Skip to content Menu
The Burning Archive

The Burning Archive

essays, notes and poetry against cultural decay

Sidebar
  • Home
  • About the author
  • About the Burning Archive
  • My poetry collections
  • My reading archive
  • On governing
  • The infinite conversation
  • Best of the Burning Archive

Tag: Essays

Posted on February 17, 2021

13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat

In early 2017 I wrote a series of posts – or let us call them essays – on Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. I wrote it still aiming…

Continue Reading
Posted on November 4, 2018November 5, 2018

The floating life within

In the 1980s or 1990s I wrote down on an index card, this observation from Robert Musil An essay is not the provisional  or incidental expression of a conviction that…

Continue Reading
Posted on September 9, 2018September 9, 2018

Poem(s): To my errant mind

The following poem, “To my errant mind,” was originally published in my collection, After the Pills, which you may purchase here or here. To my errant mind Your dreams grow like a twisted…

Continue Reading
Posted on December 10, 2017

Reflections on 2017

The year is drawing to a close, and while it is yet weeks from New Year, the office christmas party season is in full swing, and my mind is turning…

Continue Reading
Posted on January 31, 2017February 17, 2021

13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat

“Psychoanalysts don’t usually write essays; they tend to write lectures or papers or chapters, or what are called, perhaps optimistically, contributions.” Adam Phillips “Coda: up to a point” in One…

Continue Reading

Categories

  • culture (97)
  • history (100)
  • literature (127)
  • music (2)
  • Personal story (81)
  • psyche (1)
  • quotations to write by (28)
  • the real world today (119)
  • Uncategorized (31)
  • What I am reading (11)

Tags

Adam Phillips America Australian politics blogging bureaucracy civil war coronavirus cultural decay culture decay democracy Donald Trump election Empire Essays featured Fernandez-Armesto Franz Kafka Fukuyama governing history Hopkins identity politics impeachment Ivan the Terrible literature lockdown machiavelli madness music philosophy poetry political decay politics power Prose public service quotes Russia Russian history society terror travel trust in government Vaclav Havel Wallace Stevens Weber writing year in review Zbigniew Herbert

Archives

  • About the author
  • About the Burning Archive
  • Best of the Burning Archive
Start a Blog at WordPress.com.
Top
Follow The Burning Archive on WordPress.com

Recent musings

  • Ezra Pound, the unavowable fury of thy true heritage in fragments February 24, 2021
  • The persistence of the Mahabharata February 21, 2021
  • Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche February 18, 2021
  • 13 ways of looking at a bureaucrat February 17, 2021
  • Sound and fury told by the American cultural “elite” February 16, 2021

Tags

Adam Phillips America Australian politics autobiography Bakhtin Blanchot blogging bureaucracy change China civil war coronavirus cultural decay culture culture wars death decay democracy Donald Trump dream election Empire Essays Ezra Pound featured Fernandez-Armesto Foucault Franz Kafka Fukuyama governing Harold Bloom history history of emotions Hopkins identity politics impeachment Ivan the Terrible Kierkegaard literature lockdown machiavelli madness Melbourne memory music Nietzsche philosophy poetry political decay politics power progressive politics Prose public service quotes reading Russia Russian history samizdat society Solzhenitsyn Symborska terror travel trust in government Vaclav Havel violence W.G. Sebald Wallace Stevens WB Yeats Weber William Dalrymple writing year in review Zbigniew Herbert

What is the burning archive?

The burning archive is my symbol for our cultural condition, and my own experiment with a new literary form. Read more here

My burning archive