I have another list that I revise every couple
of months. This is not my "Ten
Favorite Books" so much as a list of the ten books I wish everyone would
read: the ten books I most feel the
lack of in people who otherwise seem intelligent. These books would fill anyone's cranium with useful information.
In order of priority, the list would begin with:
1. Ulysses
by James Joyce. Nobody has really
entered the 20th century if they haven't digested Ulysses. And if they haven't entered the 20th
century, they're going to fall pretty far behind pretty soon, as we enter the
21st. There's a guy I correspond with
occasionally who spends all his time fighting with Fundamentalists over
Darwin. He's living in the 19th
century; nothing in the 20th century has affected him yet. He's carrying on the brave battles of Thomas
Henry Huxley a hundred years later. I
know some people who are back in the 18th century - Burkian conservatives,
trying to apply Burke's principles to modern times. I sometimes do that myself - try to apply some of Burke's
principles. But not all of them! I don't think he's written in stone
either. At any rate, everyone should
read Ulysses to get into the 20th century.
And everybody should struggle as much as they can
with:
2. The Cantos, by
Ezra Pound. And that means getting to
the last page. You may give up on some
pages, and say, "I'll never figure this stuff out!" But keep going until you get to the last
page. Pound offers something no other
writer except Dante has ever attempted - and Dante does it in a medieval way
that doesn't mean much to modern people.
Pound offers a hierarchy of values. We've heard so many voices
from the East telling us "All is One," and we've got so many puritanical
duelists of all sorts telling us, "No; there's good and bad." And they all define those terms in their own
way: the Christian "good and
evil" duality; the ecologist's "nature good; man bad" duality;
the feminist's "woman good; man bad" duality, and so on. Against this monism and dualism Pound offers
a hierarchy of values, in which he gives you a panoramic picture of human
history, very much like Griffith's Intolerance, only in it, Pound shows levels
of awareness, levels of civilization, levels of ethics and levels of lack of
all these things. And you realize that
you have a hierarchy of values too, but you've never perfectly articulated
it. Every writer gives you a hierarchy
of values. But by making this the
central theme, Pound makes you face the question, "Will I accept this as
the best hierarchy of values?" I
can't, because the guy had a screw loose.
Great poet, but a little bit funny in the head at times, trying to
synthesize Jefferson, Confucius, Picasso and Mussolini. So what you've got to do is struggle with
Pound, and create your own hierarchy of values to convince yourself that you
grok more than he did. And he combined genius and looniness. It's an invigorating book to get you out of
dualism, which is the Western trap, and monism, which is the Eastern trap, to
attain realism: a hierarchy of values.
Another book I wish everybody would read:
3. Science
and Sanity by Alfred
Korzybski. this one gives you the
tools to enable you to avoid most of the stupidity prevalent on this planet at
present. It won't cure all forms of stupidity, and you really have to work at
it; it doesn't do magic. But if you use
its principles, you'll gradually cure yourself of a lot of prevalent forms of
stupidity. If you work at it hard
enough, you may cure yourself of most.
I don't know; I'm still working at it.
4. Ovid. I wish everybody would read Ovid. The great myths of our particular culture -
the Greek and Roman myths - can't be found in any one book, except Bullfinch or
Ovid, and Ovid has a much better style than Bullfinch. So read Ovid and get the whole panorama of
classical myth. Classical myth has so much meaning that it permeates
every bit of modern psychology. The
myths of other cultures have much to offer, but we still need our myths. So we might as well face up to them. It's our culture; let's not lose it. And let's find out something that happened
before 1970.
5. The
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer - just because it's so damn good.
6. Justine, by deSade -- because
everyone needs to be shaken up. Justine
asks you some pretty fundamental questions.
And you may not find them easy to answer.
7. Instead of a Book by a Man Too Busy to Write One,
by Benjamin Tucker, which contains the best arguments for minimizing force and
maximizing options; the best argument for extreme Libertarianism that anyone
has put together. He deals with
concrete issues in economics, and makes a damn good case for a maximum of
liberty and a minimum of coercion as a formula for a happy and prosperous
society.
8. Progress and Poverty, by
Henry George. Not that I agree with
it. But everyone's heard of Karl Marx
and Adam Smith. If you read Tucker and
George, you get the idea that there are more than two choices. You don't have to choose between them. There are other options, not in between, but
at right angles to those choices; a hierarchy of possibilities. George poses a challenge to both Marxism and
orthodox capitalism.
9. The
Open Society and its Enemies, by Karl Popper, which introduces you to a
lot of aspects of modern scientific thought, but in a different way than Korzybski,
and applies them to tearing apart most of the arguments for determinism and
totalitarianism. I think determinism
and totalitarianism have done so damn much harm that everybody needs a good
inoculation against them. Popper seems the best inoculation. He fled both the Communists and the Nazis,
and had good emotional reasons for detesting totalitarianism. He was a physicist, so he expressed himself
in terms of a very deep and trenchant philosophical analysis of what's wrong
with theories that claim, "We know what's best (?) and we know how to
achieve it - and we know who has to be killed to make it happen."
10. Shakespeare. I think everybody should read Shakespeare,
not only because he was such [a] great poet, but because he's under so much
attack these days. You might as well check him out for yourself, and it
will give you an idea of how just dumb the politically correct people who
attack him seem in comparison to him.
Other recommended authors:
Jonathan Swift.
All of Gulliver's
Travels. There are some
anthologies which contain not only this, but a selection of his other writings,
too. Swift does a great job of tearing
apart conventional ideas about almost everything. He's very, very
liberating; almost psychedelic in some passages.
Nietzsche.
There are a couple of good one-volume editions which contain both Twilight of the
Idols and The
Anti-Christ. The two should be
taken together. They represent
Nietzsche at the height of his...whatever it was. More than any other writer in
the history of philosophy, Nietzsche set out to refute everyone who came before
him, without exception and without mercy, and he had the intellect to do a damn
good job. He tears down so many accepted
ideas that you're left floating in a kind of nihilistic void. Many people find this terrifying. I find it exhilarating, and I manage to
recover from it every time I subject myself to re-reading something by Nietzsche. There are a lot of other good books by
Nietzsche, but I'd especially recommend those two.
Olaf Stapledon.
There's a one-volume edition that contains both First and Last Men
and Last Men in London.
Then, when somebody has read that much, I think
intelligent conversation can begin.
Otherwise, we're pretty much on the level of grunting.
(re-typed
and posted
by: ewagner382@aol.com)
Also from Recommended Reading
on RAW’s site.
The
Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich, M.D.
Finnegans
Wake, by James Joyce
Machine Art, by Ezra Pound
Selected Prose, by Ezra Pound
Harlot's Ghost, by Norman Mailer
Go Down, Moses, by William Faukner
The
Alphabet vs. the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain
Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling
Pivot, The Analects trans. by Ezra Pound
Chaos and Cyberculture, by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.
Critical Path, by
R Buckminster Fuller
Digital McLuhan, by Paul Levinson
Saharasia,
by James DeMeo, Ph.D.
The
Natural Economic Order, by Silvio Gesell
To which RMJon23 added: “I'm surprised neither list included Peter McWilliams’ Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do. I'll go out on a limb and suggest RAW wants everyone to read that one, too.
Other recommendations:
As of today (August 11, 1997) I
find the most interesting ideas in traditional Buddhism, Nietzsche, Charles Fort, several quantum physicists (Nick Herbert, David Bohm, Fred Wolfe, David
Finkelstein) and in Rupert Sheldrake.
Add together the Buddhist yoga of detachment from fixed ideas and emotions,
Nietzsche’s and Fort's merciless assault on the cultural prejudices that are so
deeply embedded we usually don't notice them, quantum uncertainty and holism,
Sheldrake's special variety of holism, and I think we have the beginning of a
hint of the New Paradigm we need. But
after looking at this list I realize I should have included Korzybski's general
semantics, Bandler's
neurolinguistic programming
and Leary's evolutionary-existentialist neuro-psychology or info-psychology as he most recently labeled it.
From
the Paradigm Shift Interview
The
living writers whose work especially interests me at present include Douglas Adams, William Burroughs, who still
seems topical no matter how old he gets, Tom Robbins, who writes
the best sentences of anybody working in English today, George V. Higgins, who sees
humans with a wonderful irony and writes the most realistic dialogue I've ever
seen (even better than Joyce or Hemingway), and a lot of scientist-philosophers
who seem to me to be giving us wonderful new ideas and perceptions: Rupert
Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, Terrence McKenna, Barbara Marx
Hubbard, the fuzzy logic people, Riane Eisler, Nick Herbert, Nicholas Negroponte, Marilyn
Ferguson, Peter Russell,
Fred Alan Wolfe . . . and of course, Tim Leary,
who is ill, but may have a few unpublished books that might still blow all our
minds.
"There are
only two kinds of artists: the plagiarists and the revolutionaries."
- Paul Gauguin
In my opinion, the primary "revolutionary" Masters of our past century include Picasso, Klee, Pound, Joyce, Faulkner, Ginsberg, Frank Lloyd Wright, D.W. Griffith, Chaplin, Welles, Clint Eastwood, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Epstein, Brancusi, Carlin : the man or woman who doesn't know their work deeply and richly still lives in the 19th Century as the rest of us prepare to enter the 21st. The artists on that list haven't become familiar enough to stop surprising us. We still need to interpret our interpreters, as Ellman said of Joyce.
excerpt from Thought of the Month: 30 Apollo 78 p.s.U.
RAW’s Desert Island Music Choices:
1.
Beethoven's 9th Symphony
2.
Beethoven's 7th Symphony
3.
Vivaldi's Four Seasons
4.
Orff's Carmina Burana
5.
Bach's Brandenburg Concerti
6.
Bach's Goldberg Variations
7. Mozart's
Piano Concerti
8.
Beethoven's Piano Concerti
9.
Scott Joplin Rags on harpsichord