#frederick sontag | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

whatisonthemoon · 1 year

Text

Don Diligent’s Message to Sun Myung Moon and Neil Salonen: admit the UC is a CIA operation!

Re-posting from WIOTM Archive - a Don Diligent archived post from August 8, 2016, titled, “Mr. Moon! Just tell us the Unification Church is a CIA operation! Tell us now! You too Neil Salonen! Tell us now!”

Interview With Reverend Moon - Frederick Sontag - 1977

Sontag: Outsiders seem to detect a sense of conspiracy about the church and its activities. Why does it arouse this suspicion about its activities?

Moon: You know the Unification Church does not have any secrets. Many people think it is surrounded by secrets, like some sort of super CIA-type operation…I do not have anything to hide…we operate in the open.

Cults, Anti-Cultists, and the Cult of Intelligence by Daniel Brandt From NameBase NewsLine, No. 5, April-June 1994

Given the CIA’s resources, it is reasonable to expect that a commensurate interest in the cult phenomenon has secretly persisted through the years… A CIA interest in cults is far more ominous than the phenomenon of cults by themselves, because intelligence elites have the resources and mind-set to manipulate large populations.

The first example of such links is the Unification Church (UC) of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Today it is too well-established to be considered a cult; the list of their front groups and businesses in NameBase runs to 28 pages with 667 names. The UC no longer recruits on U.S. campuses the way they used to – they don’t need the money that Moonies would earn from selling flowers at airports, and they don’t need this sort of publicity. Instead they buy universities: in 1992 the UC plunked down over $50 million for the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, and one of the UC’s new trustees there is Jack E. Thomas, who was assistant chief of staff for U.S. air force intelligence for six years, and then special assistant to the CIA director for nine years.

Before the Unification Church was incorporated in the U.S. in 1963 by Bo Hi Pak, Moon had the support of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The expansion of the cult into the U.S. was conceived as a means of influencing U.S. politics. Four of Moon’s early followers were young army officers close to Kim Jong Pil, the founding director of the KCIA and chief strategist for the Park regime. Bo Hi Pak was the KCIA liaison to U.S. intelligence at the time, stationed in the Korean Embassy in Washington. Today he is one of Moon’s top aides and president of the Washington Times. In 1962 Kim made a two-week official visit to the U.S., and Lt. Col. Bo Hi Pak arranged meetings with CIA director John McCone, defense secretary Robert McNamara, and Defense Intelligence Agency director Gen. Joseph Carroll. On his way home, Kim met with some of Moon’s followers in San Francisco. Pak’s other duties at the Korean Embassy included frequent liaison trips to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. Moon… has received political and financial support from Yoshio Kodama, Ryoichi Sasakawa, and other powerful Japanese right-wing figures. In 1970 the Japanese contingent of Moon’s organization sponsored the annual conference of the World Anti-Communist League.

Church Takeover Of University Now Complete Hartford Courant August 07, 1992 By KATHERINE FARRISH

The Unification Church’s takeover of the struggling University of Bridgeport is now complete with the election of 16 new trustees, including several of the most prominent Americans in the Unification movement. Leading the list of trustees elected Wednesday by the 15 current trustees are Neil Albert Salonen…New University of Bridgeport trustees nominated by the Professors World Peace Academy: Jack E. Thomas, a retired Air Force major general, former special assistant to the director of the CIA, trustee of the Washington institute.

On the referenced ‘NameBase’ NameBase is a web-based cross-indexed database of names that focuses on individuals involved in the international intelligence community, U.S. foreign policy, crime, and business. The focus is on the post-World War II era and on left of center, conspiracy theory, and espionage activities. Founder Daniel Brandt began collecting clippings and citations pertaining to influential people and intelligence agents after becoming a member of the Students for a Democratic Society, an organization which opposed US foreign policy, in the 1970s. With the advent of personal computing, he developed a database which allowed subscribers to access the names of US intelligence agents.

0 notes

postpunkpsychedelilah · 2 years

Text

still chillin in plato's cave

So...I was thinking about writing an essay, and as a starting point, decided to dump all my thoughts out in a somewhat cohesive format. Now, this needs a lot of work. A LOT. But I usually don't get around to doing it, historically speaking. I'll try this time around, but I decided to just dump it here. That's what this place is sort of for, right? Anyway, let's hope I'm back soon with some edits! :)

sophia

-----

Is humankind still in Plato's Cave? Why did Susan Sontag think we were in it? What do Susan Sontag's concerns about photography imply about the nature of knowledge in general?

Susan expresses her concern with how the photographic eye creates a false sense that we can gather knowledge or understanding of the world through images. Susan writes on Page 3:

...This very insatiability of the photographic eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the more grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads–as an anthology of images.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

She also draws a connection of the photographic eye and an ethics of seeing. However, it must be considered on a more general level that any sense of knowledge is deeply related to an ethics. For if knowledge is considered as the conceptions that one forms of the world, and ethics as the judgments made of actions in the world, then the relation is obvious as the judgements must derive, at least in part, from the conceptions. Susan continues on Page 4:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge–therefore, like power.

In Plato's Cave

Susan states that the act of photography is akin to appropriation, as it puts the "photographer" in a certain relation of power of the "photographed". Though this is often the case, it does not have to be so. I think of the passage from Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy, where Deleuze discusses Nietzsche's discontent with Reactive Sciences. Discussing language as an example in particular, Deleuze says of Nietzsche's alternate of active philology (3.1, p. 74):

Nietzsche's active philology has only one principle: a word only means something insofar as the speaker wills something by saying it; and one rule: treating speech as a real activity, placing oneself at the point of view of the speaker. "The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rules: they say 'this is this and this', they seal every thing and event with a sound and, as it were, take possession of it" (GM 1 2 p. 26) Active linguistics looks to discover who it is that speaks and names. ... The transformation of the sense of word means that someone else (another force and another will) has taken possessions of it and is applying it to another thing because he wants something else.

To my Indian brain, there seem to be some seriously rancid colonial vibes going on with this reactive form of doing something (linguistics, photography). The key phrase to note, I think, about Nietzsche's critique of the reactive sciences, is "someone else has taken possession of it and is applying it to another thing because he wants something else." Deleuze goes on shortly to discuss a particular example of this sort of analysis that Nietzsche conducts in GM about "good", where he concludes that the sense of "good" was used by the rulers to impose their power and ways of being as desirable and create an ethical sense. This something else, Deleuze notes can be anything, God, culture, the proletariat.

It is not hard to apply this same critique to photography. It would then seem, that Susan's critique and concerns of appropriation may only be valid for reactive photography. A reactive photographic eye, insofar as it has been appropriated wills to appropriate. A Decolonized?, Nietzschean alternative, of an active photography, aims to free reactive photography (which comes about from some abstract relations? see page 74 again) from being appropriated. Instead of evaluating photography through a third party which has appropriated the act of photography (the market, capitalism, a popular sense of desirable, etc.), it aims to evaluate it from a genealogical perspective, and from the perspective of the one who wills the photograph. To play on a quote towards the end of p. 74:

Who makes a particular photograph? What do they apply it to? And with what intention? What do they will by producing a particular photograph?

Susan, to her credit, goes on to carry out this very analysis. She stresses the difficulties of transforming the photographic eye, and how images can still not lead to knowledge.

While a painting or prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.

Any sense of aesthetics is deeply connected to a sense of ethics. For judging beauty is more or less done in the same capacity as judging good, even if judgements differ due to intricacies of language. They do, however, come from the same place. What this place is is a mystery, for now, but the individual's conception of the world, and their knowledge is a great place to start.

Wittgenstein's most succinct general description of the oneness of ethics and aesthetics is given in his 1929 'A Lecture on Ethics'.5 There he stipulates that he will use the term 'ethics' in a sense 'which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of what is generally called Aesthetics'. Ethics, he says, is 'the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into what is really important. . . the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the rightway of living'.6 The values into which ethics enquires are to be regarded as absolutes. The judgement, for example, that something is ethically good is not one that states that something is good for some purpose or end but that it is good simpliciter, irrespective of any purpose it may fulfill.

The view that ethical value is intrinsic aligns Wittgenstein's ethical thinking in the Kantian strand, rejecting from the outset the contrast, already noted, between the ethical as action towards some end and the aesthetic as 'for its own sake'. So the unity claimed thus far for ethics and aesthetics is not of an exceptional or original kind: they are one in having to do with values, with the meaning of life or 'what makes life worth living', and also in that the values of both are intrinsic. (https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article-abstract/25/3/266/57042?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false).

It is easy to consider a double inversion that collapses on analyzing the connection between aesthetics and ethics in different cultures. The ethics (concept of value) seem to greatly inform aesthetics (concept of beauty), and the aesthetics (concept of beauty) seem to greatly inform ethics (concept of value). This is due to a natural overlap in those concepts from a sense of desire, though they might sometimes produce a differing relation.

Now, we can start to look around our cave.

Where does one's conception of the world come from? What informs one's sense of knowledge? From what we have read in Sontag, so far, seems to tell us that images play a great role, for better or for worse, in how a sense of knowledge forms currently in society. Indeed, even Nietzsche's own critiques, which we have already discussed, hint at this idea that knowledge comes from a genealogical source, one with a genetic and historical characteristic.

From this, it may be concluded that knowledge, as we conceive of it, on any scale–an individual, a nation, all of human kind, is merely a model of reality. It is constructions with which we can interpret phenomena, constructions which themselves become phenomena.

Is there a way out of our cave?

It should be clear, however, that the process of creation of knowledge–of discovering more and more of the coherent reality of the world–can be halted, or at least slowed down, if a reactive force appropriates the process of knowledge creation. That is, knowledge creation, or creation of any sort, must be active. An active force, for Nietzsche, is a force which goes to its full potential. A reactive force is separated from its full potential. Concretely, if the process of creation is appropriated by another force, such as "what makes art makes most money", "what work gets most awards", "what video gets bumped up by an algorithm", then our processes of creation primarily fulfills the goals of the force which has appropriated the process of creation. Though the reactive process of creation still creates to its will, it does not do so to its full extent. Only the active process of creation, creation for the sake of creation, one which evaluates creation through a genealogical lens instead of the lens of the appropriating forces, can succeed in a full regard. If we make anti-capitalist videos on YouTube to feed the algorithm, we are working primarily for the algorithm. We can never truly escape the clutches of this system if we continue to evaluate things through the lens of the system.

This makes me think of a very popular argument against classical/neoclassical traditions of economics, where the usage of concepts such as GDP, demand and supply, etc. are critiqued as ones which only observe with the aim to justify the system, and are limited by the constructs of the system.

This brings me back to this idea––in her essay against interpretation, Susan Sontag makes a distinction between the act of experiencing and the act of analyzing. I take a problem with this distinction. However, I do agree with her core ideas, when seen in this new, transformed, Deleuze-Nietzschean way. If one thinks of analyzing and experiencing as the same kind of actions, ones which involve interpretation of the world, we can see how we can draw a distinction between this reactive/colonial lens of evaluation/interpretation and an active/decolonial lens of evaluation/interpretation. Susan says herself in the closing of her essay:

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art–and, by analogy, our own experience–more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

The Exit Sign

I will change this last statement, since I already mentioned I am a bit skeptical about the distinction between hermeneutics and erotics. I will take it to mean that we need a new erotics of art, one that does not evaluate art from any existing lens, but from a genealogical view. One that aims to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

This resonates another idea from Nietzsche. Shortly following Nietzsche's critique of science, Deleuze discusses the form of the question in Nietzsche. He notes that metaphysics formulated the question of essence in the form "what is...?". To Deleuze's Nietzsche, this question presupposes a particular way of thinking, and is not necessarily the most suitable one for determining essence. Taking the example of beauty, as discussed in a Platonic dialog, Deleuze shows how this idea presupposes an essence of beauty outside particular instances, which any particular instances aim to emulate. However, for Deleuze and Nietzsche, a much more suitable way of determining the beautiful is by evaluating the particular in itself, as opposed to evaluating it through a foreign lens. Instead of asking "what is beautiful", asking "which one is beautiful, what about it is beautiful, why is it beautiful".

According to Nietzsche, the question "which one?" (qui) means this: what are the forces which take hold of a given thing, what is the will that possesses it? Which one is expressed, manifested and even hidden in it? We are led to essence only by the question: which one? For essence is merely the sense and the value of the thing; essence is determined by the forces with affinity for the thing and by the will with affinity for the forces. Moreover, when we ask the question "what is it?" (qu'est-ce que) we not only fall into the worst metaphysics but in fact we merely ask the question "which one?" in a blind, unconscious and confuesd way. The question "what is it?" is a way of establishing a sense seen from another point of view. Essence, being, is a perspectival reality and presupposes a plurality. Fundamentally it is a always the question "what is it for me?" (for us, for everyone that sees, etc.) (VP I 204).

hannah baer in trans girl suicide museum also questions the sensibility that develops with the question of what is.

And also I think that if there's one thing I want to critique here it's having critiques of things instead of just saying your underlying emotions, because abstract critique is a part of the patriarchy [I believe that it is a more fundamental human flaw, but one which is reinforced by the forces the patriarchy] (and I know this because being socialized as a man for me, especially at fancy colleges, was being trained, over and over agin, to hold power by critiquing things from a place of objectivity, instead of just saying my emotional intuition and not making up a reason for why it felt that way). I think because of this I sometimes feel bored when I have to deal with or engage someone's abstract critique, and it's easier and more fun for me to engage with their emotionality. In fact, sometimes abstract critiques make me angry which is why I developed an abstract critique of them.

We need to get out, in here is not safe.

When you presuppose an external framework through which you critique and evaluate, you are merely propagating that framework, all it's flaws with it. You are producing reactive critique, one which aims to justify the world instead of trying to understand it. On evaluating an object in itself, in its genetic and historic sense, you can affirm the differences between such objects, and produce a transformed critique one which is freed from the appropriation of these external forces.

This has obvious implications in a greater political and ethical sense. For instance, what does it mean to be trans? What does transness itself mean, and should it be acceptable? A Nietzschean analysis of gender would reveal gender as an initial construction to understand the world, then uncover gender identity and gender performance as a completely social construct which would imply any deviation from "assigned" gender to ones real gender identity would be acceptable unless one presupposes the existent social lens to look at it (as it aims to reinforce the will of the social construction). For gender identity and expression, is different from biological gender, and must not be appropriated by forces that try to reinforce the idea that they are the same.

Transness itself is not one single, definitive experience, as hannah baer notes in trans girl suicide museum (p. 20). It is not bound to any strict categorization as the reactive eye may wish for.

What does it mean to be alive? Who should have rights? What kind of rights? Are animals alive? Should animals have more rights? Are rivers, ecosystems, alive, in some sense? They move, they breathe, they are born, they die. In some sense, they are more elegant than us, more alive than us, outliving us. They cannot scream in our language, but they do so in theirs. We have just refused to listen, to feel. Still reveling, in our age-old habits, in mere images of the truth.

#notes #my writing #draft dump #politics #philosophy #frederick nietzsche #deleuze #susan sontag

1 note · View note

fettesans · 2 years

Photo

Top, screen capture from Titicut Follies, directed by Frederick Wiseman, 1967. Bottom, screen capture from The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012.

When Wiseman filmed Titicut Follies, a fruit vendor sentenced to two years for drunkenness had been incarcerated for 28. His crime: He painted stripes on his horse to look like a zebra because he thought it would attract customers to his cart. Via.

Where are we to locate the core of absolute control: where is the inner homunculus that “ultimately” controls my doings? In my mental life—which, in point of fact, I “control” in only a rather strange way, if at all? In my (intentional) bodily movements—with all of the difficulties already enumerated? Or perhaps in a part of my body...On all such views there is a sector of a person that is, somehow, “in control” of the rest: some part of a person is controlled which operates the rest of him the way the operator operates a machine. The search for the “inner man” (braincum-nerves, muscles, and skeleton) who alone exercised direct control is a fruitless and quixotic quest

Nicholas Rescher, from Understanding Reality: Metaphysics in Epistemological Perspective, 2018. Via.

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for the masses), and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.

Susan Sontag, from On photography, 1977. Via.

#diptych #reoccurrence #research for UFP

5 notes · View notes

howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 7 months

Text

For many followers of Sun Myung Moon the story that ‘Jesus passed on his mission to Moon at Easter’ is a pillar of their faith.

Moon used his story to forge a direct connection between Jesus and himself, and thereby inherit authority from Jesus and have legitimacy with Christianity. Moon was careful to keep his secret inner teachings and sex rituals hidden from mainstream Christianity because they would have been anathema. Moon experienced shamanism from childhood and ancestor liberation and shaman rituals were always a part of the Unification Church / FFWPU practise.

Moon was excommunicated by the Presbyterian Church in Korea in 1948 following his conviction for bigamy for which he was sentenced to five years in Heungnam prison.

There was no witness to Moon’s encounter with Jesus, so it could not be denied or contradicted. However, Moon contradicted himself about the date – and about what happened. He said it was on his birthday, and not on Easter Sunday. None of his accounts mention a mountain. The first recorded instance of Moon having an experience with Jesus was when he told Chung-hwa Pak in prison in 1949 that he had a dream of Jesus.

Over the years Moon’s story evolved and changed. On investigation, his story is not credible.

Sun Myung Moon: “Until our mission with the Christian Church is over, we must quote the Bible and use it to explain the Divine Principle. After we receive the inheritance of the Christian Church, we will be free to teach without the Bible. Now, however, our primary mission is to witness to the Christian Church.” Master Speaks 7, March/April 1965, page 1

Professor Frederick Sontag went to Korea in September 1976 on a fact finding tour. He had also met Rev Moon for a long interview. His book: ‘Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church’ was published in 1977.

On page 78: “As nearly as I could determine from my tour in Korea, the story of humble origin, imprisonment, and suffering is substantially true. … It is interesting that his two cousins to whom I talked knew nothing of the ‘Easter revelation experience.’” Moon’s cousins knew nothing

...

LINK

#fake news #unification church #moonies #sun myung moon #Jesus

1 note · View note

eyegiene · 2 years

Photo

Really proud of this anthology, co-edited with Antonio Rafele and @professorlatinx — pick up a copy here hype.sdsu.edu or hit my linktree biolink here @william.nericcio #hyperbolebooks Posted @withregram • @professorlatinx Thanks for the shoutout!🙏🏽Posted @withregram • @libromobile 💻Cultural Studies in the Digital Age by Aldama, Nericcio, et al. 📚About the book From Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press! What is Cultural Studies!? Oh, we know all about Stuart Hall and his landmark work and we are hip to the tune of Marshall Blonsky, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and John Berger. But what will Cultural Studies look like after AI, after COVID, after the next new wave of next-generation developments in computer science. One might think: “The algorithms will write future essays.” But that means tenure for algorithms? Surely not! In this collection you will find essays on Disney, video games, fashion photography, and more—the traditional fodder of cultural studies; but you will also find deep meditations on memes, Instagram, social media, the border, Mexico, and more. Sit back and get ready to read some of the more provocative musings on both sides of the Atlantic by up-and-coming stars of Ethnic Studies, Literature, Linguistics, and more. Contributors include: Frederick Aldama, Brian Frastaci, Federico Tarquini, Antonio Rafele, Tito Vagni, Gwendolyn Kurtz, Kristal Bivona, Luca Acquarelli, William Nericcio, Katie Waltman, Massimo Cerulo, Lorenzo Bruni, Alberto Abruzzese, Jennifer Carter, Ralph Clare, Nello Barile, Katlin Marisol Sweeney, Bonnie Opliger, Matteo Treleani, Vanni Codeluppi, Guerino Bovalino, Agnese Pastorino, Carlos Kelly, and Antonio Rafele. #santaana #libromobile #bookworm #culturalstudiesindigitalage #libros #anthologies https://www.instagram.com/p/CfzgMhEPsuC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#hyperbolebooks #santaana #libromobile #bookworm #culturalstudiesindigitalage #libros #anthologies

0 notes

yorgunherakles · 4 years

Quote

sorumluluk alternatiflerden haberdar olanlar için söz konusudur.

feyerabend - vakit öldürmek

7 notes · View notes

graceofromanovs · 4 years

Text

24th June (O.S. 12th June) 1825

Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna, the third daughter of Emperor Nicholas I and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, was born on this day in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire. She was named after her late aunt Grand Duchess Alexandra Pavlovna, but in the family she was known by her affectionate nickname “Adini”. According to her sister Olga’s memoirs, Alexandra had inherited her mother’s “Prussian look”, resembling her maternal grandmother Queen Louise of Prussia. Her father affectionately spoke of Adini as “... a little moppet, but very sweet.”

Alexandra was known for both of her wit and lively personality. She possessed musical talents, and was considered talented enough to qualify for lessons from the famous soprano Henriette Sontag. In 1844, she married Prince Frederick “Fritz” William of Hesse-Kassel. The couple would have a happy, albeit brief marriage. Alexandra became ill shortly before her wedding, which complicated her pregnancy that followed. She went to labour three months before the child was due, and gave birth to a son, Wilhelm. The infant died shortly after he was born, and Alexandra died later the same day. The first of her parents to die. Their grief and devastation would last until the end of their lives.

“I’m finishing this diary and, by strange coincidence, at the same time completing my girlish experience. It was beautiful, this existence, and very happy. I didn’t know sorrow. God and the people who love me helped me to store on necessities for my future. It is revealed now to me as the dawn of a beautiful day. So let the clouds that lie upon it dissipate before the evening, and the evening of my life be like its dawn! God help me!” — Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna, 1843.

#romanovs #history #royalty #myedits #alexandra feodorovna #nicholas i #alexandra nikolaevna

152 notes · View notes

orangerosebush · 3 years

Note

Please tell about your history as a reader! (Sorry if the question is weird, this was the best way I could come up with...)

Not a weird question! Feel free to send me an ask if I’ve interpreted your question incorrectly, also.

I’ve always liked to read, and when I was ~14, I started trying to find 1) consistencies in the sorts of books I like and 2) ways to get good recommendations. I’ll come back to this post to add some resources later, but I found that really small booktubers (<400 followers) usually were what I was looking for; I followed people documenting their degree in postmodern literature, or in Austen, or in gothic fiction, and so on. This helped me find more esoteric titles, and from there, I tried to follow people who enjoyed those books to find new titles to read!

I’ve also always been tight with my English professors, and because I’d stay in their classroom to do work in high school during lunch (I was… a very awkward teen with very few friends my age, lol), they’d often lend me books they’d just finished. My AP lit teacher gave me my copy of Elena Ferrante‘s “My Brilliant Friend”, Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My year of rest and relaxation”, and Han King’s “The Vegetarian”. On the other hand, my AP language and rhetoric teacher got me into philosophy, and he gave me pdfs of Frederick Douglass’ autobiography and Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”. These two teachers were some of the biggest influences on my academic growth, and I’m very thankful to have had them in my life.

Nowadays, I have a lot less time to read for pleasure, so I try to keep a list of books I want to read ready so that when I have a free moment, I can pull up the pdf on my ebook app :).

5 notes · View notes

palmerasenfuego · 3 years

Text

partial reading log, 2021

Great Expectations, Kathy Acker

The Oresteia, Aeschylus

Inferno, Dante Alighieri(!)

Poetics, Aristotle

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen(#)

Amiri Baraka poems

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes

Snow White, Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme stories

Mythologies, Roland Barthes

Samuel Beckett stories

The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky(#)

Bertolt Brecht essays

Lord Byron poems(!)

Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific, W.S. Cerve

Chariots of the Gods, Erich von Däniken

The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord(!)

Barbara Villiers, or, A History of Monetary Crimes, Alexander del Mar

Relativity, Albert Einstein

Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince, Marc Eliot(#)

The Epic of Gilgamesh (N.K. Sandars)

Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman

Escape from Freedom (selections), Erich Fromm

The Greek Myths, Robert Graves(*)

The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, David Ray Griffin

The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han

A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

Nathaniel Hawthorne stories(!)

Maria M., Gilbert Hernandez

How Should A Person Be, Sheila Heti(#)

A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials, Frances Hill

I Ching(*)

Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood

Kabbala: A Very Short Introduction, Dan Joseph

Dora Lives: The Authorized Story of Miki Dora, Drew Kampion

UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, Leslie Kean(#)

Gidget, Frederick Kohner

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human intelligence, Ray Kurzweil(#)

The Death of Ahasuerus, Pär Lagerkvist

Barabbas, Pär Lagerkvist

Malador, the Comte de Lautréamont

Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, Ursula K. Le Guin(#)

The Lichtenberg Figures, Ben Lerner(!)

Clarice Lispector stories

Terrorism and the Illuminati: A Three Thousand Year History, David Livingstone(*)

Federico García Lorca poems(!)

The Prince, Niccolò Machievelli(!)

Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe

Dark Money, Jane Mayer(#)

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (selections), Marshall McLuhan

The Archaic Revival, Terence McKenna(*)

Paradise Lost, John Milton(!)

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima

The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692, Mary Beth Norton

Dept. of Speculation, Jenny Offill

Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler(#)

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels

ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound

Selected Poems, Ezra Pound

Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon(!)

V., Thomas Pynchon

Vineland, Thomas Pynchon

Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais(#)

Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed

Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

120 Days of Sodom, The Marquis de Sade(*)

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley(!)

Afghanistan: A Cultural History, St John Simpson

Science and Human Behavior, B.F. Skinner

Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag

Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein

The Art of War, Sun Tzu

America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, Antony C. Sutton

Cold Fusion: The Secret Energy Revolution, Antony C. Sutton

Dylan Thomas poems

Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, Jacques Vallée

Candide, Voltaire

The 70 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, Jonathan Vankin & John Whalen

The Occult: A History, Colin Wilson(*)

The Prize, Daniel Yergin(*)

Chess Story, Stefan Zweig

key: * = in progress, ! = reread, # = abandoned

3 notes · View notes

cntrl-mag · 4 years

Photo

CNTRL MAGAZINE | BIG YELLOW ENERGY

Nuestra edición amarilla fue nuestro saludo al mundo de la impresión, ya que esta fue el primer volumen que estuvo a la venta e impresión. Nos enfocamos en el mundo de la moda he inspirado en las notas de Susan Sontag, lleno de brillo, moda y elementos queers.

Esta portada fue protagonizada por: Lexis Sierra bajo el lente de Juliana Salazar, styling Fabian Rodriguez y producción de Frederick Leonett

Descargala aquí!

file:///E:/Respaldo%20de%20Laptop/1.%20CNTRL%20magazine/CNTRL%205%20-%20BIG%20yellow%20energy/vol%205%20Big%20Yellow%20Energy.pdf

#cntrlmagazine #queer #magazine #fashion #moda #yellow #beauty #love #vogue

2 notes · View notes

whatisonthemoon · 2 years

Text

Washington Post: A Church in Flux Is Flush With Cash (1997)

Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, November 23, 1997 First of two articles

Even as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church falters as a religion in the United States, it remains a robust, diverse business -- especially in the Washington area, where the movement controls more than $300 million in commercial, political and cultural enterprises.

From rundown city storefronts to gleaming suburban office buildings, from ornately refurbished mansions to mundane tract housing, organizations owned or sponsored by Moon and his inner circle of Korean and American followers hold properties stretching from Prince George's to Fairfax counties, according to corporate, property and court records.

This vast and bewildering multinational could be called Moon Inc. It is a sprawling collection of churches, nonprofit foundations and for-profit holding companies whose global operations include computers and religious icons in Japan, seafood in Alaska, weapons and ginseng in Korea, huge tracts of land in South America, a university in Bridgeport, Conn., a recording studio and travel agency in Manhattan, a horse farm in Texas and a golf course in California.

In the Washington area, the Unification Church's investment is an important cog in a global machine that Moon uses to boost his credibility, spread his spiritual doctrine and win political influence, according to current and former church members.

As the Unification movement evolved from selling roses on street corners to acquiring control of a nationwide cable channel, the nation's capital became the epicenter of Moon's U.S. holdings. Those include the Washington Times newspaper, a video production firm and a stately old church, once the pride of the Mormons, along 16th Street NW. Washington-area property owned by the church, its affiliated companies or senior church officials is worth more than $200 million, according to property and corporate records.

Washington will be the focus of the worldwide Unification movement this week, as Moon-sponsored organizations hold a series of academic conferences and the World Sports and Culture Festival, culminating Saturday with a mass wedding at RFK Stadium. Here and at locations around the world, the church says it will marry or reaffirm wedding vows of 3.6 million couples.

At 77, Moon presides over a church in flux, an embattled religion that has found only a small following in this country despite nearly four decades of proselytizing. The South Korean self-declared Messiah has grown increasingly vehement in his denunciations of American society; earlier this year, he declared his intent to give up on his U.S. church. As the religion fades, even some loyal followers now fear that Moon's most enduring legacy will be his multibillion-dollar business empire.

Within the Unification movement, Moon's spiritual and business ventures are viewed as part of a unified whole. "Ideas without the money to back them up are just dreams," said Richard Rubenstein, president of the movement-controlled University of Bridgeport. In church parlance, a position at a church-related business is not a job, but a mission.

"The corporate section is understood to be the engine that funds the mission of the church," said Virginia Commonwealth University sociologist David Bromley, who has studied the church for more than 15 years. "The wealth base is fairly substantial. But if you were to compare it to the Mormon Church or the Catholic Church or other churches that have massive landholdings, this doesn't look on a global scale like a massive operation."

Since the 1970s, Moon has gained his highest profile in this country not with his church, but with the Times, the 100,000-circulation daily that competes with The Washington Post.

Moon said earlier this year that he has spent more than $1 billion in subsidies for the paper over 15 years. Church members say the publication has never come close to turning a profit, but the paper has become an established voice of conservative America, winning readers in the White House and praise for its professionalism and scoops on national and local stories.

Beyond the Times, Moon-affiliated entities are linked by a complex web of interlocking directorships and nurtured by a seemingly endless flow of cash from the Far East. That has enabled them to buy new businesses such as the Nostalgia Network cable channel and even help bail out the Rev. Jerry Falwell's foundering Liberty University.

Executives of Unification-related entities have acknowledged that money from Japan and Korea fuel U.S. operations, but the magnitude and mechanism of those payments, as well as their exact sources, have eluded investigators on three continents over the past three decades.

The rise of Moon's U.S. businesses and decline of his U.S. church -- leaders say membership is stagnant, former members contend it is declining -- may prove merely that it is easier to sell seafood or jewelry than a religion based on a unique merger of Western Christian theology and Eastern Confucian temperament. Bromley compares Unificationism to 19th century American communal religions such as the Oneidas, Shakers and Amanas, new faiths that began with a burst of energy, but settled into entropy dominated by their business interests.

"Membership plummeted, and what remained was the corporate structure," Bromley said.

Moon's businesses exist for several purposes, church leaders and critics agree: to employ members, to gain influence in industries Moon considers crucial to worldwide recognition of himself as Messiah, and to support Moon's spiritual and political agenda.

Sometimes, that support is direct, as when Moon's nonprofit organizations contribute to conservative political and social causes with financial donations, staff and publicity. And sometimes it is indirect, as when Moon-sponsored groups stage academic, religious and cultural conferences, inviting professors, clergy, media executives and other opinion-shapers to meetings, expenses paid.

"Of course, the whole thing is to buy respectability," said Marvin Borderlon, a Roman Catholic ex-priest who is president of the American Conference on Religious Movements, a Rockville-based group that fights discrimination against new religions. The group is funded by the Church of Scientology, the Hare Krishna organization, and most of all, by Unificationists, who give him $3,000 a month, Borderlon said.

"They'll have a conference on the essence of religious founders, like Buddha, Jesus and guess who," Borderlon said. "He gets a room full of academics to sit there while he pronounces himself the Messiah. He gets his picture taken with them. He gets credibility, they get to have their conference. It's all very messy."

Borderlon, like many people who have received some of Moon's generous bounty, has never been able to figure out the blizzard of organizations that make up Moon Inc. "My money is never from the church itself," he said. "It's always the International Something or Other."

Wide-Ranging Interests

On two floors of an office building in Falls Church -- purchased by a church-owned property development company from conservative activist Richard Viguerie -- the startling range of Moon's interests and activities is played out along hallways bare of art or decoration.

On one corridor, the International Coalition for Religious Freedom -- the group that Borderlon said signs his checks these days -- shares a suite with the Martial Arts Federation for World Peace and a company called Washington Times Aviation. The only person in the suite on a recent visit was a Korean man who spoke little English, saying only, "I am Martial Arts Federation. I work for Father," the term by which devotees of Unificationism refer to Moon.

Church officials have for years denied any direct control of the myriad businesses, saying its members run the companies and contribute to the church. But some members and internal publications indicate Moon is deeply involved in directing corporate activities.

A column in a Unification Church of Washington newsletter in 1990 informs members of "Father's Instructions": work on "economic, political, cultural whole system activity," recruit precisely 84 new members, and proceed with "national organization of the fish . . . video and electronic media . . . and jewelry businesses."

"Rev. Moon says many things," said Farley Jones, president of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, the most important nonprofit in Moon's network. "Sometimes you have to sort through it and select which activities to focus on."

Jones and a few other church leaders and members spoke to Post reporters, but most officials at church-connected organizations and businesses did not return repeated calls for comment over the past six weeks.

Moon's Washington enterprises range from a ballet academy to an architectural molding company on 14th Street NW to magazines such as Insight and the World & I.

"The idea was that we'd be like Disney, controlling all kinds of media, working on behalf of God," said Ron Paquette, who was president of Manhattan Center Studio, the church's New York recording facility, until he left the faith in 1994.

Paquette, whose job gave him access to financial information about several church-related businesses, said he believes virtually none of Unification's U.S. operations is profitable. "A lot of the stuff they do is for prestige, so they can show President Bush our dance academy and our newspaper," Paquette said. "The idea is to bring Bush in, use his name and picture, buy Moon credibility."

A 1978 congressional investigation into "the Moon organization" concluded that "the Unification Church and numerous other religious and secular organizations headed by Sun Myung Moon constitute essentially one international organization" that moved money freely among its entities.

In 1994, the Unification movement opened an unusual window onto that flow of money, as well as its willingness to suffer sustained losses, when its Concept Communications subsidiary paid $11.5 million for a controlling stake in the Nostalgia Network. It was the movement's first foray into a U.S. public company, forcing it to disclose detailed information to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The cable TV channel -- featuring reruns such as "The Rockford Files," "Tony Orlando and Dawn" and "The Captain and Tennille" -- has suffered sharp losses and dwindling access to cable households. The number of households that get Nostalgia has dropped from 12 million to 7 million in the three years since church-connected companies acquired control. Moon-related companies have spent more than $60 million to gain control of the network and keep it afloat, SEC filings show.

When the Moon subsidiaries -- Concept, Crown Communications and Crown Capital -- took over Nostalgia, they paid at least $2.30 a share, according to the companies' statements. Last week, Nostalgia was trading at 7 cents.

With numbers like that, said Bruce Leichtman, a cable TV analyst for the Yankee Group, "you have to fold. Unless, of course, you have an endless source of cash."

SEC filings show that the cash for Nostalgia comes through a chain of companies leading to the Unification Church International. It's a vertically integrated operation common in Moon's empire:

Nostalgia leases offices from the Unification-owned Washington Television Center, part of the $90 million office building at 650 Massachusetts Ave. NW, which is owned by U.S. Property Development Corp., which in turn is one of many Moon-connected companies under One Up Enterprises Inc., the main holding company for the movement's U.S. businesses.

Nostalgia's production facilities are in the Alexandria headquarters of Atlantic Video, a Moon-connected company that was one of the area's top video production firms in the late 1980s. Its billings have suffered recently, according to video industry figures.

Asked whether Moon-connected ventures operate in service of the church, Jonathan Park, a church member who until 1991 ran Atlantic and several other Moon-related businesses, said, "That's an interesting question. It's a worldwide organization. Specifically how they're all connected, I don't think is very clear."

What is clear is that the most important building for many local Unification ventures is the Falls Church office complex at 7777 Leesburg Pike, purchased for $10 million in 1987. This is headquarters of One Up, a primary conduit for overseas cash coming into Unificationism's U.S. operations, according to Paquette and other former church executives. One Up president Michael Runyon did not return calls from The Post. (One Up, like many Moon-related ventures, draws its name from Moon's spiritual teachings. His chinchilla farm is called One Mind Farms; the movie production company that made his epic flop about the Korean War, "Inchon," was called One Way Productions.)

One Up last year had estimated sales of $232.3 million and 2,000 employees in its subsidiaries, according to Dun & Bradstreet.

One Up and its parent, Unification Church International, not only share hallways with many church-supported nonprofit groups, but help many such groups get started, current and former members said.

"The idea was to connect all these businesses to the church," said Bromley, the sociologist. "UCI was then to control all the profit-making companies and . . . the profits from that are channeled into the not-for-profit foundations."

Those groups range from an inner-city runners' club called D.C. Striders Track Club to a 210-student private school in Landover Hills called New Hope Academy. The academy's principal, Joy Morrow, said Moon personally contributed $250,000 for the down-payment on the school building. She said the school was founded by Unificationists who were "really unhappy with the public schools," but she said New Hope is not affiliated with the church. Morrow described the school as "God-centered," adding that about 40 percent of the students come from Unificationist families, with the rest from about 20 other faiths.

Moon launched what is now the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Northeast, according to church publications. Housed in a splendid mansion, Kirov is widely respected for the quality of its dancers and faculty, led by artistic director Oleg Vinogradov, who was recruited from the Kirov Ballet in Russia.

Moon created the school in part for Julia Moon, whom Moon considers his daughter-in-law since she married the spirit of his deceased son in a unique church ceremony.

"The idea behind all these arts, science and media projects is that they will assemble talented and influential people and someday they will realize Moon is the whole truth," Paquette said. "His objective is not to find great dancers, but great credibility."

Seeking Credibility

The road to that credibility, critics say, is paved with cash.

"Rev. Moon sent bags of cash, big fat bags, stacks and stacks of hundreds, from Korea and Japan to Manhattan Center," the church's recording studio in New York City, Paquette said. "Whenever we asked where the money was coming from, the answer was it just came `from Father.' "

Borderlon, too, said Moon's various groups seem awash in cash. "I've made numerous trips to Japan for them," he said, "and they take me to see these great fancy businesses they have there. There's always huge amounts of cash involved in doing anything with them. In dealing with them, you have to accept cash. I came back from Japan once with $10,000 in my pocket -- cash."

Some members believe the cash comes from the church's traditional core business -- street sales of flowers, laser prints and wooden engravings. No one has hard evidence of the ultimate sources, not even a former high-ranking church member who said he once sneaked into Unification archives in an unsuccessful search for answers to the money puzzle.

The wealth of Unificationism's worldwide economic empire remains a closely guarded secret. Lawrence Zilliox, a private investigator who has studied the church for more than a decade, has concluded from church documents that Unification Church International, the main holding company for Moon's U.S. businesses, exceeded $500 million in the mid-1980s.

But the church's wealth has always been centered in Asia. A detailed analysis by the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1990 valued the church's landholdings in South Korea alone at more than $1 billion. A single property on Seoul's Yoida Island was said to be worth $250 million. The collection of Unification-related companies in Korea -- known as the Tong Il group -- was ranked as the country's 28th largest `chaebrol' or business conglomerate, with ventures ranging from titanium mining to weapons manufacturing.

In recent years, several of the Korean companies have lost money, causing business experts there to wonder -- like their counterparts in America -- where the money comes from.

The long-standing explanation: It is Japan, not Korea, that provides the bulk of the church's wealth -- as much as 70 percent, church observers estimate. A former high-ranking Japanese church member told The Post in 1984 that $800 million had come from Japan into the United States in the previous nine years.

Japanese church members have long turned profits selling ginseng products and religious items such as miniature stone pagodas -- products imported from Moon companies in Korea. But tough sales tactics -- as well as disputed claims of spiritual power -- have led to class-action suits in Japan, and hundreds of claimants have won judgments and settlements in the last five years.

Yet despite years of such legal and financial troubles, the Unification movement continues to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into existing businesses and new ventures around the world, according to business analysts and academics who study the church.

The Money Trail

Moon has repeatedly told his followers that money flowing into church coffers is meant for higher purposes. Some money goes to cultural, educational and religious enterprises. But according to former church members, the Unification movement also dedicates resources to winning political influence in America.

"Tom McDevitt always told me that Father has directed us to get members elected to Congress so we can take over America," said Craig Maxim, a church member who quit in 1995 after spending several years as a regional leader and a singer at Moon's various mansions.

McDevitt ran an unsuccessful Republican campaign for a Virginia House of Delegates seat in 1993. Campaign records show many of McDevitt's contributions came from church members and businesses. Now press spokesman for several Moon-affiliated groups, he did not return repeated calls.

Moon's most ambitious foray into the political process in recent years was the American Freedom Coalition (AFC), a conservative group that built popular support for Col. Oliver L. North during the Iran-contra probe. In addition to about $5 million, Unificationists provided the personnel that gave the coalition its grass-roots strength, former church members said.

AFC appears to be dormant; its phone was not answered and its Falls Church office was unmanned on a recent visit.

Unification support for nonprofit groups such as AFC ebbs and flows. Contributions to the International Cultural Foundation, long the leading Moon entity devoted to spreading his values among professors, book readers and the Washington policy elite, dipped from $7.9 million in 1988 to $1.1 million in 1994, according to tax records filed with the IRS. The foundation funds other Unification affiliates, including the Professors World Peace Academy, the Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy, and Paragon House, the movement's book publishing arm, the records show.

When the tap tightened at the Cultural Foundation, groups such as the Institute for Values withered and went out of business.

Other groups get quick infusions of cash for special projects. Gifts and contributions to the Women's Federation for World Peace, for example, soared to $10.7 million in 1995. The federation sponsored a series of speeches by George and Barbara Bush in Asia and the United States, with total fees estimated at about $1 million.

Bush spokesman Jim McGrath said the ex-president "strongly believes in the mission" of Moon's federations, but "has no relationship with Moon." McGrath said all of Bush's appearances have been arranged through Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of the Washington Times.

Pruden denied arranging Bush's speeches, saying that the former president had merely asked the editor to introduce him at the events. "I have no more connection with the Unification Church than I have with the Vatican," Pruden added. "I don't book the pope and I don't book for the church."

Also in 1995, the Women's Federation made another donation that illustrates how Moon supports fellow conservatives. It gave a $3.5 million grant to the Christian Heritage Foundation, which later bought a large portion of Liberty University's debt, rescuing the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg, Va., religious school from the brink of bankruptcy.

Journalist Robert Parry, who first reported the bailout in I.F. Magazine, quoted an official with the Women's Federation confirming that the $3.5 million was meant for "Mr. Falwell's people."

The Post has learned of more recent and direct financial support from Moon to Falwell. Last year, News World Communications, parent of the money-losing Times, lent $400,000 to Liberty at 6 percent interest, according to the promissory note.

Liberty University spokesman Mark DeMoss said the school was not aware of News World's connection to Moon when it obtained the loan through a broker. "I'm not going to be pious and tell you we would have turned it down," DeMoss said. "Because it was a business transaction, we probably would have moved forward even if Dr. Falwell or somebody in the organization knew who News World Communications was."

Unification-related groups court clergymen, local officeholders and news reporters, inviting them to conferences and ballgames. Their pictures then appear in church publications.

Frederick Sontag, a religion professor at Pomona College, quit organizing academic conferences for church-related groups because his initial independence was curtailed. "They wanted to bring much more Unification doctrine into it and more of their own people," he said. "I couldn't do that."

"What they're doing is buying people," said conservative columnist Armstrong Williams, who was invited to watch a Redskins-Cowboys football game from a Moon organization's luxury box at Jack Kent Cooke Stadium this fall. "They just kept wooing me, calling me."

Williams said Lavonia Perryman, who is handling press relations for this week's festival, told him her client had asked her "to put together the top, most influential journalists in Washington and put them in the box," Williams recalled. "Not once did she ever tell me it was the Moonies."

"They'll pay anything to get influence," said Sontag. "That's just fulfilling their doctrine, that they will work spiritually through these famous people. They really aren't very practical. They get these little interests, in business or academia, wherever, and hype them up, and then move on. It hasn't really gotten them anywhere."

Next: In the twilight of its founder's life, the Unification Church plans a dramatic change in direction.

Staff writer Charles R. Babcock, staff database specialist Jo Craven and staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

#tom mcdevitt #Jonathan Park #oliver north #UC assets #unification church #moonies #American Freedom Coalition #sun myung moon #assets #washington post #funding #frederick sontag #liberty university #atlantic video #nostalgia network

0 notes

catherinegarbinsky · 5 years

Text

Resources

It started with a tweet. I asked:

1 - Poets with MFAs & poetry professors: are there specific books (of poetry, on poetry) that you would recommend for writers who may not have access to formal education in poetry?

2- Poets without MFAs — please feel free to add books that have felt pivotal and educational for you in your process. I mean this primarily as a resource and did not mean to suggest that others may not have valuable texts to offer!

Here are some of the responses (I typed up as many as I could, bolded any that I noticed repeated):

Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio’s The Poet’s Companion

Kaveh Akbar’s Divedapper interviews

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook

Writing Dangerous Poetry by Michael C Smith

Creating Poetry by Drury

The Practice of Poetry by Behn

Feeling as a Foreign Language by Alice Fulton

A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass

Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Stewart

Of Color: Poets’ Way of Making Anthology (forthcoming)

De-canon

The Volta

The Alabastar Jar (interviews with Li Young-Lee)

Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonzio

On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell

Fictive Certainties by Robert Duncan

The Flexible Lyric by Voigt

Wislawa Symborska’s “Nonrequired Reading”

The Art of series (especially the Art of Description by Mark Doty, especially The Art of Syntax by Ellen Bryant Voigt)

My Poets by Maureen N. McLane

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

The Crafty Poet by Diane Lockward

Wingbeats and Wingbeats II by Scott Wiggerman

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle

Picking one poet per year, reading their ouvre and letters (an extremely helpful and nourishing assignment from a genius prof)

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Rigorously study the line, study grammar, and study some kind of oracle system (Tarot, I Ching, astrology, etc) and read as widely in poetry as you can

Poetic Rhythm by Derek Attridge

A Poet’s Guide by Mary Kinzie

The Art of the Poetic Line by James Logenbach

John Frederick Nims’ Western Wind

Poetry: A Writer’s Guide by Amorak Huey and Todd Kaneko

The Making of a Poem (Norton)

Art of Recklessness

Modern Life by Matthea Harvey

Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky

Please by Jericho Brown

Slow Lightning by Eduardo Corral

Meadowlands by Louise Gluck

Kinky by Denise Duhamel

Names Above Houses by Oliver de la Paz

How To Read A Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry by Edward Hirsch

Carol Rumen’s long-running weekly Guardian column

Poetry 101 by Susan Dalzell

Theory of Prose by V Shklovsky

The Art of Attention by D Revell

Structure and Surprise by M. Theune

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder

Poems - Poets - Poetry An Introduction and Anthology by Helen Vendler

Triggering Town by Richard Hugo

The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination by Carl Phillips

Upstream by Mary Oliver

The Life of Images by Cahrles Simic

Being Human (anthology)

How To be a Poet

Nine Gates by Jane Hirshfield

Gregory Orr book on lyric poetry

WIld Hundreds by Nate Marshall

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Helium by Rudy Francisco

Wind in a Box (or anything else) by Terrance Hayes

Blud by Rachel McKibbens

Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith

Poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams, Ted Kooser, Pablo Neruda, ee cummings, Charles Simic, Patricia Smith, Dorianne Laux, EB Voigt, Terrance Hayes, John Donne, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound

Read widely. Read more than poetry. Embrace your outsider knowledge.

Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft by Toby Hoagland

The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky

A Field Guide to Poetry

Ten Windows by Jane Hirshfield

The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry

The Book of Luminous Things (anthology) ed. by Milosz

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Poets.org and Poetry Foundation websites

Beautiful and Pointless by David Orr

Find or start a writing group!

Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns

American Sonnets by Terrance Hayes

The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner

Poetry Notebook by Clive James

Don Paterson’s 22-page intro to “101 sonnets”

Essays by Barbara Guest

Poetry is Not a Project by Dorothea Lasky

After Lorca by Jack Spicer

The New American Poetry 1945-1960

Helen Vendler’s criticism (The Ocean, The Bird and the Scholar)

Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse ed. By Philip Larkin

The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes

French symbolists

The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

The Poets Laureate Anthology

Poet’s House, 92Y Poetry

Singing School by Robert Pinsky

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets by Ted Kooser

Glitter in the Blood by Mindy Nettifee

Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide by Mark Yakich

All the Fun’s In How You Say A Thing by Timothy Steele

The Collected Poems(1856-1987) by John Ashberry

Viper Rum by Mary Karr

The Making of a Poem by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland

Rules of the Dance by Mary Oliver

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Jorie Graham lecture On Description (youtube)

Poetry in Theory

How to be a Poet by Jo Bell and Jane Commane (& special guests)

dVerse Poets

Reading Poetry: An Introduction by Furniss and Bath

Poetry: The Basics by Jeffrey Wainwright

The Poetry Handbook by John Lennard

Broken English: Poetry and Partiality by Heather McHugh

The Poem’s Heartbeat by Alfred Corn

Orr’s Primer for Poets and Reads of Poetry

Penguin’s 20th Century Anthology

The United States of Poetry

Staying Alive: real poems for Unreal Times ed. By Neil Astley

Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason

52 Ways to Read A Poem by Ruth Padel

A Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry by David Mason and John Frederick Nims

Projective Verse by Charles Olson

Retrospect/A Few Don’t by an Imagiste - Ezra Pound

Against Interpretation - Susan Sontag

Commonplace Podcast

Headwaters by EB Voigt

Olio by Tyehimba Jess

The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The Living and the Dead by Sharon Olds

Sonnets by Bernadette Mayer

The Sin Eater by Deborah Randall

The Art of Poetry Writing by William Packard

The Poet’s Dictionary by William Packard

Freedom Hill by LS Asekoff

Theory of the Lyric by Jonathan Culler

Close Listening ed. By Charles Bernstein

Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant

The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary by Frances Stillman

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

The Way to Write Poetry by Michael Baldwin

Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

Lofty Dogmas: Poets of Poetics

Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetics by Stephanie Burt

Poetry in the Making by Ted Hughes

A poet needs: grounding in verse and rhyme from nursery lines, a grounding in adult poetic diction by the classic poets (of antiquity, late antiquity, then the mediaeval, early modern and modern periods), and their own poetic vision

Pig Notes and Dumb Music by William Heyen

Satan Says by Sharon Olds

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe

#poetry #on poetry #poetry school #self education #resources #learning #about poetry #mfa programs #reading #for your own edification #creative writing #studying

98 notes · View notes