I took to reading Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (2016) this morning while reclining on a scarlet chaise-longue and bathing in autumnal sunshine. The cat was on my lap, but my attention kept slipping.... [Read More]
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 I recovered from an earlier post this different sentiment of Rumi that speaks more to my sense of the spirit of the times: "Sometimes the... Continue Reading →
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 stand tangled and tragic in a strange, haunted copse that very few today will see as an holy trinity. The iconoclasts of today's fanatical cancel... Continue Reading →
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 by Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020). The last year has seen lockdowns, curfews and bans on the most fundamental human relationships (attendance at... Continue Reading →
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 and completed in this time, but I have forgotten for now. There is a very heavy political history/philosophy feel to the readings, as I try... Continue Reading →
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 nations, genders, the public/private, and key characteritics of populations are being torn down, and being replaced by a convenient chaos of fluidity and the new... Continue Reading →
"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 from the local library Emmanuel Todd's Lineages of Modernity: a history of humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus. It is a sweeping reconception of... Continue Reading →
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 Hari speaking about addiction, depression and the loss of connection and control in our society. I woke this morning with the thought that I wanted... Continue Reading →
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 course I would believe that history is one branch of literature. A quick recap of my year's reading, before some reflections on what all this... Continue Reading →
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 as they run Or bring more or more blazon man's distress. And I not help. Nor word now of success: All is from wreck, here,... Continue Reading →
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 and soldiers to establish a trading post at Canton via a partly successful military adventure in 1637. The tactical success amounted to little initially since... Continue Reading →
The Burning Archive 