Saturday, June 17, 2017

Vanity All Is Vanity But Few Too Few Will Ever Know It

Philosophical writing is pedantically precise. It's not much fun and doesn't much influence people. The problems are hard to settle. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it... Butt (sic) Why Us?   ///  Whatever we do we must share NonKomunist Komey's story as widely as we can even as we know few people know how to read these days ... 





As Frank Lowy tells it, his journey to a British knighthood began with his love of the BBC, acquired as a young teen hiding from the Nazis  ...


Futurists dismiss religion but anoint “MEdia dragon evangelists” of technology and “oracles” of artificial intelligence. Are futurists really as atheistic as they think? Drink more poison or whisky to find out 

Austro-Hungarian modernists likeWittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and Joseph Roth were anti-utopian and anti-ideological. What were they for? Irony  Hard Core Cold Riverish Irony and Sarcasm  

Virginia Woolf's diary includes her thoughts on other people’s diaries. She read lots of them, seeing them as a valuable literary genre After all ... Not all is Vanity as in Vanity Fair  


Why live? Why keep a diary? Benjamin Franklin sought to log 13 virtues a day, Samuel Johnson “to methodise” his life. For Susan Sontag, private writing was a source of strength... Top Secrets of Senior Executioners Services 


Eric Hobsbawm became, perhaps, the world’s most-read historian. Still, he was puzzled over: How did a scholar so perceptive fail the test of anti communism ...  

Jozef Imrich's KGB file runs past James Baldwin's FBI file of 1,884 pages. It's full of marginalia, including this, in 1964, from J. Edgar Hoover: “Does not Baldwin have plenty of hair in wrong places”... Yes Bald people do have plenty of hair in wrong places  

Fifty years after the Congress for Cultural Freedom was outed as a CIA front, it stands as a reminder that state power can go only so far in setting the intellectual agenda Cohen's version of Alleluja