Hello, LW,

One of my names is holist. I am 45. Self-employed family man, 6 kids, 2 dogs, 1 cat. Originally a philosopher (BA+MA from Sussex, UK), but I've been a translator for 19 years now... it is wearing thin. Music and art are also important parts of my life (have sold music, musically directed a small circus, have exhibited pictures), and recently, with dictatorship being established here in Hungary, politics seems increasingly urgent, too. I dabble in psychotherapy and call myself a Discordian. Recently, I started thinking about doing a PhD somewhere. My topic is very general: what has caused the increasingly hostile relationship between individual and culture, and what are the remedies available? My window of opportunity is a few years away: I am intermittently thinking about possible supervisors. I have a blog at holist.hu, some of it is in English and it has a lot of pictures. The discordians at PD kicked me out, I found the Secular Café to be indescribably boring, I am a keen MeFite, but I'd like something a little more discussioney. A friend pointed me at LW. I hope it works out.

For pointers, here's a slightly random list of some books that are very important to me: Fiction: Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, Ulysses by James Joyce, Karnevál by Béla Hamvas, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, The Diamong Age by Neal Stephenson. Non-fiction: The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, The Facts of Life by R. D. Laing, Children of the Future by Wilhelm Reich, The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller, The Story of B by Daniel Quinn, Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich

I guess I'll start by lurking, but you never know :)