Category: history
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Predicting Donald Trump
This is the post I wrote on 22 July this year: https://theburningarchive.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/donald-trump-and-americas-wounded-pride/ Just as one should be careful of what you wish for, one needs to be careful what you predict! Part one of the prediction – Trump will win – has proven right. Part two is that he will fail. But those weaknesses of […]
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Wasting time on conceptual poetry
I borrowed from my local public library Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton anthology (2nd edition), edited by Paul Hoover. I am not quite sure what was the impulse that led me to this step, perhaps it was a feeling that I had little real sense of what was up in the current poetry scene, and […]
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The Great Confinement
Image Source: photograph, Sarah Lee, Bethlem Museum of the Mind exhibition, The Guardian From Keats, Hyperion: Just at the self-same beat of Time’s wide wings Hyperion slid into the rustled air, And Saturn gain’d with Thea that sad place Where Cybele and the bruised Titans mourn’d. It was a den where no insulting light Could glimmer […]
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Myths of power: merchant, soldier, sage…?
David Priestland has written a provocative book, Merchant, soldier, sage: a new history of power. His main idea is that power is controlled by “castes” or social orders defined by occupation, a prevailing social ethos and characteristic ways of wielding power. These castes or elite groups cycle through positions of dominance or alliance with each […]
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Donne’s sermons and the blogging tradition
Image Source: Oil Painting, John Donne (1573-1631), at the age of 49. Anon. British School, 1622. Victoria and Albert Museum. Twice every Sunday for 16 years from 1615 to 1631 John Donne gave a sermon. He was unpractised as a public speaker before this time. Something of a courtier and yet an outsider, who tried but […]
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The Tiger’s Eye closes for the last time
The great Australian historian or writer, Inga Clendinnen has died. Image Source: http://www.smh.com.au/national/people/warrior-of-the-mind-20140810-3dha8.html There is a moving obituary by her publisher at Text, Michael Heyward, over at The Australian. There Heyward quotes Clendinnen saying that her turn to writing in response to her life-threatening illness “liberated me from the routines which would have delivered me, unchallenged and […]
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Ivan’s Singer
Image Source: Franz Riss Skomorokh in a village, wikipedia Noone knows for sure how Ivan the Terrible died. The Tsar of all Russia, Grand Prince of Vladimir and Moscow and all the rest, died in 1584, but how we do not really know. The uncertainty, together with the availability of scientific methods, led to the exhumation […]
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The many cradles of civilizations (list)
Civilizations and natures From time to time, I am tempted to be a prophet of a doom, and like Cassandra abandon myself to “the awful pains of prophecy… maddening as they fall” (Agamemnon); but something in my temperament, holds me back to a more tempered and sane view. History is neither progress nor complete decay. […]
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Coming back late from the Hyacinth garden
Image source: Böcklin: In der Gartenlaube, ~1891, By Arnold Böcklin – “Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im jungen Bundesstaat 1848 – 1900”, Kunsthaus Zürich, 1998, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5543414 Is there a muse more poorly treated in modern culture than Clio? We forget. We lose the art of telling the stories of history in all […]
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A list of 21 books that shaped me
This list may never end, or so the green dream of the solitary reader goes: 1. A book of modern verse whose name I cannot recall but it was from its fawn paperback that I first absorbed, reading and hearing verses as a child, the taste for modernism. 2. A teach yourself Russian book, which […]
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Quotes to write by 1.
From Niccolo Machiavelli’s letter to the magnificent Lorenzo de Medici in presenting his The Prince: Nor I hope will it be considered presumptuous for a man of low and humble status to dare discuss and lay down the law about how princes should rule; because, just as men who are sketching the landscape put themselves […]
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Madness & History
I am reading Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization: a cultural history of insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Thames & Hudson, 2015). The title is a wink to the English translation of Foucault’s Folie et Déraison, that is Madness & Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. […]
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