Musings

"Tyranny offers relief from the burden of sanity and a licence to enact forbidden impulses of hatred and violence." (John Gray, The Silence of Animals) The other night I settled in to watch the US mid-term election, a bottle of single malt to hand, alone in dim lamp light. This has been my ritual since… Continue reading Slipping loose the burdens of sanity →

Some year ago, I heard Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" for the first time. The exact year is lost but I was old enough, and pretentious enough in my music tastes, for it to be an embarrassing revelation. Yet, there's also a visceral rush in stumbling upon something fabulous that you should not have, but… Continue reading There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening… →

Download In preparation for an upcoming holiday to Rome, I sought out a book about the city's history. Robert Hughes' Rome was recommended to me by a friend. Early in the book Hughes recounts a visit to a market held in the Campo dei Fiori where he encounters the brooding statue of the 16th-century Dominican… Continue reading Divinity and dust →

I’ve got a fascination with books that try to give the big panoramic statement--a big history, a big story. Lately, I've been making my way through Tom Holland’s Dominion, both fascinated by its scope and sceptical (in a way that's difficult to articulate) of its ambition. The same push/pull dynamic was there reading Simon Reid-Henry's… Continue reading Big Pictures, Small Moments →

In that hollow period between Christmas and New Year's Eve, impatient for 2021 to end but hesitant to enter 2022, I listened to "The Death of Nuance" in the concerned but indolent way middle-class-BBC4-listeners do. The programme argues we are caught within increasingly sharp political dichotomies, ensnared by technology, biology, unrelenting complexity. It all has… Continue reading Nuance →

“I’m a responsible scientist.”  Nah, mate, you’re a dead soul working in a mortuary world. To try to think beyond the horizon is a desire to live beyond the living, beyond the dying, to be lost among those never dead and never born. My method is a kind of philosophical necrophilia, a living soul in… Continue reading Methodology as mummification  →

The actual experience of being an "academic", as opposed to the naive image I held to in my 20s, has very nearly extinguished my desire to write. I still have the ability to put words on the screen, occasionally even on paper, which is vital to keeping myself profitably employed--which is, in turn, vital to… Continue reading Musing, as in to ‘meditate, waste time’ →