Very few among us can crawl or climb to the depths and heights of deep time… And so today, when there is no snow on the ground, I am thinking again about icebergs. Along with the work of Bishop, Stevens and several contemporary poets, I’ve often turned to Underland during the past year as an alternative to… Read More John Palattella – Earthly Anecdotes: an alternative to the doom-saying of our times
Early in graduate school, I had a curious dream. I had finished my dissertation, but no job was forthcoming. Taking pity on me, my department hired me to perform the functions of a janitor-cum-chambermaid. A pathetic scene followed. I found myself down on my hands and knees, scrubbing the floor tiles of the humanities building,… Read More Book review: The Apocalyptic New Campus Novel
Not many academics have studied Hindu nationalism with the intensity of Stanford University anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen. The 63-year-old’s new book, The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics, argues that anger and brutality have become mainstream in public life and politics in India. The 176-page volume delves into what Hansen calls “the emergence of… Read More The Modi Government Is a Regime of Low-Intensity Terror. By Ullekh N.P.
You see, it is just like our Russia. Those devils or demons coming out of the sick and entering into the swine – they are all the festering sores, all the poisonous vapors, all the filth, all the demons and the petty devils accumulated for centuries and centuries in our great, dear, sick Russia…. But… Read More Joyce Carol Oates: Tragic Rites in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed
Published in New English Weekly, 21 March 1940 It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and… Read More George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)
Susan Stebbing’s little Pelican book on philosophy had a big aim: giving everybody tools to think clearly for themselves There is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well.’ These words, which could have been written yesterday, come from Thinking to Some Purpose, a popular book by the British philosopher… Read More Pause. Reflect. Think
Kafka’s characters are almost always trapped – in a cage, a court case, an insect’s body, a false identity – and they share a feeling that the walls are closing in, and that a door, once there, is disappearing into the distance. This existential claustrophobia, at once vague and intense, resonates today, particularly under lockdown. … Read More Samuel Earle: Locking down with Kafka
One of the unfortunate temptations of the Trump era has been the rush to find radical breaks with the past where, in truth, the lines of continuity are strong. The themes of Trump’s speech were already well circulated among the Anglo-American elite, whether in the work of the political scientist Samuel Huntington or in the… Read More Book review: Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past
Vladimir Nabokov – one of Stepanova’s many literary companions in In Memory of Memory – once wrote: “I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.” Years ago, Maria Stepanova visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to do… Read More Book review – 'Love’s labours should be lost': Maria Stepanova, Russia's next great writer
NB: These books contain an exposure of contemporary nihilism at work. See also the links at the bottom of this post. DS Boris Johnson is “an unrepentant and inveterate liar” who feels he is not subject to the same rules as others, Sylvie Bermann, the former French ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, says… Read More Goodbye Britannia – books reviewed
After the truth-shower 