Zibaldone

‘To a Young Man Who, in Love With His Studies, Said That You Learn a Hundred Pages a Day About How to Live… so-and-so Answered “But This Book Has 15 or 20 Million Pages.”’

 

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 in 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. My inner cynic predicts it will be this: the rules have changed such that we, the smart guys with the elite education, who should be running the place, have to

Fri 7 Jul 2023

Watching Caravaggio (1986), dir. Derek Jarman