January 2012
1 post
December 2011
7 posts
The Cause of Religion
Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
(From Murakami’s 1Q84 - page 441 - which I am steadily making my way through. This is not a...
Continuing the Case for Hugo Williams
Opinion was divided as to whether she had left me, and I didn’t know for sure myself, as we don’t discuss such things. The evidence seemed to be that she had, given that she no longer lived here, but we continued to visit. People said jokingly that I had the ideal marriage, but in reality such division of life plans was difficult to think about positively, and the travelling was...
Read More Poetry
Tides
The evening advances, then withdraws again Leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor. We are drifting, you and I, As far from another as the young heroes Of these two novels we have just laid down. For that is happiness: to wander alone Surrounded by the same moon, whose tides remind us of ourselves, Our distances, and what we leave behind. The lamp left on, the curtains...
Hitchens Dead
“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second...
Death is Good For Some
Death has this much to be said for it:
You don’t have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you free.
(Kingsley Amis as quoted in the recent issue of Vanity Fair dated January 2012.)
People Don't Make Sense Anymore
People just don’t make sense anymore. You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you internalize this. Observe it, deconstruct it, and appreciate just how ridiculous most business conversation has become.
(This is from an online Harvard Business Review article posted Monday called I don’t Understand What Anyone is Saying Anymore about the silliness of business conversation...
Paradigms Lost
Most of us - almost all - must take in and give out language as we breath, and we had better consider the seriousness of language pollution as second only to air pollution. For the linguistically disciplined, to misuse or mispronounce a word is an unnecessary and unhealthy contribution to the surrounding smog. To have taught ourselves not to do this, or - being human and thus also imperfect - to...
November 2011
9 posts
It's . . .
(Thanks to Shannon Proudfoot of Ottawa, Canada for this one.)
The Gentle Response to a Break-in
If it weren’t for kindly time, I would be watching a stranger, down on his knees perhaps, going through my possessions.
Happily we weren’t obliged to share the moment, and here the first consolation presented itself: that I didn’t wake up. Gradually, I clocked the disappearances - computer, TV, camera (with a year’s photos), gold medal, bank statements, passport - then the things remaining...
Twilight v. Buffy
Rivka Galchen Where Are You?
She was kissing me; then when I opened my eyes a moment I saw, in a sideways glance, Magda. It was strange to be seen kissing; it was a very not-me situation in which to be.
(The image is the home page of Rivka Galchen and the excerpt from her book called Atmospheric Disturbances which came out in 2008. It’s not evident from her website whether anything new is on the...
Lost Generation
For thirty years students have been complaining to me that ‘it was easy for you’: your generation had ideals and ideas, you believed in something, you were able to change things. ‘We’ (the children of the ’80s, the ’90s, the ‘aughts’) have nothing. In many respects my students are right. It was easy for us - just as it was easy, at least in this...
IQ84
There’s much talk of “evil” in the book, but it boils down to the belief that iniquity is either in the eye of the beholder or a stabilizing force in human society. (“The most important thing … is for there to be a balance maintained between good and evil.”) The former is moral relativism at its glibbest; the latter, bizarrely, a sales pitch for the dark...
Being a Man of the Left
Those who let themselves be physically captive to other people and their misfortunes belong on the Left - man, the man of the Left, is the only animal who can shed his own self to enter, with fusion or effusion, someone else’s mind and heart.
(Although I have an affinity for French intellectuals, especially those of the Left, I have only read one of Bernard-Henri Levy’s books -...
October 2011
11 posts
My Favourite - Samuel Beckett
In the “Three Dialogues” he wrote with Duthuit in 1949, he claimed to favor “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”
(This is from a review by Denis Donoghue in the Sunday NYT today of the most recent collection of Samuel Beckett’s...
Gems from Mr. Hitchens
Never assume that the totalitarian or terrorist enemy is smart enough to conceal his traces. Indeed, don’t always assume that he is even interested in doing so. The utter nerve of it is often part of the strategy in the first place.
(I won’t belabor you with too many words from Christopher HItchens. There are a surfeit of gems in construction in his writing, and there is a book...
On 'Public' Intellectuals
The ‘professionalization’ of academic writing - and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of ‘theory’ and ‘methodology’ - favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib ‘popular’ articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the ‘television don’,...
Insults Done Well
By God, you supercilious streak of Irish puke! You four-eyed bog-ignorant, potato-eating ponce!
(In 1979 I interviewed French theater critic Guy Dumur for an article I was writing for the British magazine Plays and Players on the difficulties of translation. Monsieur Dumur had just seen staged his translation into French of Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties. Needless to say his translation...
A Common Excuse
(Although obviously meant satirically by @circleprivilege, I have heard too many times similar excuses for mangling the language.)
Hitchens - As Always - Hitchens
We have the same job that we have always had, to say as thinking people and as humans that there are no final solutions, there is no absolute truth, there is no supreme leader, there is no totalitarian solution that says if you will just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you will simply abandon your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss will be yours.
(Despite being treated for...
The Harm of Gossip
Even gossip apparently harmless, when widely and persistently circulated, is potent for evil. It both belittles and perverts. It belittles by inverting the relative importance of things, thus dwarfing the thoughts and aspirations of a people …. Easy of comprehension, appealing to that weak side of human nature which is never wholly cast down by the misfortunes and frailties of our neighbours, no...
Of a Dilemma - Alan Brownjohn Poem
(Published in The Spectator 25 October 2008 … and clipped to my bulletin board since. It says all that needs to be about being a man of a ‘certain age’ but with the spirit of someone young.)
Going home, having had too much, on the Northern Line
I sense, for once, a sociable atmosphere. Should I speak to the similarly binge-drunk girls
Smiling at me in all bare-legged...
Bounded in a Nutshell
“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.”
Hamlet, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2
(I have remembered these lines since high school. They have a beautiful internal rhythm.)
Nicholson Baker 'The Fermata'
“But that is the strange thing about what you are expected to do in life - you are supposed to forget that there are hundreds of cities, each one full of women, and that it is most unlikely that you have found the perfect one for you. You are just supposed to pick the best one out of the ones you know and can attract, and in fact you do this happily - you feel that the love you direct...