Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying. Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014 Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144 Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   -Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology. I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies
   
   http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

Dammit, I thought I could add sanity flair to my own posts. Is there a mod in the house?
____

EDIT: List of pages linked in the original post /u/Jero79, this is for you!

^^^.

> [this book](https://www.amazon.com/Nigger-Strange-Career-Troublesome-Word/dp/0375713719?ie=UTF8&keywords=nigger%3A%20the%20strange%20career%20of%20a%20troublesome%20word&qid=1382955230&ref=sr_1_1&sr=8-1)

^^^.

> This is a LIE

^^^.

> other FA bloggers

links to a post titled 'Big Fat List of Myth-Defying Health Resources', which a the name suggests is a list of links to about 30 FA articles, blog posts, TED talks etc. I'm not going to screenshot it because it's too complicated to sort out who counts as a 'public figure', plus there's not much point anyway without the links to the pages in question.

^^^.

> misrepresenting obesity research

I think this post is also by OP on a different blog, but I'm not a tumblr native so I'm not 100% sure how it all works. They noted that the formatting was screwed up, so I re-ordered it to how I understand it's meant to be: the block quote is from an FA blog, which the anonymous ask was posted to, and OP then reblogged the ask and added a response to the FA poster. The 'myth-busting resources' part links to a different FA blogger's list of peer-reviewed articles 'supporting' their FA views, and the post I've screenshotted is OP's analysis of the first article. (And if you're confused by that explanation, just think how I felt trying to sort through it in the first place.)

^^^.

> they don't even appear to read

is a dead link. According to archive.is it was an anti-FA tumblr post listing 'articles' cited by an FA blogger that are actually blog posts and opinion pieces.

^^^.

> fabricates stories

^^^.

> I was wrong

I hadn't read that last one and I'm kind of wishing I'd kept it that way, because now I'm just angry. Seriously, what a cunt.

There are two standard texts that most universities use to teach literary theory to undergrads, there is a lot of overlap between the two so you really only need one or the other, but they are the most comprehensive books you will find on the subject if you want to get a broad but complete overview.

1.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

2.) Critical Theory Since 1965

You can get a used copy of the latter for only a couple bucks.

Edit: In case this matters, I teach theory at an R1 university.

> From a scientific point of view

From a scientific point of view, you're an ignoramus. You know nothing about biology if this is what you actually think.

Instead of just pulling things out of your ass and calling them "le science," try reading an actual academic journal on the subject in one of any of the relevant fields, or take a class, or talk to a PhD. Do something. Or, you know, just don't open your mouth. That is, unless you want to keep making an ass of yourself and broadcasting your ignorance.

e: Look, if you want to say that the dick makes the man, I know of at least two vets who lost what you would consider their manhood to IEDs. I could get you their contact info if you wanted to present your ideas on gender to them.

Or you could reassess what you've learned from the far right propaganda shithouses on reddit and youtube.

Here. This book is arguably the cornerstone of the modern academic understanding of gender. If you read this you'll have a basic understanding of probably the most widely accepted theory of gender in academia. I wouldn't consider this all you'd need to know for a thorough understanding, but it is probably the place to start if you're confused.

You'd probably find this english/french "parallel" book (and others like it) pretty useful and in the genre of what you are looking for.

Also, I realize this isn't exactly what you were asking for, but setting custom google chrome searches to ping word reference has saved me SO MUCH TIME whilst studying. Specifically... you can set up google chrome so that if you type a special keyword in the search bar, chrome will run the "search" function that's normally on any particular page. So, I set three custom searches, and I use them constantly:

• fe will search the french-english dictionary
  
• ef will search the english-french dictionary
  
• conj will bring up the conjugation page for whatever verb i type in.
  
  So for example, i'd bring up a new tab, then type fe, space, and then aimant, and hit enter. I'd get the search page for aimant, which of course i then discover means "magnet" in english.
  
  When making flash cards or any of tons of other studying activites, double checking words in the dictionary can be time consuming, and this will save you a million seconds.
  
  You can also find plugins in chrome that will pop up with a definition of a word if you hover over it or right click... which is pretty useful for reading french news or other sites, when you need a little help.
  
  Edit: spelling is important :)

I'm not a Faulkner guy, but I love Joyce and posts like yours pop up on Reddit from time to time. First, congrats on making the effort. The world is full of sissies who are too chickenshit to ever make it past the easy stuff. Second, here's my advice on Ulysses. Have a ball!

Everyone should read Ulysses at some point in their life. It's a book unlike any other, a book that knocks you out of your comfort zone. A book that makes your brain strain like you're reaching for something on a high shelf. And it's really, really funny. I've read it a couple of times and here's my advice:

Step 1) RELAX. You're going to miss things. It's okay. Some things are worth missing, some things are boring, some things are references that don't make any sense in today's world, so who cares? Joyce didn't want people to puzzle out his book like the answers to an exam, he wanted to present a slice of life in all its freaky majesty and stupidity. Keep looking up at the stars, not down at your feet.

Step 2) Like a shark, keep moving forward. Reading this book is like trying to drink a waterfall. The point is the overall impression, not so much the individual details. Just keep pushing ahead, don't sit there with a magnifying glass trying to appreciate every single word. Joyce himself said he put in a shit ton of puzzles and tricks and things that don't make sense for literary critics and scholars, just to mess with their heads, so don't get hung up on them.

Step 3) There are no such thing as spoilers. Seriously. Buy yourself the Seidman Annotations. These are your new best friends. The introduction to each chapter will get you oriented, and if you get hung up on a phrase, a detail, a bit of wordplay, they're like the board you stick under the wheels of your jeep when it's stuck in the mud.

Step 4) Remember that Joyce wasn't living in Dublin when he wrote this. He hadn't lived there in a long time. So what Ulysses is to some extent is his attempt to rebuild Dublin in his mind, recreating the sights and smells and mind set and beliefs and feelings and streets and people he remembered, but doing it in an impressionistic way. What the impressionists and modernists did for painting, Joyce is doing for books. That's why it reads like he wrote it on drugs. Keep this in mind, the way you keep the north star in mind when you're navigating a ship (which I'm sure you do a lot, right?). This is why the book is "important," because it's an amazing act of sustained imagination. The same way that Superman has the Kryptonian city of Kandor trapped in a bottle, Joyce has one day in Dublin in 1904 trapped in a book.

Step 5) It's funny. It's really funny. You just have to rewire your brain a little to get the jokes. Joyce always thought of himself as someone who was writing, primarily, a comedy. He's sending up the epic form by using the structure of The Odyssey to talk about people going to the bathroom, and masturbating, and getting drunk and making idiots out of themselves. But by doing this, he's not only elevating everyday life to the level of an epic but he's lowering the epic to the level of everyday life. But also: fart jokes. Everywhere.

Step 6) It's okay to skip. Even the biggest Joyce scholars in the world agree: some chapters in Ulysses suck. Here's my breakdown of the book, chapter by chapter. I'm using the chapter names that Joyce gave the book in another document, not the chapter titles that are in the book:

1- TELEMACHUS - come on, it's the first chapter. You've gotta read it. It's basically two roommates squabbling over money.

2 - NESTOR - a bit of a bore but also relatively short

3 - PROTEUS - this is the first long, boring, skimmable chapter. If you're deep on Joyce it's very "important" but it's also pretty impenetrable.

4 - CALYPSO - now we're in Leopold Bloom's part of the book and this is one of the three most famous chapters in ULYSSES (the other two are "Circe" and "Penelope")

5 - THE LOTUS EATERS - fine chapter, a bit dense, but readable

6 - HADES - one of the best in the book in my opinion, just totally Irish and death obsessed and there's even some plot!

7 - AEOLUS - from this chapter forward to "Cyclops" you're in a dense, unforgiving part of the book. I recommend breezing through these chapters and keep up with what's going on with the annotations.

8 - LAESTRYGONIANS - not so bad, but tough stuff.

9 - SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS - ouch. Even Joyce scholars think this one's like getting hit in the head with a brick. Lots of academic nattering about Shakespeare.

10 - THE WANDERING ROCKS - a neat trick (19 bits, told from around a dozen points of view) but otherwise it's really just a walk around Dublin

11 - THE SIRENS - a sweet, lovely chapter but it's all pretty wordplay

12 - CYCLOPS - alert! alert! The least loved and worst chapter in the book. No one can read and understand this one. Fortunately, it's the end of the worst section of Ulysses.

13 - NAUSICAA - a really perverted, really dense, very funny chapter.

14 - OXEN OF THE SUN - scholars love this chapter and it is fun, but don't take it too seriously. The point is to trace the history of the English language from early speech to 20th Century speech in one chapter. It's very complex and kind of unrewarding, which makes it a bit like "Cyclops" but not nearly so bad.

15 - CIRCE - essential

16, 17, 18 - EUMAEUS, ITHACA, PENELOPE - the last three chapters, and completely lovely, moving and awesome.

So my recommendation is to read about it as you read it so you can know what's going on, and save your strength for the better chapters, while avoiding getting hung up on chapters like AEOLUS (which is a bunch of hot air, like its namesake) PROTEUS and CYCLOPS. Also, this is one of the few novels you can read in almost any order and enjoy. If you just want the highlights, I recommend the following order:

• TELEMACHUS
  
  
• CALYPSO
  
  
• HADES
  
  
• NAUSICAA
  
  
• CIRCE
  
  
• EUMAEUS
  
  
• ITHACA
  
  
• PENELOPE
  
  Then you can go back and read the tougher chapters however you like.

I can give you three books that I recommend without reservation. The first is the easiest to read and a solid introduction to fiction editing. The second goes into more depth, with an excellent workflow for the revising process in the latter chapters. The third is the most dense, like a college class in fiction editing with a focus on how the 19th and 20th century masters actually revised their works, but it is also the most thorough.

Self-editing for Fiction Writers (written by two editors)

Stein on Writing (written by an accomplished editor)

Revising Fiction (written by an college professor, writer and editor)

So I know this sub is not particularly interested in cognitive linguistics, but I think the idea of conceptual metaphor beautifully explains the use of "literally".

The thesis of conceptual metaphor is that metaphor is ubiquitous in language use and understanding, and this kind of metaphor is used and understood unconsciously. Metaphors We Live By is the original source for a lot of these. So for example, communication is conceptualized as a conduit, thus we say things like "get the idea across", "transmit information", and so on without realizing they are metaphorical.

Another ubiquitous metaphor is that intensity can be conveyed by "realness" or "actuality." The OED shows that the word "really" was originally used frequently to describe the real presence (as opposed to the figurative presence) of Christ in the Eucharist. We see that it has alternatively been used as an intensifier for almost the same amount of time. Exactly the same thing is the case with "truly". Both of these words primarily meant "literally" but quickly acquired meaning as intensifiers. Why? Because of the conceptual metaphor that describing something as "real" can be to emphasize it, thus "that show was really out of this world" and "she is truly a diamond in the rough." Both of these violate the primary sense of "really" and "truly" because they're clearly non-literal. But, nobody has a problem with these because the metaphor is understood and its meaning processed unconsciously. This metaphor is cross-linguistic: "de verdad" in Spanish and "真的" in Mandarin.

This is exactly how "literally" acquired its meaning as an intensifier. Its primary meaning is "real", "actual", and "non-figurative", but our minds have this conceptual metaphor such that we can easily understand its meaning in a non-literal context. It is a metaphorical or non-literal use of "literal".

If this interpretation is right, what could we conclude?

• It is more correct to say that the non-literal use of "literally" is metaphorical, rather hyperbolic.
  
• Metaphors are understood and processed automatically in context. Nobody, not even the most Eichmannesque of grammar nazis, misunderstands the metaphorical use of "literally". Thus, language is not being destroyed.
  
• The metaphor of "realness is intensity" has been used in other places for at least several hundred years, and the same people complaining about "literally" are not complaining about "really" and "truly", even though it part of the same phenomenon. So the ire for "literally" is hypocritical and irrational.
  
• Comprehension and creative use of metaphor is a fundamental characteristic of human thought and language, so fighting this is literally the most futile thing one can do.

First of all, I want to say that it speaks very well of you that you are looking to use your time in prison to your advantage. Most people would see this as a catastrophe, but you see it as an opportunity. If you want to make this a full-time, in-depth study, this is the plan I recommend.

I would first start with a good introduction to the entire Stoic system. A great one is Stoicism by John Sellars.

Then I would start reading the source material. We are fortunate enough to have the lectures of one of the great teachers of Stoicism, Epictetus. I would go with Epictetus - Discourses, Fragments, Handbook translated by Robin Hard.

After reading Epictetus, you can move on to Marcus Aurelius, who was directly influenced by the Discourses. Robin Hard has also done a translation of the Meditations.

To fully appreciate the Meditations (and to better appreciate Epictetus), next read The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot. This is an incredible analysis of the Meditations which explains Epictetus' influence on Marcus Aurelius and his work.

Finally, you must of course read Seneca. Two good sources are this book of his essays and this book of his letters.

Between the footnotes in these translations and the detail given by Sellars and Hadot, you won't need Wikipedia to get clarification on any points. You'll have the expert knowledge in your hands.

I don't think it's necessary to read one of the modern how-to type books before you begin reading these, but if you think it would help to read something lighter first to become acquainted with the core concepts ahead of time, I recommend Stoicism and the Art of Happiness by Donald Robertson.

There are other sources, such as Musonius Rufus and Cicero, but these are the three most people start with and the three that I recommend first. You can look at the FAQ for more ideas if you'd like.

Find out how many books you are allowed to have at one time, as this may be an issue in prison.

As others have said, it's a very good idea to keep a journal of your thoughts, both on what you are reading and how you relate what you are reading to your life.

A number of Margaret Atwood's books have won awards, including the Man Booker and Hammett Prizes for The Blind Assassin and the Governor General's Award for English language fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Handmaid's Tale. A full list of her awards can be found here.

Alice Munro is another Canadian author who has won a number of awards for her (many) novels.

Cory Doctorow's science fiction novels have also won a number of awards, including the Locus and Prometheus Awards. Little Brother is YA and a free ebook.

In fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay has won the Sunburst Award and Prix Aurora Award for novels like Under Heaven.

Here's the explanation of Alexander Macris (@archon on twitter) on why that's bullshit:


Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
   
   I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.
   
   
   
   credit: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

If there ever was a post to be used as an example for a legitimate downvoting in this philosophy subreddit, it would be yours because you wrote a vapidly subjective statement lacking anything discernible with its sole purpose being, ostensibly, to respond pejoratively to another theory, stamped with "this statement is ok to say because I'm his fanboy" at the end.

Regardless, I searched for what I thought I missed in Chomsky's criticism of Lacan, and all I could find was what I originally knew, which was that he had a hard time understanding it and that Lacan was a charlatan, without basis. On obscurantism, just because it doesn't make sense or isn't born out of a rational empiricism doesn't make it an invalid theory. Hegel wrote an essay in response to such criticisms to his work called Who Thinks Abstractly.

If he was a charlatan as Chomsky says, where does he base this claim? Is it because his theory isn't original as they're based on Hegel and Freud? If that's the case then, well that describes 95% of philosophy professors who all they do is interpret other people's work. That's nothing new, I could say the same for most of my professors at the undergraduate level, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn from them or distrust them. I find what they do to be just as important as those who are creating 'new' ideas. For instance, postmodernists are not new since they are building on Nietzsche's philosophy that there aren't any totalizing universal objective truths. Thus that doesn't devalue the works like Foucault's who Chomsky is criticizing here specifically, because of how he describes the implications of Nietzsche's philosophy in modern society with the best example being from Foucault that the justice system is riddled with exercising power over others rather than the virtue within the ideal of justice due to the fact that human nature is nothing more than a concept rather than something definable which Chomsky believes it to be.

For the sake of argument here, in Discipline and Punish Foucault's point is that we might presume that our sophisticated judicial system has achieved progress by eliminating the execution of criminals for minor crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread, compared with past times. Yet the concepts of crime, criminals, prisoners, and justice developed through the human sciences produces social circumstances worse than those earlier executions for minor crimes. For instance, the concept of being constantly supervised leads to the effect of what Foucault terms 'docile bodies' which describes a form of subjection to power, whether it be politically, economically, or for warfare. And the sources that help create 'docile bodies' stems from the use of new forms of technology and the ways by which the human sciences have defined human nature which are too limiting conceptually and too stifling for human potentialities—all the while proceeding as if they were describing an objective reality.

Nietzsche points to this fallibility in the belief of objective reality in the human sciences in essays 23 and 24 in part three of Genealogy of Morals. In essay 23 Nietzsche writes:
>The ascetic ideal has a goal — and this goal is sufficiently universal for all other interests of human existence to seem narrow and petty in comparison; it relentlessly interprets periods, peoples, men in terms of this goal, it allows no other interpretation, no other goal, it reproaches, negates, affirms, confirms exclusively with reference to its interpretation (—and has there ever existed a system of interpretation more fully thought through to its end?); it subordinates itself to no other power, it believes rather in its prerogative over all other powers — it believes that no power can exist on earth without first having conferred upon it a meaning, a right to existence, a value as an instrument in the service of its work, as a path and means to its goal, to its single goal... Where is the opposition to this closed system of will, goal, and interpretation? Why does no opposition exist? Where is the other 'single goal'? But I am told that such opposition does exist, that it has not only fought a long and successful campaign against that ideal but has even already overcome it in all important respects: the whole of our modern science supposedly bears witness to this fact — this modern science, which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, clearly believes only in itself, clearly possesses the courage to be itself, the will to itself, and has managed well enough up to now without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial. However, such noisy agitators' chatter has no effect on me: these trumpeters of reality are bad musicians, it is clear from the sound they make that their voices do not rise up from the depths, that the abyss of the scientific conscious — for today the scientific conscience is an abyss — does not speak through them, that the word 'science' in the mouths of such trumpeters is simply an obscenity, an abuse, an example of impudence. The very opposite of what is being asserted here is the truth: science today has simply no belief in itself, let alone an ideal above it — where it survives at all as passion, love, glowing intensity, suffering, it constitutes not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather its most recent and most refined form.

And in essay 24, Nietzsche describes how the ascetic ideal (which includes both religion and science) is inevitably linked to the obsession for the truth. And this obsession deteriorates the ability for humans not only in its condition, but its ability to see how it gives birth to an imposition of power through the use of knowledge, which Nietzsche also describes in almost every one of his works.

There's a few resources out there, none perfect.

This is a short little bit by Gaiman on how to read Wolfe. Not specific to Book of the New Sun, and a little joking, but it's completely accurate. Approach Wolfe in that manner and you may get more from the books.

This is a dictionary/glossary that can be useful to link different parts of the series to eachother, and provides a lot of context as to the real world origins of words he uses. Wolfe invents a lot less words that it seems at first glance, almost every unfamiliar word is either just a really rare/archaic word, or is invented, but pulled from a real life reference. Sadly, it's a book and not freely available, but what can you do.

This is a wiki about Wolfe's works, kind of hit or miss, but the list of obscure words is useful, and some of the analysis/discussion is good.

This is the best regarded in-depth literary analysis of the series, but it's super dense and not a straightforward explanation by any means.

There's also a super long running mailing list about gene wolfe's work, but good luck digging anything useful out of it, it's just way too much with no organization.

Read a lot. A LOT. To start, at least like five poems for every one you read. Obviously this is an arbitrary number, but it is important to read a lot of poetry when you're getting started, because poetry is a very different beast from prose, especially the type of popular fiction that most general readers are familiar with. It requires a lot more attention paid to what's happening even at the word level, as ambiguity and multiple meanings are important to poetry.

 

There are numerous very good resources online and free:
Poetry 180.

Poetry Foundation is a tremendous resource that has tonnnnnns of poems organized by theme, occasion, author etc.

Poets.org is also wonderful.

Poem Hunter is a great resource once you have found poets you think you'd like to read more of—but I have noticed small typographical errors in some of their poems when comparing them to the poems actually in collections, though not that often.


New Pages is a resource that can help you browse publications that are currently publishing, read reviews and interviews. It won't be as important right away, but once you get a decent feel for poetry, and especially once you're writing what you consider polished poems it's a great place to research possible markets for your work (please, please don't just send out to random or big name magazines without researching first. Most magazines have an aesthetic of some sort, so many poems simply don't fit at an individual magazine, and submitting it will only result in clogging the slush pile (unsolicited submissions) and wasting your (and the editor's) time. They can also help you find online magazines where you can read current writing for free. There are hundreds of them, of greatly varying content.

 

Now, by saying read a ton of poems doesn't mean don't write. Do. Especially when you're inspired by something a poem you've read has done. Try it yourself. I highly recommend keeping a writer's notebook (I have actual physical ones, as well as a google drive file for snippets and interesting tidbits I've found that I want to use in a piece sometime).


Time for my little plug here. I run a blog where I post writing exercises/writing prompts every day called Notebooking Daily. The point is to spend some time every day possible actually writing, and by starting with very specific directions it helps jumpstart the creative process even if you don't have anything in particular that you are inspired to write. On my sidebar I have a quote from David Kirby that I love:

>I’d have the young poets maintain a stockpile of linguistic bits: stories, weird words, snatches of conversation they’d overheard, lines from movies they’d seen or books they’d read. Most young poets will say something like, “Well, I have to write a poem now. Let’s see; what can I write about?” And then they end up writing about their own experiences, and, let’s face it, we all have the same experiences. So what all poets need is a savings account they can raid from time to time.

*

If you like the blog please spread the word. There aren't ads or anything on there right now, I'm just doing it as a sort of public service because I think writers can use all the support and opportunity they can get. And I really enjoy writing, haha.

 

/r/writingprompts is another good resource to use. It's quite an active sub and helps you write when not necessarily otherwise inspired. Some of the topics are extremely specific, while others are broad, and open for interpretation.

/r/passtheparagraph is a fun collaborative writing sub where you join other redditors and piece together a story or poem one paragraph or a few lines at a time. This is a great place when you don't want to write a full piece, but feel like writing.

/r/ocpoetry is a good place for beginning poets to publish, but be sure to take a look at the reddit TOS (especially the 'your content' part). But it will likely be some time before your pieces are in any shape that this will be an issue.

 

I hope the links and words are of some service. I can offer some critiques when I have the time, but I have no idea when that is usually, but if you have something specific you need an opinion or advice on you can message me and I'll do my best to get back to you in a timely fashion. Best of luck on your path! And I do highly recommend Poetry 180 to new writers, the poems are all quite accessible but not silly or light verse. Garrison Keillor's Good Poems is also a great resource, and you can buy it used for under $0.40. I found the poem I had read at my wedding in that book—shout out to Steve Scafidi!

Penguin books does side-by-side short stories (New Penguin Parallel Text, in French...I have the Japanese one), and personally I'd say French first.

The parallel text makes it easier to go sentence by sentence, so I'll read the Japanese side first, and go back and read the English side so I can practice picking up the Japanese first, instead of going in knowing what it says. It's also a good test to see if you remember this or that word from when you looked it up last time, and maybe by the 5th time you'll have it down pat. This is totally unfounded personal opinion so take it with a grain of salt, but I feel like reading the language you're trying to learn first helps you learn more.

I went to one of the best schools in the country for writing and took poetry classes with well-established poets. I've won a few well established poetry awards. I'm not trying to brag, but I'm just trying to show that I'm not pulling the following out of my arse.

You are going to get lots of bad advice. There are lots of really bad poets out there.

I'm not the biggest fan of her poetry, but Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook contains pretty much everything a beginner could want to know about how to write poetry. It's easy to read and short as well.

Some pointers off the top of my head:

Be honest. Don't try to be something you're not.

Imitate your favorite poets. This sounds counterintuitive to the first point, but you're trying to learn how to write. You learn what your own personal style is through reading others'. It is absolutely not a bad idea to start writing imitations of your favorites first.

Avoid purple prose. For the love of god. Also avoid excess adverbs. They do the least for you but everyone throws them in.

Less is more. This is probably the most important point of all. Poetry is poetry and not prose. Every word counts in good writing. It counts even more in poetry. If you have a poem made of eight lines, every fucking word counts. Even the and's, the's, and it's. When you edit, make sure every word there is doing something. Cut absolutely everything out that is unnecessary. It will make your poem WORSE to keep the extras in.

I've found that most famous writers, poets or otherwise, describe writing as a two-fold process: creative outpouring, and then editing. When you want to write a piece, first write down everything you want--everything that feels right. Don't edit yourself too much as you do so. Then, put the writing away for a little while. When you get back to it, then edit. When you edit, you should be in the opposite frame of mind from when you were actively coming up with material. Instead of adding everything you can think of, you need to be cutting out everything that doesn't belong. This is very hard to do and I'm still learning how to do it. It takes humility. Editing is just as important if not more so than the initial steps of writing a poem. Most bad writers do not realize this.

If you want more recommendations for poets to read, or articles about how to write, I'd be glad to provide more.

Do yourself a favor...

The estimated premiere is April 2018, similar to last year. The filming starts soon if it hasn't already. Moss stated that it will begin in September. It will be 13 episodes instead of 10 if the rumors are to be believed.

I assume they'll film primarily in Toronto, but since the world is expanding considerably - according to the showrunner - they may film in other locations as well. Here are some of the locations they filmed at last year.

Enjoy the rest of the show! (Also make sure to read the book, if you haven't!)

Might want to ask /r/YAwriters and/or /r/YAlit also.

While The Fault in Our Stars would be a good example of healthy relationships, I don't think Divergent is a meaningful pick if you want the main topic to be relationships and/or sex.

Some books that focus on context for relationships and sex instead of having it as a minor plot point:

• Forever by Judy Blume
  
• Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
  
• Song of the Magdalene by Donna Jo Napoli
  
  /u/caseyoc's suggestion of Fangirl is another good one. Eleanor & Park, by the same author, is even more relationship-focused and building a relationship and consent is a huge part of the storyline.
  
  If you want to go off on tangents, Eve (terrible book) and The Jewel (better) are YA dystopias that deal heavily with consent and forced pregnancy. The Handmaid's Tale is a much better examination of the topic and accessible for high-schoolers.
  
  The Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy by Rae Carson and the Trickster books by Tamora Pierce also win kudos for the protagonists choosing to have sex in a healthy relationship, seeking out birth control, and waiting for it to take effect. Both are in a fantasy setting where this problem is commonly brushed off.

Here is the textbook I used for my Critical Theory Class at UCLA. It's called the Norton Anthology of Critical Theory. While this is a good introduction to many theorists, I also suggest you to research supplemental materials on databases - ie. JSTOR - to understand movements/concepts.

There is also a comic book series that's descent depending on what you pick. While I enjoyed Foucault for Beginners, I hated Derrida for Beginners.

Lastly, Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is an excellent entry point. I actually met Culler when I visited Cornell. He's an awesome guy. Anyways, I think Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction should also be an excellent resource, although I haven't read it myself.

Some examples:

The Norton Anthology of Poetry

The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost

The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

If you're new and really want a good wide sampling, I heartily endorse a well-edited anthology. Not a shitty anthology of the classics, but a good, well-curated, interesting, broad, informative collection of poems. My first was the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, which, though it's country specific and leaves out some good poets, is pretty terrific for the relatively recent, American stuff. A different route in the anthology department is The Making of A Poem, which covers formal aspects of poetry without treating you like an infant or talking over your head, and then gives a spectacular, chronologically organized range of examples of those forms.


I think the best way to find out what you like is to read a few issues of Poetry magazine, everything they do is on their website, and find out what clicks with you.


I like to read individual collections, so I'll list some of my all time favorites here. Obviously there are a lot more than this list, and I'm offering here the stuff I think is a bit more accessible, even the moderns and Whitman are pretty lucid, even if Pound is a bit dense and Williams is a bit flightly.


Contemporary/Recent:

Maurice Manning - Bucolics and Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions

Robert Hass - Praise

Donald Justice - Departures

Louise Gluck - Averno and The Wild Iris


Further Back:

Ezra Pound - Personae

Willian Carlos Williams - Al Que Quiere! and Sour Grapes

HD - Sea Garden

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass


Non-English:

Charles Baudelaire - Fleurs du Mal

Tomas Transtromer - New Collected Poems (tr. Robin Fulton)

I use a text called Beginning Theory when I teach into to literary theory. That'll give you a pretty basic overview of the more modern stuff, plus point you in the direction of other texts.

A theory and criticism textbook like another commenter mentioned is a good idea too, though it might be a little overwhelming at first. A solid-ish, basic understanding of Western philosophy is generally, because it underpins literary criticism and theory. What we think of as "literary criticism" proper didn't even really fully emerge until the 19th century, so philosophical or hermeneutic approaches to texts are sort of the only game in town for much of history.

Another thing you can check it out are craft essays, which are written by writers about writing. Some of these will be classics, Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, for instance. Some will be quite modern. And in between.

Also, if you're reading things in canon, you can always find critical work on whatever you're reading. It might be a bit tough to wade through at first, but you can usually figure out what the big stuff is. And as always, just ask!

For a start:

• The Nibelungenlied / The Völsungsaga
  
• The Poetic Edda
  
• The Prose Edda
  
• The Kalevala
  
• The Mabinogion
  
• The Four Ancient Books of Wales
  
• Táin Bó Cúailnge
  
• Early Irish Myths and Legends
  
• Historia Regum Brittaniae

I'm a kind of casual reader these days, but Good Poems, selected by Garrison Keillor played a huge part in me getting into poetry ~10 years ago. Keillor grabs a good range of old classics and newer ones (though he kinda seems to favor beat era writers), and sorts the poems vaguely according to themes, like "Failure," "A Day's Work," "Sons and Daughters." I'd bet I've discovered 80% of my favorite writers due to this book. Props to u/JTK102 for also recommending this!



If that's too entry level, my other go-to anthology is The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, but obviously that one sticks to contemporary American writers. I like this anthology because it also gives some background to the career and cultural significance of the featured writers.


Good luck on your hunt!

Well, it might behoove you to read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man before you dive into Ulysses. Both books are more conventional in style than is Ulysses--therefore easier to read through--and both books have characters in them that appear in Ulysses. Dubliners will set you up for some of the themes regarding the ambivalence of Irish national identity in the bigger book, particularly the section titled "The Dead." Portrait also contains some of these themes, but is more important in that it sets up the character Stephen Dedalus, who is one of the two main protagonists of Ulysses.

There are two companion books that might help you while reading Ulysses that I recommend: Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses, which is a huge collection of glosses and notes explaining obscure references and history. It tends to be slightly more accurate than the other book I'm recommending, but the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming, and some of it is kind of pointlessly digressive.

The New Bloomsday Book is an excellent summary of the plot episode by episode. Blamires makes a point to show the intentional parallels between Ulysses and the Odyssey. Some of the hypotheses Blamires presents seem kind of far-fetched at times, and there are a couple of inaccuracies (at least in the edition I used), but on the whole I referenced this more than Ulysses Annotated.

I would also suggest that you pick a good edition of Ulysses to read. For too many reasons to relate here, Joyce kept revising it throughout his life and many differing editions exist. The Gabler Edition is the best synthesis of Ulysses textual scholarship and is considered the definitive edition in academic circles.

As for approach, I would suggest that you be patient. This is a book that's legendary for rewarding consideration and rereading. If you care to spend the time and effort you'd do well to read each section through without references, then read the synopsis in Blamires, then return to the text and read through while referring to Ulysses Annotated before moving on. You will see things you hadn't noticed before each time you read it, especially if you've read Dubliners and Portrait. However, this can be a bit much for a casual reader as opposed to a scholar, so you could do almost as well simply reading the sections and then comparing your observations and reading with Blamires and moving on.

Best of all would be to find or start a Joyce book club and read it through with them. This will slow you down enough to actually grasp some of the intricacies instead of just robotically scanning pages, and allows you to discuss and hash out ideas and interpretations.

Good luck, and have fun!

This will help a lot.

Here's a book of theories. Some are probably crazy, but some of the stuff in here is surely correct, such as how to tell if a character is human, robot, or alien from their names.

​

If you are really intrigued, there is always, Lexicon Urthus and The Solar Labyrinth both of which explain many of the terms used and have a great deal of in depth analysis. Both are available as ebooks as well.

I'm not a fan of Irvine's book, generally. It makes a major departure from the tradition of Stoicism as virtue being the telos of philosophy for tranquility. It's okay for a first look into Stoicism, but not much beyond that.

As a companion to Meditations, I like "The Inner Citadel" by Pierre Hadot.

Of course private prisons will be fine. They're the best way capitalism has devised for just removing people who are no longer needed from the system. Populations that are no longer needed to consume to keep up profit growth for the upper class are traded away into a system that funnels its profit into the upper class, it's a win-win for billionaires! Plus, these people were already oppressed and thus more likely to stir up trouble anyways, so throwing them in jail reduces the risk of riot and revolution! Don't forget that targeting only minorities breeds animosity between races and thus hurts class solidarity! Private Prisons are the ultimate neoliberal tool to maintain control over a population.

Discipline and Punish is more relevant today than ever.

Edit For those who don't know, the central thesis of "Discipline and Punish" is that the tools used in the modern day to ensure loyalty to the system originated within prisons as methods of discipline, and one of Foucault's broader points is that the modern system is ingrained physically into the way we act. We all step in line, we all stand for the pledge, we know the positions of work because we do this job 8 hours a day. The best way to see this in action is to look at how school's operate - with the pledge everyday, with the lunch lines ripped directly out of prison's, with lines down the hallway, raise your hand to speak, the authority figure in the room is infallible, etc... The way school's train children to be model citizens was a process perfected in the modern prison. (Modern being modernist era, early 1900s.)

This commentary was a bit more relevant in a time when most Americans, and Foucault is studying America mostly, were industrial workers, and this commentary has crossover with Albert Camus and his Theater of the Absurd, where he would go to factories and just have factory workers do simple exercises. These simple exercises revealed to the factory workers that their bodies hurt when they weren't being moved in the very specific repetition that factory work had them doing. Camus did this to build class consciousness in I believe Post-WWII France but I could be wrong about the timeframe.

There's actually a book for that

A Sea of Words, Third Edition: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian https://www.amazon.com/dp/0805066152/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_dgdKybMGPPA6K

https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Words-Third-Companion-Seafaring/dp/0805066152

This book is specifically made as a terminology companion for the Patrick O'Brian series. I picked it up myself but have yet to start the series.

Jo då, det finns det. Att inte många öppet kallar sig själva för kulturmarxister kan bero på det faktum att det pågår ständiga försök till att stämpla motstånd och kritik mot kulturmarxismen som "konspirationsteorier" och liknande trams. Därtill så är det antagligen inte något man frivilligt skyltar med eftersom kulturmarxismen är en destruktiv och subversiv ideologi. Sådant brukar inte mottas väl.

Men detta innebär tyvärr inte att de kulturmarxistiska idéerna inte fått stort genomslag ändå och det finns otaliga exempel på förment "goda människor" (nyttiga idioter) som sprungit kulturmarxisternas ärenden åt dem. Men jag orkar egentligen inte skriva ett långt inlägg om detta på nytt, så du får ursäkta, jag återanvänder ett gammalt istället:

> Jag har länkat till seriösa källor tidigare. Det är bara att gå igenom mina poster. Eller så kan du läsa t.ex. det här Flashbackinlägget, för jag orkar inte göra skriva ett på nytt:
>
> > Begreppet kulturmarxism är ju belastat post-Breivik, vilket egentligen är synd med tanke på att ordet bättre än "postmarxism", "västmarxism", "new left" och andra synonymer beskriver vad det är frågan om: en marxistisk analys där fokus ligger på den kulturella överbyggnaden istället för på den ekonomiska basen. Medan den ortodoxa marxismen fokuserar på ekonomi och klass används kulturmarxistisk teori för att studera andra maktordningar som genus, sexuell läggning, religion, kultur o.s.v. Dessa maktordningar studeras gärna parallellt i en s.k. intersektionell analys. Att dagens vänster ofta är mer intresserad av genus, hbtq, islamofobi, kulturrasism, vithetskritik och postkolonial teori än av klassklyftor är ett utslag av just kulturmarxism.
> >
> > Man brukar tala om en "kulturell vändning" eller "språklig vändning" inom marxismen, och det är just det som kulturmarxismen står för. Därför är termen egentligen bättre än det mer intetsägande "postmarxism". Till det språkliga kommer också försöken att kontrollera narrativet och skapa lämpliga "berättelser". Man har också en förkärlek för att konstruera nya ord medan andra mönstras ut. Allt enligt devisen att den som kontrollerar språket även kontrollerar verkligheten.
> >
> > Efter Utöya blev kulturmarxism-begreppet ett trumfkort för vänstermupparna, eftersom de kunde använda det för att kleta Breivik på alla som kritiserade ideologin. Den som talar om kulturmarxism avslöjar sig som Breivik-anhängare, ungefär. Under senare tid har man - som vi kan se exempel på här i tråden - övergått till att förneka att kulturmarxismen över huvud taget existerar. Det talas om en "konspirationsteori", gärna med antisemitiska förtecken. Detta är förstås ganska slugt, eftersom det blir svårare att kritisera något som man inte får benämna. Expo och Researchgruppen har kört hårt med detta under de senaste veckorna (googla så får ni se). Tidigare har det som sagt även utspelat sig ett redigeringskrig om artikeln "kulturmarxism" på Wikipedia.
> >
> > Problemet för dessa revisionister är bara att verkligheten är svår att redigera bort. Böckerna är redan tryckta och generationer av humaniorastudenter har tvingats ta del av teorierna vare sig de velat det eller inte. Den som fortfarande tror att det handlar om en "konspirationsteori" bör läsa Douglas Kellners pedagogiska artikel "Cultural Marxism and British Cultural Studies" i Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2005), s. 171-177 (se första länken):
>
> > https://books.google.se/books?id=mTZ1AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT209&lpg=PT209&dq=fredric+jameson+%22cultural+marxism%22&source=bl&ots=lnZYtge0hR&sig=jow5gGS8rQF3mxEtF6l7E3v6Xuc&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=szQIVcXqCIH4yQPxuILQBA&ved=0CFcQ6AEwBzge#v=onepage&q=fredric%20jameson%20%22cultural%20marxism%22&f=false
> >
> > https://books.google.se/books/about/Encyclopedia_of_social_theory.html?id=relGAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y
> >
> > Annan bra artikel av Kellner:
> >
> > https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
> >
> > Man kan också läsa den marxistiske supertungviktaren Fredric Jamesons Conversations on Cultural Marxism (som en liten bonus figurerar även den svenske kulturmarxisten Stefan Jonsson i denna bok, liksom Svenska Akademiens nya ständiga sekreterare Sara Danius):
> >
> > http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conver.../dp/0822341093
> >
> >
> > Ytterligare en bok om kulturmarxism av statsvetaren Richard R. Weiner: Cultural Marxism and Politial Sociology:
> >
> > https://books.google.se/books?ei=cIIIVcGEE4TkOJivgJgJ&hl=sv&id=ArLaAAAAMAAJ&dq=Cultural+Marxism+and+Political+Sociology&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Cultural+Marxism+
> >
> > ... och historikern Dennis L. Dworkins Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies:
> >
> > http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
> >
> > Detta bara som några exempel. Kulturmarxism-förnekarna kan med fördel börja med Kellners artikel i Encyclopedia of Social Theory för att sedan återkomma om det är något som är oklart.
> >
> > Ett tips till den orolige: använd begreppet "postmarxism" istället; det är vattentätt. Den trotsige fortsätter förstås med "kulturmarxism".
> >
> > Edit: Får visst ta tillbaka det sista. AFA-skojarnas senaste tilltag är att försöka kleta antisemitism på den liberala tidskriften Neo eftersom begreppet "postmarxism" förekommit i en artikel. Researchgruppens Mathias Wåg briljerar:
> >
> > http://nyheteridag.se/aftonbladet-och-expressens-researcher-anklagar-magasinet-neo-for-antisemitism/
>
> Från tråden: Kulturmarxismens inverkan på det svenska språket
>
> Vill du få en inblick i hur en kulturmarxist tänker så rekommenderar jag det här inlägget:
>
> > Jimmie Åkesson sa en gång i Aftonbladet att han ansåg att vi måste skapa en nationalism. Vi måste bygga något nytt sa han. Jonas De Geer sa i Salt (kommer inte ihåg nummer) att han inte längre var konservativ eftersom det inte fanns något att bevara. Detta är sant, vi har lyckats rasera det mesta (till och med kyrkan). Det är ni som måste skapa. Det tar mycket lång tid att skapa något, i alla fall om det skall mekaniskt (se: Durkheim) reproduceras över generationer, men att bryta ned något går fort. Mycket fort.
> >
> > Så vem är det som är en idiot här? Tror du verkligen att Reinfeldt eller Sahlin är efterblivna för att de säger att "mångkultur är spännande". Nej, det är hämtat direkt från kända skriftställare inom akademin. När Aftonbladet håller sina "Gilla Olika kampanjer", tror du att det är för att Jan Helin är ett våp? Nej, så är det naturligtvis inte. Genom att sälja dessa kampanjer internaliserar läsaren ideologier, som kanske inte är koherenta och kanske bygger på ett luftslott, men det skapar en känslomässighet till vissa begrepp. När det som betraktas som "gott" hamnar i opposition till det begrepp (som anses vara socialt negativt) förkastas det begreppet automatiskt, oavsett hur "logiskt" det begreppet förs fram. Det handlar om att kontrollera språket!
> >
> > Nyamko Sabuni kan säga "Mångfald är bra men all mångfald är inte bra". Det är i sig en motsägelse, men när den diskursen är kombinerad med tabun i samhället, som förhindrar oss att tänka bortom logiken, så går folk på det. Ta IQ som ett exempel. Finns IQ? Ja, samhället har inga som helst problem att tala om IQ i de flesta sammanhang, men så fort det ämnet närmar sig ras, kön eller social klass blir konceptet IQ helt tabu. Alltså, IQ kan gå från att vara något biologiskt till att vara något till 100 procent socialt konsturerat. Detta kanske man kalla för att moralisera över vetenskapliga reslutat och det är precis vad det är. Det gynnar helt enkelt vår sak.
>
> Läs det i sin helhet här: Högerextremist [facebook-vän] med svenska mediaprofiler (Lotta Gröning) och politiker
>
> Att kalla kulturmarxismen för en "konspirationsteori" är enbart ett sätt att slippa diskutera den. Den existerar i allra högsta grad. Något man också inser ganska snabbt om man gör den minsta ansats att sätta sig in i den.
>
> edit: glömde visst länken till inlägget jag citerat överst.

Från: https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/3l5vtf/sweddit_20/cv3nkjv

I'm a little late but I would also like to say that reading Ulysses in a group is very rewarding, especially if lead by someone who has read and studied the text. I read it in college and our professor was a bit of a Joyce scholar and it made everything so much easier to get the context of. Additionally, the companion book that has all of the contextual explanation and references is a must buy if you are going to undertake it (http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Annotated-Notes-James-Joyces/dp/0520253973). Also, it wouldn't hurt to read The Odyssey first either.

Portrait's pretty easy. But fuck that, read Ulysses. The annotations are helpful.

let me fix that for you: there is a strong connection between low socioeconomic status and "deviant" behavior, which in the United States is addressed with incarceration. outside of a particular political context, there is no fixed relationship between any behavior and incarceration. Punishment is an artifact of culture and power. what prison looks like (punitive vs reform) and the use of prison against social deviants is a product of how a society defines good/evil and human motivation, which is why we see so much variation now and throughout history.

Start here: Discipline and Punish, Foucault

> Außerhalb der Rechten Argumentation hat dieser Begriff keine Verwendung

Weshalb die Linken den Begriff so sehr fürchten, dass sie ihn mit allen Quellen aus Wikipedia gelöscht haben und nun auf einen Artikel der sich mit Verschwörungstheorien befasst verweisen.

Kultureller Marxismus ist real.

Dazu ein Text aus dem Anfang der GamerGate Zeit. 26 Sept 2014 https://twitter.com/archon/status/515729906521890817

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

> # Sorry, But Cultural Marxism is Not an Invention of Right Wing Paranoids.

> Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

> Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

> 1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450

> 2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

> Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg

> 3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144

> 4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

> Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".

> 5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd

> The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

> Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.

> 6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."

> 7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

> I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

A list of sources that talk about 'cultural marxism' from academics that have literally nothing to do with conspiracies, that I found while looking into it:

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artefacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   
6. The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
7. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
8. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

I always liked this version of the Cattle Raid of Cooley: https://www.amazon.com/Tain-Translated-Irish-Epic-Cuailnge/dp/0192803735

for those not familiar- dont listen to this guy

read it for yourselves, then look back at this guys comment

Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450

Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

"Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd

The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies"

"Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology

Welp, I guess we're going to see how Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale plays out in real life. :(

Your best bet is to pick up something like The Norton Anthology of Poetry which is basically a collection of a thousand years worth of poetry with analysis. This volume is a little pricey ($30 used), but if you look around you might find some older editions for cheaper. Once you get an inkling of what you like then you can start getting collections of poetry from specific periods/poets. Hope this helps!

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender

__

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gender-Trouble-Routledge-Classics-Judith/dp/0415389550

http://lauragonzalez.com/TC/BUTLER_gender_trouble.pdf

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Trouble#Summary

>Haha fuck off.

Logic and reason, presumably?

>I don't have all day to hang around reddit, and even if I did, I wouldn't care enough to go searching through threads to find reasonable comments that have been downvoted,

So you admit to making a politically motivated judgement based on incomplete data?

>Do you believe that no reasonable, or correct opinion has been downvoted for the way it was said in, Qeraeth?

Everything gets downvoted here, unfortunately.

>with me saying that if you have XY-chromosomes, you're born man, and XX, born woman. That is absolutely my entire point, and I'm not discriminating.

I explained at length why those conclusions are entirely inaccurate, ground in social ideas and not science, and that biological essentialism is inextricable from the discrimination trans people face. It is scientifically inaccurate (i.e. pop science), and it buttresses discrimination. So, no, you cannot escape the title of 'bigot' any more than a modern day phrenologist would.

>For the purposes of that statement I'm excluding all of the weird medical cases

Weird? My intersex friends send their regards to your arbitrary normalness.

>abnormal (which doesn't mean bad) chromosomal conditions.

You cannot separate the judgement of "weird" and "abnormal" from the implication that they are wrong, less-valid, or bad. Your disclaimer does nothing other than show the fact that you're trying very hard to have it both ways: cling to unscientific social ideas while saying you're all for equality.

You exclude intersex people (who are a lot less rare than you think) because they are an inconvenience to your argument. What makes them abnormal per se? Inability to reproduce? No, actually they can do that as long as surgeons don't butcher them at birth (you know, because they think they're weird and abnormal, and that there should only be two sexes). They empirically exist and for you to exclude them from any analysis of sex seems bizarre and table-tilting.

>Explain to me exactly how that makes me a woman-hater and a transphobic please.

Because it is not a fact.

You are going to discover that how we sex people is considerably more motivated by social ideals and politics and not purely objective science. You keep pretending your chromosome fetish is some kind of fact. It isn't, simply put.

Others might say you are "technically fact" (whatever that means) because we all still live with an understanding of essential sex, but others will tell you that there is no 'technical maleness' about trans women other than what people like yourself choose to project onto them. You cannot argue that trans men are essentially women or that trans women are essential men and not be called a transphobe.

You don't get to decide what transphobia is; the people who suffer from it do, (I know it's shocking, really, but the people who actually live with it may just know it when they see it).

It also makes you misogynist/misandrist because you're essentially defining women and men by their body parts rather than their selves. You'll probably wave your arms and go "but gender gender!" Gender and sex are both distinct and connected, and in a society where we tend to give more ontological weight to what we define as sex, it is problematic when you elect to label people against their will in these matters.

The essential idea that XY chromosomes or penises essential make men is not scientific. That's just how we chose to label things. The presumed essential sex is really just a laundry list of body parts, and as I said in my prior comment to you on the matter, even that changes when it comes to trans people.

I notice you also ignored the question about political correctness. Or have you realised that it's an empty concept used to bludgeon people who have a hard time being automatically respected on their own terms?

Here is some quick advice from someone who studied Ulysses at a top Dublin University:

1. Get Ulysses Unbound:
   This is a very well-respected guide. It doesn't hold your hand but gives you just enough to enjoy every chapter. The much more extensive Ulysses Annotated is also available for those who want more assistance but it is outdated now and full of errors.
   
   
2. Use the Gabler Edition: The editorial history of Ulysses is just awful. The book is full of very precise jokes that have been lost with poor editing. Gabler goes back to the original manuscripts and tries to create a more faithful book.
   
   
3. Take your time: We read a chapter a week and discussed it in class. A chapter a week is ridiculously slow for any normal book but perfectly reasonable for Ulysses, especially for your first read-through.

Next time you give Ulysses a go you should buy Gifford's Annotations and consult it when necessary. The book is readable and is well worth the work even without the Annotations. You just have to decide beforehand that you're not going to worry about catching every reference.

>I remember a long time ago I read about the analogy of a "mental garden", a place where you cultivate your thoughts and always keep as a place where you can mentally retreat.

I think you mean the concept of the "Inner Citadel", coined by P. Hadot, based on principles from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations:

>People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you want. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.

>-Marcus Aurelius, IV, 3

The "inner citadel" is used to illustrate the discipline of assent (sunkatathesis), comprising the field of logic and virtue of wisdom, which, in short, is about not being deceived by imaginations and judgements (phantasia) of external events (the indifferents) but seeing things as they really are (indifferent). Whenever your mind creates an automatic value judgement (hypolepsis), you have the power to agree to it or deny it (inner discourse). It is essential in order to gain tranquility of mind (ataraxia).

>If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

>-Marcus Aurelius, VIII, 47

The main idea here is that not things trouble us, but the automatically created representations (imaginations, judgements) we make about them. An inner citadel is a sort of "fortification" around your reasoning faculty (hegemonikon) which essentially is realizing that external events (things outside of you control) never had power over you. Things cause suffering because you allow them to cause trouble in your mind.

>Things Cannot Touch the Soul

>Things cannot touch the soul.

>They have no access to the soul.

>They cannot produce our judgments.

>They are outside of us.

>They themselves know nothing, and by themselves they affirm
nothing.

> -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV, 3 , ro; V, r 9 ; VI, 5 2 ; IX, r 5

If one starts reading those novels, I'd recommend getting some guides to aid in the lubber's understanding:

• A Sea of Words, lexical guide. Trust me, even if you're something of a sailor, you won't understand a good bit of what goes on in the books. Well, you'll probably get the general idea, but there's a lot of nautical nuance that will be utterly lost. Good even for seasoned fans of the series.
  
  
• Harbors and High Seas, geographical guide.
  
  C.S. Forester's Hornblower series is also great.
  
  I haven't tried the sci-fi RCN series, which was influenced by O'Brian, but I should give it a shot.

Source: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

----

Sorry, But Cultural Marxism is Not an Invention of Right Wing Paranoids.

Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
   
   I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is pretty good.

I've yet to see that title, though I'll check it out. Gonna drop these here for posterity, as the're generally regarded as wonderful books on the various forms, mechanics and techniques of writing poetry. The more resources, the better, aye?

The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, Kim Addonizio

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, Stephen Fry

A Poetry Hanbook, Mary Oliver

Sure.

Irish Mythology (as opposed to more recent Irish folklore) is divided into four 'cycles'. Each cycle contains tales dealing with certain subjects or characters.

• The Mythological Cycle deals with the foundation myths of Ireland; the Tuatha De Danann, the Formorians, etc.
  
• The Ulster Cycle deals primarily with the deeds of Cú Chulainn, which are encapsulated also in The Táin - the 'Illiad' of Irish mythology. It also, however, contains tragedies such as Deirdre of the Sorrows.
  
• The Fenian Cycle is like the Ulster Cycle in that it deals with heroes and their deeds, but has a distinctly less epic feel - usually concerning distinct incidents in the lives of heroes such as Fionn Mac Cumhaill or Oisín. It also relates another favourite Irish tragedy, Diarmuid agus Gráinne
  
• Lastly is the Kingly Cycle, short fables that impart the qualities of great kings in the face of difficulty.
  
  Pretty much any and all of these tales are available in academic form online, but it makes it much more enjoyable to find a good prose translation by a good author. You can buy The Táin on paperback here, and Jim Fitzpatrick (the artist behind that famous Che Guevara image) has made a living out of creating fantastically illustrated versions of the Mythological Cycle.
  
  There are literally thousands of collections of Irish folklore, most of which are decent enough. Original collections by W.B.Yeats and Lady Wilde are also available online

I really liked Kinsella's translation of Táin Bó Cúailnge (https://www.amazon.ca/Tain-Irish-epic-Bo-Cuailnge/dp/0192803735)

And if you're not in the mood for reading, Ronnie Drew has an "Irish Myths and Legends" audiobook that's on Spotify - it's pretty fun (bit cheesy, but that's fine, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZwYtDAN0wg)

Yeah that came across more dickish than I intended.

A love of language definitely tends to produce better prose. Rhetoric has largely fallen out of favor and isn't taught in school which is unfortunate. Writers can abuse rhetorical devices but I don't see this as reason for not teaching the subject. If anyone is interested in studying rhetoric further I can recommend:

• Silva Rhetoricae
  
• Rhetoric Timeline
  
• Recommended Rhetoric Resources
  
• Figure of Speech
  
• Wiki Rhetoric page
  
  I also strongly recommend exploring the concepts of Cognitive Metaphor and Frame Semantics. Learning the basics will change your view of writing forever. More information about these fields can be found in:
  
  
• Martin Hilpert's Linguistics Channel
  
• Metaphors we Live by (seriously, read this)
  

WE.DON'T.CALL.EACH.OTHER.NIGGERS.

Nigga and Nigger have to wayyyy different connotations. I'm not gonna get into this argument again but please read that or something like it. Nigga gets thrown around alot, not nigger. Yes, they are different.

If you're feeling sadistic, go read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

I can guarantee you that you will pick apart EVERYTHING you try to read for pleasure for at least a few months after. You'll be able to identify, in painful, precise detail, what you hate about the YA voice and what you would change in what you are currently reading.

Try to avoid reading your all time favorite author. It's never good to meet your Gods.

That's a deep rabbit hole, if you allow it.

There are different books for different parts of writing. Some focus on plot [Story Engineering], others talk you out of blocks [Bird by Bird]. Some deal with immersion [Wired for Story], others warn you of newbie errors [edit yourself]. Some only talk about the first page. [Hooked]

If you specify what you want the most, I can probably get more specific. The best way to deal with grammar, other than the dry "Elements of Style", is to take a free Cousera course, or OWLs online and test yourself. I also love this blog for crazy awesome advice both current and in her backlog.


Edit: Also too: Might as well hang out at /r/writing and pop in from time to time at /r/grammar

I'm a big fan of the poetry collection taken from the writers almanac by Garrison Keillor, aptly named Good Poems

I would check out the Icelandic sagas. While most of them focus on families or individuals, they have many of the trappings of legends. A few of my favorites:

The Saga of Egil Skallagrimson: Tales of a semi-historical Norwegian skald (poet) who gets into fights, recites poetry on the fly, engraves runes both to cure and to curse, and swears vengeance upon the King of Norway for daring to exile him to Iceland.

Njal's Saga: A family saga, detailing the family feud between two major Icelandic families, and how easy it was to spiral from petty fighting to outright murder. Also features Gunnarr Hámundarson, a remarkable warrior who, once he was outlawed, refused to leave his home in Iceland and decided to enact a heroic stand against his pursuers.

The Poetic Edda: You mentioned this one above, but it's worth seconding it. The Prose Edda and The Poetic Edda are both great reads and explain so much of how we view Norse mythology.

Heimskringla: One of the greatest sagas known to us, written by Snorri Sturluson. It details the history of Norway from the mythic past up to Snorri's present day in the 13th century. It's very long, but has some amazing legends and stories, especially about Harald Hard-ruler and his adventures working for the Byzantines.

Eyrbyggja Saga: Hard to find, but if you can, there's a section detailing what happens when zombies invade a Viking's home in Iceland. Spoilers: it involves Viking lawyers.

On the Irish side, if you can find the Ulster Cycle, it's worth a read; I think we get a lot of our popular Irish mythologies from that cycle. This one on amazon doesn't look bad, I think it's focused on the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) side of the stories.

For those interested, this is a great book on metaphors and how they shape our understanding of the world.

Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By
http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011

This book/class I took totally blew my mind.

Not so casual and perhaps not exactly what you're looking for, but definitely read the Linguistics Wars by Randy A Harris. It's enjoyable, extremely rigorous (it came out of Harris's PhD dissertation) and very, very insightful: it digs really deep into one of the most controversial period of linguistics in the United States. The author even went through underground notes. The best part about it is that it doesn't require you to be a linguist but it's even better if you are; a lot of things in there you simply can't get from modern textbooks and you get to learn how linguistic ideas originated and evolved. He has a second edition coming out so you might wanna wait for that.

For something perhaps surprising and illuminating: read Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson. Most people I know were impressed at how pervasive metaphors actually are in language and cognition. It's very intuitive and sensible once you get the gist of it. This one is quite specific though.

Finally, although now I don't quite agree with it, Language Instinct is what lured me into linguistics so definitely check it out.

These books are quite old now and obviously linguists know much more (although not nearly enough) about language today than they did back then. Claims are also often exaggerated (with the exception of the first one, I think) but they're fun to read and will interest you for sure.

Read this book!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0226468011/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1289794397&sr=8-1

Post a pasta, recieve a pasta, shill. Educate yourself:

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4
Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.
Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
"Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
"Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
"Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.

For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."

You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

Frankfurt School Cultural Marxism is Based in Jewish Mysticism
https://murderbymedia2.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/1417900885468.png

The Frankfurt School and Its Legacy
http://www.morveninstituteoffreedom.com/FrankfurtSchool.pdf

Critical Theory (Cultural Marxism) and Jewish Thought
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/theology/events/2013/critical-theory-and-jewish-thought.aspx

Satan's Secret Agents: the Frankfurt School and Their Evil Agenda
http://www.darkmoon.me/2013/satants-secret-agents-the-frankfurt-school-and-their-evil-agenda/

Fallen Jews, Critical Theory, and Cultural Marxism
https://originsofleftism.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/notes-fallen-jews-critical-theory-and-cultural-marxism/

Bill Whittle on the Narrative: Political Correctness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrt6msZmU7Y

The Spread of Cultural Marxism to Latin America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Reb9wvTzg

The Triumph of Cultural Marxism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk9CWm0W4Q4

Cultural Marxism
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism

Cultural Marxism: The Corruption of America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIdBuK7_g3M

Erich Fromm, Judaism and the Frankfurt School
http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/Illumina%20Folder/kell24.htm

Freud, The Frankfurt School, and the Kabbalah
http://www.conspiracyschool.com/blog/holiness-sin-freud-frankfurt-school-and-kabbalah#.VGsgXIeRk7B

Frankfurt School
http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

Frankfurt School of Social Research
http://jettandjahn.com/2010/10/frankfurt-school-of-social-research/

The Frankfurt School & Cultural Marxism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghx3d1GiAc0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkcy7256tBM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG6TcYfpQOg

The Frankfurt School of Social Research and the Pathologization of Gentile Group Allegiances
http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/chap5.pdf

Frankfurt School - Satanic Judaism in Action
http://www.henrymakow.com/frankfurt-school-satanic-judaism-in-action.html

The History of Political Correctness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acjIw7cVc2k

How a Handfull of Marxist Jews Turned Western and U.S. Culture Upside Down
http://davidduke.com/how-a-handfull-of-marxist-jews-turned-western-and-us-culture-upside-down/

The Jewish Frankfurt School and the End of Western Civilization
http://www.dailystormer.com/the-jewish-frankfurt-school-and-the-end-of-western-civilization/

The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and "Political Correctness"
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/921_frankfurt.html

Who Stole Our Culture?
http://www.wnd.com/2007/05/41737/

Sabbatean-Frankist Roots of the Frankfurt School
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBfT0pi0cMs

It's hard to suggest a single text, but there are many histories of the different strands of literary criticism available. There are some written by practicing specialists, and others by historians of literature. There is a multi volume work published by Cambridge UP that deals with the history of lit-crit that is very valuable, but not easily accessible, or very concise.

My suggestion would be to break down your time-frame to maybe 50 year chunks and read some of the seminal works on the major movements in lit crit during those times. This is one that's used a lot in Universities, though I must admit it wouldn't be one of my favourites (though I can absolutely support it as an introductory work). http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beginning-theory-third-introduction-Beginnings/dp/0719079276/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1410136722&sr=8-8&keywords=literary+criticism

Otherwise, there's the text based approach--where you read different texts from the history of lit crit, using an anthology. The uber-bible of this sort is the http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Norton-Anthology-Theory-Criticism/dp/0393932923/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1410136722&sr=8-4&keywords=literary+criticism. There are smaller, more specific (and probably overall more helpful in a non-reference way) ones too, like this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Criticism-Theory-A-Reader/dp/0582784549/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1410136722&sr=8-11&keywords=literary+criticism.

Hope that might be of some help.
M_G

'The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism' is my go-to as an introductory anthology source. I think that warrants inclusion.

https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Theory-Criticism/dp/0393932923

Here's my list so far. It's a mix of FTM-specific, general trans, and gender studies books, including essays, memoir, and more academic works. In no particular order:

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler


Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman


Nina Here Nor There by Nick Krieger

Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam

Nobody Passes - Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore


Whipping Girl by Julia Serano


How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz

Becoming a Visible Man by Jamison Green

Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer by Riki Wilchins

PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality edited by Carol Queen

Genderqueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary edited by Joan Nestle

From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond edited by Morty Diamond

Second Son by Ryan Sallans

Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

and the must-read fiction:

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

I'll edit this if I can find any others, I'm probably missing a couple. Been a big non-fiction reading year for me!

EDIT: Edited to add links, and a few more on my wish list I haven't picked up yet.

Letters for my Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect edited By Megan M. Rohrer, M.Div. & Zander Keig, M.SW.

That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men by Lori B. Girshick

Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide to the Transsexual Experience by Matt Kailey

The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male by Max Wolf Valerio

Oooooh, child, there is a lot of great stuff out there for you. Don't worry about not finding material.

• First of... "class just started"?? ew, are you doing a Maymester?! I will pray to the Drag goddesses for you.
  
  
• Second. How do you see the structure of the paper panning out? How are you using the documentaries? Because it seems like you could do a paper on depictions of drag (as fashion elements) in film alone and that already might make for an interesting paper. And that way you could also look at non-documentary works... Priscilla Queen of the Desert, La Cage aux folles, John Waters' early movies, Ma Vie en Rose, Hedwig, and Bad Education are all wonderful films. And plenty have been studied academically and have that kind of ~intellectual~ prestige that teachers love.
  
  
• I think "Notes on Camp" is good, but Sontag's text is pretty introductory, and a lot of scholars have built up (and taken down sometimes) on what she's said. I wrote a paper last semester on Pierre et Gilles for a class on contemporary art, and my most useful book was Camp, Queer Aesthetics, and the Performing Subject: A Reader. It's sort of this big encyclopedic book on past and contemporary scholarship on camp theory. There's a lot of great stuff on there, and I'm sure you could mine their bibliographies and expand your research that way.
  
• The other ~canonical~ text on drag is probably Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
  
• My other favorite (contemporary) book on drag is Jose Esteban Muñoz' Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
  He looks at drag from a cultural/ethnic perspective. Great read. Not all chapters would be applicable to your paper, as his scope is much larger than drag (as is Butler's), but he does devote a significant portion of his writing to Vaginal Davis.
  
  Let me know if you have any questions! I love this stuff. Good luck on your paper!
  
  

For other tips for reading Wolfe, and general theories and whatnot, there are a few books well worth picking up.

Lexicon Urthus

Solar Labyrinth

The Long and the Short of It

The first book here is by Michael Andre-Driussi and has a foreword by Wolfe. This is mostly a dictionary and etymology-tracer of the words and names and theories in BotNS. Considering Wolfe's endorsement, it feels fairly official, even borderline cannon.

The last two are by Robert Borski and are absolutely great reads. Very imaginative, even if some of his theories seem too wild to be true.

The notion of public being enraged and oppressing the individual can only be uttered in the presence of a self-ruling society. Because in that case the majority opinion rules the state elements. So when we say, "protecting the individual against the public" we are talking about ensuring your rights in the presence of the state.

What you are suggesting seems to be more in the lines of social elements rather than legal. The guarantees brought by human rights' main function is against the state. They protect the individual from a legal person rather than a real one.

Laicité is not something that directly protects the person from raging crowds of belivers or non-believers. It allows people to not be in a advantage or disadvantage for freely practicing their religions, because it bans the state from getting involved. Now, freedom of religion is a different concept than laicité. Freedom of religion can exist in a Theocracy too for example. Such country(Say it's Christian) can allow Muslims to form sects, cults and let them pray whenever, wherever and still only let Christians in the government offices and ban other religions/atheists from many benefits. Laicité however offers a more prosperous society by effectively banning the state from anything religious.

I mean it should be taken into account that in case of freedoms usually the part of state is argued rather than the general public however democratically represented the public opinion is. That is because the legal system actually has effective power over violations. Written words do not hold much power over the simple man. It is the actual political power that does.

You can read this book to have an idea about how civil unrest is prevented or made

If you want really excellent intro books then I definitely recommend Lois Tyson's Critical Theory Today. This has all the really important schools that are important right now, except eco-criticism, which is kind of a bummer. But I think the latter edition hits a little bit on it under postcolonial theory. This is a good intro text that has overview of what's going on.

Norton Anthology of Critical Theory was mentioned, and while this is an excellent anthology, it's huge and can be a bit complicated to read the actual source material without knowing about it before hand, but it's pretty nice being able to read the actual texts of different theorists. Similar to this is Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology. While Norton's goes chronologically all the way back to Plato, Rivkin's text groups all the texts under the major schools so you get a comprehensive view of each one. It's worth mentioning though that Norton does have a secondary Table of Contents where they group the readings under school as well.

You mentioned wanting to know postmodernism, and that's another thing that Tyson's text doesn't include, as it's more of a movement instead of a criticism. An intro text similar to Tyson's that does include eco-criticism and postmodernism though is Peter Barry's Beginning Theory.

If you have very little knowledge of theory and criticism, I'd really recommend picking up Tyson's book and reading that so you get an overview of the text before moving on to an anthology. Like I said, the texts can be incredibly dense and difficult to read, and if you've never been exposed to them before it'll just make it even more difficult. Tyson's text also has suggested readings under each school as well to expand what you're reading.

Read lots of poetry, and not just old stuff.

Read criticisms and histories of poetry.

Read books about writing poetry. Some that I recommend:

In the Palm of Your Hand

Ordinary Genius

A Poetry Handbook

and if you're into Formalist poetry (rhyming) you may also like:

Rules for the Dance

The Making of a Poem

All The Fun's In How You Say A Thing

Write poetry. Keep writing it. Keep changing it. Scrap it. Start over.

Get criticism by posting to a forum. For metered poetry I recommend Able Muse.

I would suggest a first read where you just let the lines kind of wash over you. Don't try to interpret it immediately. Just let the words exist in the space around you and see where the poem elicits emotion from you. Then use that experience to zero in on those places first and try to see how the poet used certain language to evoke those feelings. I would also say it's a good idea to look for certain forms of figurative language and map them out (metaphor, simile, personification, etc). From a general mapping of those sorts of things, you can begin to interpret the form of the poem and try to understand exactly what the writer is trying to say/accomplish.

I suggest this book as a guide as well: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789

I've always found the Norton collections to be a solid starting point for good poetry.

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789/
http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Poetry-4th/dp/0393968200
http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Modern-Contemporary-Poetry
http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Introduction-Poetry-Alison-Booth/dp/0393928578/

are all excellent introductions to reading. Very broadly speaking, classical poetry is more focused on rhyme and imagery that many can comprehend (albeit with some effort), while modern poetry is more focused on free verse and word choices, and tends to use imagery that's more self-referential (that's just my experience, though).

In terms of writing, I'd suggest scanning through /r/OCPoetry to see poetry written from a mostly modern, mostly amateur perspective.

What you're saying so far is basically akin to 'I want to know more about the ocean and everything living in it/relating to it. I know what a tuna, a blue whale, a great white shark, and an octopus are, but I don't know where to go to get information about them and learn about them. Can you guys help me find good sources for everything from marine biology to oceanography and everything in between?'

As such, my suggestion for the Norton's. If you find something that you like, you can help narrow your search field a bit, and it'll be a heckuva lot easier to help (in your reading search, that is).

Writing's a whole different ballgame, and I defer to /u/jessicay and/or /u/ActualNameIsLana for (possibly) helping you out a bit more on that topic, as they've far more experience than me.

Paul Fry's OYC lecture series: https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300#sessions

Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism: https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Theory-Criticism/dp/0393932923

Can get an used copy of the above for 15 bucks or so.

Maybe not what you're looking for, but the Norton Anthology of Critical Theory has an alternate table of contents within it that categorizes the readings not chronologically but by field.

I mean, you really need to be reading anthologies to get a basis of the poetic tradition and then move on to individual books. While individual books of poetry help you get a sense of each writer, getting a taste of many poets throughout many periods is the only way to really become well versed (pun-intended). Also, part of the way to learn how to read poetry more critically is learn how to write poetry, or at least what goes into writing poetry. And my personal advice is to purposefully read poetry that is hard for you to grasp or find interest in, whether that be due to understanding or content (e.g. Yeats and his faeries don’t interest me in the slightest).

Theory/Reading Critically:

• A Poetry Handbook (super basic approach)
  
• How to Read Poetry Like a Professor
  
• Why Poetry?
  
• The Poetry Handbook
  
  American:
  
• Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American
  
• The Oxford Book of American (my personal favorite)
  
• Any of The Best American Poetry collections, to read the most contemporary poems.
  
  Other:
  
• The Norton Anthology
  
• Six Centuries of Great Poetry
  
  Source: Have a Master’s Degree in poetry and currently working on my MFA. My expertise is in 20th & 21st Century American Poetry, particularly post-War/post-45.

My discipline is Geography, so one of my favorites is Feminism and Geography by Gillian Rose, which I think is actually great even for non-geographers. Feel free to skip the bits about the academy. As for the list I mentioned in an earlier comment, Feminism is For Everybody by bell hooks is probably the most accessible and general book that I'd recommend. It should be on your bookshelf. I wouldn't try tackling Judith Butler if you're not in the mood for an academic slog (even though her work is phenomenal), but Gender Trouble is probably her best-known book. A Field of One's Own by Bina Agarwal is a stellar look at farming economies in South Asia through the lens of feminism. A Cyborg Manifesto (PDF link) by Donna Haraway is fairly polemic among feminists, but she's a name that's almost invariably brought up when talking about posthuman/transhuman theory. She's somewhat problematic, but I personally like her writing style.

It being performative and constructive doesn't necessarily signify any degree of choice by any means. Most (hardcore) constructivists concede that, though we may recognize the ways in which we socially construct concepts, that doesn't at all mean we can change them on a whim; they're not objective values, but neither are they subjective values, they're intersubjective. Which means a constructed social conception is far from implying any sort of "choice".

​

I reckon you probably know it already, but this book comes very highly recommended in case you want to look more into the concept of constructivism within queer theory/gender studies, and an insight into the performativity of gender.

I took a number of women's studies courses. When I worked on my 2nd bachelors, I completed almost all of the requirements for the degree with women's studies classes.

If that is out of your price range (I had a lot of needed pre-reqs for a masters degree I had to hammer out anyway), perhaps they have some advice for a reading list.

Some books you may find interesting to read (your local library may have them):

Being Boys; Being Girls. This one is about how boys and girls learn masculinity and femininity as various ages.

Men's Lives. I had an earlier edition in one of my sociology courses. This one is about the construction of masculinity - how boys become men.

Gender Trouble. I had an earlier edition of this book in my gender courses. Butler's argument is basically that gender is a performance. We're all copying something of which there is no original. Could be confusing to read.

Whipping Girl. I recommend this one because it is a very readable book about becoming a transwoman. One way to understand how our society treats men and women differently is to see how things change as someone changes gender. It is the same person, but now how we treat them based on what is/isn't between their legs.

Ain't I A Woman. One of the influential works on Black Feminism. Some black feminists feel that the feminist movement is a bit too much focused on white women. The word "intersectionality" is frequently used to describe situation where racism and sexism collide - and that things get more complicated than just sexism or just racism happen.

As others have mentioned, I would recommend staying away from most blogs/tumblrs and sticking to published books and papers.

Here's a few in the ballpark(?). Casting a wide net here, as your query could go in any number of directions:

Sylvia Federici -“Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour,”

Rosemary Hennessy – Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism

Judith Butler – Gender Trouble

Nancy Fraser – “Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler”

Jose Esteban Muñoz – Disidentification

J.K. Gibson-Graham – Queer(y)ing Capitalism in and out of the Classroom

I happen to like Lexicon Urthus, which helps organize the material. I happen to hate the Solar Labyrinth, which I think is a lot of silly imagining of things that aren't there.

The truth is that there aren't a lot of straight-forward answers with Gene Wolfe. We want there to be; we want Dr. Talos's play to make perfect sense, if only we had the answer key. But Wolfe's work thrives in ambiguity, and while there are some clues hidden, I think there are far fewer clues, and far fewer real answers, than most people do. The point isn't to understand in a conventional sense; I think it's to experience a kind of wonder.

As for your spoiler question: [Spoiler](/s "The woman wasn't actually ever harmed during the festival, and there's no evidence she was a robot. Actually, this is one of the rare places where Wolfe leaves some pretty credible clues: there's good evidence that that lady is Severian's mother.")

But to assume it's a plot hole and not dig deeper is to miss out on the depth and detail of Wolfe's writing. I highly recommend reading Borski's "The Solar Labyrinth" ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0595317294 ) to help see some of these deeper connections and hidden details.

off the top of my head:

Meditations, with The Inner Citadel as a reader

Letters from a Stoic

A Guide to the Good Life by Irvine

Do The Work by Pressfield as well as The War of Art by Pressfield

Managing Oneself by Ducker

Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl

What Predicts Divorce by Gottman

Nicomachean Ethics

Models by Manson seems to be popular on reddit

So Good They Can't Ignore You by Newport, as well

I'm currently reading Triumphs of Experience by Vaillant and find it insightful.

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. Good place to get a start and to get a great source.

Can't go wrong with Foucoult either.

Honestly read Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punish. It will change forever the way you see punishment.

I highly recommend Peter Barry's Beginning Theory. It is about literature but also applies to a film's writing.

Is the teaching of college English a joke? This is not a personal affront to your profession but more of a query about the people that belong in these classes. If one achieved stellar grades in high school English, I don't see why these courses are still required in college. If you're an English major, fine, but leave the rest of us out of it. One's writing ability depends largely on their will to hone the craft in their free time as well as read. I don't think a few courses will do anything for the individual besides annoy them.

I picked up this book on a whim:
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Theory-Introduction-Literary-Beginnings/dp/0719079276/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280199852&sr=8-3

Never again did I have a problem with English classes. I find it neurotic that I was using questionable literary theory to analyze the fictional musings of someone that other lovers of musings thought that this particular musing had enough merit to warrant the application of questionable literary theory largely divorced from reality that was created specifically to analyze the fictioAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Goddamn it. Should've stuck to questions about sex.

There are actually companion books to the Aubrey/Maturin series with explanations and illustrations of both the nautical stuff and historical events. I have this one, can recommend:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Words-Lexicon-Companion-Seafaring/dp/0805066152

"How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy" is a good book, there's some useful stuff in it. But for a raw beginner it doesn't hold a candle to Ben Bova's "The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells" (http://www.amazon.com/Craft-Writing-Science-Fiction-Sells/dp/0898796008).

Some other books I recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Characters-Emotion-Viewpoint-Techniques-Viewpoints/dp/1582973164

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690 (note: despite the title, I'd recommend reading this before you write a book).

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/dp/1439156816

Mr. Coorlim is right however that you should ignore anything you read about the business side of writing. It's all changing too quickly now for any book to keep up.

Here are a few I think are good:

Getting Started

On Writing: This book is great. There are a lot of nice principles you can walk away with and a lot of people on this subreddit agree it's a great starting point!

Lots of Fiction: Nothing beats just reading a lot of good fiction, especially in other genres. It helps you explore how the greats do it and maybe pick up a few tricks along the way.

For Editing

Self-Editing For Fiction Writers: there isn't anything in here that will blow your writing away, land you an agent, and secure a NYT bestseller, but it has a lot of good, practical things to keep an eye out for in your writing. It's a good starting place for when you are learning to love writing (which is mostly rewriting)

A Sense of Style by Steve Pinker: I really loved this book! It isn't exclusively about fiction, but it deals with the importance of clarity in anything that is written.

Garner's Modern American Usage: I just got this about a month ago and have wondered what I was doing before. This is my resource now for when I would normally have gone to Google and typed a question about grammar or usage or a word that I wasn't sure I was using correctly. It's a dictionary, but instead of only words, it is filled with essays and entries about everything a serious word-nut could spend the rest of their^1 life reading.

^1 ^Things ^such ^as ^the ^singular ^their ^vs ^his/hers

Publishing

Writer's Market 2016: There are too many different resources a writer can use to get published, but Writer's Market has a listing for Agents, publishers, magazines, journals, and contests. I think it's a good start once you find your work ready and polished.

There are too many books out there that I haven't read and have heard good things about as well. They will probably be mentioned above in this thread.

Another resource I have learned the most from are books I think are terrible. It allows you to read something, see that it doesn't work, and makes you process exactly what the author did wrong. You can find plenty of bad fiction if you look hard enough! I hope some of this helps!

A couple quick thoughts:

1> You have to really commit to your story. We're talking marriage level commitment here, none of this half-hearted crap. Treat your characters like they are real. Tell them that their story is worth telling, and promise to tell it for them. This is, of course, only necessary if you're really serious about writing a book. Otherwise it's just silly.

2> Set a daily quota. 1000 words a day. On days that you can't find any new words for your story, write notes about your story. This means writing when you don't feel like writing. This means closing your browser.

3> You can learn how to write a book. Natural talent is important, but your work ethic is much more important. There are more than a few instructional books out there that are very good. I recommend starting with Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. It's exceptional, and the chapter on active voice versus passive voice is critical to effective storytelling.

Best of Luck to you. Looking forward to reading more.

The assimil books are like that - French on one page with English translation on the facing page.

Also if you just want to read stories, then there are the Penguin Parallel texts.

I have a book called "Short Stories in French" -- has parallel pages with the exact translations: http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-French-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0140265430

Penguin has a line of books: https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-French-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0140265430

I picked this up at a book store last week.

Good Poems is my go-to for a great, well-rounded collection of poems. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Poems-Garrison-Keillor/dp/0142003441

I'd suggest starting with poems that are relatively brief, highly readable, and modern -- really get a taste for how poetry can be relevant to your everyday life. There are a ton of good books out there dedicated to poetry of this type, such as Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, with poems like Mary Oliver's Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Oliver has also written a Poetry Handbook which discusses the technical aspects of poetry like rhythm and form, and illustrates the principles with poems generally considered to be modern classics, if you're looking for something more technical.

Keillor also does the The Writer's Almanac on NPR, and you can go to the Writer's Almanac site for a (usually) good poem each day. Other good starting points include Billy Collin's Poetry 180 and Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.

I'm also a fan of Catherine Bowman, who's a bit obscure (she's the Poetry... um... person for NPR's All Things Considered) and so I'm going to post one of her poems (Broke Song) because I'll probably never have another chance to do so as smoothly as I am clearly working it into this post.

You move through the world broken. Navigating
by the stars encoded on your hearts axis. July
grasses. Rain. How the world breaks us.
Midnight scatters across what’s left
from an evening prayer. The broken
song of the warbler at dawn
on the last day of winter. You move
through the world gathered
together in a pulse. Running your fingers
up and down what is odd and so familiar.
How dazzling the fit. To be remade
by the glue of your oaths and kisses.

Edit: Also, Robert Bly.

good poems -- garrison keillor is what got me into poetry.

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Poems-Garrison-Keillor/dp/0142003441/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482336925&sr=8-1&keywords=good+poems+garrison+keillor

Garrison Keillor has an excellent anthology, titled simply and accurately Good Poems.

Read the Tàin translation by Thomas Kinsella The Tain: Translated from the Irish Epic Tain Bo Cuailnge https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0192803735/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_GHNtDbYX3YTFF

YES! I studied Irish mythology in University, so here a few of my favorite texts :)

The Tain is a lovely translation of the Tain Bo Cuailnge ^(sounds like "toy'n bo cool") which is the primary source of written mythology. It's dense.

Over Nine Waves is also, in my opinion, an imperative supplementary text on the myths and legends as well. It feels less academic.

The Lore of Ireland is just that - a book of Irish lore.

As for Samhain ^(I can't figure out how to properly give you a "sounds like" since I don't have little phoneme symbols - but basically like "sahwin") itself, I'm not sure whether holidays are out-right discussed in these texts. I will say, if you do find it - it'll be mostly in lore as opposed to myth or legend. Most Celtic holidays are focused on the changing of the seasons (like all holidays, really) and their connection to the Land of Eternal Youth (Tir na nOg - you can actually pronounce this one like you might expect it to be said) and the Tuatha De Danann ^(sub a "w" for the "th").

If you're looking specifically for myths dealing with faeries, they'll also be in lore. Myths/legends usually refer to the great heroes like Cuchulain ^("cuh-cul-lin") (there's a statue of him in the post office of downtown Dublin in honor of the Easter Uprising during the Irish revolution! Probably one of, if not the, most important myth/legend. In the war between gods and man, he almost single-handidly defeated Madb ^("mave") and her sons in a battle that last weeks/months/yeards depending the variation. He tied himself to a post as he was dying in order to look like he was still alive and held off attacks until crows landed on his shoulders and started eating his body. Basically. It's way better than my telling lol..) and gods and the cycles of power over the land itself.

Okay, fine, I'm done. Sorry for being so long-winded!

Oh! If you're looking for less heady material, I would also recommend Lady Gregory and Yeats. They were mythology nerds and wrote tons of plays/poems/retellings. L.Gregory's Grania is my favorite retelling of Grania and Diarmuid! I actually got a tattoo of one of the lines from the play in Ireland the first time I visited :)

Happy reading!

> See, the problem here is your taking the context entirely and exclusively from the Anglo-Saxon's point of view in this time.

I'm going off of an idea presented in Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word where the use of the word extends beyond being an insult or slur, and in this case is being used exclusively as a synonym to a color. It's not a very sensitive name for an animal, given every potential audience, but this was not a case of Lovecraft using the term with any intent to cause offense.

> The translation point is also a very flawed argument.

I wasn't making an argument, I was pointing the translation bit out as an aside.

> So basically what you are getting at here is he knew how to behave when he felt like it.

My point is that like all of us, Lovecraft was sensitive to his audience and adopted his language (and, in some cases, subject matter) to accommodate. He did not deliberately seek to offend people (with a few notable exceptions), and worked actively not to offend people on the subject of race or ethnicity. It's code-switching, basically, and we all do it; I pointed it out to emphasize that Lovecraft was generally aware of the impact of his language and tailored it accordingly.

Keep in mind, I'm not at any point arguing Lovecraft wasn't racist - only that the specific example, the name of his cat which he later adopted for "The Rats in the Walls," which offends so many people today, is really not an example of Lovecraft being consciously racist. The dude had a lot of moments of saying heinous shit, but that particular one is not quite what you're trying to make of it.

>The only place I can seem to find any real opinion other than the simple "Its bad" seems to be in stand up routines, so I want to hear what you have to say.

I have some suggestions.

Start with Randall Kennedy's book, and then watch the documentary "The N Word".

I also recommend this discussion between Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, hosted by Tavis Smiley.

There's more, but that should get you started.

There was a GIF making the rounds recently, in which a black woman says (to the best of my memory): "You want to say it, but you don't want the unemployment gap. You want to say it, but you don't want to get pulled over all the time for no reason. You want to say it, but you don't want poverty and discrimination." That pretty much sums it up for me.

The word has a long history of dehumanization and white supremacy, and while black folks have endeavored mightily to reclaim some of their humanity by turning it into a term of endearment for each other (much like gay people call each other "queers" in a loving way), I don't know of a single white person who has earned the right to say it in that way. (Well, maybe Tim Wise, but he wouldn't want to.)

I believe that came from the black power movement of the mid 20th century, as a way of taking the power of the word away from white people and putting it in the hands of black people.
For more information on the word, check out this book, it's really interesting. http://www.amazon.com/Nigger-Strange-Career-Troublesome-Word/dp/0375713719/ref=la_B001IOF8XQ_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345003057&sr=1-1

The Stand is one of my favorites. I've compiled a list of other books that might be of interest to you.

Oryx and Crake

Handmaid's Tale

World War Z

On the Beach

Wool

The Road

Marget Atwood not only is a brilliant wordsmith, but most of her novels are dystopian. She's a breath of fresh air in a mostly male-centric genre.

Preggokyla is right, start with The Handmaid's Tale.

I revived my Kindle in mid-March and I've been reading like a fiend!

Enchantment by Orson Scott Card, $7.99 USD

A fantasy romance that won't make you retch, this mashup of Russian folklore features a plucky scholar-athlete, a headstrong princess, Baba Yaga (naturally), a bear-god, and a Boeing 747. A solidly weird, wonderful story, I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys historical fiction or fantasy and wants a little romance that's not sickly sweet.

Next by Michael Crichton, $7.74 USD

Firmly in the "so bad it's almost good" category, Next is a genetic engineering horror story ripped straight from the headlines... but that's pretty much all the research Crichton did for the book. Featuring a smart-aleck parrot, a potty-mouth orangutan, a human-chimpanzee hybrid (that also talks), and loads of awful people doing awful things, it goes best with a strong drink of your choice and a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 mindset, but I had to read it for class.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, $9.99 USD

This 10 minutes into the future dystopian tale is narrated by a woman who knows the society she lives in is oppressive, but she's too smart and not pissed off enough to come out swinging - after all, dissenters are publicly executed and gibbetted or mysteriously shipped off to "The Colonies" never to be heard from again - so instead she quietly scratches out her own agency, and finds some unexpected allies on the way. A satire on what happens when the line between politics and religion blurs, and maybe more relevant today than it was when it was published in 1985, I'd recommend this for anyone who's ever felt oppressed or threatened by conservatism or gender politics.

I believe form is critical at times. As a HS English teacher with a creative writing background, I see lots of my colleagues doing the awesome work of including poetry writing into their curriculum, but they focus so strongly on free verse and spoken word that the students do not honestly understand the genre tools they are trying to wield.

Form provides structure and context for the writer and the reader. Repetitious forms (villanelles seem to be especially popular in contemporary form poetry) call a readers attention to those repeated lines and phrases. Of course, in keeping with our creatively libertarian times, contemporary writers (and my students I teach form to), are given authority to break some of the rules so long as the structure still remains largely in tact.

Ultimately, I agree with those who have said that it really depends on what you are trying to write. I have tried to jam some poems into forms that didn’t work for the content.

I highly recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=mark+poetry+form&qid=1564951877&s=gateway&sr=8-2

It was a required text for a college course I took, I use it with my students now, and even gave my copy to an especially talented young writer in my classroom to keep (I need to use this link to order my new copy!).

Form matters. Free verse is good, too. It has its place. But form matters.

Eavon Boland and Mark Strand's anthology 'The Making of a Poem' may be the perfect resource for you. The editors arranged the collection according to poetic form with each chapter containing brief histories, descriptions, and exemplar works to illustrate the many ways in which they can behave. Blank verse, sonnet, villanelle, sestina--it's a trove of wonderful models to work from, a truly invaluable resource for someone writing their first (or thousandth) poem. Link below: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789

To go with the Norton Anthology, consider picking up The Making of a Poem
You can find a used copy for next to nothing, because it is also used as a textbook.

The Making of A Poem http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology/dp/0393321789/ref=pd_sim_b_4

And Camille Paglia's Break Blow Burn http://www.amazon.com/Break-Blow-Burn-Camille-Forty-three/dp/0375725393/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1341117050&sr=1-1&keywords=break+blow+burn

Are two great books that can serve as references to really unraveling the structure of poetry. Despite what people might say about "enjoying it on its own", I guarantee there is a world of poetry that one needs to study before it can be fully enjoyed. The most important structure or "lack of structure" in poetry is the use of emphasis and unless one understands how emphasis is being used by a poet, a truly beautiful poem can sound like absolute nonsense to an untrained reader.

Is this the second book you mentioned? How do you like it? I have a Norton Anthology of literature, but I haven't used it much.

My best advice is to try the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (it's expensive but you can get it from the library or buy it used - https://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Theory-Criticism/dp/0393932923). It takes the most important canonical excerpts from the most important canonical texts of theory and criticism starting basically with Plato. One advantage, as well, is that it has succinct, practical introductions to each author and text, contextualizing them, and also providing a decent bibliography for further reading. One really helpful thing for beginners is that it provides several ways of indexing/organizing the texts -- chronologically, but also by area of inquiry. Most theory beginners use this in their first Problems and Methods course.

Okay, fair point, I have not seen any actual data on the portion of radical vs non-radical feminists (though the word "radical" itself implies that group is the minority). That impression comes from the fact that, out of all the people who claim to be feminists, and all the websites claiming to be about feminism (either predominantly or incidentally), nearly all of the ones I've come across (via random links, StumbleUpon, and school research, over the course of 5+ years) are strongly pro-equality, and are vocal about not just women's rights, but men's rights, LGBT rights, and racial equality.

That's not to say those groups aren't without flaws. They're often very quick to shut down dissent and can be hostile towards honest questions (usually on the basis that they get asked the same questions all the time and the person asking should just google it). They also frequently seem to prefer only talking about men's issues independently and don't always react well when they're brought up in an existing discussion on women's issues, even though in most cases addressing minority and LGBT issues is always welcome/expected (any failure to acknowledge the existence of gay or transgender people--for instance, by talking about pregnancy as a women's issue without mentioning that trans men can also get pregnant--is usually quickly corrected, not always nicely).

But they do talk about things that affect men pretty regularly, especially traditional gender roles and how they relate to stay-at-home dads and men and boys who like traditionally "female" things, media portrayal (like the "bumbling husband" stereotype you see in almost every sitcom and commercial), child custody, and the idea that men as more suited to dangerous jobs and how this makes them seem expendable.

The only strongly anti-male feminists I've come across that were in any position of influence were the authors of the essays we read in a class on literary criticism, and those were from the 1960s. I wasn't alive then, so I have no idea what mainstream feminism was like at the time, but every example of feminist literature in the book we used (or at least every one we read, but the professor didn't seem like the type of guy to cherry pick those) was like that.

That is purely based on my own experience, though. It could be that the percentage who are anti-men is larger than it seems, but I haven't seen them because I haven't ventured to that portion of the internet.

A few more come to mind, less literature but more about stylistic and analytic skills you'll require in your advanced years in the Humanities.

People say to read a good style guide like Strunk & White, which is just okay. But I'd highly recommend Pinker's A Sense of Style--he also unpacks some of the problems with Strunk & White's core edicts.

Stanley Fish is just a great person to read in general. From his op-ed stuff in the NY Times to his class How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. I'd also highly recommend reading the full introduction of the Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism or the introduction to Rifkin & Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology. When it comes to the lit theory stuff there are some good torrents with a lot of anthologies and canonical texts lumped together as PDFs. I also find a lot of good stuff with my Scribd membership.

The Norton Anthology of Poetry is an investment, but will have lots of older, modern, and contemporary poetry.

Ditto!

I also am very interested in some of those books. I will edit my comment tomorrow after I look through my books to see if I have anything that you might like.

E: I have The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th Edition, which is over 2100 pages and has only light writing in the back and some shelf wear. I can send you a list of the poets if you are interested.

The Norton Anthology World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition is in rough shape but contains lots of poetry.

I also have The Complete Works of Shakespeare, The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe, Plato's The Republic, biographies, and boatloads of literature and other books. Anything trip your trigger?

I would really, really like:

C++ Without Fear - Overland

Hacking, The Art of Exploitation- Jon Erickson

HTML 4 for Dummies

MySQL Visual Quickstart Guide - Ullman

Thank you!

First off, good on you for taking the initiative.

For introductory books, I'd recommend Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. Now, I haven't read it myself, but it's been mentioned on this sub often enough for me to feel comfortable mentioning it. It might also be a good idea to pick up a miscellaneous collection of poems in order to get an understanding of the variety and depth of the subject matter. A more informal volume might be something edited by Garrison Keiler, like Good Poems. While that specific book is more bent towards Modern American poets, there's still a lot to draw from. A more academic book would be The Norton Anthology of Poetry ot The Norton Introduction to Poetry, which has a lot more to choose from. These two also give you a bit of structure – my copy of the Introduction has clear headings, like "Symbol" or "The Sonnet," with neat little introductory essays and poems chosen to help you understand how these concepts work. That being said, Norton tends to be a little expensive, though if you live in a college town you can probably find a cheaper copy. The benefit of these kinds of collections lies in helping you to find a poet whose style or subject matter you particularly like.

Regarding online sources, there's The Poetry Foundation, which has archives of poems and articles on the poets themselves. Their monthly articles can vary from the interesting to the banal, however, so keep your bullshit detector on. You can probably also find podcasts that deal with the subject. A personal favorite of mine is called "Entitled Opinions," and is run by a professor of Italian Studies over at Stanford by the name of Robert Harrison. Mind you, this particular podcast deals with philosophy and literature as well, so while I'd recommend listening to all their episodes you would have to do a little bit of searching in order to find a particular episode on poetry – though I would reccomend the one on "Dante and Prufrock." I imagine these kind of examinatioms would be useful because they can give you a sense of what poetry 'does' or 'how it means' beyond a surface play with words.

As for the writing of poetry, the first thing I'd recommend is that you read and meditate on a lot of poetry, good and bad, in order to get a sense of how its all done. Learn certain conventions – like, say, that of the sonnet – in order to see how poets follow through with them, or how they play with them. Learn prosody so you can understand how the precise meter, or 'beat,' of each line can affect the reader. I can't really give concrete advice with regards to this, save for a metaphorical "go west, young man!"

I would look into purchasing or borrowing a poetry anthology. They usually include biographical information about the poet as well as an analysis. I've enjoyed reading Norton's poetry anthologies. I've purchased them from used bookstores, and sales at libraries. You can find used paperback copies for cheap (around $5) on Amazon. For example, here's one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0393979202/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

I also liked reading Harold Blooms collection of poems: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0060540419/ref=tmm_hrd_used_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=used&qid=&sr=

I like these collections and anthologies because of the commentary, and they include several poets. So you get exposure to several famous poets. If you like a particular poet you can choose to read more of their work.

If you're wanting more specific recs, you may like Walt Whitman, he uses vivid imagery. Also Robert Frost, Edwin John Pratt, Edgar Allan Poe, William Wordsworth. Pablo Neruda is good too.

http://www.amazon.com/Good-Feminism/dp/0415389550

you cant control culture? are you serious? you just said the social science equivalent of "climate change aint real". also, I just read your name and lost all desire to argue with you. I am going to leave you with some introductory reading material, do with it as you will. And if you actually have a wife and daughter (red pill not wirking for you?) and you care about them a bit, ask them if they have ever been catcalled, groped or molested by anyone. And then square that with their constitutional and legal rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_legal_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_abortion_law_debate
https://www.amazon.com/Gender-Trouble-Feminism-Subversion-Routledge/dp/0415389550/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Realize that it was written during a certain period, for certain readers.

The person who was interested in this book in 1922 would have likely read Joyce's earlier works and been familiar with Stephen Dedalus. He/she would likely have been familiar with some Latin (the Mass was still conducted in Latin then). ...would have understood the history of Irish and English conflict. Ideally (and Joyce did not expect this) he/she would have been familiar with Dublin.

All of this means that Joyce basically skips the entire common (and expected -by-the-reader) concept and writer's device of exposition.

Which makes for a confusing ride if you aren't an Irish catholic living in Dublin born at the turn of the 19th century and who has read all of Joyce's previous works. And especially because most of us come at this book due to its reputation and being lauded as a Modern Masterpiece. ...we don't usually choose to read it because we have read his other books and loved them, but because it is required reading, or because we have heard so much about it, that we give it a shot. This means we come to it unprepared.

But sheesh... who ever prepares to read a book? Well, we would prepare ourselves if it were a foreign language, or in a technical field we knew little about, or was perhaps Shakespeare in the original English, or Beowulf in Old English, or the Canterbury Tales, etc. etc.

Lots of books require a little more effort than we are often prepared for. The reward is in reading them in their original sense rather than in a sanitized easy-access version. This is one of those books, that's all.

Sure, I'm exaggerating a bit. But let's look at merely the FIRST PAGE (This is the page that convinced me I really wasn't quite the reader that I thought I was, when I picked this book off the shelf for the first time with false bravado).

What the hell is Buck Mulligan doing and saying? What's with the frigging Latin, and can I buy a footnote clarifying it? Well, no, you can't. You're supposed to know it's basically the Catholic Mass, in Latin. Hell. My mother, who had no desired to read Joyce, basically laughed at me when I showed her and she plucked it all out. "It's the Mass!" she said, whacking me in the back of the head.

Where are they? what the hell is this gunrest crap? Barbicans? Towr? WTF? ...well. Martello Tower. What other tower is there on the bay in Dublin? sheesh. everybody knows that

Why's he wearing black, and saying he can't wear grey pants? Jesus. I'm two paragraphs in and sinking fast. ...well, his mother died. When someone was wearing black then, it wasn't a fashion choice. You automatically assumed the person was in mourning.

And so (to beat this to death), Joyce doesn't trip over himself explaining this stuff. The characters do not think to themselves for the purposes of letting us in on things, or for explanation's sake, they simply think the way you do, to yourself. You don't use full sentnces, or explain to yourself what you already know.

So you aren't going to get a line from Joyce that says:

"Buck Mulligan, a guy who is kinda fun on the surface but is really just a blowhard ass, and who is taking from Stephen what he can get (lodging, beer money, and intelligence-cred, among other things), comes from the stairwell getting ready to shave, but first goofs around by pretending he's a priest and so (blasphemously) holds up the shaving cream in a bowl like the sacraments held aloft by a priest, and says "Coming to the altar of God", only in Latin."

This is why the book benefits from a little view behind the curtains. Because as u/danuscript says, except for Joyce, no real all-knowing reader exists. There's also no reliable narrator running consistently throughout who can hold our hand.

It's essentially unfolding in little vignettes seen though others' eyes, or from an uninterested narrator (objective as possible).

So, grab the Gifford annotated volume (the bigger thicker one HERE ). But realize you don't need EVERY notation here to understand it. And some are speculative. really, does the yellow color of the dressing gown warrant three paragraphs? A lot of folks have read in more than joyce may have intended.

Also, try the "New BloomsDay Book". It is is an excellent synopsis, with as much exposition as is needed to understand the meat, and what is happening.

Last... the book is NOT meant to be a one hit wonder. It's not a beginning/middle/end thing, which is read once, and whose 'climax' is some great revelation or surprise. It's meant to be re-read. You would then understand the subtle unsaid things (e.g. which occur in interactions between people, which hinge on these), and you'll understand what's happening which you will have missed the first time through.

And skip.

There. I said it. Bogging down? Eyes glazing over? Try skipping a bit, or reading the first and last line of the medium-sized paragraphs. No shame in it.

If you find that you like the language, are getting the story (with help), and are glad you waded in, then you'll likely be back for a second read, and that can be the one where you focus, and delve, and read each line.

Took me three times, frankly, to make it through.

But I was aware that it wasn't Joyce's failings. but mine, which kept stopping me.

There really is a there there.

I agree with what a lot of people have said about just reading it for the language, and letting go of understanding every sentence. However, if you're curious about the connections to The Odyssey, and also want to know as much as possible about every reference in the novel, I recommend Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated. I liked having it on hand to use if I felt like referencing a place, name, or slang word, or when I just was trying to figure out what the hell is going on at certain points.

This book is generally considered to be the Ulysses bible - the end all guide to understanding all the references, jokes, minutiae, etc. I think it's better to have a guidebook that you can reference occasionally, rather than blunder blindly through what is known as one of the most difficult novels in the English language. That's just what I would do, but of course you have to be careful not to get too obsessed and just to enjoy it as well. Good luck and have fun!

Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses by Don Gifford et al.

> For clarification, are you recommending/would you recommend that I listen to Delany concurrent to reading each chapter

Yeah he literally breaks it down page buy page. Sometimes an episode will be fifteen minutes on one paragraph. It is amazing.

Yeah and if you have any questions I can do my best to answer them.

This is the edition I have. It is the 1922 text as reset in 64? or something like that. Make sure you get a copy that is not trying to peddle the 'original' 1922 printing as it is full of errors.

http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Modern-Library-Reprint-Hardcover/dp/B00C7F057E/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458323096&sr=1-1&keywords=ulysses+modern+library

Get this book. It makes the framing of Joyce's Dublin really easy to understand.

http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Annotated-Notes-James-Joyces/dp/0520253973/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458323069&sr=1-1&keywords=ulysses+annotated

>Also, I appreciate the invitation to share a chat about it, I may indeed take you up on that. Thanks.

Any time. Any question. It wont just help you but it will also help me understand the book more.

You might want to also read Hamlet and be failure with the odyssey seeing as Joyce used those works for the basic outline of the book.

Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated is chock full of interesting tidbits, although Penguin's Ulysses: Annotated Student Edition is also good for someone who doesn't want to go as deeply as Gifford will take you.

That being said, I completely agree that you don't "need" the notes, especially since they can mislead readers into thinking that they can get a total picture of the world Joyce is creating. More to the point, it is missing the forest for the trees: the point is that Joyce is recreating the world he lived in; it isn't expected (or possible) that you relive it as well. The first time I read it, I got fixated on references. Now, I just refer to the notes when my studies or interests necessitate more information.

Get this book: http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Annotated-Notes-James-Joyces/dp/0520253973/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377602116&sr=8-1&keywords=ulysses+annotated

Les Miseables is fantastic if you're an empathy zealot. East of Eden is fantastic as well - I met and fell madly for a woman who had the disposition of Cathy Ames once - it was stupid of me to fall for her as it was after I had read East of Eden. Crime and Punishment makes me feel kind of sick as I read it so I wouldn't say it's a book I like to read, but it's still epic. I don't really like Raskolnikov - but who really likes him?

Be sure to check out some of the volumes (yes volumes) of literary review written about A Book of the New Sun.

I recommend Lexicon Urthus and Solar Labyrinth.

The essays therein really helped me reach a new appreciation for Wolfe's work and let me enjoy them on a new level.

There are actually a couple of books that try to piece together what actually happened in The New Sun: Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" and Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle. The latter is a dictionary, but a lot of entries have observations about plot developments, as well as etymology that sheds light on the intended (hidden) meaning. For example, did you know that the character of Baldanders is borrowed from Germany myth via Jorge Luius Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings? The dictionary also has a plot summary. Solar Labyrinth is an in-depth analysis, which among other things posits that Nessus is a future version of Buenos Aires, and that [Spoiler](/s "Father Inire is Severian's father") (if I recall correctly). Of course, you already figured out the stuff about [Spoiler](/s "Dorcas (the 'dead' girl from the lake) being Severian's grandmother").

Having read TBotNS twice, I'd also recommend the audiobook. The reader actually does a great job, especially with the "stage script" scenes, which I always found tedious reading. It goes by very quickly.

Also, Robert Borski's Solar Labrynth (http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Labyrinth-Exploring-Gene-Wolfes/dp/0595317294) has some good guiding essays on the books.

The fact that Borski is debated as being wrong about several conclusions just add to my interest in how various parts are interpreted. The Urth.net (http://www.urth.net/) mailing list also has a lot of interesting discussion.

In my mind, digging into TBotNS is as rewarding as Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest. I first read it in high school and just enjoyed the story. As I've gotten older, I keep finding more to enjoy.

Marcus Aurelius, is not something you read and go "FUCK YEAH, I CONQUERED THAT BOOK. I'M A BADASS!!!!"

It's an investment that will pay dividends years to come. It's not the simplest stoic text to read. However if you want the feeling of reading the words of a Roman Emperor from 1,000 years ago, and also actually use his words to change and live your life by, here are a few ideas:

• Read and skim through it. Get a general sense of the book. Read the Gregory Hays translation. READ THE GREGORY HAYS TRANSLATION. READ THE GREGORY HAYS TRANSLATION (shout out to a hero of mine /u/ryan_holiday for this)
  
  (I'm trying to emphasise this and I might not get this point across, but honestly you can read a translation written by someone who knows the english language and the worldview context in 2002, or by someone from the 19th century. Your choice.)
  
  
• You won't really understand the book. But you'll get a sense of the general philosophy he was trying to remind himself. They're called The Meditations. Aphorisms and pieces of advice written in a specific format to remind himself how to live. We actually don't have any modern equivalent to this.
  
  
• Now, you're ready for the golden treat. The princess at the end of the castle. The goose that will keep laying golden eggs. Pick up a copy of The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot. Think of it as the guide to read the Meditations. The cheat guide to the crossword puzzle. The How-To Manual on how to understand Marcus Aurelius' mindset as he wrote that beast throughout his life. It's with this book that you'll understand Meditations. You'll understand the 3 central tenets he wrote by, and just why he wrote them in a codified mysterious way. You'll get a glimpse into the man. You'll understand just what role Philosophy actually played in ancient times. (Hint: it wasn't the circle jerking that modern philosophy is) And you'll come away with a deep understanding of Stoicism. Heck, it might just change your life.
  
  Honestly it's not the greatest introduction to Stoicism. Personally I prefer Seneca (I've gifted a short version of his On The Shortness of Life to 4 different friends), because he was writing for a wider audience as opposed to just himself. But if you want to go down the rabbit hole. If you want to take the red pill, read it like I've just suggested.

To read along with the Discourses.

To read along with the Meditations.

Sure thing. See The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot which is a scholarly work on that idea.

Also, this book, Man's Search for Meaning, is great and really goes well with Stoicism.

http://streetschool.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Viktor-Emil-Frankl-Mans-Search-for-Meaning.pdf

If any of the stuff I linked to interests you, definitely check out Marcus Aurelius's book Meditations and Inner Citadel. You can probably get the latter book through interlibrary loan.

I've just always been interested in how people psychologically overcome horrible tramas, like surviving concentration camps or prison or stuff. IMHO, the philosophy of Stoicism is a great tool for this and it has helped me in some aspects of my own life. So just throwing it out there.

OK, with philosophy background and her current situation, you must get her this!

If you get something on WWI, follow it up with Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

It's one of those books that shifts your world view. It will punch you in the gut 3/4 in. Left me staring at the page for a couple of minutes. It goes on and on about how prisons are failing in what they are supposed to do - and then you learn, - actually no, they are highly successful in their failing. Their use is just not what you thought it was. It's an insanely well written book. the book about the history behind disciplining people, punishment and prison.

You may be interested in Foucault's Discipline and Punish. He explores a lot of these ideas in different historical contexts.

Writing dilemma overtakes every writer. The desire to achieve perfection makes us blind to feel the reality. In such days I prefer to make my head free of disruptive thoughts: running, mediation, walk in the forest. Then, I read. Read in the morning and in the evening to find inspiration the works of literary criticism. My favourite is Beginnin Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory written by Peter Barry who is sharing a window to the ideas and principles of literary theory. You will wind your way. Do not re-read your own books and do not try to find something similar to your topic. It can confuse you. Also, avoid plagiarism and do not imitate someone else's style or idea: writing manipulations corrupt good manners.

I'll give you a few suggestions based on what I've read.

A good introductory book that covers many different literary theories is Peter Barry's Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Theory-Introduction-Literary-Cultural/dp/0719079276/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452013996&sr=8-1&keywords=beginning+theory). His chapters on Cultural Studies and New Historicism, as well as the other chapters, are very accessible.

Robert Dale Parker's How To Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies (http://www.amazon.com/How-Interpret-Literature-Critical-Literary/dp/0199331162/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1452014126&sr=8-8&keywords=cultural+studies) focuses on major literary movements since the 1930s, and it is one of the more accessible books about the newer forms of literary theory.

Catherine Gallagher's Practicing New Historicism (http://www.amazon.com/Practicing-New-Historicism-Catherine-Gallagher/dp/0226279359/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452014436&sr=8-1&keywords=new+historicism) is an excellent and easy-to-follow-without-being-condescending introduction to this area of literary theory.

Beginning Theory: Introduction to Literary Culture and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction were two helpful supplemental texts from a literary criticism class I took in graduate school.


This is more theory of literature, though, and wouldn't speak to style necessarily, but would give you some idea of the lenses that many folks out there use to look at literature.

I also recommend reading around /r/AskLiteraryStudies for some ideas, too.

Generally speaking, Beginning Theory is a nifty wikipedia-esque sort of book that helps in organizing your mind regarding what goes where.

Yes, I just reread the books a couple weeks ago and he's made a baron, given a knighthood and made a Colonel of the Marines (a sinecures or ceremonial position). Thus putting him the peerage and entitling him to the honorific "Lord".

And I also third the Patrick O'Brien recommendation and I would add to that a hearty recommendation that you pick up a copy of Sea of Words which is a sort of lexicon/companion book that has entries for all the words, concepts and Biblical/literary references in O'Brien's writing. He's a wordier and less... accessible writer in that he just assumes you understand the references and nautical terms. If you don't, you end up missing some important bits. Anyway, I found reading the series a second time through after finding Sea of Words was really enjoyable.

You can always pick up the book "Sea of Words" to assist you in understanding the more esoteric sailing and RN language used by O'Brian.

The first book is a bit difficult to get into, but is essential in the development of the relationship between Maturin and Aubrey. My brother bought me this for my birthday before college. The range of things discussed and themes portrayed are immense. I don't think anyone can come anywhere near O'Brian's brilliance when it comes to naval warfare in the time period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A Sea of Words is also helpful in understanding some of the finer points that the book goes into.

My first time through the series I just read the books without any special guide to the terminology - just full immersion except maybe for some Google searches here and there. It's a bit like learning a new language by immersion and over time you will figure a lot of it out via context. That said there is a book I picked up which helps a lot as a reference: https://www.amazon.com/Sea-Words-Third-Companion-Seafaring/dp/0805066152 . I think I got this near the end of my first read through or the beginning of the second. It's a great reference book.

As for audiobooks, that's not my thing so others could chime in on that. I hope you enjoy the series!

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690 A lot of it might seem a bit obvious if you already have editing knowledge, but as an editing beginner I found this book to be super helpful.

Where do you live (State / Country)?
Indiana

Male, female, other?
Female

How long have you been writing?
If you count the really weird book my friend and I typed up on WordPad back in 1999, it's been 18 years.

What is your writing motivation?
I would love to one day find an agent who can get a book with my name on the cover in physical bookstores across the world.

What programs do you use to write?
Microsoft Word... and also a really battered journal.

How fast can you type?
77 WPM (4 errors, adjusted to 73)

Want to share a photo?
It's up, at the very bottome :D

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r/whimsywrites

My favorite author

My favorite writing book

My other favorite writing book

None of those are affiliate links. And if you can, buy them in print from an actual bookstore!

I found this book on editing very helpful. I think you can find it online for free, too, if you hunt around a bit.

Just start. You read mass quantities as broadly as possible, you read as much in your genre--or genres--of choice as possible, and you write as often as possible. You finish what you start, you revise what you've finished, and you read the final result with a critical eye in the hopes of improving your craft. It's simple. The shit just ain't easy.

Start simple. Pick your favorite genre. Write some short stories in that genre. Use either first person ("I shot the sheriff") or third person ("He shot the sheriff"). And use past tense ("He shot the sheriff") instead of present tense ("He shoots the sheriff"). You can branch out from there once you get the basics down.

Grab a few of the best how to books in your genre(s) of choice, but don't stop writing as often as possible, and don't just keep on reading every how to book ever published.

One of the best books is a general reference, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers.

But really, it comes down to read, read, read, and write, write, write.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is hands down the best book I've read for creative writing.

Stephen King's On Writing is also very good, but about half of it is a biography more than writing lessons; still interesting though!

Otherwise the best things you can do are to write more, read more (think like a writer though - why did they choose the words they did, the order they did, the perspective, etc.), and seek critique for your own work.

For more formal writing, the most important part is keeping it organized. For example, once you get comfortable with the 5-paragraph formula, you just modify it to fit your need each time and you can pound out an essay in no time once you have your research on hand.

If you're planning to go the traditional route, then it's absolutely necessary that you learn to self-edit your own work. Brown and King's Self-Editing for Fiction Writers is an excellent book that teaches the basics of what you need to know to give your work a good polish.

The author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers mentioned in the forward to the second edition that they had added advice on where embellishment should be instead of just where it shouldn't be for precisely this reason. So many books on writing emphasize simplifying your sentence structure that I think a lot of newbie writers develop a complex about it.

I learned a lot from reading copyeditor manuals, not style guides. I recommend this book for revision work.
Editors learn about the publishing industry on the job, but craft is kinda incidental.

Off the top of my head, I tend to refer to these four the most:

Self-Editing For Fiction Writers -- When it comes to editing, this book is what helped me break things down and showed me how to get the most out of my writing in a way that clicked.

Alan Moore's writing for Comics -- Nifty if you're really into comics or want to write your own. Spotted this in a thrift store. Best $1.00 I ever spent.

On Writing Horror -- Writer's Digest has quite a few of books on writing. And they all have exercises and excerpts, but out of the small collection that I have this one is my favorite. Kind of gave me an idea of what to watch out for. It's like reading bits of advice from different authors.

The negative Trait Thesaurus -- Actually, I love the entire series as a resource. The kindle has to be good for something. (Much cheaper) But it helps keep my traits together and my character's reactions from getting stale. Out of everything I'm always pulling these books out.

*Started with three, but I really had to mention the trait thesauruses.

I'm fortunate in that I married an editor, but I have read

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504296604&sr=8-1&keywords=self+editing+for+fiction+writers

I certainly don't think it's the end-all-be-all of self editing. The writers come off as a bit full of themselves, they can lean a bit too heavily on examples, and they sometimes take a little too long getting to the point (I'm also a little impatient at times). BUT there is some good stuff in there.

Boom

I have a copy of Le Petit Prince that has French on one side and Tunisian Arabic on the other. I also have a book of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry that is Arabic/English. One thing I like is that Penguin puts out a collection of "Parallel Text" books that are collections of short stories. My SO has the French one.

I'm afraid I don't know about The Kite Runner but equivalent books in French would probably push you quite hard. It's normally best with reading not to have to look too much up because it can be a drag. It's also why I'd recommend sticking to shorter works.

You might like to look into some parallel texts (ie French on one page with the corresponding translation on the opposite side). They really help when you come across difficult idioms and mean you can read easily out and about when you don't have a dictionary to hand. Here's a collection of short stories in French. There are more in this series. They will be harder than Le Petit Prince but it seems you might enjoy more literary writing.

If you're worried about difficulty you might like to look at this Easy French Reader which gets progressively harder. In fact, this might be the best stepping stone for you.

I've got a lot of benefit from reading 'parallel texts' (par example https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-French-Penguin-Parallel/dp/0140265430 ) - I don't know your exact level but I really enjoy it and the translations on the other side of the page are accurate and helpful.

You might want to consider "Short Stories in French: New Penguin Parallel Text," available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Also available at Waterstones if you're in the UK.

It's not "small" (fairly thick), but I've really been enjoying Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor.

I've quite enjoyed Garrison Keillor's Good Poems.

no problem! let me know what you think of these poems! (I also recommend A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver- https://www.amazon.com/Poetry-Handbook-Mary-Oliver/dp/0156724006. Some great advice for the aspiring poet.)

[A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver] (http://www.amazon.com/A-Poetry-Handbook-Mary-Oliver/dp/0156724006/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=1KW7NXQKV7AS70CM419V)

I'm not a big fan of Mary Oliver's work but this book is growing on me. There are things I agree with like studying poetry more than writing poetry, and hearing the words of a poem being important.

But I don't agree with the whole "poets are born but need training" idea. I do think anyone could be a good poet with enough willpower and practice. At least that's what I'm hoping for in my case.

The CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts) database hosted by UCC hosts transcriptions of many Old Irish texts. There are some English translations, though they can be difficult to dig up. Nonetheless the database contains a wide variety of material the narrative literature section includes mythology.

Ignoring the somewhat dodgy-looking website MaryJones.us contains a wide selection of Irish (and Celtic!) material and more translations. The only real downside to MaryJones is that the sources of translations aren't always provided, so the accuracy cannot be checked against the actual texts the translation is working from. Nonetheless, the majority are good translations.

Irish Literature which includes many of the historical and mythological texts that CELT also has, and some Pre-Christian Inscriptions.

In terms of books, The Táin, early Ireland's great epic is a good one. I've yet to read the latest translation, admittedly, but I do quite enjoy Kinsella's version: he manages to capture the feel of Old Irish, so to speak, and its occasionally choppy narrative style, while making the text legitimately readable. It stays true to the text while still being accessible.

Likewise, Jeffrey Gantz's Early Irish Myths and Sagas is an excellent introduction to some of the more interesting, and important myths of early Ireland. The translations are very readable - though at times he has sacrificed the tone of Old Irish to do so.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Tales of the Elders of Ireland as translated by Ann Dooley and Harry Roe, has retained the Old Irish flavour, and is therefore occasionally difficult to understand.

In terms of secondary material, you'll have to be a little more specific as to what you're looking for. Miranda Green has a pretty good book, but she runs into the same issue that we all run into: we don't know how the myths that we have were perceived by or influenced the people who created them.

All of our stories, all of our information, really, is relayed to us through manuscripts that were created primarily in monasteries (though we have some created by laypeople and not monks, they're younger, and fairly well-removed from whatever paganism may be represented in the texts.) Few (if any) of them provide any commentary, or meta-analysis - and what we do have is pretty spare (ie. a note that the scribe doesn't believe any of what he's just written.)

The texts do tend to uphold the laws that we have, so I suppose you could argue either way: did the myths influence the laws, or the laws influence the myths?

But as I say, as we have no sources, really, from pre-Christian Ireland, only material that has been transmitted through a Christian lens, it's hard to know how the remaining texts were treated. Granted, their preservation does indicate that they were regarded with a certain level of reverence, but their actual influence is unknown. There is some literature that compares the ways in which the Christian authors follow some of the tropes of myth in their own writings of saints lives, but I'm not sure if that's what you're after.

Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Tain is very accessible.

Hello! I am not OSP but figure I might be able to help a little bit (at least with the first question). For me, at least, when I hear "Fae folk" the first thing I think of is what became of the Irish's "Tuatha Dé Danann". This is not to say that other countries don't have their own "fae" or "spirit" beings (domovoi, hobgoblins, etc), but if I were you I'd start by reading up on Irish mythology. So you could probably check out books like, Tales of the Elders of Ireland or The Tain. If not that, then there are more general books like Fairies: A Dangerous History (I've never read it, but did a quick check on the author and they're a lecturer of Renaissance Literature so it at least sounds decently founded). Besides that, if you're in school and have access to a scholarly database or library you could always try looking up journals/articles relating to them within history or religion and culture. Hope that assists you. :)

If you want the story of Cú Chulainn, you should read the poet Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Táin. Ideally an edition with the striking illustrations by Louis le Brocquy. As a translation of quite early material, the language has that old, epic feel to it. You can "look inside" this edition on Amazon to get a taste of it.

The Táin

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tain-Translated-Irish-Epic-Cuailnge/dp/0192803735/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1482052174&sr=8-2&keywords=T%C3%A1in+B%C3%B3+C%C3%BAailnge

I see we have both separately discovered the importance and practical value of George Lakoff's work :-)

His book with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By was a revelation for me, it completely changed my understanding of how we use language. I now consciously look for metaphors to describe things that highlight the important aspects of a situation. It is impossible to choose a name/metaphor for something that describes that thing perfectly, so

I hope that people will see your post and read some of his work, as his ideas make it much simpler to see how people are using language in a way that draws attention to some aspects (often, like you say, to their benefit) and downplays others.

Regarding a name for (Full-) RBF, the most significant part for me is that not only can the fee be raised to increase the chance of a miner including it, but the outputs can be changed(!), and so what is being "replaced" can be the most important part of the transaction, the person who receives the payment. I am trying to think of something that better captures the sinister, undermining behaviour of Full RBF. Some ideas I have are "Pay To Redirect", "Pay To Rewrite" and "Pay To Divert" (PTD), although I think PTD better captures the risk of accepting a transaction ("redirect" sounds like an innocuous postal service).

/u/Thelonious_Cube nailed it. You might be interested in George Lakoff's book Metaphors We Live By.

I did the idea a disservice by writing so quickly and rattling it off. My apologies. If you're interested, I suggest going straight to the source with George Lakoff's work. You might be first interested in the section near the bottom, "The Basic Claim." Here's an excerpt:

>...At the center of the conservative worldview is a Strict Father model. This model posits a traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall policy, to set strict rules for the behavior of children, and to enforce the rules...

>...The liberal worldview centers on a very different ideal of family life, the Nurturant Parent model: Love, empathy, and nurturance are primary, and children become responsible, self-disciplined and 'self-reliant through being cared for, respected, and caring for others, both in their family and in their community...

If you want more on the concept of cognitive metaphor in general, check out Lakoff's book, Metaphors We Live By. At any rate, I'd love to hear what you think about the proper articulation of the idea of government as family. Sorry again for my sloppiness earlier.

I've just started reading Metaphors We Live By, and it seems pretty good so far. It argues that the human brain interprets the world through metaphors, viewing information in terms of how it relates to other concepts already known to the mind. That's all I can really say about it so far.

When we encounter new phenomena, it's easiest to characterize them in terms of phenomena we already know, thus we give them labels. The new labels will usually be metaphorical extensions of existing words (e.g. a network, a pulse, a current, an atmosphere of pressure), or new words that come from resources already existing in the language. To make new words we can:

• make compounds, which combine two or more words (e.g. plane mirror, transverse wave; there's also a type of compound called the neoclassical compound in which the elements come from Greek or Latin but not in a way that the languages would have used them, like corpus callosum from Latin words meaning 'firm body' or eukaryote which combines Greek and Latin roots meaning 'true kernel')
  
  
• we can derive new words by adding affixes (e.g. acceleration from accelerate)
  
  
• we can coin new words (e.g. ohm named after a scientist and is a unit of resistance, and mho, the inverse of the word ohm and a unit of conductivity -- the inverse of resistance)
  
  
• we can clip words (e.g. gene from genetic, the adjectival form of the noun genesis)
  
  I get the impression that you're more interested in the metaphors of science. If you want an introduction to metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors we live by might be of interest to you. More directly relevant is Making Truth: Metaphor in Science by Theodore L. Brown. I haven't read the second one, and it's not written by a linguist, but it's written by a professor emeritus of chemistry so my guess is that it's probably well-researched from the science perspective and will give you some insight.
  
  EDIT: Missed a bullet point.

Eh, almost all of it's in book form. These two 1 2 are probably the best places to look if you're interested.

Yeah they have completely different meanings. They're probably both always or usually offensive when said by non-blacks in a non-academic capacity, but that doesn't mean they're equally abhorrent and offensive was my point, and people in the linked thread seem to be treating the word "nigga" with the same disgusted reverence with which we treat the word "nigger."

There's been a lot written about it, although I've read very little on it. Here's one book, and I find it fairly amusing that reviewers can't even refer to it by name.

If the question is scholarship and clarity, no fault can be found with Randall Kennedy's [N-word]

That's probably because amazon doesn't allow cursing in their reviews, but it's still funny, like that poor reporter who tried to talk to Sam Jackson about it. If somebody can't even say it when they're directly talking about it, they're probably not ready to talk about it, as Sam Jackson so hilariously showed.

There's no shortage of both paid and free resources.

​

I would recommend:

​

1. Robert Mckee's "Dialogue". The definitive tome on writing dialogue.
   
   https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1455591912/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1
   
   ​
   
   
2. "Self -editing for fiction writers". All-round comprehensive book on craft. Covers all aspects of writing, with clear straightforward advice.
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Yourself/dp/0060545690/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_pt_BR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&keywords=self+editing+for+writers&qid=1563126077&s=books&sr=1-1
   
   ​
   
   
3. "Helping writers become authors" podcast. Heavily focused on craft and technique.
   
   Listen for free here:
   
   ​
   
   https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/podcasts/

Read some novels and some educational books on writing? I can recommend this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Editing-Fiction-Writers-Second-Edition/dp/0060545690 or watch the Write about dragons videos http://www.writeaboutdragons.com/

Some books I'm looking at getting to help myself tackle my NaNoWriMo draft are the following:

20 Master Plots and How to Build Them

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print

Revision And Self-Editing (Write Great Fiction)

In terms of self editing, I found this book incredibly helpful. It comes up a lot in discussions about self editing on various forums, so I finally bit the bullet and bought a copy, and it's really helped me step my editing game up.

You can write internal monologue from either perspective. If your book is 3Rd person limited perspective, then you can slip seamlessly into internal monologue using the same 3Rd person past.

Or, if you want to zoom in really close, use first person present for monologue. In these cases, you are using the exact words that play in the characters head. The convention for this type is to use italics. This signals the change of perspective to the reader.

There is a chapter on internal monologue in this excellent book on self editing. If this is the sort of problem that interests you then you'll love the book.

I'm not sure about what questions you could ask a coach, but any information i'd ever want to learn about writing can be found in the following books:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1444723251

Stein on Writing
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0312254210

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Renni Browne
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0060545690

Maybe some questions you can answer for us? Why have you sought out a writing coach? What kind of writing do you do? How long have you been writing and at what level?

You may get some better responses after these questions. :)

I'm going to recommend this book to you: Self-Editing For Fiction Writers Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself Into Print

You may also want to check out: Dynamic Characters and Story Engineering

You could check this out.

Every time I'm chatting and trying to say something as fast as possible I press enter/send after every sentence (or single coherent thought). Maybe if you broke it up into multiple lines without adding punctuation and put it in a block quote. Maybe even add time stamps from the chat or other formating IM has. Would make it more legible at least.

edit: You should also get this just because.

Morthy demands:

old posh Englishman: old posh Englishmen like to write, right? (Writing Stuff)

Never seen in public: these slippers would look ridiculous in public (Other Stuff)

Most phallic: this is the best I've got(Other Stuff)

Akeleie demands:

Most geeky: probably my Adipose toy (Other Stuff)

Achieve a goal: I would love to be a writer (Writing Stuff)

Deserted island: who doesn't need a ukulele on and island? (Other Stuff)

Thanks for the contest!! :D

Sure. This, this and others.

If you believe your words are gospel, then just accept the feedback and move on with your life. If you want to start down the road of legitimately writing poetry that someone who actually reads poetry can appreciate, it's time to get to fucking work.

Of course, you think your "words" are special, but they aren't. This is the same thing every beginner churns out. It's cliché abstraction and it's not worth sharing with anyone. You can call it "poetry" and say it's your "art" and that poetry can't be "defined" -- whatever.

But anyone who actually reads poetry will recognize your "words" immediately for what they are and turn the page.

Read some poetry, man. Read some books about writing poetry and the tools poets use to craft their poems. If you need recommendations, I can give you some, but you'll have to do some fucking work. You might have missed the memo, but writing poetry is hard work.

***

Edit: Here some recommendations to get you started.

• A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
  
• The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser
  
• In the Palm of Your Hand by Steve Kowit
  
• The Poet's Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux
  
  And if you insist on trying to use end rhymes:
  
  
• Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver
  
  And please, please pick up a good book of poems from multiple authors so you can get some exposure, such as the Norton Anthology of Poetry or the compilation Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. One of my favorites is A Book of Luminous Things by Czeslaw Milosz.

The best poetry (the arts, really) resource on the web, courtesy of Dan Schneider - no, not of Nickelodeon infamy, another one. Here's the link, and just dive in. Got some very strong perspectives regarding poetry and the arts, that many find off-putting, but he's invaluable, to my estimation.

​

If you find a poem that you like, but can't immediately access intellectually, see if you can find an entry of it on Shmoop. I love Plath and Stevens and Crane, but couldn't tackle them full on as a poetry novice. Shmoop (and others) helped me gain some insight on some of their poems. Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West" is a doozy, but Shmoop's analysis helped clarify some difficult passages.

​

And like everyone else has said, keep reading - anything and everything by anyone. The more you passionately pursue the subject, the more you'll find things beginning to make sense. Also, an excellent book for poetry lovers who want to delve into the craft: Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook.

​

Hope this helps!

Myths and legends podcast has a few episodes dedicated to irish Mythology https://www.mythpodcast.com/3459/22a-irish-folklore-the-tain-red-ledger/ https://www.mythpodcast.com/3487/22b-irish-legends-you-wouldnt-like-me-when-im-angry/ he publishes some of his sources on his website https://www.amazon.com/Tain-Translated-Irish-Epic-Cuailnge/dp/0192803735?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

Táin Bó Cúailnge is amazing. https://www.amazon.com/Tain-Translated-Irish-Epic-Cuailnge/dp/0192803735/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=ulster+cycle&qid=1554669328&s=gateway&sr=8-2

​

Anything published from Oxford's World Classics is always great quality too, although I haven't read any of their Irish mythology books.

Get him into philosophy, niestche, Wittgenstein, Plato, especially socrates, you should read this wikipedia article on socrates here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus

An amazing book to help you think more clearly about everything... an amazing read

Metaphors we live by

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

Title: Where does mathematics come from...

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Comes-Embodied-Brings/dp/0465037712/

Check out the standard encyclopedia of philosophy to find things you might think he would like:

http://plato.stanford.edu/

Metaphors are everything

I tend to be the oddball non-Platonist who things math is created, not discovered. Math that "works" sticks around.

Two readings that got me there: Metaphors we Live By, Where mathematics comes from. Both somewhat controversial.

Some of it just recognition - if you see something in a book that reminds you of something you read about in another book, or something you know about the world, or history, or religion, then your mind may make the leap to say "Oh, this is a symbolic reference to trench warfare in France during WWI" or whatever. So the more "stuff" you know about, the more equipped you are to recognize references. So studying history, religion, economics, world news, various natural sciences, etc., etc. will help you with this And the more you know about the author you're reading, the time he/she lived and wrote in, etc., the more you can pick up on.

Note though that a lot of this symblic stuff is indirect / abstract... they are vague allusions using analogy or metaphor, and not necessarily explicit. So the more you develop your capacity for abstract thinking, thinking in metaphors, etc., the better. To that end, you might consider reading Metaphors We Live By, Surfaces and Essences, and similar books.

Also, a lot of "symbolism" is rooted in the thinking of Freud and Jung, even to this day. A lot of Freud's stuff has been discredited now, but from a "cultural literacy" standpoint, it wouldn't hurt to read his book on dream interpretation, as well as some of Jung's stuff. The stuff about archetypes and the "collective unconscious" would be good.

Also, a lot of symbolism may be rooted in, or linked by metaphor, to existing mythology. Some ideas from myth are tropes that appear again and again. With that in mind, I'd suggest reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces and The Hero's Journey by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. If you're really interested, any and all of his other books would probably be useful as well.

One last final note: It's entirely possible that all of most of this "symbolism in literature" stuff is total bullshit. What I mean is, you (or I, or whoever) can "find" all sorts of symbolic links in a work, and find arguments to support that link. But unless the author is still alive, and willing to confirm or deny his intent, you never really know if the "link" you've found is really "a thing" put there by the author, or just your own overactive imagination running wild.

The first one that comes to my mind is an insect colony. Some conservative politicians are fond of thinking of society in terms of a corporation or a factory. Poor urban neighborhoods are often conceived in terms of a war zone or a jungle (especially in gangsta rap!). Tensions between different economic classes are metaphorically spoken of in terms of military battles ("class warfare"). Unwelcome intrusion of government into the private lives of citizens is usually portrayed in the language of totalitarianism or fascism.

Since reading Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By I see conceptual metaphors everywhere.

This gets into Conceptual Metaphors and Lakeoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. Lakeoff is a linguist.

Also Chinese is interesting in this respect: things in the past or future can be "above and below" (or "in front or behind").

Last week (上星期) and last month (上個月) are "above" (上) while next week (下週), next month (下個月) are "below" (下). And "before" and "in front" (前) or "after" and "rear"/"behind" (后) which is similar to English.

http://www.amazon.es/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011

I don't think any chatbot will be able to pass the Turing Test if it doesn't have a body. Here's why.

How do humans understand one another? Because we can mentally simulate each other's experiences. When someone uses the English idiom "I bent over backward to meet my boss' deadline", we literally simulate bending over backward ourselves, and wince with the imagined pain. That allows us to understand that the other person suffered to accommodate the deadline. Even if we've never heard that idiom before. More about metaphors here.

The need to have a body to be intelligence is a particular stance in AI, known as Embodied Cognition. You can read more about it in our book, or here.

I'm fairly certain all languages (even unwritten ones) have stuff like metaphor. That's basically the premise of Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By. And all languages have idioms/euphemisms as well (look at how people talk about death, bodily functions). One possible exception for a lot of things is ASL, which is notorious for avoiding euphemism (though this may be a feature of Deaf culture, not the language). ASL does have idioms etc. though.

A language without figures of speech. This sounds like a good scifi premise. Actually, it sounds a lot like China Mieville's Embassytown.

> Cultural marxism in my experience is a most definitely right-wing term.

No it isn't. Below is a quote from this twitlonger http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sc1pi4

**
Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

)1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450

)2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg

)3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144

)4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".

)5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd

The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.

)6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."

)7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

***

Cultural Marxism is a real academic term, Orwellian efforts of Wikipedia admins to redefine it notwithstanding.

Read this.

link to the book

Congrats to you and your husband, that is such wonderful news! :)

You should get us both this! I've heard great things about it, it's supposed to be really wonderful.

This one is supposed to be fantastic as well! I've been wanting to read both of them for a while, and I'm not sure which one sounds more appealing to you.

16 bucks an hour!!!

Thank you for the contest!

The Handmaid's Tale.

I link this every time one of these threads comes about, I really just need to buy it already!!

I already posted link to The Handmaid's Tale being on Kindle Unlimited but I found some more links for these books so I thought I would just make a comment here!

Here is an "extended preview" of The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey.
Here is A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf on Australia's Project Gutenburg.
And again, here is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood through Kindle Unlimited, which you can get a 30-day free trial to.
Couldn't find anything for The Complete Persepolis, but I'm sure you can find it at your library :)

I can't really recommend too many true crime novels because I don't really read as many as I should considering my interests. Typically I read my fictional material and watch my non-fiction material if that makes sense. Not saying they're bad, but so many true crime authors write about the same criminals and it gets so hard to pick out which one of those books is the most engaging.

I don't really have a favorite author; I kinda jump around. However, I can try to recommend a few fiction books in keeping with the theme and what you've mentioned. I would highly recommend Let me In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist. It has serial killing, the paranormal, and some romantic elements, but it sticks more to horror and I hate romance but loved this book. Acceleration, by Graham McNamee, which is about a kid who finds a possible serial killer's journal while working at a lost and found is also a book I remember fondly. And, if you want to give yourself nightmares as someone who frequents child free and is female, The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood is a must. Also The Giver has two sequel books; Gathering Blue and Messenger

I don't want to get too much further off topic and distract from OP's story (I could recommend books all day), so if you are looking for other potential books and authors, I recommend making a post on r/suggestmeabook . Happy hunting :)

I read The Handmaid's Tale during the Bush years and partly because of that, it was one of the most chilling reading experiences of my life. I don't think I could stand to read it again just now, but for those who can, the kindle edition is now on sale for $2.99.
https://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood-ebook/dp/B003JFJHTS/

Preface: This is going to be long but because I'm trying to be thorough in context for myself and expand on my thoughts and points, you don't need to respond to all of it unless you feel like it

> oh, weird my bad. ummm idk just merge the two thoughts lmao not entirely sure what i was trying to do there, im tired and working on other work too rn

Not a problem haha

>yes

Okay, if I suggested resources or books to read in regards to that, do you think you'd take the time and effort to read them?

>for sure. perhaps analogies will help? So rape victims often have recurring thoughts of "i couldve carried my drink," "I should have worn a sweater," "it's my fault for going to that party," stuff like that. In that way they are victim blaming themselves. They did absolutely nothing wrong but are still trying to put it on them.

Ah I see, I do that myself in general. I feel guilty for things far more than I blame others.

>Just curious who these scholars are you read that don't think black people should use the n-word, I research this kind of thing significantly (I participate in and coach debate on a competitive level) and the lit base is definitely in my favor from what I see.

Dr. Amos Wilson - who even states that black on black violence (while he believes was basically designed by white people to keep blacks subservient) that it's the sole responsibility of blacks to fix.

Sheriff David Clark - He is black and grew up hating cops. He watched in the summer olympics as Tommi smith and John Carlos raised their fists (https://i.imgur.com/Xng6uxS.jpg), this is when he knew that something was wrong with America.

~Story time~

He raised his fist as a police car passed his house, trying to convey and I quote "Black pride. Black power. You aren't welcome here." The police car stopped and the officer got out, thinking in his mind that he was trying to flag him down, the situation instantly changed when Clarks father Clark Sr. stepped outside and realized what his son did.

His father was an army ranger, back then they called black soldiers "buffalo soldiers" they had a patch to distinguish them, they embraced the name and it was a sign of respect. His father was in a particular company that suffered severe casualties. General Douglas MacArthur recognized the importance and historical significance of Clarks company and stated: "I have one criticism of negro troops who fought under my command in the Korean War, they didn't send me enough of them."

His father was a no-nonsense man, he was adamant that when his son (months before he raised his fist at the cops) was called the N word and told to get off the swings at a playground, that he not be a victim. His father went through the slander, the segregation, the insults, the deaths around him without complaining. In his mind his son had no reason to be angry at those cops. After being scolded by his father, he never did it again.

Clarks position, he's black and has been through those times when in America saying the N word was used as a form of power over blacks, he could grasp the black power fist symbol and what it stood for. His father however was also a part of his life (which unfortunately many black families can't say the same, even I grew up in a single parent household as a minority) which instilled some good life lessons in him. He eventually became an officer and could then see the situation from both sides, in how the black community treats officers. A lot of the black community however has seen it fit to disown him and ignore his own life and experiences.

Brando Starkey - https://theundefeated.com/features/if-you-truly-knew-what-the-n-word-meant-to-our-ancestors-youd-never-use-it/

He states "the current use of the word is owed less to white folk calling black folk “nigger” and more to black folk who thought they were niggers and said so. Black people have hurled the infamous word for nearly as long as white folk have. It exists within black speech now because it existed within black speech then. The uncomfortable truth must be confronted: Absent the internalized oppression of those who called white men and women their masters, “nigger” would probably not be a part of black folk’s lexicon. We black folk are reclaiming it not from bigoted white folk but from our ancestors, who, sadly, deemed their blackness a badge of inferiority."

"I seek not to usher the word to the gallows. I harbor no aims to kill it. I can still bump a Young Thug track or chortle at a Dave Chappelle routine. “Nigger” does not bar my enjoyment of popular culture. My soul, though, winces whenever I hear it. The decision for black people to include it in their vocabulary, nonetheless, remains personal, and I reject the criticism of black folk who continue to wield it."

Randall Kennedy - https://www.amazon.com/Nigger-Strange-Career-Troublesome-Word/dp/0375713719 and some of his thoughts on the issue if you don't feel like buying/reading the book https://www.cnn.com/2015/03/23/opinions/holmes-n-word/index.html

Allen Francis - http://www.ycteenmag.org/topics/african-americans/The_'N'_Word:_It_Just_Slips_Out.html?story_id=NYC-1994-01-07 mostly because his "essay" is used for discussion in schools.

Also The N Word is a documentary you might want to watch.

The NAACP denounces the use of both "nigga" and "nigger".

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2001/08/05/loc_1the_n-word.html

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/04.09.98/cover/nigger-9814.html

We both acknowledge that the word has power, what we differ on is if it should retain its power. If we all stop using it, then future generations won't use it and won't even hear it till they learn about black history through school, or we strip it of its power by normalizing it and truly reforming it like lesbians did with dyke, when you do that, someone trying to use a word against you that you're so used to, it will have no effect.

It's disingenuous to make it so that only white people (who let me remind had nothing to do with the slave trade of the past) get threatened with physical violence for simply singing along to a song, when blacks enslaved other blacks to sell to europeans and blacks also owned black slaves, not only that but it seems like black people have this monopoly on slavery, when they were far from the only race of people enslaved (humans enslaved humans, that was just a thing) and had that kind of history, no other race though milks quite it as much or has a race only word.

>What I mean here is that the alt right has created these strawmen, but even non-alt-right people are starting to believe them as reality.

I see. Is it at all possible that while the alt right are usually what we see as "the bad guys" that maybe even some of what their saying has some truth to it? Because if we're being completely honest, no one side has the 100% truth about anything. As horrible as they see us in the left, we know that there is some (though we clearly think it's more than just some) truth to what we're saying. I imagine they have also done their own research, though to further their own agenda, much like we also do, but I'm fairly positive that it's probably backed by at least some historical truth, sprinkled with misconceptions/myths and agenda pushing, which is every political side at this point to be honest.

>Parts karma, parts it's a nice way for me to vent about the idiocy (pardon me) of other viewpoints, and parts hoping that some people will see my side. I'll admit I don't always do a good job of convincing someone else in favor of just mocking them, but it's also annoying to have to explain what SHOULD be basic knowledge to other people.

I can understand that, though after some deep soul searching and a lot of reading, I've come to realize that my version of reality isn't the same as yours or even my neighbor. What is "common sense" or just seems natural for me is weird and odd to someone else. For example we grew up eating pizza with popcorn as a kind of "side dish" totally normal for me. Once I met other people and my girlfriend I realized that wasn't "a thing" that people did, it was unique to my family. I learned that popcorn was literally just a movie theater treat.

My reality changed. Some people who are white grow up in black neighborhoods, have mostly black friends and are allowed to say the N word along with them, some are not. So in a situation like Kendricks show, someone might be conflicted on if singing along is expected (it's 2018) or if we're still supposed to censor ourselves. I make no assumption on that girls intentions, because only she knows that, I do not however believe they were malicious, it would make little sense.

Just food for thought that what might seem like totally common sense to even a few hundred or thousand people, by comparison it's not the majority and even then some peoples realities are different, they aren't being malicious on purpose usually.

>Anyway, sorry if I was ever too rude. If I could leave you with one resource, it would be The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, a full and free PDF of the book can be found here

That's really cool, I'll be able to put this on my kindle to read, thank you for that.

Here are some books I've read that I guess you could call "craft" books. I'm not speaking against craft books. They can be helpful, but again I would remind you that the best teacher is poetry itself. Craft books have to be taken for what they are, which is often that poet's own perspective on poetry that may conflict fundamentally with your own. But, there are some things that are helpful, and I know some of them may seem kind of "basic" but trust me they are helpful. You should never think you have poetry figured out. Once you feel that way I think you've already lost.

Anyway here are some books I've read, not always through classes but some are.
A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line- Edited by Emily Rosko & Anton Vander Zee. This is a collection of short essays by poets on the poetic line. Look at it as a way of collecting ideas about what lines can do, because many of these essays will contradict each other. It's not because one is wrong, it's because the line can do a lot of things. https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Thing-Poets-Line/dp/1609380541/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524596709&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=a+broken+thing+preston+the+line

The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland is a great book if you want to study forms more closely. It is an anthology of poetic forms, so it gives you the basic "rules" of the form, and then a ton of old and modern examples of the form. A good way to do a close study of specific forms. https://www.amazon.com/Making-Poem-Norton-Anthology-Poetic/dp/0393321789/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524596728&sr=1-1&keywords=making+of+a+poem

Sound:
Two come to mind. One is The Sounds of Poetry: a Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky. This is one that will feel somewhat basic because Pinsky frames it for beginners, but I promise it is helpful to review. He really understands sound better than most. https://www.amazon.com/Sounds-Poetry-Brief-Guide/dp/0374526176/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524596743&sr=1-1&keywords=sounds+of+poetry

Two, if you want to understand meter better, which every poet should, this is the best book on meter: Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell. It's out of print but you can probably find a copy at a local library, or at a university library. You may have to pay for access to it, but it's cheaper than a $100 for a used copy.

Finally, Singing School by Robert Pinsky. Again, going to feel a bit basic. The whole book's purpose is to teach you to write and read poetry by doing imitations. Do not devalue the importance of imitating better poets than yourself. Every poet, even Keats, started by doing imitations. This book is a good guide to starting a practice of imitating. Imitations actually help you discover yourself as a writer better because you realize where you can and can't sound like another poet. Those are good things because often those can't's are what you find to be the things that make you unique. It also just really hones some basic skills every poet should have.
https://www.amazon.com/Singing-School-Learning-Studying-Masters/dp/0393348970/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524596763&sr=1-1&keywords=singing+school

Hope this helps! Best advice I can give you is read actual poetry and write every single day.

The Making of a Poem: The Norton anthology of Poetic Forms is an invaluable read.

Otherwise, read poetry; writers read several times more than they write.

The Poetry Foundation website is a great place to start.

My favorite poetry book that I take everywhere is The Making of a Poem. It's a Norton Anthology and it's amazing. Honestly recommend reading it cover to cover if you want a foundation in traditional forms.

It's currently 15 bucks on Amazon!

The Making of a Poem, by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.

An excellent anthology that outlines many of the major poetic forms, as well as providing examples and classics in those forms. Explains the forms and then lets you read some of the best expression of those forms. Widely taught in many major university poetry classes.

It's good that you want to expand your reading! And honestly, you'll probably always feel like you're missing something. My reading list has gone out of control since I started college. The more you read the more you'll want to know!

I suppose that's what I meant by range. Being able to sample different and varying bodies of work. That way you learn a little bit, but still open up avenues for finding new information. (Like going to a grocery store and eating all the samples, but then only buying one of the products to take home to fill your tummy until the next shopping day.)

There's a couple ways you can do this: start with a really broad scope and then go specific from there. Or, start with a narrow focus and then go broad.

An example of narrow to broad: I took a class on African American Science Fiction. Which is a pretty narrow field of study. We read lots of different authors whose works were specific to African American literature (e.g. Nalo Hopkins, Octavia Butler), but also situated within the broader genre of sci-fi. So we had to pay attention to not only the African American perspective, but also what was going on in these books that was pertinent to sci-fi writing. After the class was over I got more interested in sci-fi as a genre because it can do some really cool stuff!

Broad to narrow: During the same quarter I also took a literary criticism class and we got this monstrous behemoth as a textbook: http://www.amazon.com/Norton-Anthology-Theory-Criticism-Edition/dp/0393932923 (To this day I can't look at that book without feeling anxious. It's DENSE. Helpful and interesting, but DENSE.) Anyways, for the class we read a lot of different authors with extremely diverse perspectives and focuses (e.g. Saussure, Marx, Haraway etc.). That's the type of writing (i.e. critical essays) that you can apply and find incredibly relevant in other areas. You can take one of those essays and manipulate it and use different perspectives/readings to understand another piece of work more deeply. So for my final essay in this class, I used Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto and applied it to my particular understanding of a short story we read in my African American Science Fiction.

Both of these classes allowed/forced me to read things I normally wouldn't have. They put me out of my comfort zone.

So long story short, read lots and make connections!

As far as where to start...that's really up to you. Find something that you're interested in and go from there. Like superheros? Read Watchmen by Alan Moore. Like history? Read the actual story of Pocahontas (spoiler: it's nothing like Disney). Like all of the current hullabaloo about the NSA? Read 1984.

Don't read something just because it's a classic. Read it because you're actually interested in what it's about. That being said, it's best to try and keep an open mind. Also, genre writing can get a lot of flack for not being "literary enough." But genre writing has it's own merits, they're just a little different.

If you're looking for more suggestions and are curious about what's being read in academia, try googling a university and their English dept. Often they'll link to course catalog descriptions that may include their required reading lists.

I hope this helps! :)

TL;DR Just keep reading. Really. Even reading the back of a shampoo bottle is better than nothing.

mhmm. u cn buy a copy of this for $26 USD, it's got all kinds of poems in there. otherwise just torrent a copy and read through it, real easy. gl

Epistemology of the Closet is an interesting and very much classic read that's better than most of the queer theory out there.

if you don't mind the often impossible syntax, Gender Trouble is also good and widely read in some parts of the academy.

and Regulating Aversion is an excellent theoretical reading of contemporary dialogues on tolerance.

http://www.amazon.com/Gender-Trouble-Feminism-Subversion-Routledge/dp/0415389550/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341194938&sr=8-1&keywords=gender+trouble

This

That

And so many more things... like common sense.

Don Gifford's annotations are super helpful for this problem.

I'm about to tackle this shit as well. Last week I read the Odyssey and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for homework and then I picked up the Gifford annotations book to read along with an e-copy of Ulysses. The annotated book is an extra 700 pages to read but I can tell it's going to help with my comprehension a ton.

Love Ulysses.

Here's a copy of the Gilbert schema and the Litany schema.

If you're trudging alone, Ulysses Annotated is invaluable.

This helped immensely with my Ulysses read-through.

Her kan du få den for knap en halvtredser inklusiv fragt: http://www.play.com/Books/Books/4-/455531/Ulysses/Product.html?searchstring=ulysses&searchsource=2&searchfilters=s{ulysses}%2bc{91}%2b&urlrefer=search

Hvis du vil nærlæse den, kan jeg anbefale dig at have denne guide liggende ved siden af: http://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Annotated-Notes-James-Joyces/dp/0520253973
Men som du selv siger er det nok en del sjovere bare at læse igennem den som førstegangslæser. Jeg læste den selv sammen med en læsegruppe første gang, hvor vi nærlæste den nærmest på enkeltsætningsniveau. Det var fedt, men jeg ville næsten ønske jeg bare havde bøffet den igennem selv først.

Jeg overvejer selv at læse Karsten Sand Iversens nye oversættelse.

Du nævner selv du læser den med en underviser - hvad læser du? Engelsk? Litteraturvidenskab? Det er forhåbentlig ikke en gymnasielærer der har sat den på programmet :)

It was deep enough that it inspired others to write their own. That does not happen too often.

Michel Foucault, an extremely prominent social theorist, has written at great length on this subject in his work, Discipline and Punish. If this is a subject to which you've given a lot of thought, you would probably enjoy reading some academic work on the subject.

Foucault argues against the notion that western society moved away from public, chaotic, violent punishment and torture towards comparatively private, organized, and "humanitarian" punishment NOT because of any moral or ethical or humanitarian reasons, but as a reflection in changes in society as a whole. It's a pretty dramatic shift we're talking about- he cites examples from the mid 18th century of public torture, shifting to descriptions of regimented, ordered, more modern-seeming imprisonment in the early 19th century- not a long time for such a big change in how we punish to occur.

Let's examine the goals of torture, which you advocate. The use of public punishment and torture is meant to be theatrical, in order to serve as a deterrent, as you say. The crimes (and punishment) are made public, the violence of the crime reflected in the violence against the body of the convict. It is also a form of public revenge upon the criminal.

However, these methods have some unintended consequences. Publicizing the spectacle opened the doors for the prisoner's body to become an object of sympathy, creating a cult of personality around those persecuted by a government with which the citizens do not agree. The public site itself is transformed into a space of protest and resistance to the very power being displayed.

So, all in all, public torture can have a pretty high political cost. With these drawbacks, it gradually lost favor as the most efficient way to control the populace. It seems to run afoul of the ideals of order and consistency that are central to modern, western societies- the system should be sanitary and organized and consistent and fair and just- bureaucratic, if you will. It's not easy to standardize and apply consistently an act of torture.

So, there's a gradual progression to the system we have now. You see some interesting intermediary stages- labor camps, public debtors prisons, chain gangs where the imprisonment is displayed- ways in which to make imprisonment a public spectacle as well.

If we look at the ways in which we in reality treat severe crimes, we can see hints that this newer form of control extends beyond the prison itself. The prison is just one element in a broader system of control that has emerged as a result of these shifts I describe in how power is applied to the people.

A mass murderer isn't just a criminal, he's mentally unstable, there is likely to be something wrong with him psychologically (under our system). We treat this individual not just as a criminal, but a patient. Psychology, just as much as the penal system, acts as a "deterrant", to establish the lines and keep people within them. The school system can be argued to function the same way, establishing boundaries and ways to keep people within them. Other social institutions are on this list as well, the church, the workplace. Read the book, it's real interesting.

I may be going off topic a bit here, but to change your view, we ought to first understand why we stopped using torture in the first place. Firstly, torture has its drawbacks, as described above. The desire of the state is to produce order, to shape citizens into the individuals required for the more modern society- especially workers, with the rise of the factory. Public torture, even as a deterrent, isn't the most effective way to do this. We instead gradually shift to the prison, which should be viewed as just one element in a larger system of control.

TL;DR- We switched from torture to other modes of discipline as the result of a broader shift in societal philosophy. Read the book, it's interesting. I can talk more about this if anyone is interested in a specific aspect, but I think I may have gone on too long already.

I don't know of any particular source to point you on that directly, but I think you should read From Slavery to Mass Incarceration by Lois Wacquant, and Racecraft by Karen and Barbara Fields, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

[From Slavery to Mass Incarceration article and PDF] (http://newleftreview.org/II/13/loic-wacquant-from-slavery-to-mass-incarceration)

Racecraft (book)

New Jim Crow

None of these sources addresses for-profit prisons directly, I don't think (I don't recall maybe New Jim Crow does) but I think they'll be informative. I know you aren't talking about race but you can't talk about poverty and incarceration in this country without talking about race. From Slavery demonstrates how the economic system of the US has always depended on the extraction of cheap or free labor from black people while socially ostracizing black bodies. This began with slavery and it tracks its evolution to mass incarceration, and ends with a note about how there is developing a for-profit prison system which is basically extracting slave labor from large numbers of blacks and repeating the same pattern. The New Jim Crow does a good job of explaining how mass incarceration is the direct result of post Civil Rights era attempts to roll back the gains made during the Civil Rights movement, and goes into detail about the suppression and theft of black productivity that it institutes.

You asked about for profit prisons, but here I am talking about black people - why? This is where Racecraft comes in because it demonstrates how the entire purpose of racial distinctions and classifications is not only to create hierarchies between black and white, but to create hierarchies between rich whites and everyone else. The effect of this for hundreds of years has been, by injecting racial divisions, to destroy the ability of the lower classes, black white or otherwise, to unite and act productively in order to achieve class equality.

Thinking about that, it follows that the drug war, and the irrational, racist fears of the crack epidemic, and extremely harsh penalties in favor of "law and order" spiraled into a system where all poor people are at risk of being scooped up and enslaved in a system where their labor can be extracted for almost no wage -they are still economically productive but they can't actually reap the benefits of their own production. But whenever we talk about the issue, notice the discussion always devolves into a discussion about "black culture" and "white privilege" and so on...Racecraft really made me believe that it's not just that race and class are "linked" - in America, they are identical issues, whose two facets are obscured from each other.

You might also want to read Discipline and Punish for a background on prison systems generally, and how they are designed to perpetuate criminality and create a criminal underclass for the exploitation of the rest of society.

Try the following:

http://www.amazon.com/Great-War-Modern-Memory/dp/0195133323/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1289962516&sr=8-2

http://www.amazon.com/Rites-Spring-Great-Birth-Modern/dp/0395937582/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1289962495&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-History-Alun-Munslow/dp/0415391431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1289962236&sr=8-1

http://www.amazon.com/Discipline-Punish-Prison-Michel-Foucault/dp/0679752552/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1289962265&sr=8-1

read the above in tandem with:

http://www.amazon.com/Read-Foucaults-Discipline-Punish-Theory/dp/0745329810/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1289962292&sr=8-2

It'll be out in the summer.

Also:

http://www.amazon.com/War-Human-Civilization-Azar-Gat/dp/0199236631/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289962330&sr=1-1

And:

http://www.amazon.com/Civilizing-Process-Sociogenetic-Psychogenetic-Investigations/dp/0631221611/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289962353&sr=1-1

Last one:

http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Nations-Medieval-Origins-Europe/dp/0691114811/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1289962458&sr=1-1

For anyone fighting this still, I seriously suggest you read Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punish. You cannot 'reform' a system to do what it was never established to perform in the first place. It is futile to define what you want in its limited scope of definitions. Prison was made exactly counter to the idea of reform, so the thought that you can take its idea of punishment and somehow turn that into correction is insane. You need to abolish the current system and make something new if you want real change.

Then you could visit /r/meditation .

Also, have you read Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison? It is quite an interesting read, i thought you might enjoy it.

Thanks for this AMA and for sharing your thoughts, appreciate it a lot.

I wish the best for you. :)

Don't worry about it; the goal here is not to discipline and punish people who post those questions but rather to help users get useful answers, cut down our own workload, and discourage low-effort posting.

I have this image of some guy at a desk in Washington reading Foucault and treating it as an instruction manual. Guantanamo as a total institution.

You do realise that Gitmo justifies our enemies, it lets them point and say, "look, that is what we are fighting against."

To quote one of the more complicated founders "If God is just, I tremble for my country. "

I use Barry's Beginning Theory in my honors classes.

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Theory-Introduction-Literary-Cultural/dp/0719079276/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419336989&sr=1-2&keywords=critical+theory+for+beginners

Best guide I've ever read

You can get a used copy for like around 50.

Second best

Honestly, it was bugging the daylights out of me too. THANK YOU.

For those who care, and contextually reasonably close to the setting:
http://www.amazon.com/Sea-Words-Third-Edition-Companion/dp/0805066152
Actually fascinating, and you can find them used on Amazon for $1.

Buy this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Sea-Words-Third-Companion-Seafaring/dp/0805066152

One suggestion, for if you get a bit lost with all the naval terminology, is Dean Kings A Sea of Words. It contains what is basically a dictionary of the naval terms used in the series, along with some diagrams and information about the Royal Navy at the time.

Oh I envy you being able to read Patrick O'Brian for the first time. I firmly believe that the Aubrey/Maturin series is the greatest work of modern English literature.

I do know that the movie is actually based on the plot of The Far Side of the World, which is actually the tenth novel, and that the stole some of the best anecdotes from various novels. For example, the "lesser of two weevils" gag is from The Fortune of War, which is the sixth book.

Not sure what advice to give you before you embark on your journey but there's two major paths: using references to understand everything, and learning along with Maturin (PO'B uses Maturin to explain some of the more esoteric concepts and terms of square-rigged sailing). I wrote the following in a previous Reddit post:
>In Master and Commander, the first of Patrick O'Brian's brilliant Aubrey/Maturin series (which may very well be the best-written English-language books post-WWII), we are introduced to Stephen Maturin, the perpetual land-lubber who acts as a guide for the reader to the more obscure jargon used by sailors -- especially that of the Royal Navy during the heights of the Age of Sail.

>When Maturin is being given a tour of the HMS Sophie, his first ship deployment, he becomes perplexed by the language being tossed at him and asks, "You could not explain this maze of ropes and wood and canvas without using sea-terms, I suppose? No, it would not be possible. ... No; for it is by those names alone that they are known."

>And that is how it is with the language of sailing; like learning a foreign language, one must become familiar with its terms and jargon for there is no other language to define it.

As for references, there are two major ones: "A Sea of Words", which is a dictionary and general reference for sailing/nautical, naturalism, medicine, politics, and sometimes foreign-language dictionary, though sometimes it comes woefully short on obvious terms; and "Harbors and High Seas", an atlas which maps out the various locations and journeys of Aubrey's missions.

Enjoy! And feel free to ask me any questions regarding the series. I've got whole passages memorized lol

EDIT: I forgot to mention my favorite fact: Patrick O'Brian never stepped aboard a sailing vessel...

Foucault was right.

Robert, your post speaks for itself. If you want to actually help people, then I'm not kidding about reading up on structural violence. If you aren't afraid of a civil discussion, meet with the chair of the SJSU Anthro department, buy him lunch and ask him to look at your post and explain what's wrong with it.

I don't live in the area or I would come talk to you, I'd even walk along on one of your marches to watch you upset the dirty homeless you seem so scared of.

I don't care that you never threw a punch. Congrats on meeting the very bottom criteria for not being a terrible human, you still went out and harassed homeless and made judgments about people based on their appearance.

There is so much wrong with your post, man. Please, I'm begging you, please meet with the chair of the Anthro department and also a therapist to help you work through your ideas about power and responsibility. I'm in therapy too man, I don't mean it as an insult, but I do mean to say that you need a professional to help you understand what your actions are and why they are not okay.

Please at the very least read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault and Pathologies of Power by Paul Farmer. You are contributing to the tension between the haves and havenots in downtown SJ, and you have no right to do so. You are hurting more than helping, and you are doing so in an arrogant and uninformed way.

If you want to pretend to be doing the right thing, than at least read up on what it is that you are contributing to. Foucault will be a great resource for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

(just adding some books some may find interesting)

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

You're in over your head. You've been mislead.

Am I right in assuming that you also believe "Cultural Marxism" is fake news, a fabrication by the "alt right"?

Let's look at some literature:

• Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
  
  
• Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
  
  Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
  
  
• "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
  
  Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
  
  
• "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
  "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that
  
  "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. https://www.readings.com.au/products/6300010/cultural-marxism
  
  
• The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
  
  Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
  
  For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/index/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", described as "long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
  
  You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
  
  I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies

Its the same thing. Words have meaning, yes? N-word is a euphemism for nigger. It means exactly the same thing. If i say lick my arse, you get that i'm telling you to lick my ass. The whole concept of a word being forbidden is silly; regardless of whose feelings get hurt by hearing a word. I'm not going to be disrespectful and call this the N-word book.

There's a whole book about it!

So when David Brooks (who is Jewish) writes a piece on the differences in views between generations and uses the term he is "trying to say something without saying it"? When Marxist cultural theorist Frederic Jameson collates 10 interviews of his into a book he calls: "Conversations on Cultural Marxism" he is part of this "verifiable history" and therefore "hateful". Perhaps consider Dennis Dworkin, a historian, in his account of the history of cultural studies and the left more broadly titled: "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain" is he secretly advancing a Fascist plot? Or finally, if none of this has swayed you, consider when the term is used in reference to Antonio Gramsci's work on Cultural Hegemony in the 1984 Italian Quarterly, is it the case here that the author is somehow referring to a right wing conspiracy theory thought up by Lind 20 years after the articles publication‽

Again, in case I haven't made this point strongly enough, the far right use the term in bad faith and there is no point engaging with them on it. However one needn't look far to find another term that is favoured amongst the alt right: "The Frankfurt School". Yet we on the left aren't denying that such a school or group of theorists existed; but rather claiming that the vile conspiracy theory dreamed up by Lind and his ilk is nothing more than that: a conspiracy theory. We should be doing the same with the concept of cultural marxism, acknowledging that there is a school of thought in cultural studies, and perhaps wider society, that takes many ideas from Marxist theory, and defending it.

Let's try a simple example first.

If I wanted to convince you of the validity of a universal wealth tax, I would recommend [Thomas Pinketty's (that's pronounced Thom-ah) excellent book, Capital in the 21st Century] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I2WNYJW?btkr=1), of which I'm sure you've heard. It is a huge achievement because Pinketty collected an incredibly large and detailed dataset on international wealth inequality, which is a task requiring a lot of planning, expertise, patience, and funding. His dataset shows I think definitively that the way we currently distribute wealth is fundamentally flawed (not necessarily because of the theory, mind, but because of the various transaction costs and market failures that either theory or policy fails to account for), and will hurt us in the future. As such, his suggestion of a universal wealth tax, which is highly controversial, certainly has grounds for insertion into mainstream discourse, if not yet or ever grounds for implementation. To reiterate: is the universal wealth tax a valid policy that is valid for real consideration? Absolutely. Is it valid in the sense that it is practicable? Probably not. Is it valid in the sense that it will accurately correct the system? Probably not.

If you're still with me, let's try a harder example. If I wanted to convince you of the validity of gender feminism, I would point you towards [Judith Butler's Gender Trouble] (http://www.amazon.com/Gender-Trouble-Feminism-Subversion-Routledge/dp/0415389550), which is perhaps a controversial choice, since Butler is controversial and her writing is a fucking disaster of postmodern proportions, but I think it lays out both the position of gender feminists and the benefits of gender feminism in exhaustive detail. Butler starts with the assertion that both sex and gender are socially constructed categories (forgive me if my shorthand is too broad, but basically, does it matter if you are a male or a female if other people can't tell by looking at you?) and concludes that gender identity is bullshit a priori and we don't need it socially or individually. Most people don't agree with her; most feminists don't agree with her, including, in my experience, academic feminists (although [this book] (http://www.amazon.com/Who-Stole-Feminism-Women-Betrayed/dp/0684801566/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414605464&sr=1-1&keywords=who+stole+feminism) by Christina Hoff Sommers, which I would use to convince you of the alternative view, disagrees with me re academia). But this view exists in feminism (it is found in vast quantities on /r/tumblrinaction) because, in part, Butler's logic (given her assumptions) is valid and her argument is convincing to a point. Are her assumptions valid? Who knows. We have no way of testing that except with more philosophy.

I'll finish off with an example for which I will not give you readings because you can find them in your local newspaper. Throughout the economic crisis, people have talked about the benefits of fiscal stimulus versus fiscal austerity. Logically, is either view valid? Of course; both have existed since the inception of macroeconomics. Furthermore, both have been successful in some situations and disastrous in others. Which view is valid given the situation? Depends on who you ask, and depends in a formative manner. For instance, Latvia experienced a contraction shock in 2008-2009 and the IMF were called in to design a policy program for recovery. The IMF are famous for their austerity stance, but in this situation, the Latvian government actually elected to fiscally contract more than the IMF thought necessary (fiscal contraction is when you increase taxes and reduce subsidies - it's political suicide and has potential to seriously harm the economy in the short term). They had the EU to answer to, and they wanted to show that they were in control of their situation and willing to enact such measures as were necessary. I've been wishy-washy in parts, but I'm pretty decided here: if you think that a politician's decision to act on the economy in a certain way is invalid because she is a politician, you are an idiot.

I can't tell you anything about astrology or shamanism because, as I've mentioned 5 times already, I am not qualified to talk about either. But validity in the social sciences and humanities is not a binary situation, and, whereas you're under no obligation to get it, you can at least be civil and shut up when you don't know what you're talking about.

o rlly?
Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450

Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014

"Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093

Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd

The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf

see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies"

"Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.

Cultural Marxism is not an invention of the paranoid right. It's a school of thought developed by left-wing Marxists and named by them as such because it describes the application of their own theory to culture rather than economics. Whether you agree with the movement or disagree with the movement, saying that it's not a movement, or that William Lind created a fictitious movement in 1998, is absurd. You are either misinformed or lying.

Below is a list of sources drawn exclusively from professors and scholars practicing cultural Marxism in which they use the term to describe the Frankfurt- and Birmingham-descended schools of thought.

1. Richard R. Weiner's 1981 book "Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology" is "a thorough examination of the tensions between political sociology and the cultural oriented Marxism that emerged int the 1960s and 1970s." You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Political-Sociology-Research/dp/0803916450
   
   
2. Marxist scholars Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson further popularized the term in "Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture", a collection of papers from 1983 that suggested that Cultural Marxism was ideally suited to "politicizing interpretative and cultural practices" and "radically historicizing our understanding of signifying practices." You can buy it here:http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Interpretation-Culture-Cary-Nelson/dp/0252014014
   
   Note that the left-wing and progressive Professor Grossberg is a world-renowned professor who is the Chair of Cultural Studies at UNC, near my house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Grossberg
   
   
3. "Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain", by Dennis Dworkin, is described by Amazon as "an intellectual history of British cultural Marxism" that "explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought" that represents "an explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar Left". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Marxism-Postwar-Britain-Post-Contemporary/dp/0822319144
   
   
4. "Conversations on Cultural Marxism", by Fredric Jameson, is a collection of essays from 1982 to 2005 about how "the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences". You can buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Jameson-Conversations-Cultural-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822341093
   
   Note that Dennis Dworkin is a progressive professor at the University of Nevada, where his most recent book, "Class Struggles", extends the themes of "Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain".
   
   
5. "Cultural Marxism," by Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, states that "Cultural Marxism is a generic term referring to a loosely associated group of critical theorists who have been influenced by Marxist thought and who share an interest in analyzing the role of the media, art, theatre, film and other cultural institutions in a society. The phrase refers to any critique of culture that has been informed by Marxist thought. Although scholars around the globe have employed various types of Marxist critique to analyze cultural artifacts, the two most influential have been the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany (the Frankfurt School) and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK. The latter has been at the center of a resurgent interest in the broader category of Cultural Studies." You can buy it here. http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Cultural-Marxism-Frederic-Miller-Agnes-Vandome/2237883213/bd
   
   The essay "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies," by UCLA Professor Douglas Kellner, says " 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life... There are, however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001)." The essay is available here: http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf
   
   Note that Professor Kellner is a progressive professor, an expert in Herbert Marcuse, and critic of the culture of masculinity for school shootings.
   
   
6. For another reference, see http://culturalpolitics.net/cultural_theory/journals for a list of cultural studies journals such as "Monthly Review", the long-standing journal of Marxist cultural and political studies". Note that the website Cultural Politics is a progressive site devoted to "critical analysis" of the "arena where social, economic, and political values and meanings are created and contested."
   
   
7. You could also check out "Cultural Marxism: Media, Culture and Society", Volume 7, Issue 1 of Critical sociology, of the Transforming Sociology series, from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Sociology.
   
   I hope that this brief survey amply demonstrates that Cultural Marxism is a term created and actively used by progressive scholars to describe the school of thought that first developed at Frankfurt and Birmingham to apply Marxism to cultural studies.

To my knowledge, gender doesn't mean male and female, but masculine and feminine.

http://www.amazon.com/Gender-Trouble-Feminism-Subversion-Routledge/dp/0415389550/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382651230&sr=8-1&keywords=gender+trouble+judith+butler

Hence, gender roles will always exist and that's not necessarily a bad thing because being masculine and feminine has traditionally been a requirement for being male or female.

If you just look at it and accept that females can be both masculine and feminine and the same for males, then there's nothing wrong with gender roles because it has nothing to do with sex (i.e. being male or female), but gender (being masculine or feminine).

edit: To clarify I'm not saying that women should be relegated to any traditional role, but that a yin-yang dichotomy will still exist of masculine and feminine gender roles and that both males and females are free to take up.