“The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations. But each generation must determine for itself which circumstances are in fact comparable.” – Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy
Entries from October 2017
Like with like
October 31st, 2017 · No Comments
Tags: Politics & Law
Sheltering snowflakes
October 30th, 2017 · No Comments
“As an adjunct professor at a private university, I protect students from the reality of my own precarity and of theirs. I protect the illusion that institutional education is still or ever was in its majority a liberatory experience and a sustainable one. I falsely present myself as a ‘sustained’ being. There are strong reasons […]
Tags: Economics
So there
October 29th, 2017 · No Comments
“It’s very hard indeed if not impossible to intend or design something uncanny. The uncanny results, it isn’t something you have much control over.” – Ian Penman, “Wham Bang, Teatime” (emphasis in original)
Tags: Lit & Crit · Vizarts
And vice versa
October 28th, 2017 · No Comments
“It turns out that every local solution is also global.” – Christopher J. C. Burges, “A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition”
Tags: Other Stuff
The we’ll try to put them back together
October 27th, 2017 · No Comments
“Let’s follow the time honoured tradition of understanding things by trying to break them.” – Christopher J. C. Burges, “A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition”
Tags: Other Stuff
Sir yes sir
October 26th, 2017 · No Comments
“The Army’s the greatest teacher in the world. There’s only one answer for any question and you learn that answer because your life depends on it.” – M. F. McAuliffe, “The Cohort of Mist, Fog, and Fire”
Tags: Verandah
Most of the atoms are still around
October 25th, 2017 · No Comments
“Of all the many places celebrated in poetry since ancient times, most have vanished. Mountains have crumbled, rivers taken new courses, and roads new routes. Stones have been buried and hidden in the earth, and old trees have given way to saplings. Time passes and the world changes.” – Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
Roads to travel
October 24th, 2017 · No Comments
“Mythology—and therefore civilization—is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels. The shallowest minds see in it the local scenery; the deepest, the foreground of the void; and between are all the stages of the Way from the ethnic to the elementary idea, the local to […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
Bliss of ignorance, folly of man
October 23rd, 2017 · No Comments
“A woman’s life is quite different from a man’s. God has ordered it so. A man is the same from the time of his circumcision to the time of his withering. He is the same before he has sought out a woman for the first time, and afterwards. But the day when a woman enjoys […]
Tags: Verandah
Then what happened
October 22nd, 2017 · No Comments
“There can be no doubt that in the very earliest ages of human history the magical force and wonder of the female was no less a marvel than the universe itself; and this gave to woman a prodigious power, which it has been one of the chief concerns of the masculine part of the population […]
Tags: Economics · Lit & Crit · Politics & Law
Or it’s no society
October 21st, 2017 · No Comments
“A society depends for its existence on the presence in the minds of its members of a certain system of sentiments by which the conduct of the individual is regulated in conformity with the needs of the society . . . the sentiments in question are not innate but are developed in the individual by […]
Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law
It’s not on the sofa
October 20th, 2017 · No Comments
“The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering.” – Igjugarjuk (quoted by H. Ostermann, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition)
Tags: Verandah
Eyes tight shut
October 19th, 2017 · No Comments
“Why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination—preferring even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some violent god, to […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
The answer is no
October 18th, 2017 · No Comments
“Was any man ever the happier for being unhappy about death, and did he live any longer? Is suffering made the less by tears about it? Or another’s pain removed by your abundant gloom?” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
Onward, Buddhist soldiers
October 17th, 2017 · No Comments
“No Buddhist has ever burnt his neighbour’s body for the sake of his (non-existent) soul, nor has there been a ‘Buddhist’, still less that blasphemous phrase, a ‘holy’ Buddhist, war. It has always taught that truth is either relative (all that we know), or absolute (which we cannot know).” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
We know their names
October 16th, 2017 · No Comments
“And if there shall ever arise a nation whose people have forgotten poetry or whose poets have forgotten the people, though they send their ships round Taprobane and their armies across the hills of Hindustan, though their city be greater than Babylon of old, though they mine a league into the earth or mount to […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
Otherwise, go figure
October 15th, 2017 · No Comments
“What we do is what we are; when we are, we shall know what to do.” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
Git on it
October 14th, 2017 · No Comments
“Now is the best time for everything, because if done now it is immediately done, without like or dislike, purpose or desire. For things are what we do with them; they are not good or evil save as we make them so, and the same applies to their being useful, beautiful or just plain dull.” […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
Holding it close
October 13th, 2017 · No Comments
“There are only three things in the world, one is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry!” – Rupert Brooke
Tags: Lit & Crit
The equation
October 12th, 2017 · No Comments
“Freedom is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do.” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
The thousand points of light
October 11th, 2017 · No Comments
“The hope of mankind does not lie in the action of any corporate body, be it ever so powerful, but in the influence of individual men and women who for the sake of a greater have sacrificed a lesser aim.” – Kenneth Walker, Diagnosis of Man
Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law · The American Constitution
Illuminated manuscript
October 10th, 2017 · No Comments
“Words exist for their meaning, of which they are but the shadow, and if they enshrine some part of the meaning, they probably obscure still more.” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
Rolling stones uphill
October 9th, 2017 · No Comments
“Knowledge is always an attempt. Every fact was established by an argument—by observation and interpretation—and is susceptible to being overturned by a different one. A fact, you might say, is nothing more than a frozen argument, the place where a given line of investigation has come temporarily to rest. Sometimes those arguments are scientific papers. […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
Don’t let it get away
October 8th, 2017 · No Comments
“The weather is always ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It is nothing of the kind. It is the weather. The same applies to the news, one’s neighbour’s morals and the soup.” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
Well, shut my mouth
October 7th, 2017 · No Comments
“All words are nets in which to ensnare the flow of life.” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
Two monks walk into a bar
October 6th, 2017 · No Comments
“Zen can no more be explained than a joke. You see it or you don’t.” – Christmas Humphreys, Zen Buddhism
Tags: Lit & Crit
Let me tell you about . . .
October 5th, 2017 · No Comments
“As a species, we repeatedly fail to acknowledge the equal and inherent right of all other species to exist, a right implicit in existence itself and in no way subordinate to our own. We ignore, as if instinctively, nature’s right to itself—its autonomy, if you like. No matter how we feel or act as individuals, […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
Nanny’s not gonna give you that
October 4th, 2017 · No Comments
“The decisive distinguishing feature of Western philosophical or metaphysical spirituality is that it does not regard the truth as something to which the subject has access by right, universally, or simply by virtue of the kind of cognitive being that the human subject is. Rather, it views the truth as something to which the subject […]
Tags: Lit & Crit
The political process
October 3rd, 2017 · No Comments
“A scheme of which every part promises delight can never be successful; and general disappointment is only warded off by the defence of some little peculiar vexation.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Tags: Lit & Crit · Politics & Law
Sing joy spring, etc.
October 2nd, 2017 · No Comments
“No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold. And in the spring, the rites do not seek to compel nature to pour forth immediately corn, beans, […]
Tags: Lit & Crit