February 2012
30 posts
1 tag
“In love everything is love, even pain and revulsion.”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 165. Compare the Buddha’s comment on enlightenment: “even the grass was enlightened.”
2 tags
“There will never be, and there cannot be any economical or industrial democracy...”
– Leszek Kolakowski, “My Correct Views on Everything,” in a collection of his essays with the same title, edited by Zbigniew Janowski, St. Augustine’s Press, 2010, page 25.
4 tags
“The Victorians cherished privacy and detested secrecy. What consenting adults...”
– John Pemble, “Gaslight and Fog,” a review of Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective, Oxford, 2011, London Review of Books, 26 January 2012, page 21. “Nothing is hidden,” according to Dogen Eihei.
2 tags
“The law is a bigger racket than crime.”
– George Orwell, 1944, quoted by Pemble, LRB, 26 January 2012, page 22.
2 tags
“The world market, as Frederic Jameson has put it, is ‘a space in which...”
– Žižek, LRB 26 January 2012, page 9.
1 tag
“If the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested money into...”
– Žižek, LRB 26 January 2012, page 9.
1 tag
“The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point,...”
– Žižek, LRB 26 January 2012, page 10.
2 tags
“It is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also...”
– Jean-Pierre Dupuy, cited by Žižek, LRB 26 January 2012, page 10.
1 tag
“Everything we feel and do is somehow oriented ‘lifeward’ and the...”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 134.
1 tag
“It may be a convenience and a comfort for most people to find the world...”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 136.
1 tag
“What makes this craving for the renovation of life into a perpetuum mobile is...”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 138. This should have been accompanied by one of the recent photos of Rupert Murdoch discussing the Sunday edition of The Sun with its editors.
1 tag
“If, in the course of time, commonplace and impersonal ideas are automatically...”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 121.
1 tag
“True lovesickness is not a desire for possession but the world’s gentle...”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 129.
Things evolve
A note that appeared “here” (on the thread of tumblr blogs that I follow) leads me to comment that very few connections with other people are irrevocably broken. Time allows them to find their rightful place. There’s no way to know what that place will be, but the connection itself - its moment - has to be seen as part of life’s trajectory. I just read Tony Judt’s...
2 tags
“Over time, it can be a strain to project yourself as both an exception and an...”
– Adam Mars-Jones, “Mrs Winterson’s Daughter,” a review of Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Cape, 2011), London Review of Books, 26 January 2012, page 6. I disagreed viscerally with much of this long review, which gives the sense of the reviewer’s...
1 tag
“Lament for past mistakes keeps modulating into self-praise.”
– Mars-Jones, LRB, 26 January 2012, page 8.
1 tag
“The possibility of the privatization of the general intellect was something Marx...”
– Slavoj Žižek, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie,” London Review of Books, 26 January 2012, page 9.
2 tags
“A man who does something truly great usually doesn’t know why. As Cromwell...”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” A Man Without Qualities, page 90.
1 tag
“All enforced sociability, beyond a certain naive and crude level, springs...”
– Musil, “Pseudoreality Prevails,” The Man Without Qualities, page 104.
4 tags
“Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a...”
– Jorge Luis Borges reviewing Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds in 1939, quoted by Toibin, LRB, 5 January 2012, page 35.
2 tags
“The Irish have always been famous for being the iconoclasts of the British...”
– Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Colm Toibin in “Flann O’Brien’s Lies,” London Review of Books, 5 January 2012, pages 32-33.
2 tags
“Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language.”
– Fernando Pessoa, quoted by Toibin, LRB, 5 January 2012, page 33.
1 tag
“Lies are more honest ways of telling the truth.”
– Colm Toibin, LRB, 5 January 2012, page 33.
4 tags
“The person the writer sees most of, most often, actually every day, is himself....”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, quoted by Claire Tomalin in Charles Dickens: A Life, Viking, 2011. According to Deborah Friedell, in her review of this and two other biographies of Dickens, the quote may be spurious. The review is “His Friends Were Appalled,” London Review of Books, 5 January 2011,...
2 tags
“To be a poet is not my ambition, it’s my way of being alone.”
– Pessoa, quoted by Toibin, LRB, 5 January 2012, page 32.
3 tags
“Taste takes on average 25 years to complete a cycle and bring the fashions of...”
– Cecil Beaton, quoted by Rosemary Hill, “As God Intended,” a review of The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot “Capability” Brown 1716-83, Chatto, 2011, London Review of Books, 5 January 2010, page 18. Postmodernism (in architecture) is right on schedule.
“Hubris is a virtue in a material world.”
– An excerpt from an essay I’m writing on theories of immortality that I’ve personally considered.
2 tags
“You know someone matters to you if they can betray you, or be betrayed by you....”
– Adam Phillips, “Judas’ Gift,” London Review of Books, 5 January 2012, page 14.
2 tags
“Somewhere in ourselves we associate being loved with being betrayed, and being...”
– Phillips, LRB, 5 January 2012, page 14.
January 2012
31 posts
“In a crisis democracies can experiment with autocracy but autocracies...”
– David Runciman, “Will we be all right in the end?”, London Review of Books, 5 January 2012, page 3.
1 tag
“The problem for democracies in a crisis is not that no one knows what do do,...”
– Runciman, LRB, 5 January 2012, page 5.
2 tags
“Tocqueville said that the overriding vice of the democratic age would turn out...”
– Runciman, LRB, 5 January 2012, page 5.
1 tag
“Finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or...”
– Robert Musil, “A Sort of Introduction,” A Man Without Qualities, Vintage, 1996, page 56.
1 tag
“In bad periods the most appalling buildings and poems are constructed on...”
– Robert Musil, “A Sort of Introduction,” A Man Without Qualities, Vintage, 1996, page 53.
1 tag
“Zoology teaches that a number of flawed individuals can add up to a brilliant...”
– Robert Musil, “A Sort of Introduction,” A Man Without Qualities, Vintage, 1996, page 27.
1 tag
“In a community coursed through by energies every road leads to a worthwhile...”
– Robert Musil, “A Sort of Introduction,” A Man Without Qualities, Vintage, 1996, page 27.
2 tags
Life & Death: Materiality →
The second section of my essay on the theories of immortality that I’ve personally considered.
3 tags
“To raise money for the Anymachen Tibetan Culture Center in Zhandetan, Qinghai,...”
– Dan Levin, “Teaching Tibetan Ways, a School in China is an Unlikely Wonder,” New York Times, 28 January 2012, page A8. Modified to make sense as a quote.
2 tags
“Occupy is opening up a space - the space of deliberative democracy - as a...”
– Harry Eyres in the Financial Times, “Life & Arts,” 28-29 January 2012, page 23.
2 tags
“Cyril Connolly, himself not a notable hiker, once said that no city should be so...”
– Will Self, “Diary,” London Review of Books, 20 October 2011, page 38. An interesting criterion for setting a city’s limits. If you walk north, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco qualifies. Berkeley, too, north or east.
“Distributed intelligence in a voluntary cooperative is a hallmark of real...”
– Friedrich Hayek, quoted by the economics working group at Occupy London in “How Hayek helped us find capitalism’s flaws,” Financial Times, 26 January 2012, page 11.
4 tags
“In his famous essay, ‘Composition with 12 Tones,’ Schoenberg...”
– Nick Richardson, “Set on Being Singular,” a review of Bojan Bujic, Arnold Schoenberg, Phaidon, 2011, London Review of Books, 20 October 2011, page 31.
4 tags
“‘A bull is mad and destructive when it is frustrated,’ Reich wrote....”
– Adam Phillips, “Am I a spaceman?” a review of Christopher Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Fourth Estate, 2011, London Review of Books, 20 October 2011, page 27. (The quote is from Reich Speaks of Freud.)
4 tags
“Psychoanalysis had to build a world in which, as Reich wrote, ‘natural...”
– Phillips, LRB, 20 October 2011, page 27. (The quote is from Reich’s The Sexual Revolution.)
4 tags
“The reason Freud had to distance himself from Reich was that Reich was taking...”
– Phillips, LRB, 20 October 2011, page 27.
At South Beach
I spent the afternoon at South Beach, which reminded me of other beachfront towns. There’s a lot of Art Deco. The beach itself is really nice. The Atlantic of South Beach is unlike the Atlantic of New Jersey. I saw the former Versace Mansion, now a boutique hotel and popular place to be photographed. One of my party commented that this seems a little creepy, but dead celebrities clearly...