POETS; DRAMATISTS; ARTISTS; ACTORS(male/female);SINGERS(ma­le/females)DANCERS; COMEDIANS;MOVIES?

Novelists? Anne Rice and Anne Rule. Rice is well known for the Vampire series (oops, my goth is showing isn't it?). And Rule is a true crime writer. One of her best books is "Stranger Beside Me" where she tells how she actually knew and worked with Ted Bundy WHILE he was in the middle of his killing sprees. They worked together at a suicide hotline center if you can believe that.

Poets- I like Dylan Thomas, ee cummings, Whitman, TS Eliot and a lot of early American poets. One of my favorites is the love song of J Alfred Prufrock ("I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas"). Here's my favorite ee cummings poem:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis ....

Singers? Trent Reznor, Tori Amos

Comedians? Mitch Hedberg, RIP. <link>

Movies? Grapes of Wrath, A Streetcar Named Desire, Dogma, Office Space, Apocolypto

Top Comedian: George Walker Bush, a walking, talking, idiot-non-savant joke, if he weren't screwing us over so badly.

Novelists: Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Le Carre, Dostoevsky, Zelazney (sp?), Heinlein, Solzhenitsyn

Poets: Shakespeare, Ferlinghetti, Yevtushenko, Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron

Singers: Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Lotte Lehman, Franz Tauber, Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, etc.

Actors: Too many, but I've got to put Ingrid Bergman, Barbara Stanwyck (sp?), Gweneth Paltrow, Carey Grant, and Fred Astaire at the top.

Dancers: Fred Astaire, Rudolph Nureyev, and just about any prima ballerina for the Bolshoi or Kirov ballets up until the breakup of the USSR.

Comedians: Johnny Carson, Steve Martin, Whoopie Goldberg, and Robin Williams.

I am impressed by the above lists. I have read some of the authors. Now in my old age and being a busy Mom ,Grandma and arguer on the Fray I like easy reading like John Grisham. He is a wonderful writer and he has socialist leanings, a good man. My Grandfather came from Wales and instilled ideals in his family and I grew up with a bookcase that had sets of books from Shakespear, Dickens and Hawthorne. summer reading in N.C. when it was too hot to move . I also felt it important to know as much as possible about life. Now it is Truthout and Democracy Now that keep me up to date.

This is really tough,

The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menard

JK Rowlings she has a very readable style,

Christine Feehan vampire series

Katherine Mansfield

Anthony Alpers bio on KM

Hofstadter (sp) physics books

Stephen Hawkings

Noam Chomsky

Frank Herbert

Anne McCaffrey (sp)

Ann Rice vampire series only

Gerard Manly Hopkins

Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy (Poetry)

Orson Scott Card

Gordon R. Dickson

Alan Moore

Neil Gaiman (Graphic Novels)

Satrapi (Comic Novels)

Guy Delisle

Stephen Vaughn

Terry Pratchett

Leslie Fiedler is a must read for Literary Criticism

and Alone Alone! by Rosemary Dinage is an astute grouping of essays about Female Artists (Katherine Mansfield is included as well as Virginia Woolf)

There was a history book I read recently (last year) that I cannot remember the Title or Author of, but it reinserted Americans (now called American Indians) into American History as it was. Also dealt with poor southerners, but I can't remember the name. It was around the time Guns, Germs and Steel came out.

Unfortunately, I could go on and on and on with this list, so much of it depends on what I'm reading at the time.

Will add one more that will probably get some flack but Ken Wilbur. I just think he's interesting. Although I think his philosophy could also take into account need of population in an agragarian and or warlike societies and woman's roles, vs gender that is in implicitly in charge of population.

Am re reading A Communist Manifesto, it's a lot different than I remember it 20 years ago. And plan on rereading Sartre. Have read some discourse on Camus/Sartre and French Ouvre, if for no other reason than for the word Ouvre, and have kinda got into reading dissertations. (Dissertation on Prostitutes during Medieval Europe)--brings up interesting ideas about definition and how money has changed the definition of words.

For this we almost need a favorite novelists in this category, then we can try to break that down into subcategories.

Loved reading others tastes though, there are a lot of Novelists!

POETS; DRAMATISTS; ARTISTS; ACTORS(male/female);SINGERS(ma​le/females)DANCERS; COMEDIANS;MOVIES?

Poets: Marge Piercy, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Stevie Smith, Dorothy Parker, Bukowski

Dramatists: Brecht, Edward Albee, Eugene O'Neil, Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller,

Actors/M: Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Liam Neeson (sp), Gerard Depardieu, William Macy

Actors/F: Cate Blanchette, Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman, Kathy Bates, Jessica Tandy, Jennifer Jason Leigh,

Dancers: rather do it than watch it.

Comedians: Chevy Chase and I rarely watch stand up...John Candy, something forgot his first name Black, Barbara Streisand, whoever that one woman is who does the SNL commentary.

Movies: Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle, My Dinner with Andre, Ran, Equilibrium, Donnie Darko, Everyday People

>>Am re reading A Communist Manifesto, it's a lot different than I remember it 20 years ago.<<

You should post your thoughts about it sometime jeqal.

Just got through reading Ortega y Gasset's revolt of the masses a quote by him:

We do not know what is happening to us, and this is precisely what is happening to us, not to know what is happening to us: the man of today is beginning to be disoriented with respect to himself, dépaysé, he is outside of his country, thrown into a new circumstance that is like a terra incognita. (1926)

Within it he talks of three stages of society

Stage One: Society Defines itself...tensions mount

Stage Two: Society declares enemies and goes to war

Stage Three: Society accepts it's members and becomes amoral, their roots lay dormant until it begins again.

I thought this was interesting. Would love to find a dif translation

Back to Marx. When I studied political theory and philosophy formally in college. I began to notice what people said. the common farmer is by their work ethic a Marxist. To me Marxism is observation, not something used to take action, but something used to observe and better understand the human condition.

Will get back to you on this! Have you read any philosopher's lately?

The last philosophers I read..... Plato's Republic, where he talks about the ideal city (also meant to be theoretical, I believe, like what you said about Marxism). I thought it was interesting that he did not consider Democracy as the best form of government and would rate a monarchy higher. I also read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World. That one took a while to soak in and I can't say I followed all of it, but he had some interesting points. I think he is too dismissive of the value of religion in society, though.

TXDem:

The last philosophers I read..... Plato's Republic, where he talks about the ideal city (also meant to be theoretical, I believe, like what you said about Marxism). I thought it was interesting that he did not consider Democracy as the best form of government and would rate a monarchy higher. I also read Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World. That one took a while to soak in and I can't say I followed all of it, but he had some interesting points. I think he is too dismissive of the value of religion in society, though.

Application of religion to science (metaphysics?)is different than application of religion to society(philosophy). I think he approached it from how he was raised, the argument that god is looking "after even the smallest sparrow" argument does conjure up absurdity.

IE: if god is looking after the sparrows, who is looking after those women in the Middle East who are tortured for their deviance from mainstream society. ETC.

God applied to what is observed, vs god applied to what is not observed.

Religion is rough to me, I get the whole "I just don't believe in the white dude with the white beard, who is looking over sparrows" routine. There is an inherent desire to believe in how I was raised because it is part of who I am as a person. But the intellect does not allow it. I had viral meningitis over 5 years ago now and it ate through my shortterm memory (not the same as 50 first dates). My brain has since rewired itself, but the point is this. My girlfriend who is a catholic, was with me in the hospital and I began crying. "what's wrong" she asked...and I said "I'm afraid I'm going to become a religious cheerleader like my sisters" the thought of that had me pretty crazed. So I looked at my friend and said "do they have euthanasia for this type of thing?" She kinda looked at me and said "huh? no they don't!, but if you begin motivational speeches, I'll take care of you" hehe something like that. The memory it impacted was the ability to remember small things, (going to the bathroom, why I was in the mall, how did I get there, my memory for conversations remained intact, ability to do technical work was not diminished, just this short little cache was gone until my brain made a little work around for me)

At any rate....on Marxism:

Am reading this page ...." of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff."

Now that the issue of global taxation is upon us. It makes for an interesting read. This is page 176 for those with a kindle 4 pnt font downloaded from the gutenberg project.

Thanks for the Carl Sagan, it has been forever since I thought of him. I didn't read the Billions and Billions book, I had a book on tape with Cosmos in the title. I don't remember it terribly well. Hofstadter is more my speed as far as metaphysics go.

>>Application of religion to science (metaphysics?)is different than application of religion to society(philosophy). <<

Great point. I was looking at it from an anthropological perspective. I understand the point he was trying to make, having been on both sides of the fence. I was raised Southern Baptist, my grandmother was Presbyterian (yikes), and I am now happily unaffiliated. I haven't subscribed to an organized religion in 15 years and I don't see myself ever going back. Although I do consider myself spiritual. With that said, from an anthropological perspective, religion is the driving force behind most cultures. Geertz (although his writing drives me nuts) said that religion is a way to explain what can't be explained. I felt that Sagan was looking at religion from the luxury of having 400 years of science behind us and was a wee bit condescending. But then so are most scientists.

This reminds me of this weekend when I was watching the reruns of "Living With the Mek Tribe" on the Travel Channel. That was a good show. Two white dudes went to live with a tribe in DEEP Paupa New Guinea. These people had never seen Europeans before them.

During one of the episodes, one of the huts burned down and the villagers were really frightened because they thought it was the work of a flying witch that is said to suck your blood while you are asleep. Enter the local shamen. He went about asking those who were in pain to step forward, and proceded to suck what he said were embeded objects out of their skin, ridding them of the evil left by the witch. Everyone was much relieved that the village had been cleansed and they were "safe."

My mom and brother in law made the comment about how "uneducated and stupid" was this aspect of their religion. I asked if it was really that different from what goes on in OUR churches every Sunday, when people walk up to the pulpit because they are in pain or having a round of bad luck, and the preacher "rids them of their demons" or the "devil" lurking in their life. When you look at it that way, all a preacher is is a local shamen.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting to point out to them that religion can't be dismissed so easily, whether you believe in it or not, because it does have a functional purpose in the society in which it operates. Even if the only purpose is to make people "feel" psychologically better. I thought Sagan really missed that point.

I have never read Hofstadter.