Reasons and Evidence

Excellent op-ed on Iraq’s “patrimony” from last March, referenced in a Tomdispatch article by Jack Miles today.

Conference: “In Defense of Sloth”

Jens Lekman: “but I will never kiss anyone…who doesn’t burn me like the sun.” Night Falls Over Kortedala is such a wonderful album.

Listening to Max Richter, The Blue Notebooks. It sounds derivative of something, but I can’t quite place it. Have the suspicion that it would be extremely impressive to people who listen mainly to pop music, but old hat to people who work in experimental/electronic/ambient music. I happen to love it, though I couldn’t imagine being an artist who put stuff like this out regularly. Need something else to lighten things up, which Richter actually has, e.g. production work with The Thermals and other rock groups.

Example of an independent Left: Socialism ou Barbarie. Its program would not really work in the US, however, given the intransigence of libertarian ideology in this country. That is to say, its critique of bureaucracy is too-easily folded into the knee-jerk US libertarian fixation on liquidating state agencies and leave the provision of health care, education, environmental control, etc., up to the free-for-all of the market. The same goes for Autonomia, perhaps, though there does exist such a thing as left libertarianism, i.e. anarchism, academic proponents of which include David Graeber and Simon Critchley.

Reason number 53 that it is difficult to take The Man without Qualities seriously:

"Ulrich [the main character] liked girls like this: ambitious, well-behaved, in their well-trained timidity like little fruit trees whose sweet ripe fruit is destined to fall one day into the mouth of some young knight of Cockaigne as soon as he deigns to open his lips. 'They have to be brave and tough,' he thought, 'like Stone Age women who shared their hunter's bed by night and carried his weapons and household gear on marches by day,' although he himself had never gone on such an expedition except in the distant prehistoric age of his awakening manhood" (189).