Welcome to Litsy!

#TLT #ThreeListThursday @dabbe
Had to jump in for this one (but couldn‘t quite narrow it down to three 😆)
1. Tagged
2. Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
3. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell
4. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
5. Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

Apparently I really like memoirs 📚

And I meant it. Great history of critical race theory and biographies into it's creators and influencers.
Easy #audiobook

In the summer of 2022, I chanced upon a reference to CLR James‘ “Mariners” in Noel Ignatiev‘s posthumously released collection of essays. I was fascinated & so I resolved to read Moby Dick, which took me 4 months during that fall & winter. Almost exactly year after finishing Moby Dick, I‘ve finally read “Mariners” and I truly feel like I‘ve completed some sort of visionary quest. Full circle moment for sure!

The witch-hunt was also the first persecution in Europe that made use of a multimedia propaganda to generate a mass psychosis among the population. Alerting the public to the dangers posed by the witches, through pamphlets publicizing the most famous trials and the details of their atrocious deeds, was one of the first tasks of the printing press

WE DID IT!! After more than a year, and 1,000+ pages, my partner and I finished reading Capital Vol. 1!! We basically took turns reading the entire thing out loud line by line. I also kept a notebook that I‘ve updated after each chapter (still need to finish my notes on the Appendix)! It was so much clearer (and funnier!) than I anticipated & I would encourage anyone who wants to read it to not feel daunted. But, definitely read with a buddy 🤓

I‘m pretty bummed because I was really excited to read this, & I think the author‘s intervention is an important one, but I did not really love this book. Even though I agree with many of her conclusions, I feel like she relies too much on ungenerous assertions (often without citations) and bizarre analogies. I wonder if I didn‘t vibe with the style of argumentation because she‘s a “philosophy person” instead of “political theory person” 🤷🏻‍♀️

"It seems to me that all suicides in circumstances of hunger and need have the undoubted character of murder... The question of a right to suicide will only make sense in a future society where no material motives for suicide will exist. Only in a society that has guaranteed to all its members the means of existence will the question be appropriate.”

- Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, 1912

“The capitalist himself does not know in most cases how much variable capital he employs in his business. We have already seen . . ., and we shall now see further, that the only distinction within his capital that impresses itself on the capitalist as fundamental is the distinction between fixed and circulating capital.”

Marx and Engels‘s historical analysis is breathtakingly, brilliantly simple. I think it‘s wrong but, again, you‘ve just got to admire its genius. Obviously, without understanding the historical basis of Marx‘s thought you can‘t understand anything else in Marxism.

“We see here again how a variation in constant capital has the same effect on the rate of profit, irrespective of whether this variation is brought about by an increase or decrease in the material components of c, or simply by a change in their value.”