the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season

"As early as December 20, [Walter] Benjamin made the analogy between cities and people explicit: 'For me, Moscow is now a fortress, the harsh climate which is wearing me down, no matter how healthy it might be for me, my ignorance of the language, Reich's presence, Asja's utterly circumscribed mode of existence, all constitute so many bastions, and it is only the total impossibility of advancing any further, only the fact that Asja's illness, or at least her weakness, pushes our personal affairs into the background, that keeps me from becoming completely depressed by all this. Whether I will achieve the secondary purpose of my journey—to escape the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season—remains to be seen.'

"On December 31, this question also seemed to have been answered. Benjamin was standing in front of a theater poster with Asja when he admitted: 'If I had to be sitting alone somewhere tonight, I would hang myself with misery.'"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

a project-based teacher

"[Ludwig] Wittgenstein was a project-based teacher. He always tried to make his subject matter visible in objects. He was particularly keen on animal skeletons, which he prepared and assembled with his pupils. The carcasses, which included cats and other roadkill, he collected from the village streets, skinned and disemboweled them himself, before boiling the bones for several days. Even in Trattenbach the resulting foul stench led to fierce complaints from the neighborhood. But this didn't stop Wittgenstein from persisting with all the further stages of these projects. In the end he wasn't doing it for himself, he was doing it for education. Moreover, he couldn't have cared less about the opinions of his fellow villagers, unlike those of the children under his tutelage. Whenever complainants showed up at his house, he slammed the door in their outraged faces and told them that if the smell bothered them so much, they should simply leave, ideally forever!"

~~ from Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Eilenberger

Peter Hessler returns

In the January 3 & 10 print issue of The New Yorker, Peter Hessler writes about correspondence and visits with middle-aged Chinese we first met as 1990s college students in his classic River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. Despite being only a tiny slither of mainland experience, this update on his students' lives does a remarkable job of capturing the entire country's changes and development over the past few decades. It's highly recommended reading.

the top two feet

 For ten bucks, we get the top two feet of a Christmas tree.

Christmas came

"Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret. His wife went to Mass and cooked a turkey. Sober, Elliot walked in the woods."

~~ from "Helping" by Robert Stone

permanent

"Idi Amin's lesson is permanent."

~~ from "A Wife's Story" by Bharati Mukherjee

tremendous

"Tremendous" is how a recent reader described the final pages of Fight for Your Long Day.

adolescence

In this telling, the house burns down.

the great books

While I agree that "The Left Should Defend Classical Education" (i.e. reading Western classics, "the great books," Plato, Hobbes, Melville, Nietzsche, and so on), I haven't yet had a chance to read Liza Featherstone's article. 

Letter from Cape Town, profile from France

For recent online reading, I appreciated the comical moments in Adam Gopnik's portrait of the far-right Algerian immigrant, media celebrity, and French presidential candidate in The New Yorker as well as this South African business about Nikolai Gogol and stolen noses in Harper's Magazine.

race stuff

"But when I make my way over to [Officer] Inoue, he tells me that if I'm going to try some Asian crap it won't work, so I ask him what the hell that even means.

"The race stuff, he says. You're Asian, and I'm Asian, so you think we have some kind of connection. I'm telling you right now that we don't. I'm Japanese, and you're either Chinese or Korean. There's no connection here, so please sit down and wait while my backup gets here."

~~ from Jeff Chon's "There's No Connection Here" in King Ludd's Rag, No. 5, May 2021