than a draft for Finnegan’s Wake: the second greatest modernist epic.
But if one epic is borne of the ocean, and one of a river; it’s obvious which must be greater.
Kallocain by Karin Boye
Okay, fuck that. Suicide is perfectly rational, after all.
See you in the next life!
(Other than the most depressing monologue about love and human connection ever written, the book is totally unremarkable—but that one passage is a tour de force.)
A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialect by Gyorgy Lukacs
Managing to do what few but everyone since France became the only post-World War II country not to decapitate its intelligentsia has attempted: be both terse and dense.
In terms of content, it’s a massive step backwards, reducing Marx to Aristotle (albeit the only interesting part of Aristotle: that our senses are as much creative as they are reactive), but although I fundamentally disagree with it (while Capital is a great empirical analysis of 19th Century economics, we no longer live in the 19th Century and we are no closer to empiricism being the foundation of economic thought today than we were then, so his only influential and profound contribution to Western thought is the seemingly banal yet utterly radical suggestion that it is humans, not a higher power, who create the world in which they live; albeit imperfectly and within the limitations of physical reality), the argument presented by Lukacs that Marx is merely Aristotle 2.0 is magisterial in its rhetoric and style.
What Heaven Looks like by James Elkins
Whoever did these joins El Greco in the pantheon of the greatest visual artists. With just two residents (unless there were multiple painters of these fascinating works), it’s more an alcove than a pantheon, really.
Jose Marti, Major Poems
While Rimbaud and co. were busy inventing the precursor to [post-]modernist irony—the mask of self-inflicted ennui—Jose Marti was already showing it was possible to deliberately conceive reality just as lucidly as these proto-symbolists positioned themselves as superior to a reality conceived by others naïve enough to procreate decades before the surrealists, and without the epiphany of the first world war.
Delta of Venus and Little Birds by Anais Nin
The two world wars (if they can even be divided) were a catastrophe for both the body and the mind. Before the war[s], artists could at least try to fashion out of Freud’s version of Catholic confessional narcissism a liberating theology which emancipated both body and mind from the shackles of the self—making narcissistic masturbation public, and thus turning it into a mutual act to be shared with one’s confessor, not merely one’s lover; sanctifying one’s private pleasures, and thus universalising it.
After the war only in petit revolutions (all of which have been successfully crushed and/or appropriated) has the body or the mind wandered free without seeking the justification of the church or the state, and all successful movements for liberation have been won by begging for their approval.
So it is that we live, counter-intuitively, in a golden age of conservatism.
Anyway, Nin makes a very unconvincing case for a division between male and female sexuality: naturally, as a woman of the pre-war world, she worships the body of her own sex, and the whole person of the other; whose child-like mind and body are to her own epiphanies: reverse the role of the two sexes, and you end up with the sexual perception of the epitome of manhood whose hilarity I refer to below—albeit she represses her homosexuality through platonic rationalisation rather than platonic worship, and Hemingway is too dense to have even an epiphany (a better artist than them both would find in the childishness of the other a revelation, not merely an epiphany; and the best artist: nothing at all): nevertheless, for Hemingway the male body is an erotic source of power, as the female is for Nin, and it is the female person, not her body, who he desires; as she desires the male person.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
I couldn’t stop laughing the whole way through! This was self-parody, right?
The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary
Women used to be thicc. Their arms were, anyway. Back in the days when they didn’t do any sort of physical work and were wrapped in cotton wool, no less. My grandmother’s arms were like tree trunks; my mother’s like branches. I’d say my sister’s were like twigs, but she is also very strong, so my generational analogy has failed.
While Of Human Bondage might be more moving, it’s nice to read a modernist ode to the tragic vulgarity of life that features people who aren’t artists of the body or the mind interacting with one another.
The painter’s relationship with the woman with my grandmother’s arms is more confronting, more earthy and more real than anything in the comforting fairy tales of Henry Miller.
The Worst:
Lacan’s Ethics
Imagine attending hundreds of hours of lectures before the professor gets to the point. Now imagine that, if the professor ever gets to a point at all, it’s a banal regurgitation of Freud. Watch this instead!
Aristotle’s Ethics and Rhetoric
This is why we[st] are stupid.
The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
This is why we[st] practice religion primarily in the sphere of politics. Our votes are merely prayers that the sovereign won’t kills us. Our tithes the guarantee.
Serious question: why does the American president pardon people as he leaves office: I thought Republics weren’t meant to have sovereigns who justified their rule through the spectacle of mercy.
An Essay on the Principles of Population by Thomas Malthus
The Enlightenment equivalent to the poverty porn genre.
Also, if you’re the type of boor who likes to tabulate the number of people any given author might have killed because someone, somewhere, was stupid enough to take them seriously, Malthus would obliterate the competition.
Dodger by Terry Pratchett
Early on-set Alzheimer’s is a tragedy.
The Gulag Archipelago by Dostoyevsky’s Idiot
A great argument against Stalin: the author survived every single purge.
Bomarzo by The Sycophant
It’s rare I find anything boring. But I found this boring. I read the whole thing, so the joke’s on me.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Noir and Beat fan fiction trash.
The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail
No wonder America is so envious of France. This dude is in the academy!
He’s also one of the few forms of French intellectualism acceptable to the American status quo and “deep state”, having inspired many American courtesans and the politicians whom they flatter.
Solzhenystzn by Gyorgy Lukacs
As shallow and bland as the author the book is about.
The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard J. Hernstein
Technically I didn’t read the actual book, but listened to some abridged version—really, a summary. But I’m familiar enough with the work it cites that that doesn’t really matter.
The biggest problem the scientific community has confronting bad science on race is its apocryphal mythology that phrenology and other outdated forms of racial science were pseudoscientific. On the contrary, just as The Bell Curve is a New York Times bestseller, they were serious empirical endeavours—that a scientific field turns out to be wrong or even wrongheaded does not mean it was not science conducted in good faith; indeed, if anything separates science from other forms of enquiry, it is this very willingness to be very, very wrong.
The living author of The Bell Curve, on the other hand, is incapable of being wrong. Nor is the book primarily a scientific work—nor is it conducted in good faith: the authors’ intent is clearly political, using science to justify a new eugenics policy which would see poor people’s breeding and political power limited by starvation—a truly idiotic position: the more impoverished people are, the more they tend to breed. If eugenicists like Charles “Malthus” Murray and the late Richard (((J.))) Hernstein (LOSER: I can’t take any dead eugenicist seriously) want to stop stupid people breeding, the solution is simple: feed them more, not less.
This will also make them more intelligent.
Problem solved.
While defenders are quick to point out that no one denies that black people score lower on IQ tests than white people in America (and fascists eager to differentiate themselves from white supremacists are quick to point out that whites, in turn, score lower than Asians and Ashkenazi Jews), at no point do the authors attempt to come up with any causal explanation as to why Africans imported to America would have developed stupider brains than Anglo-Saxons imported to America: yet it’s pretty clear what would have caused them to have developed darker skin.
Worse still, the race and IQ correlation that is well established is, in fact, based on data so bad it’s comical. To cherry pick one example (by definition, when dealing with cherry picked data, one can’t avoid cherry picking data!), one citation contrasted the IQ of mentally retarded black children in a home for the disabled to un-mentally retarded white children capable of going to a school as evidence of the IQ difference between whites and blacks.
Perversely, this may not be as stupid as it first appears: given the authors’ probability of having high IQs, clearly there is no correlation between mental retardation and IQ.
So the next time Charles Murray comes to a university near you, remember that his science is so poor and his political prescriptions so abhorrent that it’s actually best to let the imbecile speak than to try and silence him while pointing out he’s a Nazi (he isn’t one, after all: he’s actually a throwback to the good old days when scientific experts were still trusted, and American science was so respected that its plans for the mass sterilisation of the weak, poor and retarded inspired the Nazis and pretty much everyone else!), then after he has spoken explain how awful his science is, and that his only response to criticism of his work is to portray himself as an innocent victim persecuted by political opponents acting in bad faith, and that one day The Secret Society of Enlightenment Geneticists will come down from on high to publish their results to the public which will vindicate him.
Probably around the same time that Jesus will walketh again the earth.
(Which will be bad news for Murray himself.)
What an absolute fucking moron. Albeit one so charismatic and charming, it’s impossible not to like him if he’s giving a talk. So stick to reading his books, where his hack writing conveys none of his infectious personality.