why don't more people know about jeremy reed? the more i read his fiction and his poetry the more i want. if you've never been fortunate enough to encounter his work before, this is the place to start. he creates a vivid (if not realistic or necessarily true to 'reality')artaud for his novel and shows a great deal of sympathy for his alienated suffering and painful bouts of total isolation and madness. the ending is particularly beautiful and awe inspiring, wherein artaud finally realizes the dream of all imaginative poets, writers and just creative people in general--an actual plunge into the world of the imagination. of course none of it is really realistic, but curiously enough i take reed very seriously. he is not a man filled with wishful thinking or a desire to spread his longing for poetic and artistic escapism, but a man with such a luminous and stunning inner vision that he can do nothing else than write beautiful and absolutely unforgettable works of the most intense aesthetic vitality and vividness. reed portrays artaud brilliantly as a warrior of the poetic imagination and an avowed enemy of a society that represses the surreal and the creative. "madness is the pejorative term that capitalism applies to vision", he says at one point. the critics, pretentious morons that they are, dismiss reed because they see him as too 'derivative'. if jeremy reed is derivative, i for my part can only hope that more modern writers and poets will follow his lead and become derivative, if it produces works of aesthetic genius like this one. anyone who enjoys surrealist poetry and literature (or 'anti literature' as they so aptly called it) or is interested in the history or relationships within the group, buy this book the next chance you get. and any lover of poetry, whether he or she tends toward classicism or modernism, will adore this book. a must. (also read "delirium", reed's subversive and powerful study of rimbaud and his years as an adolescent rebel and seer.)

as soon as people see breton's name on a book, they immediately feel indignation and privately exclaim, "the dictator of surrealism!" what they don't seem to realize is that, despite being a flawed and somewhat ambivalent man, he probably had more passion in his pinky than they do in their entire body. "nadja" is simply one more delightful proof of breton's genius and his infallible flair for the surreal, the mysterious, the mystical, and everything that is profoundly divergent. in this tale of intrigue and obsession he travels the streets of paris with a ghostly, clearly insane young woman who calls herself nadja, which is the russian word for hope. the most captivating parts of the novel are the bizarre and surreal conversations he has with her. even though he found her incredibly fascinating and almost an ethereal enigma, things start to turn sour between them and breton grows bored with her. at the end of the novel, nadja is put into an asylum after the police are called because of her incessant screaming and apparently incoherent behavior, some of which suggested that she was living in a world of hallucinations and irrational fears. we do know that nadja was a real woman and not by means some fictitious creation of breton's, and we also know that she came to a somewhat unfortunate end. it may be true that breton's behavior and attitude of indifference and deliberate ignorance about her truly wretched fate (she died of cancer, insane and completely alone) is indeed nothing to admire, but those who put too much emphasis on this admittedly accurate fact forget that while he may in a sense have betrayed her, he also made a truly admirable effort to make the world see nadja and those like her as no one has seen them before, and immortalized her in a book that is absolutely unforgettable and breathtakingly beautiful. breton was a profoundly hopeful and truly revolutionary figure who exhorted humanity, even while the second world war raged and reaped it's devastating results universally on all of mankind, to recognize the miraculous and wondrous nature of our very existence, however 'absurd' or meaningless some felt it to be after the horrendous events of the twentieth century. it is true that he occasionally goes over the top with his optimism, but his iron will and determination to fight 'miserabilism', the philosophical justification of human misery, at all costs can only call forth our admiration. his exaltation of the imagination as the highest of human faculties and the sole organ of man that will allow him to attain felicity seems to be verified by direct, concrete experience of life. as we grow older and we come to realize that sensual pleasure is a big part of life but essentially empty and hollow, our inner lives (hopefully) become more vivid and we end up spending more and more time there. breton knows this and wants us to cultivate it to the highest degree possible. don't be fooled by the 'anti breton' rhetoric and take a dismissive attitude toward him, because you'll be missing out on some of the most fascinating books (to my mind) ever written.

iris origo really has something here, and her poetic biography of the great giacomo leopardi is a classic in itself. the darkness and despair of leopardi's verse is probably one reason for leopardi's obscurity and little known philosophical works, but the overwhelming sense of nothingness and meaninglessness that his work conveys is no reason to put him aside. we do not necessarily have to agree with an author about everything to enjoy the aesthetic brilliance and the passion present in his essays and poetry. anyone who gets a dark thrill (as i do) from philosophy and poetry that focuses on the more shadowy and sad side of existence will devour leopardi's work. he would undoubtedly gotten along with and befriended the two other great literary prophets of doom, samuel beckett and arthur schopenhauer, and unconsciously shares their philosophy and really disturbing reflections about the emptiness of human life and it's accidental and contingent origin. leopardi was a quite genuine pessimist, unlike schopenhauer who betrayed through his lifestyle and even occasionally in his work itself a love and passion for life and art, and his gloom is not simply temperamental or tongue in cheek as it with arthur, but is very serious and profoundly felt. leopardi's work openly refers to the poetic imagination and man's feelings of divinity or supremacy in the universe as "beautiful illusions", which is all the more infuriating to those who have them because does not violently condemn them or even make an effort to disprove them objectively, but just dismisses them offhandedly as the obvious products of wishful thinking and fanciful self delusion. despite the depressing and sometimes unbearable bleakness of his work, i think giacomo leopardi is unjustly obscure and the best italian poet since dante. all of his work is a must read for students or lovers of philosophy and poetry.

(...)like nietzsche, who unlike ayn rand i admire somewhat, she mistakes ALL morality as herd instinct and falsehood, and on this point they are both simply wrong. it is true that some morality is based in weakness and unhealthy emotions, but the faculty of sympathy and compassion in man is what makes him great and genuinely human, along with his intellect and imagination. anyone who is half decent will find this woman's so called "philosophy" chilling and disgusting. what can one say about a person, no matter how bright or literate, who actively campaigns against pity and concern for others? even when i was 15, not the most mature or well informed age for anyone, i realized after about three chapters that this lady had no aesthetic sensibility, no actual talent as a writer, and absolutely no capacity to entertain and hold the reader's attention. her characters are so cardboard that you expect them to fall over, and wish that they would so it would end the book. it is pure didacticism, but not interesting didacticism, just labored and pretentious. she made it her mission to root out and destroy all feelings of love between man and man, although in this as in everything else she failed miserably. but nonetheless we should despise her for corrupting impressionable and naive students of philosophy and literature everywhere. artists and thinkers should be able to recognize this kind of philosophy for what it is, truly evil and poisonous ethical relativism which, whether they know or not and whether they admit it or not, leads the horrifying motto of dostoevsky's ivan karamazov, "anything is permitted!" i would class her less with the serious, relevant and sensitive philosophers of the twentieth century, and put her more in the category of someone like max stirner or aleister crowley (the crucial difference being that while they are clearly depraved and utterly misguided, i can actually read and enjoy their work). if there was a satan (i am an atheist) spawned philosopher to inhabit the world, it would not be anton lavey, it would undoubtedly be ayn rand. (...)i may not believe in a controlling factor in the universe and i openly admit that there are no 'values in themselves', but i am hardly for this reason going to run with it and formulate a philosophy of egoism and hatred of the other. her notoriety and reputation as being a ground breaking writer is false to the point of madness, and her cult of objectivism will get weaker and weaker and eventually die out completely. put this down and 'shrug' it off.

what exactly is it that people see in this movie? it's just one more sci-fi/shoot em up flick in the long line of that sad tradition. far from the plot being all that fascinating or philosophical, anyone who attended college could have written this garbage up as the movie was shot. and who can actually take keanu reeves seriously?? during all that drivel about 'introducing a reality with no rules' or whatever, i just kept expecting him to break out and scream "gnarly dude!" the reason people rave about these kind of ridiculous, ephemeral (...) fests is because the rest of the movies out there are even worse and do not bother pretending (as this one does) to have substance. call me too artsy or cerebral, but i want more out of a movie than pointless shooting scenes and busty women, and i would really appreciate it if the director took me seriously enough to do something other than string me along with a sadly fake and laughable attempt at depth or meaning. it really is a sad state of affairs today:even blatantly obvious pretenders to the throne are superior to the norm. this movie does not even work as what it basically is, adolescent escapism. and escapism, contrary to what the majority think, can in fact be great and even substantive, when it is done the right way. anyone with a little bit of a brain must have been depressed but nonetheless slightly amused as they exited the theater after this atrocity mercifully ended and overheard the lively chat about how deep it was. many of my friends talk enthusiastically about what a profound comment on reality this nonsense is, and i agree in the sense that it drives home quite firmly the reality of everything that can go wrong with a movie. you can just see the directors of these things laughing to themselves privately as the bucks roll in and secretly wondering, "what idiot said that you can't fool all the people all the time?"

first of all, i love colin wilson's work and recommend that everyone buy this and read it whenever they have the chance. it is vivid, extremely well written, and (most likely)creates in the reader that incredible and inspiring enthusiasm for ideas that wilson has. actually, i would say that his work has serious philosophical value and should be referred to by not only casual readers of the field but serious students of all kinds, although he is widely considered a crank and a pseudo thinker. on the other hand, over the years i have come to certain realizations about wilson and his professed 'optimism' and cheery outlook on human life. wilson accuses pessimistic philosophers and writers (huysmans, camus) of having gloomy temperaments and intellectualizing their own personal misery into literary condemnations of human existence, but anyone with half a brain can tell that wilson does the exact same thing, only in reverse. it is as if he says to himself, "this pessimism and sterility in 20th century literature is a dead end and discourages creativity even if it is true. therefore i will make an illusory rationalization of why pessimism and realism are false and a completely bogus theory of why optimism is true. (***)nonetheless, wilson is a truly passionate thinker (albeit one who engages in error and is clearly tainted with the snobby disdain virus that so many intellectuals are) with a natural propensity to explore and illuminate obscure philosophy and literature. just be wary of his claims to impartiality and objectivity.

jk huysmans was a man of unsurpassed genius and, even better, the most bitter misanthrope and the sickest neurotic to ever live! for anyone who has felt that suicidal feeling of nauseating disgust for the banality and insanity of day to day society, this book will make you feel less alone. huysmans does the only thing the creative individual really can do when faced with the horrendous burden of a life made meaningless and utterly miserable by a hostile, anti-artistic and sick society:he inhabits the world of the imagination and elects to stay there by any means necessary, whatever the cost to his personal health or sanity. des esseintes is a man who launches a twisted and perverse yet heroic revolt against the monotony of
existence and like his favorite poet, mallarme, he tries to live purely in the ideational and the imaginative. his attempt at liberation, however, is an utter failure, and in the end he submits to his weak nature and returns to society in all it's greyness and hopelessness. but despite the disappointing ending it would be tragic to not read what went before it, as des esseintes celebrates pessimism, supernatural literature, sickly mysticism, literary escapism and decadent poetry, and things so deranged as to defy description. a must for anyone with a quarter of an intellect and certainly for anyone who has, even if only once or twice, recognized society for what it is, a collective deception and farce.

my feelings on this excellent movie are mixed. on the one hand it is about ten times better than the worthless explosion movies that dominate theatres today, but on the other hand it is a sell out movie in the sense that it discourages youthful questioning and rebellion. while it is true that senseless rebellion, directed at nothing in particular and just angry for the sake of being angry, is not real rebellion at all, it seems self evident to me that the person who recognizes society and traditional ways of life for what they are, i.e. death traps and ridiculously absurd, will come to the conclusion that nonconformism and rebellion of the authentic kind, individual and philosophical, is perhaps the only way to a happy existence of any kind. the 'realism' represented by the main character's father is not by any means a recognition of the true state of things, but is rather a weak submission to a commodified and insane world. so in that sense i can only call this movie an active encouragement to conformity, and therefore despicable.

Let's clear something up. TCM is not Hooper's best movie. He is an amazingly talented horror director, but a lot of this is just shock value and dated gore. It has a certain sickening atmosphere and something hard to name about it that both repulss and yet attracts in a bizarre way while preventing it from being another stupid slasher movie, but I think "Salem's Lot" is still Hooper's best. It has substance, suspense, tension like a demon from hell, and pays off for the viewer's patience. TCM, on the other hand, is too obvious and what we see from the beginning is what we get till the end. it is without doubt a fascinating, sickening, weird study of madness and maybe even a philosophical tale about man's illusions of superiority to the animalistic and the primal when the reality is that his primitive side is quite real and perhaps predominating (i may be reading too much into it, but i don't think so). and it IS a horror classic and a must own, but the popular misconception of it being the landmark of hooper's career is simply bogus.

Let's clear something up. TCM is not Hooper's best movie. He is an amazingly talented horror director, but a lot of this is just shock value and dated gore. It has a certain sickening atmosphere and something hard to name about it that both repulss and yet attracts in a bizarre way while preventing it from being another stupid slasher movie, but I think "Salem's Lot" is still Hooper's best. It has substance, suspense, tension like a demon from hell, and pays off for the viewer's patience. TCM, on the other hand, is too obvious and what we see from the beginning is what we get till the end. it is without doubt a fascinating, sickening, weird study of madness and maybe even a philosophical tale about man's illusions of superiority to the animalistic and the primal when the reality is that his primitive side is quite real and perhaps predominating (i may be reading too much into it, but i don't think so). and it IS a horror classic and a must own, but the popular misconception of it being the landmark of hooper's career is simply bogus.