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
“These tactics constitute a ‘total war on criminals’, though what this means, in...”
– James Butler
A wasting shadow
Think about this from Ross Douthat:
When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Aubade’ — that ‘death is no different whined at than withstood.’
(Previously in Douthat.) There is a grade of...
“But for us to pretend that we are not stressing the ecosystem on a multitude of...”
– Tom Murphy
December 2011
12 posts
“The calmness is a special kind of final joy even at deep unkindness, because it...”
– J. H. Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats
In the film A Taste of Cherry, a man wants to kill...
“What use is it to know that we are deluded, if the knowledge does not dispel the...”
– Freeman Dyson
“At first, it is in order to escape things that we think; then, when we have gone...”
– E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay
Note on permanence
some assert that the passage would be better translated “I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds.”—Wikiquote
Haven’t you ever watched a clock tick and wondered when the present is? I mean, there’s ‘metaphysics’, with its questions, and then there’s being the being which is at stake in them. And we talk them over. We weigh them. We think through...
“Increasingly, in fact, I believe […] that part of the deep responsibility...”
– Keston Sutherland, in one of the more interesting interviews with a poet you’ll’ve read all year. I despair of a literary culture that feels compelled to ostracise brilliant uncompromising voices like Sutherland’s.
“To use a word I never wholly understand, it’s a kind of...”
– Hill
“what’s happening in Britain now is that depressed estimates of long-run...”
– Krugman. I said on Facebook: Tory spokespeople seem concerned to represent low yields as both a sign and a feature of the auspicious state of the economy, and to be using the interpretation of them as a sign to argue that we should strive to maintain them as a feature.
“A minor hypocrisy is the inevitable result of the clash between philosophy’s...”
– Zachary Ernst
“These are poems easy to dismiss—and yet, and yet.”
– Logan on the Daybooks
“The independent Office of Budget Responsibility, which Osborne set up on taking...”
– John Cassidy
“The majority of dramas are long-running returning series or genre pieces –...”
– Charlie Brooker
November 2011
18 posts
“And yet everything depends, of course, on defining fidelity. Nabokov’s...”
– Adam Thirlwell, who I don’t really know what he’s saying, but like it
“If capitalism has proved tolerable to the mass of workers over past centuries,...”
– Benjamin Kunkel
“The demands of the Occupy movement may be inchoate, or else conflicting. But it...”
– Gray
“Most poems are written by lovesick teenagers and lonely men. Their readership...”
– Guy Stagg calls it as he sees it
“To the Greeks, says Hölderlin, “holy pathos” and the Apollonian “fire from...”
– Coetzee on Hölderlin
“Humans seem prone to self-fulfilling waves of optimism and pessimism.”
– Wolf
“The only known massacre carried out during Gaddafi’s rule was the killing of...”
– Hugh Roberts
“There is no solution, no magic summit at hand. At this point, it is a choice...”
– Tim Duy
“There is nothing surprising in the fact that we strongly resist the implications...”
– Leszek Kołakowski
“Years later he was to say that he wrote all his books during his nightly walks...”
– Charles Simic on Cioran
“Experiments are under way to detect the tiny fraction of protons that decay in a...”
– Steven Weinberg
“My students tend to think that something is most potent when you’ve got a word...”
– Christopher Ricks
“Even worse, we don’t know what we don’t know.”
– William Easterly reviews Daniel Kahneman
“If people can’t comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own...”
– Krugman
“If debt destruction were desired, the least damaging policy would be inflation....”
– Martin Wolf. If you follow the blogospheric Keynesians, you’ll frequently encounter them talking as though they were surprised that policymakers, too, are prey to that dread human thing, psychology. This or that technocratic solution would get us out of this mess, they insist, if only policymakers...
“It is rather clear that conventional oil is fated to peak (or plateau) and...”
– Tom Murphy
“The peak itself is nothing but fun!”
– Tom Murphy
Note on policy
Since the beginning of October and their conference and what with n quarters of discouraging numbers to their name I’ve noticed the Tories—in the justification of a policy of austerity—resorting more and more to the invocation of a threat. Which is that of the yieldspike. If you don’t swallow the cuts to make sure a yieldspike won’t happen, goes the argument, a...
October 2011
7 posts
Note on solipsism
Part of a longer thing—about Arnold, Larkin, Paterson—which I’m still working on.
There is a kind of quandary in argument which crops up when you are trying to reason about something you have only one example of. In reasoning about things like the universe, and the subjectivity of the reasoner, conclusions from what may be perfectly valid premises, as soon as they are thought to be true,...
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i.m. Mark Speight
I am full of projects. It is my dry occupation in a month of showers (that’s April). Rasher than the polling goes on to determine the politics of the following year, I batter a life to jollier shape, or fashion dolls of badger fur. These are my fingers of butter. Springtime crises burgeon the gunshot burgeonings galling for brasher optimists of progress, the...
“It looks to me as if the resources of space are effectively stranded in place.”
– Tom Murphy has the best new blog since fuck knows
“Giovanni Arrighi argues that capitalist powers experience a belle epoque of...”
– Will Davies
“The novelist Eduard Limonov describes Surkov himself as having ‘turned Russia...”
– Peter Pomerantsev