Diary

2025 Reading 📖

4.1: Ravelstein, Saul Bellow (Viking, 2000)

5.1: Symposium, Plato (trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones & William Preddy, Loeb, 2022) 🔁

6.1: Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips (Yale UP, 2014)

7.1: Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton (Fitzcarraldo, 2023)

13.1: Within the Context of No Context, George W. S. Trow (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997)

21.1: Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach, Philip Kitcher (Columbia UP, 2013)

28.1: Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh (Verso, 2024)

28.1: Death in Venice, Thomas Mann (trans. Damion Searls, Liveright, 2023) 🔁

29.1: Phaedrus, Plato (trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones & William Preddy, Loeb, 2022) 🔁

31.1: Sun & Steel, Yukio Mishima (trans. John Bester, Secker and Warburg, 1970) 🔁

21.2 I Love Dick, Chris Kraus (Serpent’s Tail, 1997)

14 Jan 2025

14 Jan 2025

In the absence of adults, people came to put their trust in experts. (Trow 82)

The work of television is to establish the false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and to chronicle it. (Trow 82)

The culture, for reasons having to do with the working of the marketplace, did not make available any but the grimmest, most false-seeming adulthood. Childhood was provided. An amazing, various childhood, full of the most extraordinary material possibilities. That was it. Nothing more. Just childhood. An adolescence had to be improvised, and it was. That it was improvised–mostly out of rock-and-roll music–so astounded the people who pulled it off that they quite rightly considered it the important historical event of their times and have circled around it ever since. (Trow 97)

12 Jan 2025

10 Jan 2025

Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the city, I know a window from which you can see, beyond a foreground, a middle ground, and even a third ground made up of the serried roofs of several streets, a violet bell-like shape, at times reddish, at other times, in the best ‘proofs’ produced by the atmosphere, an ashy black; it turns out to be the dome of Saint-Augustin, and it gives this view of Paris the feel of certain views of Rome by Piranesi. (The Swann Way, 64)

View of the Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian (now called Castel S. Angelo) from the rear, from Vedute di Roma (Roman Views), Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Part of a spacious and magnificent Harbor for the use of the ancient Romans opening onto a large market square…, from “Opere Varie di Archiettura, prospettive, grotteschi, antichità; inventate”, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

View of the Campo Vaccino (Roman Forum with the Temple of Castor and Pollux to right), from “Vedute di Roma” (Roman Views), part II, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

4 Jan 2025

I always suspect I know when a book from the BSL has been read before me by J.M.C.—the typos are circled in lead pencil. What an archive for the patient scholar.

21 Feb 2024

Plan of Residence of Dr. F. W. Hunter, Potts Point. The Salon: Being the Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, vol. 1, no. 3 (November-December 1912): 158.

17 Feb 2024

Reading essays by Dave Hickey, from Air Guitar (1997):

So there are no Mozart Requiems here, nor masterpieces by Velázquez, no mind-bending sexual encounters or life-confirming acts of friendship, no bloody curtains or puking withdrawals, no heartbreaks, gunshots, humiliations, or bodies hanging in the bedroom. This is just the ordinary stuff—the ongoing texture of the drift, where, it has always seemed to me, things must be okay, or the rest will certainly kill you; and if I have any real qualification for the job that I have undertaken, it is that I have always been okay with everyday life and beguiled by the tininess of it—and beguiled as well by the tininess and intimacy of artistic endeavors—by The Bird with his horn and Velázquez with his tiny brush—and by the magical way these endeavors seem to proliferate.

As if that weren’t enough, the essay “Dealing” has given me the idea of an essay—“Two Legacies of Modernism”—thinking about the missed encounter between Hickey and J.M.C., Texas 1967…

14 Feb 2024

On the hunt for Marc Bloch’s two-volume Feudal Society (1939). Tried a couple of second-hand bookstores and struck out, so have ordered the 2014 Routledge Classics edition from Dymocks instead.

13 Feb 2024

Read Guillaume Dustan, In My Room (1996) in one sitting. I will order Nicolas Pages (1999).

Tue 31 Oct 2023

Even as a child [Sam Bankman-Fried] thought that the whole idea of Santa Claus was ridiculous, and when he encountered the fact that some people believe in God, he was incredulous. His takeaway: “Mass delusions are a property of the world, as it turns out.” He “had to accept that there was nothing he could do about this … He simply came to terms with the fact that the world could be completely wrong about something, and he could be completely right.” Much of what he was taught at school he thought ridiculous, especially the humanities.

This pattern of behaviour was accompanied by a profound internal void. His inner life and cultural world are severely truncated. “I don’t feel pleasure,” he wrote in his journal while at Jane Street. “I don’t feel happiness. Somehow my reward system never clicked. My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be… I don’t feel pleasure, or love, or pride, or devotion.” Years later, after moving to Hong Kong, he was saying something very similar: “In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others. But in the end, there’s a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don’t feel happiness.”

John Lanchester, “He-Said, They-Said”, LRB, 2 Nov 2023

Mon 30 Oct 2023

Reading Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (2023). The format of the book itself is irritating: small pages and small type. The ideas, however, are interesting. I note that Rahel Jaeggi endorses it on the back cover.

Tue 24 Oct 2023

Sun 22 Oct 2023

Last night watched Errol Morris’s The Pigeon Tunnel (2023). Very good. Lighter on some things than I would have liked, but on the whole, beautiful and surefooted. The most resonant part for me involved dwelling on that line from le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim, “the inmost room is bare.” Morris wants to take this in an existential direction, and why not; but to me this image is most effective as a rejoinder to the way we habitually picture democratic government: that behind or beneath the surface chaos, deep within the hidden corridors of power, there is a room full of hyper-competent, wizened experts keeping the whole enterprise from going off the rails. But there is none such–the inmost room is bare. Politics is only the aggregate of actions taken by people just as flawed as we are.

Thurs 18 Oct 2023

Tue 17 Oct 2023

W. B. Yeats, from MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER

The Leaders of the Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

Mon 16 Oct 2023

Finished reading Michael Ignatieff’s 2013 memoir Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics in the early hours of the morning, when I couldn’t sleep. Choice quotations:

The Liberal government had cut the deficit, and our methods of restoring fiscal discipline in the 1990s, however brutal, were admired worldwide. The economy was growing and the prime minister was widely credited with creating the conditions for sustained prosperity. (43)

Global admiration is some recompense for immiseration, I guess!

I don’t have good feelings about the ferrets dispatched to check out our modest family house in the south of France, hoping to find a splendid chateau that would fit their narrative of the spoiled expatriate. (140)

Having a home in the south of France isn’t a sign of being spoiled, so long as it’s modest.

I wanted a moment of pure recognition (83)

This remark strikes me in light of the classic opposition between recognition and redistribution, albeit Ignatieff is describing his aspirations for a conference speech during his leadership campaign. Nonetheless, this is the psychology of elitist liberalism in miniature. The candidate’s exceptionalism (his unique standing) will become a searchlight directed outwards into the darkest crevasses of society, offering the dwellers there what the acclaiming crowd now bestows on him: recognition.

The crux of the book is this: “Embracing a political life means … knowing who you are and being adamant about what a political life is for. You can’t succeed unless the people who elect you believe that you’re in it for them. If you’re not in it for them, you shouldn’t be in politics.” Yet the very next sentence reads, without a hint of potential contradiction: “It might take a long time to figure out who you do politics for” (178).

In other words, if you believe yourself to possess certain traits and virtues, jump in the ring; figure out who you want to represent as you go along. Missing from this picture entirely is the notion that there might be other potential candidates with organic connections to the communities they presume to represent (working people, migrants, minorities, etc.)—and anyway, shouldn’t those communities feel lucky to have such a magnanimous and accomplished intercessor?

22/10/23: Of course, the unsayable thing that the text nonetheless concedes from the outset is that Ignatieff was foredoomed; the smarter thing would have been never to have thrown his hat in the ring. Easy for me to say, with my talk of organic communities and genuine representation, but the real sequence of events confounds my theory in any case: the figure who restored the Liberals’s standing and vanquished Harper is Justin Trudeau, the ultimate figure of dynastic privilege and, in Ignatieff’s terms, a political “natural.”

Thurs 12 Oct 2023

Nihilism as the will to power’s desublimation: Jiwei Ci via Hans Sluga

Tue 19 Sept 2023

Finished the audiobook of Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge yesterday; listening to Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger now (both pub. 2023).

I’ve probably known something about Rory Stewart for as long as I’ve known anything about British politics, but my timeline gets hazy: I’m sure I read the notorious New Yorker profile from 2010, but I must have done so while already living in the UK. My recollection would place it back in 2009, before I moved. I think—and this is ironic since it turns out that they’re friends—I must have conflated the Stewart profile with Adam Gopnik’s profile of Michael Ignatieff, published August 31, 2009. Oddly enough, that piece made such an impression on me that I can remember where I read it: over lunch at the old Penang Hawkers Corner, in Renaissance Arcade.

Ignatieff fucked everything up: Politics on the Edge reveals that Stewart admires him regardless. I will read Ignatieff’s book (Fire and Ashes); I want to know what kind of a through-line there might be between their two stories.

Fri 7 Jul 2023

Watching Caravaggio (1986), dir. Derek Jarman