journal

Dani Rodrik’s policy trilemma holds that “democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.” – from here. D. writes to me the foregoing, under the subject-line, Re: Anti politics at work,

People were really angry that Lacan said that being melancholic was cowardly–it seemed to rough ride over what in it might be an ethical or legitimate response to loss. But he felt this was too much Romanticisation. The thing about the melancholic is, even if they have the courage

He imagines people on the street looking up from their phones and into each other’s eyes–Hello, how are you? Why are you so sad? How can we do better? — Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In The Dark, 2022, p. 232 … Why read this book? For the reason

DBC Pierre in Release the Bats: 1. Nothing is at it seems. Show what really is. … 3. The taste in your mouth is ultimately what you’re writing out. Whether you know what it is or not: trust it. 4. What would you write if you weren’t afraid? Write

(What does it mean to be human?) …“a peer of the Norwegian pessimist Peter Wessel Zapffe [argued] ‘against Zapffe’s view that life is meaningless, that life is not even meaningless.’” — Rob Doyle, Threshold, (London, UK: Bloomsbury Circus, 2020), 75 [unless otherwise indicated all quotes following from this source] The

…the lyric has limitations. I’ve found myself impatient with the lyric form. And that’s the reason I changed my style, a rebellion against the traditional, contemporary, lyric form of, say, William Carlos Williams. I had had it that way. I found my language was responding to the form