I’ve been memed again! Twice this time – by Wally Conger and Matt Jenny. Okay, here goes:
One book that changed your life: The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson
One book that you have read more than once: On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One book that you would want on a desert island: Primitive Wilderness Living and Survival Skills by John and Geri McPherson
One book that made you laugh: The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy
One book that made you cry: The Face Beside the Fire by Laurens van der Post.
One book that you wish had been written: To Lorne Dieterling by Ayn Rand.
One book that you wish never had been written: Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger
One book that you are currently reading: Making It Explicit by Robert Brandom
One book that you have been meaning to read: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Now tag five more people: Can’t make me. The meme* has crossed the event horizon of my blog and will never rise again.
Ok, I’ll bite:
“Beatnik Wanton” is a lame attempt by some white male in the 60s to write some sort of pornography, right?
All I know about the book is its cover. And I would never judge a book by its cover ….
Actually I was searching the web for images of “beatnik” — I had momentarily thought of photoshopping Bush’s face onto a beatnik and photoshopping a copy of Camus into his hand. But my image search brought me that cover, which was so silly I couldn’t resist using it instead. (Though it’s still not as funny as this cover.)
Man, they must have been smoking some potent stuff back in the 60s…
Fun fact: One of Brandom’s best disciples, Mark Lance at Georgetown, is a left-anarchist who folds Wittgensteinian-Neo-Sellarsian-Brandomian themes into his politics. Also, his book, The Grammar of Meaning, is good. Lots of good stuff about the irreducibility of the normative and how to account for it without falling into the traps of platonism or social descriptivism. Right up your alley, I’d bet.
One of Mark Lance’s students was an instructor here at Auburn a few years back. But then he imprudently accepted a job at the American University in Beirut.
I’ve just been re-memed!