Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

Grade:	B+ (Difficult but mostly worth it)
Sentimental Value: Current Price:	$99.99 14.94

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

The sale of this book has, appropriately enough, been somewhat maddening. It's the last holdout from Foucault, and is something I feel I need to read all of. The parts I studied in school were eye-opening, especially in the way they shed light on other theories of psychology such as that of RD Laing. This is the kind of thing I would like to one day need to know, if I can ever get off my ass and get ready for grad school. I priced it pretty high though, seeing as it's the only copy of that printing for sale on Amazon.

Update 2/7:

I almost didn't make it through the first part about the transformation of the artistic representation of madness from the renaissance to the "classical age" of reason, the enlightenment. It's a slog, if you're not well-versed in the art, literature and history of the period, but I can't be bothered to sort it all out. Eventually I think I pretty much got the picture.

He traces the imagery from the pilgrimage of Bosch's Ship of Fools

to the confinement of first lepers, then, as leprosy disappeared from Europe, the mad as well as criminals and the excess human capital from the first factories (the poor), to the exhibitions of such "monsters" (derived from monstrare: "to show") for entertainment. One administrator found his colleagues had discovered an elegant moral loophole to justify the practice:

The English traveler is right to regard the office of exhibiting madmen as beyond the most hardened humanity. We have already said so. But all dilemmas afford a remedy. It is the madmen themselves who are entrusted in their lucid intervals with displaying their companions, who, in their turn, return the favor. Thus the keepers of these unfortunate creatures enjoy the profits that the spectacle affords, without indulging in a heartlessness to which, no doubt, they could never de-scend.

This became useful as an additional revenue stream after the ineffectual efforts to exert corrective effects on the markets (by incorporating the inmates into a factory for useful work) devolved into a mission to break man's rebellious animal spirit and restore the divine order, based upon the collective acceptance of the curse of human labor. Kind of the same way the Soviets went down.

It makes me wonder what influence the instruments of control developed in the houses of confinement may have had on the methods used by other organizations, based on the training at the last job I had.

It was at a warehouse for a large online retailer. I had to leave after two days. Actually, it's what inspired me to open my bookstore. Now they fulfill my orders, instead of the other way around.

You know those dreams where you're back in college/highschool? The training was like that, except you keep regressing until you're like, "I know I went to Princeton, dammit. What in blazes am I doing in Kindergarten, man?"

The game players of Titan by Philip K. Dick

Grade:	D (Didn't Read)
Status:	For Sale $old
Sentimental Value: Current (Sane) Market Value:	$220.00 (which a couple of fools are selling these for) $38.49

The Game-Players of Titan (The Gregg Press science fiction series)

I'm hoping I get a chance to read this one before it sells. I borrowed it from my college library right before going on a leave of absence, and when i got back there was no record of it on my library account. Eminent domain? I think the statute of limitations has run out at least.

Anyway I hear it's mad.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Grade:	D (Didn't Read)
Status:	Sold
Sentimental Value: Actual Selling Price:	$6.99 $1.25

I wasn't sure how I was going to review a book I didn't read. Fortunately Reading Rainbow did the job for me:

Reading Rainbow Banned Book Review #1 - watch more funny videos

Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius by Gary Lachman

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	For Sale
Sentimental Value:	$93.23

Gary Lachman (aka Valentine), the keyboardist from Blondie, is a deeply cool guy. He's written about the Gurdjieff work in a very astute yet personal way, and here he unearths all the juicy occult stuff from the little corners it's hidden itself in in 1960's culture, all clearly well researched and referenced.

Some of my weird and mind-bending favorites from the book:

"At a seminar "On Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, LaVey served the amputated thigh of a young woman, donated by a Berkeley physician, perpared by his second wife Diane following a Fiji islander recipe for puaka balava, 'long pig'. The most satanic of his audience in the early days was the film-maker Kenneth Anger, who introduced Marjorie Cameron, Jack Parsons' widow, to LaVey ... Susan Atkins, who stabbed the pregnant Sharon Tate to death, was for a time a dancer in LaVey's tawdry Topless Witches Revue that played in some of San Francisco's seedy venues. She would later claim it was LaVey who put her on the road to murder. And as we will see, Bobby Beausoleil, another member of the Family convicted of murder, starred in an early version of Anger's Lucifer Rising. Tate's husband, Roman Polanski, was the director of Rosemary's Baby, which features LaVey as the Devil."

So really that last part is a myth, which is weird because I really thought I remembered seeing LaVey as the Devil but it never actually happens. Zizek would have something to say about it, I'm sure. But the occasional misstep is worth it for such a journey through the hidden underbelly of 1960's stardom.

Later Anger falls in with the Stones through the witch Anita Pallenberg, but I don't want to spoil any more of it. It's like Anger's own Hollywood Babylon, but for Rock 'n Roll.

Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius by Gary Lachman

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	For Sale
Sentimental Value:	$19.99

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

So, first up on the chopping block. I actually wrote my final paper for phil on this one. Hume breaks down the source of all morals and human feelings with merciless precision, explaining how and why they come about in an almost phenomenological way, describing how they arise in the mind and make reason "the slave of the passions.”

I compared Hume's analysis of morality with Singer's hypothetical scenario, in which you are walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it. The problem is, you just bought these pants today, and they were really expensive. Do you risk getting the jeans muddy just to save a child who is going to die any second?



Psychologically healthy people would feel obligated to help, to prevent the suffering and death of the child. Singer's comparative example from real life is the equally certain imminent suffering of those threatened with starvation. I would add all the people living in hell in the Congo.

He compares the uncomfortable but morally irrelevant sacrifice of the cleanly state of one’s clothes to the equally morally irrelevant sacrifices of enjoyment of wealth the affluent would have to make to help the starving. The only difference between the two situations, Singer argues, is distance. Thus, if distance carries no intrinsic moral weight, as Singer holds, the affluent are under equal obligation to help alleviate famine as they are to save the drowning child.

Bummer city, right?

The other little story I liked from that class was supposed to illustrate a woman’s right to choose.

Imagine you live in a city where there’s a serious vagrancy problem, and the bums all catch a weird sleeping sickness that causes them to fall down and roll around on the ground. It’s summertime, and no one can afford air conditioning.

It’s a really hot night, and it would feel so much better to open one of the french windows everybody in town has and let the breeze blow through. You can just taste the cool breeze on your skin. But the law states that if through your negligence, one of these bums rolls into your house, you have to feed and care for him for the next 18 years to life.

Proof that NYC is bummer city USA courtesy of Girlnarly aka she of gnarly ideas