Retrato do autor

Jonathan Bricklin

Autor(a) de Sciousness

4 Works 35 Membros 9 Críticas

Obras por Jonathan Bricklin

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA

Membros

Críticas

Geronimo Katzenjammer, cliff-diver extraordinaire kicks off this surreal masterpiece with aplomb when his fiancée is abducted by aliens. Following his story to a Mexican resort where he meets a mermaid torch-singer, the story gets more bizarre involving an extensive cast of players.

Delightfully irreverent, and bizarrely humorous, it reminds me of Mark Leyner’s “Et Tu, Babe” in its California-flavoured satire.

Laughed out loud several times, shared quotes in 3-way-text-messages, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
CelynKendrick | Nov 15, 2022 |
Esta crítica foi escrita no âmbito dos Primeiros Críticos do LibraryThing.
I received this book through the LT Early Reviewers program, but I never got around to reading it. The bulk of the book, it transpired, is made up of public-domain essays or excerpts from William James. The new material is in two essays, and those aren't all that compelling. I tried to pick it up a few times, but just couldn't get excited about it. It wouldn't be fair to rate the book, since I didn't read most of it, but at the same time I can't really recommend it unless you're a big fan of William James or are very interesting in the original essays by Bricklin and Flournoy.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
szarka | 7 outras críticas | Jan 19, 2015 |
Esta crítica foi escrita no âmbito dos Primeiros Críticos do LibraryThing.
I acquired this book from LT's Early Reviewers program.

I quite enjoyed the opening piece “On Believing in Mind” by Seng-ts’an – it resonated quite nicely with some other Zen/Buddhist readings I have recently encountered.

Jonathan Bricklin’s piece “Sciousness and Con-sciousness: William James and the Prime Reality of Non-Dual Experience” lost me at times – but that may reflect my relative non-familiarity of the topic. Heavy use of italics (and parenthetical asides) for emphasis and clarification were, at times, rather distracting.

Once I got into the pieces by William James himself, I quickly found myself overwhelmed. I found that if I sat the book down one day and picked it up the next I was unable to pick up the thread and would have to start over again. The problem seem to consist of partly my naivety of the concepts discussed and partly the outdated language and academic tone. When I was able to sit down and focus the “thought experiments” were mind-expanding but I REALLY had to work at it. Overall the William James’ work reads like a work written for graduate students in philosophy at the turn of the century (unsurprising, since that is the era and environment of its writing).
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
PortiaLong | 7 outras críticas | Nov 10, 2008 |
Esta crítica foi escrita no âmbito dos Primeiros Críticos do LibraryThing.
I assume that LT's early review algorithm chose me for this book because I have several books already on Zen and on 19th century philosophy - it isn't smart enough to take into account that I hadn't actually marked any of those as "read". That said, I am interested in a dilettantish way in theories of consciousness, and especially non-dual, simplifying ones, and I enjoyed this book, and got quite a lot out of it.

That said - it's hard going. The selections from James here aren't too bad, granted, as William James' writing goes; the Zen poetry (which I was hoping to get more of) was very Zen, but not overly so; and the other essays were actually quite readable. But it's *heavy* stuff, man. Not a book for casual reading. A book that you want to be able to sit and think hard about while you're reading it, because the concepts in here all make a great deal of sense - just not the kind of sense we're used to thinking in.

The basic idea here is William James's theory of "radical empiricism", the basis of which is the conception that noting exists except pure sensory experience, without taking it all the way through to pure solipsism; and the Zen principles which mirror this idea of sensory experience as prime reality. It all makes perfect sense if you follow the reasoning - you just have to be able to follow the reasoning.

I thought the essays selected here were good choices and a great introduction; I could have wished for the really long essays by James to be more broken up by other content, particularly more Zen content, because his prose isn't exactly *compelling*, and that's where I kept stalling out in reading it, and by the time I got through I'd lost track of most of the Zen stuff - but even the James essays are simply packed full of things to think about.

The book itself is very well-made - it survived months of being carried around as my day reading! - with an generally attractive design. I support the large print and lots of white space, as they made it quite a bit less scary, and the editorial intros and footnotes were great. The pull-quotes that were sometimes interspersed with the text didn't do much for me, though - they weren't distinct enough to stand out when skimming pages, and they sometimes ran into the general text too much.

Overall, a book I'd recommend for anyone who's into Zen and wants to look at similar Western ideas, or the other way around, and it is definitely staying on my reference shelf.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
melannen | 7 outras críticas | Aug 20, 2008 |

Estatísticas

Obras
4
Membros
35
Popularidade
#405,584
Avaliação
½ 3.4
Críticas
9
ISBN
5