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Intellectual Hubris
For reading alongside Pierre Hadot’s texts, I recommend Alexander Nehamas’ The Art of Living, which has similar concerns about how to practise a philosophical life, rather than casually reading...
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Links of the Week
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or...
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Links of the Week
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or...
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To Follow Spinoza
Of Spinoza, Hegel professed boldly, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all” and “It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of...
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Come as you are .. to Spinoza (and Deleuze)
Deleuze is difficult, but I read his work like opaque poetry. There are good maps available for those who want to engage in what Deleuze called the “nonphilosophical understanding of philosophy.” I...
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A Work of Translation
A five-volume edition of Paul Valéry’s Cahiers/Notebooks have awaited my attention for a while now. Beyond inattentively flicking through some random entries, I have waited for some curious alignment...
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Rustling Leaves
The Hand (2011) – Ellen Altfest Valéry’s Cahiers/Notebooks cannot be hurried. His meticulously worded thoughts are often original and unsettling. Every few pages I go to my shelves (or the internet) to...
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Links of the Week
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or...
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Back to Calvino
Italo Calvino: Letters 1941-1985 I know Michael Wood as the author of Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence, both works of literary criticism that I liked very much. Wood both...
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The Kind of Guy
In this passage from Calvino’s Letters, before he has published a first novel, Calvino reveals his dedication to veracity: They want articles all over the place and I write them because it takes half...
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Reading Coetzee’s Age of Iron
In the late eighties, the professor in charge of our research group invited us regularly to his Muswell Hill house for debates that would often extend, over dope and Rioja, into the next morning. Let’s...
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A New Kind of Space
I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read...
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Unplugged
Northerns – Moriyama It is time for a holiday, to a cabin in a forest with a lake. I have books and a canoe. I am unplugging from the grid. See you on the other side. The Hermitage at the Center The...
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Decompression Zone
After several days living in the dappled shade of a forest comprised mostly of ancient giant redwoods, I’m unable, or unwilling, to return to London. I find myself in need of a decompression zone, so...
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That Smell and Notes From a Prison by Sonallah Ibrahim
Suspected to be the iceberg that sank the RMS Titanic, there is supposedly a red smudge, like the Titanic’s red hull, near its base at the waterline. In iceberg jargon this would be termed a pinnacle,...
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Need Need Need
Below is an extended quotation from Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring. The book is a beautifully written, lovingly researched, fascinating account of why writers drink. It is one of those...
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Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg
Such darkness in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, ostensibly the tale of a haunted, fictionalised Dostoevsky returning to nineteenth century St Petersburg to mourn and collect the papers of a dead...
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Links of the Week
Many of these links have been tweeted in the past, but here I can tag and categorise them for future reference. I hope you find some of them interesting too. Please feel free to discuss in comments or...
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Better than a Dublin jarvey!
Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire – Ilya Repin (1880-1891) Mehmed IV, Sultan of the 1676 Ottoman Empire, demanded that the Cossacks submit to Turkish rule. The...
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Quietism
What is essential is not to know whether we are wrong or right-that is quite unimportant. What is important is to discourage the world from concerning itself with us. All the rest is vice....
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