Year: 2019
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Reflections on 2019: walking through the desert
It has been a barren year. My writing projects have not developed as I would like. I have made progress with Ivan’s Singer, but I have not been finishing the sections according to schedule. I think it is still viable for me to finish next year this Sebald-like novel about Ivan the Terrible and my […]
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Reflections on 2019: notes on my reading
The year’s reading has been among my least studious. The troubles of the year have robbed me of time and concentration to read deeply and widely, and there has been less discovery of new topics or rediscovery of old masters than in recent years. Yet still if I document my reading I may discover curiosities […]
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Reflections on 2019 – the democratic rebuff to progressivism
Democracy is a mesmerising word. The power of the idea overwhelms definition and precise thinking. The mandarin political theorist, Emeritus Professor John Dunn of Cambridge University, posed these questions in Breaking Democracy’s Spell: “Why does this word democracy now hold such singular political authority? Where is the power that lurks so strangely within it? What […]
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Reflections on 2019: walking through the circles of hell
It has been a difficult and personally challenging year. Much of the year has been consumed by profound stressors. I have been stalked by the threat of redundancy. I have endured the daily reality of ostracism and being an outcast at work. I have stared into the frightening prospect of unemployment in my later 50s […]
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The impeachment of the republic
Over the last week or so amidst some illness, which led me to convalesce in bed for four days, listening to podcasts and watching youtube, and some insomnia, which led me to wake anywhere between two and six am, I have tuned into many hours of the impeachment hearings being conducted in Washington. There appears […]
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Where is virtue in dark times?
“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. […]
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The Sacrifice
In 1986 Andrei Tarkovky released his final film, The Sacrifice. It has long been one of my most treasured films, and for reasons that are mysterious it is calling to me this morning. Perhaps it is the pervasive sense of doom, the collpase of meaning, and the threat of cultural catastrophe, and the need to […]
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Bloom’s last lilac: the death of Harold Bloom (1930-2019)
The American literary critic, or rather lover of literature, is dead at 89. There are the usual range of bad obituaries, collected over at aldaily.com, prepared by scornful woke journalists (“staff writers”) on the make or embittered post-modern pedants envious of his gifts of memory, language and understanding. But these fashionable madmen cannot mar the […]
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Forgiveness and the madness of crowds
Douglas Murray places this remark from G.K. Chesterton in epigram of his The madness of crowds: gender, race, identity: “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.” His book is a restrained testing of the absurdities of identity politics, social justice and […]
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To govern does not equal to change
In 2016 following the vote on Brexit, an American political journalist wrote: “But what if progressivism isn’t inevitable at all? What if people will always be inclined by nature to love their own — themselves, their families, their neighbors, members of their churches, their fellow citizens, their country — more than they love the placeless […]
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Frankenstein’s children
In 1815 Mount Tambora, on the northern coast of the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, erupted in the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history. The vast amount of ash and gas thrown into the atmosphere led to strange weather being recorded across the world – in China, in India, in America and Europe. In central Europe, […]
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The Crisis in Australian Politics 2010-2013 (reposted)
As described in the previous post, Free speech for public servants and Osip Mandelstam, I am reposting here an extended set of posts that I originally posted in three parts on the Happy Pessimist blog (no longer online) in 2013. The Crisis in Australian Politics 2010-2013 07 Apr 2013 (originally posted on The Happy Pessimist […]
The Burning Archive 