BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS

I recently spent a few days at one of those Getaway campground cabins that sit on top of trailers and had one of those awful travel moments where I didn't know what to read. I finished Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami on my Kindle faster than I expected and wasn't really in the mood for the physical books I brought as back ups: Simulacra and Simulation and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928-1941. The latter I read years ago and still think of as a classic and I will certainly read again at some point, but it was not the thing to read while trying to distract myself from the types of thoughts that usually creep in around the evening time.

I bought Baudrillard's book thinking it might be useful to read something different from what I normally have my nose buried in - but French post-structuralism wasn't the ticket to distraction either. His ideas aren't really difficult to understand and there's some clever lines of thought there- but my reaction to the whole project was "SO WHAT?" It reminds me of Sartre in that I could easily imagine it as a response to some challenge to articulate the most boring response imaginable to a godless universe. It's a dull mental exercise that is meant to distract you and sounds deeper than it actually is. That line of thinking that Sartre's ideas stem from an exhausted post-war France giving up on itself (before the intellectuals got a jolt of energy and took up the dullest type of leftism in the 1960's) is sneered at by his admiring interpreters but it also struck me as hitting pretty close to the truth. Baudrillard (and basically anything that gets tagged with a label that begins with "post-") seems like the physical manifestation of the ennui of a few decades' worth of graduate students not quite smart enough for Sartre.

Or something. I'm not a philosopher I'm just a loser who likes books.

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