More specifically concerning: meaning
14.10.01
14 October 2001, around 16.37.
History – surrounded, immersed, drowning, etc., with regards to it. Be wary of being ahistorical. Yet history has of late become mere voyeurism, people sitting in their homes before some flickering screen, or engaged in a voluntary deafness to all but the radio. Even the sound of newsprint has learnt hysteria – and this is […]
06.03.02 – Wednesday
6 March 2002, around 21.16.
For once Vergil moved.
17.03.02 – Sunday
17 March 2002, around 21.28.
On being made, per Alfred Russel Wallace.
26.03.02 – Tuesday
26 March 2002, around 21.24.
Now there’s a word I don’t like: spiritual. Heard in these contexts: ‘I’m not religious or anything, but I am very spiritual…’ -or- ‘yeah, you know, he’s all spiritual and shit.’ Spritual people supposedly tap into the grand essence that is, the great non-materialistic who-knows-what, all without the aid of organized religion. In general, they […]
28.04.02 – Sunday
28 April 2002, around 13.59.
History is not a discipline but something that is not yours – which is the main definition of beauty. Hence, the sentiment, for it is not going to love you back. —Joseph Brodsky (‘Homage to Marcus Aurelius’) How tiresome it must be, to reduce the essential story of the world to nothing by a case […]
Elenchus
16 September 2002, around 13.35.
Socrates was married, you know, and his wife, Xanthippe, was a shrew. Perhaps that’s why he liked to sit in the cobbler’s shop and talk with young aristocrats about the meaning of words. ‘The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’ How many a man has said that, in the course of […]
Compendium academicorum
27 November 2002, around 16.42.
Within this field, which no single scholar can create but which each scholar receives and in which he then finds a place for himself, the individual researcher makes his contribution. Such contributions, even for the exceptional genius, are strategies of redisposing material within the field. Even the scholar who unearths a once-lost manuscript produces the […]
Annales
7 December 2002, around 11.20.
In the year were children born, were wars waged, and markets opened. In the year were ships sunk, were markets falling, were deserts crossed, was oil spilt more freely than wine. In the year were plagues driven through towns and cities, were roads built, were bridges burnt; in that year, too, were pestilences common and […]
Loot
17 April 2003, around 16.18.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main— A sun—a shadow of a magnitude. —John Keats (‘On Seeing the Elgin Marbles’) Allow me to sound heartless for a […]
reference
2 August 2003, around 8.06.
On the origins of regret.
Citation (18)
8 March 2004, around 8.12.
adventurous students always read classics.
layers upon layers
11 January 2011, around 16.57.
The cut direct.
beautiful-good-true
11 April 2011, around 16.06.
Sow seeds for flowers right now, I thought this spring, and sowed many more than usual
regression analysis
21 February 2015, around 17.51.
Around the neighborhood. One of the more interesting stylistic problems during the Hellenistic period was the problem of quotation. The forms of direct, half-hidden and completely hidden quoting were endlessly varied, as were the forms for framing quotations by a context, forms of intonational quotation marks, varying degrees of alienation or assimilation of another’s quoted […]
Montaigne 1.24
26 June 2015, around 13.22.
Now, I say that not only in medicine, but in several more certain arts, there is a good deal of luck. Why should we not attribute the poetic flights which ravish and transport their author out of himself to his good luck, since he himself confesses that they exceed his power and ability, and acknowledges […]
wellspring
9 November 2016, around 18.41.
Meaning and mediocrity.
explicatio
30 April 2017, around 18.00.
Diogenes the cynic, radical pragmatist.
Small pome
5 April 2020, around 4.23.
appetite alters everything restive beneath words containing all meaning —less you have been used to your beauty
de finibus
31 May 2020, around 15.23.
There is the sense that the book has an argument, that it wants some sort of artist’s statement to illumine its depths. I complained of this, and PF observed that experimental authors tend to fall into two camps – the Nabokovian and the Joycean. The Nabokovian camp will tell you in great detail all the […]
arche-tecton
10 February 2021, around 5.08.
There is a passage in the third chapter of Toril Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgeinstein, Austin, and Cavell that drew my eye: In many cases, then it is useless to spend time and energy trying to produce a sharp concept. To avoid meaningless work, we need to understand the situation we […]
stalking horses and other specters
2 April 2021, around 5.31.
Paul Nash, Stalking Horse (black and white negative, 1941), presented by the Paul Nash Trust to the Tate in 1970 CC-BY-NC-ND. The experience in which we meet specters or let them come visit us remains indestructible and undeniable. The most cultivated, the most reasonable, the most nonbelieving people easily reconcile a certain spiritualism with reason. […]
in brief
9 April 2021, around 5.00.
Dear Professor ———, It was with great interest that I picked up a recent translation of one of your books, as I hoped that it would provide a fresh perspective on what could perhaps be called ‘the current moment’. Although your book failed to be helpful in this regard, it did provide food for thought. […]
Citation (67)
11 May 2021, around 9.39.
consciousness and memory…
the misanthrope
31 May 2021, around 23.53.
Laura Riding considers the tedium of the phallus.
untold runes
1 June 2021, around 14.05.
The conversion of nothing into something is the task of criticism. Literature is the storehouse of these rescued somethings. In discussing literature one has to use, unfortunately, the same language that one uses in discussing experience. But even so, literature is preferable to experience, since it is for the most part the closest one can […]
31.vii.2022
31 July 2022, around 17.41.
‘It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle….’ —Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
game trails and cow paths
31 August 2022, around 5.21.
Everything I set down has a source in prior song or the written record. Some poets don’t want to read first; some of us want to give the stories we know a longer life […] —Stephanie Burt (‘(frag. 612)’, After Callimachus, p. 79). Shortly after becoming acquainted with the dog, then a black puppy of […]
4.i.2023
4 January 2023, around 13.26.
‘…words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience’ —Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (Chapter V, Section 1: Being Active)
the new credulity
24 March 2023, around 9.20.
We reject without question the meaning the author gives his text. We declare that he does not know what he is saying. From our several centuries’ distance we know better than he and can correct what he has written. We even believe that we have discovered a truth not seen by the author and, with […]
invicta
31 March 2023, around 4.43.
There are always other eyes seeing what I see, and imagining that other angle, imagining what these senses that are not mine could make out through my own sense is, all things considered, the best definition of love that I know. Grief is the end of loneliness. —Cristina Rivera Garza (Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Part IV) […]
a conceptual primer
5 April 2023, around 4.56.
One can say that the concept of a game is a concept with blurred edges.—‘But is a blurred concept a concept at all?’—Is a photograph that is not sharp a picture of a person at all? Is it even always an advantage to replace a picture that is not sharp with one that is? Isn’t […]
Adversaria (2)
31 May 2023, around 6.21.
‘The deepest secrets are to be found in the simplest natural things, but, pining away for the Beyond, the speculative fantast treads them under his feet’ —Ludwig Feuerbach (‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in The Fiery Brook: Selected Writings, p. 94, trans. Zawar Hanfi) ‘Even though many ideas come, we do not think about […]
Adversaria (3)
30 June 2023, around 4.22.
‘Their ideas were beautiful and academic, like pictures in a gallery, but somewhat remote’ —Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard & Clara Winston, p. 68) Just as his mission in life, to solve the puzzle of existence, represented an act of love for human kind, his love for Adele was analogous. His love of […]
all gibberish
2 July 2023, around 4.56.
I felt a downright fear of mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion […]
Citation (74)
30 July 2023, around 9.05.
Institutional linkrot.
the rosy outlook
21 August 2023, around 10.07.
It is a nightmarish scene, yet one that seems to embody the conditions of a new dark age. Our vision is increasingly universal, but our agency is ever more reduced. We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it. The resulting sense of helplessness, rather […]
Adversaria (5)
31 August 2023, around 4.33.
‘Take a story from a place and drop it into another place and it doesn’t necessarily make sense, at least not at first. Like people, stories don’t always travel well. Nothing belongs everywhere, and some things only belong somewhere. But some stories, when they travel, can spark strange things in unmeasured hearts’ —Paul Kingsnorth (Savage […]
cut to the chase
23 September 2023, around 6.34.
‘A doctryne of doctoris’ or ‘a example of maisteris’ Normally when I get an idea, I charge ahead and scribble about it, tangling words together in the hopes that I will net my quarry – that is, some sort of sense (even if it is nonsense). Usually it works (more or less), but sometimes it doesn’t. […]
Adversaria (8)
30 November 2023, around 4.16.
‘And yet it’s autumn now, as clear as water and as bright as a mirror, and I should be happy’ —Eileen Chang (‘On the Second Edition of Romances’, Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, p. 218) ‘Every reader is cumbered by an excess of books, and every book by an excess of readers—each overwhelmed […]
cathectical
21 December 2023, around 6.17.
We are constantly telling stories—about how we are, about every person we see, hear, hear about—and when we don’t know something, we fill in the gaps with parts of stories we’ve told or heard before. Stories are always only representations. […] to tell a story based on a character-driven plot or a moment of epiphany […]
Citation (77)
18 February 2024, around 16.42.
why write?
okey-dokey
23 March 2024, around 12.40.
…the field is open to conjecture, so long as conjecture does not soar in the air but follows the true tracks that survive and is in keeping with the character of the times and the persons involved. —Jacob Burckhardt (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas, p. 237) One can spend a lot […]
the frond
22 May 2024, around 10.33.
Words are the living carriers of feeling – only pedants and scholars dilute them with analysis or kill them with devitalising formulae. A word is the stamp of life – the richer the better. —Isaiah Berlin (‘The Magus of the North’ in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p. 396)
pseudaphoristica (23)
4 August 2024, around 11.21.
The economical hobby of using pathetic fallacy to achieve the alchemical transformation, not of base metals into gold, but of worth (or value) into meaning.