2021-08-10 11:39
“But though the nation be exempt from real evils, it is not more happy on this account than others. The people are afflicted, it is true, with neither famine nor pestilence; but there… Read More
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2021-08-09 10:43
I’m a structure man, not an agent man. I’m instinctively suspicious of lists – the most overrated movies, the hundred best novels, etc. Of course, I’m a sucker, like… Read More
2021-08-07 08:04
Whenever I go on twitter and read the twits from stans of Elon Musk or Bebeeyed Bezos, I think of this post of mine.In 1973, A.O. Hirschman, with his characteristic, concealing modesty (it c… Read More
2021-08-05 16:52
Life… makes nothing happen.I, too, heard the cowbells MomCrossing the border into SwitzerlandAnd of course I thought of you.I thought of Heidi, and then of youAnd then of you and meWa… Read More
2021-08-05 10:37
In Mill’s Logic, that grand old lumber room, in Chapter 18 of Book three, a principle is spelled out that, in our day, has been shorthanded into the sometimes tendentious phrase, corre… Read More
2021-07-30 18:10
Dead HorsesI have always had a soft spot for Frederick Engels. In spite of the man’s obvious gifts, he will forever be the annotation to his friend Marx: the follower, the suppor… Read More
2021-07-24 10:23
Der Mensch ist geboren, nackt zu gehen und Kokosnüsse zu essen, nicht Uniformen zu tragen und Militärbudgets zu bewilligen. “Man is born to go about naked and eat coco… Read More
2021-07-22 09:08
What would history be like if you knocked out the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense, philosophical history does just that – it reject… Read More
2021-07-19 17:29
The final girl is a trope in horror movies, referring to the female protagonist who remains alive at the end of the film – Merriam Webster dictionary The final girl writes h… Read More
2021-07-17 12:08
“… Mont Blanc was before us- the Alps, with their innumerable glaciers on high all around, closing in the complicated windngs of the single vale- forests inexpressibly beautiful… Read More
2021-07-14 18:30
I notice that Bjorn Lomborg, who I had totally forgotten about, is on a global Murdoch-y tour to tout his dismal pseudoscience. I'm impressed - most conmen from the OOs have crawled un… Read More
2021-07-10 08:44
In 1991, an anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas, wrote a book entitled “Entangled Objects” in which he proposed that other dimensions of commodity exchange exist outside of what is u… Read More
2021-07-07 10:49
La Chambre (after Balthus) A stub fury stands drawing open the vast drapesletting in the accusatory lightupon the sprawled, naked sleeper whose odalisque interiorityis thus so rudely s… Read More
2021-07-06 07:13
I can’t hold together, in my head, these two things: on the one hand, my knowledge that myself and my cohort have loaded up the future with the unimaginable horror of climate change &n&hell…Read More
2021-06-30 10:34
On white privilegeThe conservative complaint about the term “white privilege” is that it induces guilt in white people. That, oddly enough, is consistent with my complaint, which… Read More
2021-06-26 12:12
During the Cold War, anti-communist historians were unanimous on one topic: the Communists were liars. Their statistics were lies, their trials were lies, the bones of millions in the Gulag… Read More
2021-06-19 11:13
Anyone who reads continental philosophy or the philosophical essayists will soon be impressed by the almost obsessive mooning over the concept of absence. This has no parallel in Anglophone… Read More
2021-06-18 10:30
Janet Malcolm - one of the four angels of the 70s and 80s, with Joan Didion, Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick - is dead. Damn. One of the few essayists who I read on name only - if… Read More
2021-06-16 13:39
Yes, yes, yes I too have bought the lemon soap at Sweeny’s. Bloomsday is corny – it is a corniness laid at the foot of the monument, Ulysses. I can say it: this is my "favorite"… Read More
2021-06-15 08:18
The channel changer was put on the market by Zenith in 1950 under the label “Lazybones” – an oddly moralizing kind of brand name. In the fifties, as home technology reshape… Read More
2021-06-11 07:36
John Maynard Keynes famously remarked that Newton was the last of the magicians. He was referring to Newton’s fascination with alchemy and the book of Revelations. Keynes was, of… Read More
2021-06-09 12:35
“- When do you write? - Not all the time. - So you aren’t a writer? -I am a writer just as a venomous beast stings at some time or another, when it is provoked, when it is stepp… Read More
2021-06-05 16:21
There is an article in the Philosophers Mag that made me laugh outloud. It is a survey essay by Helen Beebee entitled Women in Philosophy: What’s changed? Beebee lists the things… Read More
2021-06-04 09:45
The Little France syndromeWell, at last the NYT emerges from its Macron daze to notice the sheer cretinism of the Macron cultural politics, driven by its far right allies, all swimming… Read More
2021-06-01 08:48
“The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus.29 They t… Read More
2021-05-30 17:20
It was, I believe, the existential psychoanalyst Erik Erickson who first coined the phrase “identity crisis”. In “Young Man Luther” - a truly Hollywoodish title… Read More
2021-05-28 08:37
The press at the moment is full of UFO stories. The Pentagon is about to come clean – to publish its files – encounters of the third kind are leaping off the pages of National En… Read More
2021-05-24 08:39
“What age was I? Six or seven, I think. I was stretched out in the shadow of some poplar trees contemplating a sky almost without clouds. I saw this sky teeter, and fall into the empt… Read More
2021-05-22 10:15
“Honeysuckle. So named because of the old but entirely erroneous idea that bees extracted honey therefrom. The honeysuckle is useless to the bee.” What, then, is useful to th… Read More
2021-05-21 12:15
Ferdinand Lundberg, in 1939, wrote a book about the sixty wealthiest families in America. He made the audacious claim that these families collectively owned and directed most of… Read More
2021-05-20 07:04
In Kleist's essay, On the Marionette Theater, Kleist presents a dialogue between himself and a marionette master concerning theater and the relation of the marionette to the human acto… Read More
2021-05-18 08:34
Everybody has his or her year of genius, a yar in which neurons configure into revelations. For some it is at age five, for others, at age 65. Everything becomes a portal. You see your… Read More
2021-05-12 09:02
Walter Benjamin was convinced that gambling – and the gambler – was the temporal coordinate of the stroll, and the flaneur. The gambler was an intrusion, he thought, into t… Read More
2021-05-11 07:36
The pre-modern form of askesis was all about giving up desires. The Greek stoic, the Tuscan saint, and the Chinese Confucian sage all agreed on this point. Epictetus wrote a man… Read More
2021-05-10 08:30
1. Lets start out with the obvious: Starmer is a crap politician and his weaknesses just become more evident as he goes on. Labour should replace him. But: 2. There is something to the… Read More
2021-05-09 13:33
Well, I must say, Starmer is surprising me. The task of the Labour leader, Starmer said to himself, is to be even more laughable than the leader of the Tories. And he's done a bangup j… Read More
2021-05-08 09:54
Hommage to Aretha F. Zombies don’t seem to shit. And they are absolutely null as lovers. In my cosmos of pop horror, we have, at the top, the aristocratic vampire, then… Read More
2021-05-02 12:39
Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner begins with these definitive two lines: “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the state And I hunched in its belly till… Read More
2021-04-30 15:08
“The PPS, established a September 9, 1967 in Vevey, broke off from the Swiss Communist Party (marxist-leninist). According to article 3 of the statutes, the PPS was open to orientation… Read More
2021-04-27 07:34
The program era killed the proletarian novel. Or perhaps, it died when the cold war turned to modernism. Whatever the causes of death, the corpse seems to be largely unmourned. The disorga… Read More
2021-04-27 06:45
“Philippeau, welch trübe Augen! Hast du dir ein Loch in die rote Mütze gerissen? Hat der heilige Jakob ein böses Gesicht gemacht? Hat es während des Guillot… Read More
2021-04-21 11:39
“Nobody will deny that in a world in which everything is connected through cause and effect, and in which no miracles ever happen, each part is a mirror of the whole. If a pea is sho… Read More
2021-04-19 07:50
Geography lessonThe clams clamor on the shoreI walk by – a tempus fugitiveleaving behind a bitch’s spoor.This is life. This is how I live.We’re all undressed in its b… Read More
2021-04-16 14:35
Art for art’s sake was born to be the weakling, the easy target, the punching bag. Imagine the effrontery of the thing! If a painting, a piece of music, a poem exists for its own… Read More
2021-04-11 18:34
I am a big fan of certain reactionary writers. Of pedophiles, racists, misogynists and a buncha sorry ass mandarins. At the same time, I am aware that criticism of these people for being ped… Read More
2021-04-08 08:58
One of the oublis of the Nazi state was the accelerated construction of a slave economy – the so called “forced laborers” – Zwangsarbeiter. There are vari… Read More
2021-04-03 10:53
Clarity – or clearness, a word that blemishes the clear, slightly, with the -ness – has an almost universal claque. It is the rare soul who says anything against it. Such applaus… Read More
2021-03-30 11:58
In Sir Thomas Ellyot’s dictionary of English from 1559, there is an entry for defector: “he that so departeth or rebelleth, or goth from one to an other.” It goes back to a… Read More
2021-03-27 09:14
Muriel Rukeyser responded to the American jitters in a poetry collection published in 1938, US1. The book is most famous for the “documentary’ poems known as the &ldq&hell…Read More
2021-03-24 12:04
Anti-fascist seems like a bland title, at least in the U.S. After all, the mythology of American power was based on the largest anti-fascist operation in history, called World War II… Read More
2021-03-22 09:13
I spent the 00s in a froth of indignation, and my frothing found a home on my blog. But no matter how I whipped the hypocrisy, cretinism and downright pig ignorance of Bush’s administr… Read More
2021-03-19 10:10
In 2006, Harper’s Magazine sponsored a forum on the possibility of an American coup d’etat. Among the participants in that discussion was one Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr… Read More
2021-03-15 13:15
We live in an epoch in which objects have taken one of the attributes of kings - that is, they get biographies. The biography of the fork, the pencil, Wall Street – the transfer of th… Read More
2021-03-14 10:39
The Ides of March Fate’s patent on circumstance makes a monopoly of accidents. Me, for instance – isn’t my every hair counted by God on his golden throne? Down here below… Read More
2021-03-12 13:38
Cold War reflectionsDuring the Axis of Evil years, there was a sub-category of journalistic histories that went back over the 30s and the Cold War from a Bush-ite perspective, a search… Read More
2021-03-07 11:51
"The Tax Policy Center in Washington estimates that the direct payments and expanded tax credits in the bill would, by themselves, increase after-tax income this year by more… Read More
2021-03-03 08:54
Balloon love goes through three stages. First there is the curious rubber minnow, with the strange mouth. Your mom or dad blows it up, because though you try and try, you just seem to end up… Read More
2021-02-26 11:28
Yawn is an ordered thing like heartbeat or equation -or like the song you sing on occasion. “Fetal yawing in amniotic fluid (like a fish’s yawn in water)” shows yaw… Read More
2021-02-23 10:03
In the anglosphere, the philosophical discussion about the environment often tends to be about rights and rational choice. I think it was Anthony Giddens who pointed out that, w… Read More
2021-02-15 09:55
In the thumbnail sketch of modernity I carry around in my head, I see it as the result of two revolutions, both of which have failed. The first, or bourgeois revolution was basically a… Read More
2021-02-12 15:44
I know what boys likeI know what guys wantJohn Dupre, in an nifty little takedown of the use of rational expectations theory as the master key to all the social sciences in Human Nature and… Read More
2021-02-11 11:06
Philosophers present arguments; other people, lower in the pecking order, just argue. Among the meanings of the Latin verb, arguere, is blame a person for a crime. In Roman law, this is t… Read More
2021-02-10 09:28
Surely, giving the finger to the man tailgating you on Highway 10 is poetry too, and should be counted where they count such things in Rilke’s heaven. Among my tropes and ruses and t… Read More
2021-02-06 11:40
There's one thing I really about the meanstesting neolibs, who claim to be so compassionate towards the poors that they wanna means test any relief package so it doesn't benefit the nas… Read More
2021-02-04 12:09
“The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of… Read More
2021-02-01 14:35
Crossword puzzles and philosophyApollinaire started writing his typographically complex poems, the Calligrammes, in Paris in 1913 -14. By that point, the cubists were pasting bits of p… Read More
2021-01-30 11:03
“The fantasy idea that a “child is being beaten” is confessed with surprising frequency by persons who have sought out psychoanalytic treatment either for hysteria or compu… Read More
2021-01-26 16:50
“I was visiting Kyoto's Fushimi Inari shrine with a friend, who told me that the Japanese word for pun is oyajigyagu, or "old guy gag". Puns are the jokes older men tell. Wordplay does… Read More
2021-01-24 12:12
There is a small subset of historians in France who have mulled the politics of vandalism, starting with James Guillaume’s “Gregoire and vandalism” in 1901. The locus… Read More
2021-01-19 10:46
A blues for the rich girl Exhilaration and depression Joined hands above my cradle One voice Issued from two mouths How can I How can I sur... How can I survive Such tremendous patronage?… Read More
2021-01-15 10:25
“It is precipitated not by a mechanical breakdown but by the descent of an emotional block . Its gravest form , which science has come to call fugue, embraces three classically dr… Read More
2021-01-13 11:09
Sometimes, a writer finishes his text. Sometimes, the text kicks the ass of the writer so hard that the writer has to stop. This text is one of the latter. It is part of a series of tr… Read More
2021-01-11 11:50
I'm sorta interested in the false flagging, by rightwing groups, of leftwing groups. It has been a common thread in rightwing extremism since at least the 1930s, and flowered into the strate… Read More
2021-01-09 10:50
Susan Sontag, I think of you!In Illness as Metaphor, when she went after the “anti-intellectual pieties and a facile compassion all too triumphant in contemporary medicine and psychiat… Read More
2021-01-08 08:11
Blow after blow, the Trumpkins must be coming down from their high. Frist "Mr. Trump", as the NYT has taken to calling him - which is a sign that he really is expelled from the countrf… Read More
2021-01-05 19:52
While the aesthetic sphere is full of objects corresponding to the sense of sight or of hearing, there are no objects directly correlating to the the sense of balance. Dance and… Read More
2021-01-02 09:01
Mickey Mouse came to the new world with his ancient paraphernalia - a cauldron, a wand boosted from the paleolithic. The wilderness was full of strange forces that Mickey could bind… Read More
2020-12-29 12:09
When I first started reading Emily Dickinson in high school in the 1970s, she seemed to be either a tame poet, good for holiday cards, or a morose poet of the kind satirized by Mark Tw… Read More
2020-12-28 07:19
There is an attitude that is at the base of great English comedy, from Twelfth Night to Wodehouse. It is the moment when judgment – moral or aesthetic – shifts to the register of… Read More
2020-12-27 11:29
Love come out, I said, and fight I’ve got the gloves, I’ve learned the pace - Honey child, I’ll uncork my right And land you on your bitchass face. The cutgal in my corne… Read More
2020-12-21 11:20
This summer I re-read a lot of John LeCarré novels from his prime years – the 1960s and 1970s – and read a few from his decline – the 2000s. The George Smiley epic… Read More
2020-12-19 13:03
“A well regarded psychologist once wrote down the proposition: ... for the animals are not capable of smiling and laughing.” – Robert Musil, Can a horse laugh? When I was a… Read More
2020-12-18 10:31
Is there anything to be said for pretension? Simon During’s thumbnail review of Lisa Robertson’s Baudelaire Fractal used the word pretentious, and then semi-takes it back: &ldquo&hell…Read More
2020-12-18 09:24
Out of lunch we made a nest The wine, the salad, the cigs at the end And lined it with the bleeding rests Of our talked down, forked over, knifed over friends You and I, Leandra: behi… Read More
2020-12-14 08:30
“... men demand activities, even such that include a certain element of coercion mixed in them. Just as false is the idea that if Adam and Eve had remained in Paradise, the… Read More
2020-12-12 16:44
Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.For the victims, i… Read More
2020-12-08 16:12
Every social order creates victims. Consequently, every social order has to deal with victims. And victims have to deal with the social order – if they survive.For the victims, i… Read More
2020-12-03 17:09
First wind came out of the wombGuzzling atmosphere like champagneBawling the certainty of self.Second wind came out of recess- a whistle, the line of girls-the pecking order had my heart in… Read More
2020-12-02 09:15
John Quiggins at Crooked Timber published a post last week about controversial opinions. He describes tweeting two of his controversial opinions, to see what response he would get. The… Read More
2020-11-30 07:07
I think of myself as a cultural relativist, but I am constantly irritated at my fellow culture relativists and the debate they wage with their antipodes, the various kinds of moral abs… Read More
2020-11-27 09:48
I cannot prove this or weave too large a theme out of it, but I think there is a Mediterranean modernism, one that takes up the challenge of Nietzsche’s Gay Science. “Man h… Read More
2020-11-25 14:24
I’d as soon lay hold of Emily’s dash and trifle as I would lift my uncle Jeff Cash’s favorite rifle from out of the case where he keeps it in his den - under where the he… Read More
2020-11-21 08:37
Like everybody else, I live among my marginalia.The orange peels, the leftover lentil stew, goes in the trash,I presume. I let the maid take care of it.There are drawers full of photos, alth… Read More
2020-11-18 08:37
Tennyson, famously, was averse to the word "scissors". Something about the s-es. I don't know if Tennyson had a lisp. When I was a child of six or so, I did. Scissors would be a treach… Read More
2020-11-17 13:37
We are not living in a post-Truth era, for the simple reason that we have never, ever lived in a Truth era.We are living in the era of data availability. For instance, I don’t know whe… Read More
2020-11-17 08:43
What is this poem selling? For the plausible, the uncle looking man On the You Tube channel is definitive: It is by selling that we die and live All things we see above us And the terror in… Read More
2020-11-12 10:17
The genteel trapWhen Santayana used the phrase “genteel tradition” to refer to a certain strain in American thinking - a romantic avoidance of the real, haunted by Calvinis… Read More
2020-11-11 14:20
Throwin time away - hattip BLCKDGRDThe story of the structural anthropologist and his deconstructive sidekick (his Sancho Panza, his Gilligan, his Groot). How they go out, like sha… Read More
2020-11-08 11:33
In my opinion, one of the worst pieces of advice in all American history is: 'when they go low, we go high.' This is not just appeasement, it is smug appeasement - the kind of passive aggres… Read More
2020-11-04 12:14
- Bob Marley The Real SituationThe stories of Noah and Jonah in the Bible mirror each other to the extent that they seem variations of some deeper story, one sprung from the Apocalypse… Read More
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