Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs > Recent Status Updates

She was a ship of gold, but her diaphanous flanks showed treasures over which the blasphemous sailors Spite and Nausea and Madness clashed.
So, what has survived this flash of storm?
What about my heart, abandoned ship?
O, still it sinks, deep in
Dream’s abyss!

Émile Nelligan, Canada’s Poète Angélique!

A budget-priced book that augurs well for my successful navigation of Deliverance!

A fantastic Audible audiobook - great for summertime listening!

I think this book is an INDISPENSABLE roadmap for the radically new challenges facing the aged in postmodernist times. Especially of note is Peters’ psychological insight into gerentological (of, or pertaining to all us oldtimers’ lifestyles) habits. A remarkable book!

An Audible audiobook!

A sparkling entertainment!

Isabel, as per form, steers past all the sharp social shoals of stressful folks in her safely sagacious and sane manner, and always comes out into more placid sailing waters the clear-headed winner!

When lovely woman stoops to folly
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
What art can wash her tears away?

Do you find the ornery waspish wit of the early Evelyn Waugh - long before he swallowed his own pride with the damning self-incriminations and regrets of Brideshead Revisited - a great deal to your taste? If so, you’ll love the Leacockian Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich, in this similarly rich satire!

Shaw’s such a funny guy, but he wears - to quote Auden - “a missionary grin!” He’s always trying to sell us something, and that something in Pygmalion is a Classless Society, cause he mocks the utter absurdity of class distinctions...

A sunny book from the wonderful GBS! We all know it as My Fair Lady. A Buddy Read with my faraway friend Elinor.

A STEAL today on Amazon and Kobo for $0.99!!!

When the great and epochal thinker Jacques Derrida visited with close friends (and fellow philosophers) in Strasbourg, as he continually did during his life, he - and they - knew his cancer was terminal. That was in June, 2004. A few months later he had gone to his reward.... This is the record of that meeting, as they looked back and reflected on his contribution to intellectual history.

A very fine book.

“Man approaches God most nearly when he is least like God.... This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it; it also wrecked all my previous attempts to write about love.”

“George Loewenstein has conducted research on ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ states. A hot state is when emotions are at a high intensity and we feel a strong urge to do something...; a cold state is when the intensity... is low and our rational mind is more dominant.... We THINK IN (RADICALLY) DIFFERENT WAYS (depending on our state).”

“Cults of real saints - the sort who wrought miracles or led lives of privation on barren islands - have been taken away from us, made risible, reduced to being private weaknesses for the superstitious and the gullible.”
BRAVO, Mr. Smith! And a deal at $1.50.

When the injunction “just to live our life” (go with the flow) becomes a license NOT TO CHOOSE, we end up being pulled along by OTHERS’ choices, simply behaving the way we always have in the past, passively reacting to life rather than creating the life we really want to be living.
- THE SAME OLD RUT!

Excellent!

I LOVE this book. It’s the author’s life in Northern Ireland at the horrific time of the Troubles, as he grew into his teen years. It’s also an in-depth study of U2’s music, and its pulverizing effect on a young Irishman. An AMAZING deal at UNDER TWO DOLLARS!!!

A stirring specimen of wisdom from a great early 19th century hymnodist and co-labourer with Murray McCheyne in the Great Scottish Revival.

Socrates was everlastingly right; for even if a Divine point of departure is ever given between man and man this is the true relationship, provided we reflect upon the absolute and refuse to dally with the accidental, from the heart renouncing the understanding of the half truths which seem the delight of men and the secret of the System.

Wow! A wildly inventive Aspie-eye view of Reality. Aspie or not, you should like it, though it’s a tiny bit too rich for my old, thinned, and medicated blood. I’ll take it in small doses, though, because Kite is a fantabulous writer.
BTW, if - like me - you’re an Aspie, feel free to have a look at the Aspie Book Group here on GR!

LUV it! 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟

This is GREAT!

Why do we write?
“We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”

This is a wonderfully and painstakingly detailed, but short, family and personal history which must be to this fantastically oblique and mysterious writer a direct and concrete summation of his identity: the very thing that has been so long held back, because, lacking detail after a traumatic childhood, it had always been nebulous and inconclusive. To me it points to the final triumphant filling of a traumatic void.