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La crainte du temps perdu
While reading Mary Read’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, I was transported to my brief time at St. John’s College. A decade ago I struggled to bridge the intellectual, cultural and ideological gap I perceived between a Hellenic and a Christian Western civilisation. While I endeavoured to span the chasm, my cohorts made the transition […]
On Last.fm
I have been scrobbling since 2005. I have never used Last.fm to discover new music or exploited its social network features. Instead, I use Last.fm to log the music tracks I play. It is an unobtrusive process, for the most part. And ever since I stopped using iTunes entirely and switched to Spotify, the activity of tracking my […]
Portobello
We have moved. Again. We relocated from the ostensibly working-class Dunedin suburb of Ocean Grove to the village of Portobello. This settlement is halfway up the western side of the Otago Peninsula, nestled around the eponymous Portobello Peninsula, which juts out into the Otago Harbour. We have exchanged the sound of the Pacific Ocean for […]
on genius
On the discordance between the artist and his creation: But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them …. Genius consist[s] in reflection power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.1 […]
A lot happens in five years
A lot has happened since the last time I actually blogged. I am no longer in Ireland. And after four years back in the United States (first in Ohio and then New York), I found myself relocating to yet another island. However, this time I would travel to a place more than halfway across the […]
Lazy Mexicans
Between 1836 and 1848, Mexico would lose 55 per cent of its territory to the United States. According to Engels, the entrepreneurial Yankee had struck a blow for civilization and human progress against the “lazy Mexicans.”1 The wealth of California would be developed and the Pacific would finally be opened up to mankind. While California […]
something something something
I wrote something and decided it was either too personal or of absolutely no consequence and therefore deleted it. This is all that’s left. A sign of something that was and is no more.
On the bearers of civilization of the Hellenistic world
The conquests of Alexander the Great opened the nations of the ancient east to the Greeks, however, these Greeks were no Platos, Herodotus or Sophocles. They were your garden variety Greeks. In their footsteps came a mixed company from every corner of Greece: mercenaries, peasants, traders and undefined persons without fixed occupations, sometimes also adventurers […]
The Industrial Military Complex
At the conclusion of World War II, the economist John K. Galbraith was appointed director of USBUS — United States Strategic Bombing Survey — which was tasked with assessing the effects of Allied aerial bombing on German industry and military. He summarizes the board’s findings: In Germany the strategic bombing, that of industry, transportation and […]