Lemon · Cupcake

I have a book available:



http://www.lulu.com/shop/edward-butler/essays-on-a-polytheistic-philosophy-of-religion/paperback/product-20092701.html

This book includes the two articles I published in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, "The Theological Interpretation of Myth" and "Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion", as well as two previously unpublished essays, "Neoplatonism and Polytheism", which is the text of a talk I gave at the American Academy of Religion conference in 2005, and "A Theological Exegesis of the Iliad, Book One".

My contributor's agreement with The Pomegranate prevents me from making this available as an ebook, unfortunately; so it is only available in print.

I'm posting the January tweets a little early, because there's a lot here. This month I began tweeting my notes on the demotic Egyptian "Book of Thoth", which also incorporate some material from another recently published fragmentary demotic text, "On the Primaeval Ocean". There are a few exchanges in this material; in those, I've italicized the words of others, and prefaced them with their Twitter identification.

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This is no order other than that in which I read them, loosely.

The Player of Games, by Iain Banks. I've been enjoying Banks' "Culture" novels for a while now, but this is the first one that really works as a novel, and not just for the world he's built.

Tom Brown's Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes. A really sick book, don't get me wrong; but if you want to understand the Victorian British construction of masculinity, this is where it's happening. For extra credit, you want to follow it up immediately with The Loom of Youth, by Alec Waugh, which questions all the key assumptions of Tom Brown from squarely within its world.

Alliance Space, by C. J. Cherryh. This is really for 40,000 in Gehenna, which isn't published separately at this time. If you enjoy 40,000, definitely read Cyteen right away; it sets the stage for it brilliantly. Merchanter's Luck, which rounds out the volume, is fun, but nothing special.

Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In a year when the fall of dictators was in the air, this was a superb accompaniment.

The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz. Rather depressing, to be sure, but a rich, satisfying experience.

I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets, by Fletcher Hanks. Just read the Fantomah comics, she's amazing. The other outstanding comic collection I read this year was The Wonder Woman Archives, Vol. 1, by William Moulton Marston. You won't believe how cool these are. It's really hard to understand why nobody can do Wonder Woman properly today, when everything you need is already there at the beginning.

Knight Errant, by John Jackson Miller. It's impressive that a Star Wars novel with no connection to any of the movies could be this compelling; and a female protagonist helps for a change. The other Star Wars novel I really enjoyed this year was Dynasty of Evil (Star Wars: Darth Bane, #3), by Drew Karpyshyn, a worthy conclusion to this series. If you're into the Star Wars franchise at all, you owe it to yourself to read them, because you will understand why people would choose to be Sith.

Moonchild, by Aleister Crowley. A wild yarn of occult combat in the Edwardian era. I read this together with The Sea Priestess, by Dion Fortune, which is much more of a serious novel, but involving many similar themes. Reading these two novels gives an unparalleled insight into occultism's high modernist generation.

A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3), by George R. R. Martin. The high-water mark of this series, in my opinion, before it started to decline; I'm still hopeful that it will rally towards the finish.

On First Principles, by Theophrastus (trans. Dimitri Gutas). A superb new translation of this potent inquiry into Aristotle's metaphysics by his closest and most brilliant pupil.

The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss. Sequel to The Name of the Wind. These books are my best suggestion for what to read when there's no more Harry Potter.

For some reason, I was spending a lot of time on Twitter in November and December. This is a selection of the most interesting exchanges I had during that time, and a repository of my monologues. My presentation here does not do justice to my interlocutors, because I only include the point in their discourse at which I jump in, or where we engage directly. I beg their pardon for this practice. In the following, I have italicized others' words, preceded by their Twitter identity; my own Twitter ID, @EPButler, precedes my own words, except where I initiate a discourse; these are the rest of the unitalicized texts. I have run tweets together that constitute a single utterance. Text in parentheses or brackets is explanatory.

( Without further ado… )

I thought I'd gather (and annotate) here some tweets that were occasioned by a passage quoted by Khaoid from Nietzsche and Philosophy:

@khaoid: 'Heraclitus had taken a deep look... he saw no negativity in becoming, he saw precisely the opposite, the double affirmation of becoming...'
 
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This was part of an exchange with Robert Wallace, author of Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God, one of the best books I've read about Hegel, excerpts from which are available, along with some of Bob's other work, on his site.

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