May 2012
10 posts
“… like all good comedy, it is funny because it hooks into something...”
– Matthew Reynolds on Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-All, in his The Poetry of Translation
“One of them said: ‘This is not Europe: I’ve been to Europe and this...”
– Paul Mason
“Our taste for literature which arises from [the imagination of disaster] is a...”
– Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self
“It is natural for artists, and lovers of art, to entertain the thought that art...”
– Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words
“I think a plausible case can be made for childlessness and addiction being the...”
– Will Self. ‘Nihilism’s for boys’, was Emmy the Great’s line
“There is a treachery inherent in making the whole organic point of a poem come...”
– Hill
“What Bruegel says back to the Book of Revelation—and surely his voice was that...”
– T. J. Clark on Bruegel’s Cockaigne
“Left politics is immobilized, it seems to me, at the level of theory and...”
– T. J. Clark
“There are things that can be done in fundamental physics without building a new...”
– Steven Weinberg
Letter on Lanchester
re ‘Marx at 193’, London Review of Books, 5 April 2012
James Butler said on Twitter, ‘There is a certain difficulty in writing where any project may become so expanded as to become coterminous with the entire universe.’ The remark struck me, because this has indeed been my experience. And I worry that this isn’t just a sign of untutored practice, but of a limitation...
April 2012
8 posts
“What matters is that Gray allows himself to pause in his driven indictment of...”
– George Kateb
“Certain people in the community take pride in how great it is that we ask...”
– Shalom Auslander on Orthodox Judaism
“But it is also, this guy, I can’t figure out he gets away with it, he...”
– Wallace disagrees with Michael Wood
“What are those with the usual complement of fear to do when the fearless have...”
– Richard Lloyd Parry
“Of what would you repent?
Nothing.
Nothing?
One thing. I spoke with...”
– Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
“Is there or is there not, a remarkable inertia masquerading in England as...”
– Geoffrey Grigson
“The least controversial, or the most defensible, thing to want at any given time...”
– Gideon Lewis-Kraus. But ‘sustaining existence’ in itself cannot be a goal: it cannot be achieved, unless the goal is to sustain existence for an amount of time which is necessarily arbitrary (‘as long as we can’). The difference between us and the animals is that we see this....
“Hill was breathtakingly shy, nearly as shy as a hedgehog—formality and bluster...”
– William Logan
March 2012
20 posts
“Simple faiths tend to be driven to distraction by anomalies, and to bring an...”
– Marilynne Robinson
“Connectivity technology pushes every button. There’s this new research that...”
– Sherry Turkle
“I am every day subject to the many microaggressions of American racism.”
– Teju Cole
What I am trying to say I suppose is my politics...
Note on humanism
We just need to transform our picture of the world a little… —Kirill Medvedev
What is humanism? I want us to forget the definitions of humanism: I want to define it again. Humanism is the belief in the inalienable value of one’s own flourishing. Humanism, therefore, is the belief in the flourishing first of one’s family, then of one’s nation and finally of...
Footnote to 'Note on the hipster'
This is an update to an earlier note. I’m posting it separately as well—not because I think it has any great merit as an argument but because it complements the ‘Note on policy’ I did in November.
I have an analogous and no less makeshift theory about the behaviour of three factions of the overclass of policymakers, all of whom are operating in the teeth of consistent...
“No longer is there the possibility of revolution, merely the possibility of...”
– Jamie Berk, anticipating what I said here amazingly closely
“It is not by chance that advertising, after having, for a long time, carried an...”
– Baudrillard. Via Jamie Berk, skewering n+1
“The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at...”
– Hazlitt
“Perhaps the worst thing the complex has done, however, is to institutionalise a...”
– Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka on the ‘nonproliferation complex’
“The effect of this is at times that of reading stand-alone maxims in the manner...”
– John Armstrong on Odi Barbare
“There is that sense in which to be on the left — whatever that means — is to...”
– Simon Critchley. I riffed on this on Twitter.
“For a writer the university is death.”
– E. M. Cioran
“But the fact is that we just do not know why we now live so much longer.”
– Robin Hanson
Note on the hipster
with a prefatory note on truth
i
I’ve lost my faith. Thanks to reason, I’ve lost my rationalist faith in reason. I’ve lost a faith implicated so primally in my upbringing that I was scarcely aware of it, or capable of defining it, until I found it questioned. Faiths in the supremacy of the conception of truth latent in the scientific method, and in an idea of science’s...
“But if you think the problem with Russia is Putin, then all you have to do is...”
– Keith Gessen
“—is “bitingly legitimate gravel thing” noise or signal?”
– John Latta on Timothy Thornton
“The state might bully you or its agents be rude, but at least as a citizen you...”
– Ross McKibbin
“Told by Geithner that preventing a second Great Depression would be his...”
– Yglesias
February 2012
3 posts
Altogether elsewhere →
Secularism and poetry: Arnold, Larkin, Don Paterson
“Patrick’s only ally is his intelligence, and it gives the novels their power....”
– James Wood on Edward St. Aubyn
“It is no coincidence that scientific advance is most rapid in this day and age...”
– Tom Murphy
January 2012
12 posts
Traumatised by Lear, Johnson couldn’t reread the last scenes until he was compelled to edit them. According to Hazlitt, he approved the imposition on it of a happy ending which was the calculated practice of the contemporary stage. Tolstoy forgot himself in animosity towards the play and tried to wreck its reputation, because—according to Orwell—it presented too precise an account of his own...
“Indeed it would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human life, the...”
– Hazlitt (last one I promise)
“The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to...”
– Hazlitt
“Religiosity seems to ooze out of the flagstones here: ministers and police...”
– Laurie Penny (Cf James Butler)
“The most interesting part of seeing these guys up close is seeing the way people...”
– Taibbi
“The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with...”
– David Bromwich
“It is not so much that we care to be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence,...”
– Hazlitt on the fear of death
“Men assemble in crowds, with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy: but if...”
– Hazlitt on hating
“For the habit of his mind would lead him to find out a reason for or against any...”
– Hazlitt on Burke