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Arthur Koestler appreciation thread 2017-03-10 02:19:37 Post No. 9217729
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Arthur Koestler appreciation thread 2017-03-10 02:19:37 Post No. 9217729
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Why do we never talk about him? He raped Simone de Beauvoir for god's sake.
>[Koestler] began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud's. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Travelling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a "crazy party" in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists [and fellow-travellers] of the era, including Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but he did not die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940 Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s he helped to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Melvin Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.
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I fucking love Koestler. All of his shit. Act of Creation is responsible for half of what I'm doing with my life.
>Koestler was known to be a sexual bully; De Beauvoir described him as liking rough sex. But in a 1998 biography, David Cesarani added fuel to the fire by alleging that in the 1940s Koestler had raped Jill Craigie, wife of the Labour politician Michael Foot. Although some doubts remain about the allegation, the general consensus is that even if it wasn't true, it wouldn't have been entirely out of character.
I like him even more now.
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I've only read Darkness at Noon, it was ok.
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degenerate, raping jew
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>>9217729
Any book recs?
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I enjoyed Darkness at Noon and The Sleepwalkers (Kepler's cool; Galileo a shit). I have The Act of Creation in my to read pile.
Interesting guy.
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>>9217798
Midewife is good too
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>Breasts like champagne glasses! Ha! Ha! Ha! *adjusts pince nez*
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Age of Longing is decent. Also gotta recommend Scammell's biography, "The Indispensible Intellectual".
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>raped Simone de Beauvoir
doing god's work
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Koestler interests me because he seems like a very bright guy who dedicated his time to positing and defending fringe theories. Only read Roots of Coincidence so far, which hasn't convinced me of the paranormal, but nonetheless touched upon some really interesting material with regard to statistics, physics, and his own metaphysical ideas of the holon. Excited to read more, mostly his non-fiction but maybe I'll read Darkness at Noon someday.
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Reflections on Hanging is pretty interesting too.
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>>9217729
Dudes got an advancing hairline. Pretty soon its going to cover his whole forehead
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>>9218016
Looks like it was a politician's wife, Jill Craigie, who makes that claim. de Beauvoir mentions he liked rough sex.
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