December 2011
32 posts
Conflict in the Middle East (2)
So, we’re caught up in this, aren’t we? We’ve tended historically to back the Sunni side. Iran is the Shia center, with the Shias of Iraq as an obvious ally. The whole thing could readily devolve into a regional war at some point, perhaps triggered by civil strife within individual countries - Iraq, for example. If Iraq were partitioned - Kurds, Sunnis, and Shias - Iran and the...
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Conflict in the Middle East
Reading an account of the discrimination and harassment experienced by Shias in the Saudi Eastern Provinces, I thought that the real conflict in the Middle East is between Shias and Sunnis. While the conflict with Israel is real enough for the Palestinians, it’s a sideshow for other countries in the region - one that they’ve kept going in order to distract from the internecine quarrels...
The occult
My childhood friend shot himself when he was 30. “I want to cross the veil,” his note read. He had delved into the occult - communicating with spirits, writing a manuscript dictated by one of them via automatic writing. I believe that they lured him to his death. Swedenborg says that along with angels, we’re attended by demons, malevolent spirits who look for our undoing. There...
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“Salvation is an extraordinarily difficult thing. It’s a matter of...”
– Mark Johnston, quoted by Galen Strawson “Religion is a sin,” a review of Johnston’s Saving God and Surviving Death (Princeton, 2009 and 2010), London Review of Books, 2 June 2011, page 27.
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“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of...”
– Albert Camus, quoted by Strawson, LRB, 2 June 2011, page 27. This got a lot of play, I see. I like it, too. Something for would-be suicides to bear in mind. Offered in rueful memory of Steven Gregory and Frederick Herbert Engelmann.
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“For those who are good enough, death will appear differently. To the extent they...”
– Johnston, quoted by Strawson, LRB, 2 June 2011, page 28.
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“So what are the genuinely religious to do? Stripped now of idolatory and...”
– Johnston, quoted by Strawson, LRB, 2 June 2011, page 28.
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“Salvation is not making it all better; it is the grace of finding a way to live...”
– Johnston, quoted by Strawson, LRB, 2 June 2011, page 28.
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“Acquiring a good will is a matter of anatta - complete dissolution of the...”
– Strawson, LRB, 2 June 2011, page 28.
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“Even coldly calculating people do not succeed half so well in life as those with...”
– Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. I (Vintage, 1996), page 10.
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“We wanted flying cars, and instead we got 140 characters.”
– Opening statement of the manifesto of the Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm founded by Peter Thiel, quoted by George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,” New Yorker, 28 November 2011, page 46.
“Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.”
– Kyle Bass (quoted by Jeffrey Grundlach). I think bankruptcy is more like purgatory, though.
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“The 2008 problem was a private economy problem and businesses - the business...”
– Jeffrey Grundlach, Financial Times, 22 December 2011, page 22.
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“We are blessed by the dead. They leave spaces in our lives that, for some of us,...”
– John Burnside, “I put a spell on you,” London Review of Books, 2 June 2011, page 23.
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TraceSF →
This San Francisco Bay Area-focused design blog launched last night, a joint effort with my friends Yosh Asato, Yukiko Bowman, and Brad Leibin. I’m particularly glad to have an article by Richard Ingersoll, who edited the print quarterly Design Book Review while I published it.
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“Tradition may be elegance, competence, courage, modesty and realism. It is also...”
– Ernest Gellner, quoted by Stefan Collini in “What’s not to like?” a review of John Hall’s biography, Ernest Gellner (Verso, 2010), London Review of Books, 2 June 2011, page 11.
Christmas letter →
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“Poetry does not have to be great or even serious to be good.”
– W.H. Auden, quoted by Michael Wood in “I really mean like,” a review of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose Vol. IV, 1956-62, Princeton, 2011, London Review of Books, 2 June 2011, page 3.
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“Among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honor should be prepared,...”
– Auden, LRB, 2 June 2011, page 3.
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“True liberty consists in self-direction.”
– Isaiah Berlin, quoted by Jenny Diski, “Save it for HBO,” a review of Stanley Fish, The Fugitive in Flight (Pennsylvania, 2010), London Review of Books, 17 March 2011, page 43.
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SFMOMA's expansion →
A short riff on the proposed removal of Mario Botta’s staircase in SFMOMA’s lobby and its implications.
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A post on loss and gain →
Written after reading an essay on loss posted by my writer friend Kenneth Caldwell on his blog Design Faith.
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“Agamben derives his notion of biopolitics, or the administration of human life...”
– Giorgio Agamben, The Open, quoted by Hal Foster in “I am the decider,” a review of the Agamben-influenced The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. I (Chicago 2009), London Review of Books, 17 March 2011, page 31. Foster also quotes Agamben’s assertion that the exterminations of the...
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“‘I protect, therefore I obligate’ (protego ergo obligo): that could...”
– Foster, LRB, 17 March 2011, page 32.
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“Do you call these genteel little creatures American poets? Do you term that...”
– Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, edited by Ed Folsom (Iowa, 2010), quoted by Mark Ford, “Petty Grotesques,” London Review of Books, 17 March 2011, page 28. A pistareen is a 19th-century Mexican peseta, then considered by Americans to be a debased currency.
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“No ‘foreign conquerors,’ could subdue America, ‘but the fear...”
– Whitman, quoted by Ford, LRB, 17 March 2011, page 28. This apropos the current political scene. About a year ago, a Russian military leader suggested that the US could break apart within a few years.
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“What if Noah was secretly pleased that all this was happening? What if we all...”
– Gary Shteyngart, quoted by J. Robert Lennon in his review of Super Sad True Love Story (Granta, 2010), London Review of Books, 16 December 2010, page 32.
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“‘The 1980s were a cultural and intellectual wasteland except when it came...”
– A character in Tristan Garcia’s novel Hate (Faber, 2011), quoted by Theo Tait, “It belonged to us,” London Review of Books, 17 March 2011, page 20. (The novel was translated from French into American English by Marion Duvert and Lorin Stein.)