Vacation reading

<![CDATA[I read several very good books during my week off. Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris, is an excellent portrayal of TR in the years after his presidency, when he was the most prominent American in the world and quickly saw his first opportunity to reclaim the White House shattered by his party’s growing fragmentation.
Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a book one has to be ready to read and I’ve been preparing for a long time, but still need another reading to get a more complete handle on the ideas.
William James’ lectures on A Pluralistic Universe, free on Kindle, was a good counterpoint to the radical monism of Deleuze and Guattari — not to mention as a refrain on Theodore Roosevelt’s aggressive patriotism. James’ approachability in contrast to the wild language of D&G, which carries several kinds of weight in Anti-Oedipus, and stark dismantling of the univocal nature of reality helped me think through the Spinozan foundations of the the critique of capitalism and the family structure. Neither side wins definitively, but it was a good contest.]]>