Now reading...

[Lucy]

Thanks!

[Markus]

Hey folks,

the cuckoo's nest is waiting on my Kindle, but for the time being it has to queue after these following two books:

Margarete Wein: Abland. Traumernte aus sieben Jahren (Offland. Dream harvest from seven years). This should have been quite interesting - dream diary entries. But as fascinating or touching or scary these scenes and stories may be - I don't know the author nor does she tell anything about herself, so the dreams stay meaningless for me. A pity!

Christian Morgenstern: Phanta's Schloß (Phanta's Castle). Part of a book with all his poems that I bought as an e-book for less than 2 Euro. What a find! I already know his amazing "Galgenlieder", where he is doing incredible things with and to the German language. "Phanta's Schloß" is different - also very imaginative but more serious, poetic, philosophic... If you can find a translation in your language, give it a try! If you speak German, go for the original!

Cheers!

Markus

[Markus]

Vladimir Solovyov: A Short Tale of the Antichrist.

[The One]

Due to immense amounts of schoolwork, I've only recently started on the third book in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire", "A Storm of Swords".
However, due to one (pretty awesome) university course, I've read Alexander Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades" and "Boris Godunov", Mikhail Dragomarov's "Notes on the Slavic Religio-Ethical Legends", Prudence Jones' and Nigel Pennick's "A History of Pagan Europe", the olden "Lay of the Host of Igor", Alexander Griboyedov's "The Trouble with Reason" and a good bit of a book called "Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogenics" by Peter T. Furst. 

[Markus]

Hey there, folks,

all the Slavic stuff the young One mentioned reminds me of some recent reading of mine:

Jorge Pilay: The Old Gods of Rus.

Recommendable, albeit a bit misnamed. The full title should read "On the Difficulty of Finding the Old Gods of Rus" because you don't really get a lot of information on the ancient Slavic pagan belief system. You don't get a lot of information because there isn't a lot of information! The author explains very well why there isn't much definite to be said. He traces possible connections and parallels to other ancient beliefs as well as remnants of the ancient Slavic paganism in Russian folklore, so he shows a way to reconstruct the old beliefs. However, it is not possible to draw as detailed a picture as we have from Greek, Roman or Germanic mythology.

And, seriously: I will always prefer an honest, profound "We don't really know" to any bold dubious claims. If you can get a copy of this essay, do read it!

Cheers!

Markus

[Markus]

Hey folks,

me again. So how did I like the "Antichrist"? Worth reading, but far from being great.

This was written at the end of the 19th century and makes two remarkable statements about the 20th century: It would be a century of the last great wars, the worst of them being fought worldwide for cultural dominance. And there would be Asian dominance. Well, Asia's economic power is increasing greatly now, and the 20th century was indeed marked by two terrible great wars. The prediction is wrong in so far as that Asia's rise is coming later than predicted and that the last great war wasn't begun by Japan but by Germany. Still I find this quite remarkable.

The Antichrist is drawn quite interestingly at first: An extremely smart man, a genius, a friend and benefactor of all mankind. A vegetarian, by the way! He brings peace to the world and ends poverty and famine. His only mistake is his great pride, his hubris, that there could be no greater man than him, not even Christ.

However, Solovyov doesn't make enough from this basic idea. His Antichrist remains plain, simple, straight-forward. He has no doubt, no conflict, no real development. Thus he stays pretty bloodless and uninteresting.

Solovyov makes some prophecies fulfill quite interestingly (I have to re-read the Revelation of John in order to check for allusions I might have overseen) while towards the end he seems to lose his delight in writing and just scribbles the remaining prophecies down one-on-one without interpreting them.

 I can imagine this to be interesting material for a Therionic opera but it requires some work to turn this into a good plot with good characters (i.e. authentic, interesting, emotionally touching and intellectually challenging).

Cheers!

Markus

[Lady Sa'iltu]

I'm translating (and reading, of course) F. Barrett's "The Magus"... Actually, it is one of the silliest books I've ever seen... Huge sentences and unknowns animal species make the process even longer... I'm really bored )