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The Burning Archive

The Burning Archive

essays, notes and poetry against cultural decay

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Tag: writing

Posted on January 31, 2021January 31, 2021

Cantos from a cage

Today I am reposting this reflection on the true heritage of Ezra Pound, Cantos from a cage, which I originally posted in April 2018. I have borrowed from the local…

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Posted on January 3, 2021January 7, 2021

Taking time with Szymborska

I have established several practices for the New Year to make it a more mindful, culturally enriched and satisfying year than the plague year of 2020, now buried in an…

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Posted on December 30, 2020

Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin

I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin…

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Posted on December 16, 2020December 27, 2020

The kaleidoscope of 2020: year in review

A tradition that I have embraced on this blog over the last few years has been to write year in review posts in December. In 2019 I reflected on walking…

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Posted on December 15, 2020December 15, 2020

Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857

Today, I am reposting this response to William Dalrymple’s magnificent The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. I wonder if, over the next 5 to 10 years,…

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Posted on December 14, 2020

Axel’s Castle, a mirror and an encyclopaedia

Today I am reposting this post from April 2, 2018 that reflected on some of the literary symbols that formed uncanny fascinators in my mind. *** When I was about…

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Posted on December 13, 2020December 16, 2020

A solution to political decay: the ordinary virtues of governing well

I am reposting this reflection on the response to political decay in the midst of the constitutional crisis under way in America, which reveals dramatically the rot in America’s institutions…

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Posted on December 6, 2020

An interlude on Solzhenitsyn

Prophets are despised in their own country, and now and then I am tempted deeply by Cassandra’s fate. So in appreciation of true prophets and great writers, who formed my…

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Posted on August 3, 2019August 3, 2019

Heaney on Writing

https://wp.me/p1YJAa-2xN This interview with Seamus Heaney (vale Seamus) is wonderful. I particularly like the line that poetry is stratification of the need for transcendence.

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Posted on July 21, 2019

11 years with WordPress – from the archive: Good Government Starts Today

Earlier this week I got a message from WordPress that I had passed my 11th anniversary as a blogger on the platform. I began with an anonymous blog, The Happy…

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Posted on December 10, 2018December 10, 2018

What I am reading… Gerard Manley Hopkins

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…

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Posted on December 9, 2018

Reflections on 2018 – 1. self-portrait at 55

The year is drawing to a close, so time to begin reflecting on what the year’s stream of images, texts and events meant to me. Where has this year left…

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Recent musings

  • A revelation from Rumi February 28, 2021
  • 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

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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

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