Tag Archives: Victor Hugo

no need for computers

Who needs computers with mathematical prodigies like these… Cyrus the Great could address every soldier in his army by name. Leon Gambetta, the French statesman, could quote thousands of pages of Victor Hugo verbatim. Mathurin Veysierre of Prussia could listen … Continue reading

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karl marx: many faces

The many faces of Karl Marx: Prophet, historian, newspaperman, revolutionary, philosopher, fond papa- all thse faces were his, and one other; that is, the romantic idealist exhorting man to triumph over the things he manufactures… One can imagine few greater … Continue reading

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1848 again? …the madcap laughs

An Arab Spring. Riots over a stupid internet film, the Innocence of Muslims, The Occupy Movement, technological unemployment. Continents are trembling and a world is awakening. In some ways, our past several years, and the so called American “fiscal cliff” … Continue reading

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goncourt recollections

…As it turned out, however, it was none of these things that rescued the Goncourts from “oblivion.” It was, rather, their Journals — the scandalous, vain, vengeful, brutally honest diaries in which the two brothers, and then Edmond alone, wrote … Continue reading

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touching a flaming comet

The disordering of the senses. A somewhat romantic and irrational project it was, to glorify the romantic’s seemingly narcissistic obsession with the process of creativity, an earnest concern to find the secret of creativity, like a holy grail, or a … Continue reading

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and the hunchback gets the girl

This symbol of the lower realm of thought. The central quality, deformity, forcing and unremitting gaze on the earth, on nature, on material, on what we mainly regard as the malevolent and dangerous. The wild, untamed. The deformity of the … Continue reading

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angelus in the midnight hour

from George Steiner: …the thesis whereby it is the ethical and cognitive duty of history, of enacted remembrance, to rescue from oblivion the oppressed, the enslaved, the victims of successful injustice, to bring them back to protesting life out of … Continue reading

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WMD: cook the books

Leveraged exchange traded funds or ETF’s….These financiers. Morbidly earthbound figures, weighed down by the heavy change in their pockets. Without that primitive anchor of coin rooting them to the soil, they would float away into a void, a kind of … Continue reading

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heine sight is everything

The personification of a straight line. Those who philosophize everything delicious out of life. Does the ancient land of dreams still exist? Heine did not believe that it would so soon come to pass; there were too many black ravens … Continue reading

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small is beautiful: a free man in paris

It was a time when Paris was a city for the young. Students, painters, intellectuals, journalists, grisettes: all were there along with a young German poet who recorded a period of creative ferment between one revolution and the next. …. … Continue reading

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