november reads (Patreon)

one of the more bizarro months of my life to be sure..not even related to the reading. the hits keep coming; they don’t stop coming

the superluminal universe by regis dutheil and brigitte dutheil

picked this up totally by chance..there was one copy face-out at blackwell’s and i said oooh..published in french in the nineties (as l'homme superlumineux) and was only just translated to english so i felt like i’d found a secret text..

anyway, holy fuck!

quantum physicist theorizes about 'a superluminal universe where time no longer exists and which is filled with all human knowledge and consciousness'. consciousness argument is built on ‘superluminal particles’, a.k.a. tachyons, a.k.a. particles which move faster than the speed of light. we are still trying to prove these exist

ok..physics people..i apologize in advance..my attempt: the idea is connected to the second law of thermodynamics..where hypothetical tachyons experience cause and effect in reverse to how we experience them..and move towards order instead of chaos. loosely arguing consciousness is 'made' 'of' 'tachyons'. was thinking of the 'consciousness particles trending towards order' thing alongside terence mckenna’s ideas about novelty 

also enjoyed talk of the explanatory gap, the dead zone between sensation and conscious experience – there is a before, and there is an after, but what is the during, and how? ooh! goosebumps to recount

a bit on synchronicity; a bit on quantum quantum quantum; exploration into near-death experiences...the perplexing similarities between them across cultures..brain candy..gets woo with it

awhile ago grimes tweeted about consciousness being..'beamed’? something like that? in from another place and i told this to my then-boyfriend with interest; he looked at me like i was a fucking dunce. checkmate!!

briefing for a descent into hell by doris lessing

professor goes on a cosmic voyage from a hospital bed, much to the dismay of everyone around him

i love doris lessing. strangely meditative to read

really liked. fits very much with the altered states of consciousness theme

notes from underground by dostoevsky

what a joker!

honestly very funny. generally enjoyed. i'm such a determinist these days

but my biggest takeaway was this: i couldn’t stop thinking about pale fire while i was reading..narrators are like..autistic outcasts....constantly addressing an audience they 'don’t care about'..insight gunked with delusion..elaborate justifications for why they are like this...and then i learned fascinatingly, i didn’t know this, maybe you did, but fascinatingly, nabokov hated dostoevsky, his ‘lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity’...he calls him 'a claptrap journalist' and a 'slapdash comedian'.

dear vlad..perhaps we hate that which we see ourselves in..who’s pre-freudian now..

f by franz wright

:) yeah. found me. stark and heartbreaky poetry prose

he’s honestly for the girlies: ‘One day I am going to start to cry and never stop until I die. So what.’

‘I have no more idea what I look like than you do, I’m happy to say; all of that is over, that business with the mirror. One winter afternoon I noticed it had stopped. I couldn’t anymore, and that was all, wish I’d thought of it sooner.’

‘There are indomitable hearts that take the pain and will not die, and I suppose there are shriveled remnants of that organ wandering around, there are, I have been of them, and somehow returned, and I have good news. The rose opened.'

‘All minds are pretty much the same, they’ll tell you so themselves, but secretly each is devoted to the conviction that it is irreparably different from all the rest–in fact, it is this in which they are most fundamentally alike.’

happy apocalypse by jean-baptiste fressoz

frenchman charts how france and britain entered industrial modernity. not about environmental destruction, more about how societies consciously processed and accepted technological risk

argues past societies weren't naive to environmental damage..there was debate and resistance..the industrial revolution wasn't an inevitable march but the result of choices

case studies are vaccination campaigns, chemical factories, gas lighting. kept thinking about ai, obviously..pattern of awareness, concern, acceptance

hm

the doors of perception + heaven and hell by aldous huxley

i’ve been thinking about psychedelics a lot lately. more on that..soon. anyway. these are 1) a short text about huxley's experience on mescaline and 2) a survey of paths to transcendent experience, including but not limited to art, schizophrenia, and self-flagellation

i haven’t read any huxley since brave new world in high school (which i loved, loved) so reading this felt like seeing your favorite teacher at walmart

i love when a scientifically curious mind finds itself in an altered state....i think it’s because the altered states come with such irreverence..it's impossible to stay in that purely intellectual zone..you will go goofy..it can't be helped..fun to watch

huxley says the drug strips away our biological 'reducing valve'..the idea that our brains actually filter out most of reality so we can function..and the drug lets us access the 'mind at large'

close to an lsd 'insight' of mine about experiencing a more real ‘real’..i wrote 'this is an exhausting way to process information'. but it was information!

+ 100 pages of g(odel) e(scher) b(ach) by douglas hofstadter

i’m working on the puzzle box. it’s coming along

clearly am preoccupied with consciousness, different ways of seeing

other stuff:

clarice lispector's only filmed interview, 1977

terence mckenna interview in the jungle; 'and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.'

cool terence mckenna talk: part 1, part 2

zizek at the oxford union predicts a future of 'soft fascism', gets a little quantum quantum, says ai can't think like humans because humans participate in ritual and ai cannot swear, and then ends by saying we must 'restore a basic sense of shame'. lovely to hear from him

'the invisible man': eerie and hugely frustrating firsthand account of homelessness by a former boston globe correspondent

let me know what you're reading or have read! i'll see you in december.

sav x