I came across an essay almost a year old by one Mattias Desmet called “The De-Souling of the World.” It ends with these lines: “This revolution essentially boils down to this: a society led by a propagandized mass is replaced by a society led by a group of people connected through sincere speaking. […] What …
Continue reading “Language, Sincerity and Authenticy in the Machine Age”
Recent events — or the media imagery thereof — put in my mind an old Thomas Pynchon article, “Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?” from nearly forty years ago. There’s a photo that could go with this, but it’s far too obvious, so you’ll have to settle for Kong. For readers interested in the …
Every year during my childhood, our post box was graced with an 80 page volume of one of the World Book’s Christmas Around the World series, a gift, I think, from my globetrotting grandparents. Although somewhat dated and with some breathlessly misleading information (the Spain entry insists that Spaniards eat loads of turkey for Navidad, …
From Henry Adams’ Education of Henry Adams: Minister Adams felt the same compulsion. He bluntly told Russell that while he was “willing to acquit” Gladstone of “any deliberate intention to bring on the worst effects,” he was bound to say that Gladstone was doing it quite as certainly as if he had one; and to …
On the occasion of the 96th birthday of Martin Luther King this coming Monday, the second movement of Berio’s Sinfonia.
‘Today, the United States faces very powerful enemies, but the mortal danger comes from within: not from Moscow but from that mixture of arrogance and opportunism, blindness and short-term Machiavellianism, volubility and stubbornness which has characterized its foreign policies during recent years and which remind us in an odd way of the Athenian state in …
Continue reading “An excerpt from Octavio Paz’s “Mexico and the United States””
Hunter S. Thompson, who was from Louisville, would have turned 79 this week. With the Republican National Convention in full swing and on the cusp of a truly ludicrous election, we need him now more than ever. The Paris Review’s lengthy interview from 2000 is worth re-reading, and quotes the following from 1988’s Generation of Swine: …
Continue reading “Happy (belated) birthday, Hunter Thompson”
I’ve always enjoyed dialects, and I’ve had the good fortune to live in a few places with strong dialect areas, from Torlak to Veneto to Cantonese. But what about American dialects? Are we too young of a nation to really have them, as our transatlantic cousins might assert? I don’t think so. I had fun …
There’s no age quite as awkward as the semi-pubescent 11-14 age range which corresponds to what we now know as the middle school years. My own awkwardness at that age can probably best be encapsulated by a rundown of my lunchtime eating habits: every day, a can of StarKist albacore tuna, some saltines, and a can of …
Continue reading “Sorry, Charlie: Deep Parables of Consumer Capitalism”
Peter Hessler was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan in 1996-1998 and his book chronicling his life there, River Town, is an excellent Peace Corps memoir. Even though I can’t think of a place more different from Macedonia, where I served, than China, he still has many of the same or similar experiences living in a …