User:SMB
Simon Becks was here.
YEAR 2
Annotated Bibliography
Nelson, Maggie - ‘The Art of Cruelty’
A compendium of thoughts, works and texts on cruelty. Asks questions if image-making of cruelty make us part of it. Not afraid to break open taboo, whilst being inquisitive and interested in not stepping over into idiot-cruelty.
Paglia, Camille - ‘Provocations’
A manifest to fearless inquiry into whatever. Breaking open age-old taboos and lifting her status up as a provocateur pur sang.
Buruma, Ian - ‘Theater of Cruelty’
In Theater of Cruelty Buruma explores what makes the human species behave so atrociously and links this to the ideas of Antonin Artaud and his coined term Theatre of Cruelty
Bachman, Richard (Stephen King) - ‘Rage’
Psychological thriller. The novel describes a school shooting which, after inspiring several school shooters, was allowed to fall out of print. Might offer interesting insight in the role of art as being a good influence.
Einstein, Albert & Freud, Sigmund - ‘Why War’
An exchange of open letters, sponsored by the Institute, which leading intellectuals exchanged ideas on major questions, the most crucial of which was the threat of war.
Baumeister, Roy F. - ‘Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty’
Considering evil from the unusual perspective of the perpetrator, Roy F. Baumeister asks, How do ordinary people find themselves beating their wives? Murdering rival gang members? Torturing political prisoners? Betraying their colleagues to the secret police? Why do cycles of revenge so often escalate?
Bandura, Albert - ‘Moral Disengagement - How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves’
Textbook that asks the question: How do otherwise considerate human beings do cruel things and still live in peace with themselves?
Dahl, Roald - ‘Cruelty’
A collection of short stories exploring the notion of cruelty and why it is we make others suffer’
Sontag, Susan - ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’
A series of analysis of how to picture suffering.
Dawes, James - ‘Evil Men’
For this book is not just about the things war criminals do. It is about what it is like, and what it means, to befriend them. Do our stories of evil deeds make a difference? Can we depict atrocity without sensational curiosity?
Smith, David Livingstone - ‘On Inhumanity - Dehumanization and how to resist it’
Smith takes an unflinching look at the mechanisms of the mind that encourage us to see someone as less than human. There is something peculiar and horrifying in human psychology that makes us vulnerable to thinking of whole groups of people as subhuman creatures
Bergman, Rutger ‘Human kind - 'A hopeful History’
An argument is made that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the greatest factor in our success. Good to read to diversify ideological pov.
Oppenheimer, Joshua - ‘The Act of Killing’
Documentary film about individuals that reenact the mass killings of certain war criminals that live out their lives in current Indonesia.
Freud, Sigmund - ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’
Freud, Sigmund - ‘A Child is Being Beaten’
A study of an infantile perversion in neurotic adults.
Cowart, Leigh - ‘Hurts so Good: The Sience and Culture of Pain on Purpose’
A book on the science of pain and correlate it with a variety of intentional experiences from ballet to eating wildly hot peppers, ultra-marathon and BDSM.
Bloom, Paul - ’The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning’
A book posing the idea that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. An ‘exhilirating antidote to toxic positivity’.
Bloom, Paul - ‘Against Empathy’
We think of empathy - the ability to feel the suffering of others for ourselves - as the ultimate source of all good behaviour. But while it inspires care and protection in personal relationships, it has the opposite effect in the wider world. As the latest research in psychology and neuroscience shows, we feel empathy most for those we find attractive and who seem similar to us and not at all for those who are different, distant or anonymous.
Cooper, Dennis - ‘The Marbled Swarm’
A fiction book about high art, old money and the unspeakable system of coercion and perversion. Dennis Cooper as a figure is interesting as one who has completely synthesised his dark sides in his work.
Queen for a Day (tv show)
American radio and TV show where contestants, women, were asked about the recent financial and emotional hard times they had been through. What does the participant need most. Therapeutic equipment for their chronically illy child, or a hearing aid? The winning contestant was selected by an applause metre. The gameshow makes suffering and sadness the goal and the prize.
Lewis, C.S. - ‘The Problem of Pain’
Frost, Christopher & Hulsey, Timothy - ‘Moral Cruelty’
The overarching purpose of Moral Cruelty is to identify and sensitise the reader to the existence of "moral sadism."
Smith, David Livingstone - ‘Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization’
Boudry, Maarten - ‘Illusies voor gevorderden’
Niemand wil in een totale waanwereld leven, maar de waarheid kan ook kwetsen en verontrusten. Mag je haar niet af en toe wat geweld aandoen? Maarten Boudry vraagt zich af of er nuttige illusies bestaan, uitgekiende en doordachte wanen, heilzaam voor lichaam en geest. Wat is er mis met een placebopil, als je er beter van wordt
Nietsche, Friedrich - ‘Beyond Good and Evil’
Bernel, Albert - ‘Artoud’s the Theater of Cruelty’
Hobbes, Thomas - ‘Leviathan’
De natuur van de mens is wezenlijk competitief en zelfzuchtig, stelt Hobbes. Daarom pleit hij voor een krachtige soevereine heerser – een ‘Leviathan’. Deze heerser heeft de macht om vrede af te dwingen en de wet op te leggen, maar hij is ook het levende symbool van de eenheid van de staat, waarin alle burgers een plek vinden om te leven.
Dostoyevsky, Fjodor - ‘Notes from the Underground’
Dostoyevsky often writes about men who make deliberate fools of themselves when their reputations have become to pristine. The narrator mocks the idea that humans seek only what is beneficial to them; a man, he insists, may ‘consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself. What is stupid -- simply in order to have the right to desire for himself, and not to be bound by any obligation to desire what is only rational.
Kono, Takeo- ‘Toddler-hunting and Other Stories’
Collection of short stories, evoking admiration and disgust in the reader.
Montell, Amanda - ‘Cultish - The Language of Fanaticism’
Ngai, Sianne - ‘Ugly Feelings’
Envy, irritation, paranoia -- in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotion like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations where action is blocked or suspended. These minor and politically ambiguous feelings the writer diagnoses as a character of late modernity.
Carrol, Noel - ‘The Philosophy of Horror’
What makes something horror. And why do we enjoy it?
Artists to look into
Wolfson, Jordan
O’connor, Flannery
Von Trier, Lars
Haneke, Michael (Raping the viewer into independence)
IDEAS AND CONCEPTS TO LOOK INTO
Shadow Work - Jung
Morbid curiosity
Trickster mentality
Hegelian Dialectics - Every Demon needs their Angel
Methods of non-moral (not A-moral but not moral) thinking. Thought as aesthetic gesture.
Actors playing evil - German rules. Method acting. Not being arrested after plays as their fiction is still inside them
bio
I'm just a Lutherin boy in a XXX world.
writing
File:TEXT ON PRACTICE SIMON BECKS.pdf