essays, notes and poetry against cultural decay
Wallace Stevens is a poet of comedy, and comedy relieves the distress of tragic history. Comedy reconciles the restless, Romantic imagination with the present and the real. When the world falls apart, one must cultivate one’s garden, but also tell some comic stories over dinner. It is comedy, not alone but inseparable, that moves the infinite conversation on.
This morning I read some poems from Hafez (c 1315-1390) that celebrated love and wine and striving of a mysticism. Notwithstanding the art, the sentiments left me cold, and so…
The story of Ezra Pound’s mind cannot be told in plain and simple affirmations. Three twisted trees grow from this mind in all accounts: poetry, unavowable politics, and madness. They…
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of “soft totalitarianism” described in Rod Dreher’s Live Not…
Over at my blog’s My reading archive page, I have updated my notes on my main readings over the March to July period. I feel there were other books read…
Frank Furedi has proposed an intriguing idea that the spectre haunting radical identity politics, the Rainbow Guards of our raging Cultural Revolution, is a difficulty with borders. The boundaries between…
“Never have human groups of such a size been so rich, so old, so educated, so devoid of collective beliefs.” Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of Modernity, p 21 I picked up…
Sitting in a shopping centre cafe, I am reading A Year with Rumi. I am waiting for a back massage, sipping a coffee and listening to Sam Harris and Johann…
Looking over my posts for the year I am struck by the recurrence of history in my material. I have read more history than literature this year – although of…
Here, listen to the uncanny insight… 75 The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; The times are winter, watch, a world undone: They waste, they wither worse; they…
I am reading Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: the Opium War and the end of China’s last golden age (Knopf 2018), in which he describes the initial attempt by British traders…
Two passages from Max Weber’s The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism…
