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տեղոյր ճմիղ. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man sprechen. Mentalese is thought-rain: what had been squeezed out was coming down in a torrent.
Since no one comes to attend the fatally plague-ridden performances promoted under Chairman Trump in the Lincoln Center, this modest proposal calls for stocking the rows and tiers of empty seats with pristine mounds of unsold copies of Lenin’s works from the former DDR
From Norwegian: dugnadsånd, the spirit of communal volunteer work to help your local community in some way
On 'weak man syndrome': Of the 43 Gauleiters (political district officers) in Nazi Germany 1944-1945, all but ONE abandoned his post and fled, instead of organizing local defense against the advancing allies. Yes, Trudeau's tears show him to be the REAL deal, not the craven lot attacking him online.
Half of Americans have an eighth grade or lower literacy level, never mind what Americans imagine their capacity to be. Carried further—from deluded states to ignorant—their fund of psychologies of self-awareness wouldn’t feed a sparrow. In abstract that's doom scrolling in its recursive loop
Naming is the prerequisite for knowing; thereunto, ceremony for uttering in full outcry names of the dead, often held in a bothy, summons knowledge to take its seat at the shrine
Nothing anyone says in favor of Trump can be entertained unless the claimant is familiar with Defensor pacis of Marsilius of Padua. Short of that competence, please stick your head further up your ass. And if one is a journalist, no degree of study will gain the requisite grasp of that skill set.
In the US human psychology isn't thought through—it's acted out. Goes some distance in explaining how obtuse the press organs are in face of imminent danger, yet too how obtuse the public is in grasping governing outcomes by a president and executive officials who have manifestly bad character
Without an outside referee—say, California—America is locked in a war with itself. We in California can begin by correctly naming the war of 1861-1865 THE SLAVERS' REVOLT, to give the sad event its true color. Americans will have to chafe under that label instead finding political euphemisms for it.
so much talus, so much scree, this counts for you—educated pebble—not me
Cruelty, the ultimate result of gains-oriented rationality. —Shadi Bartsch
Does physics give you self-knowledge? Not really. Does law? Not really. Does computer science? I don't think so. Humanities: without them we are robots.
Nabokov warned that if we do not look closely at the world around us now, we will have nothing with which to furnish or empty rooms in heaven.
But I, being a young Frenchman born in the north, in Paris—can I really be sure I can correctly infer what Italian minds thought and felt in 1559? The best I can hope for is to divine what might appear elegant and piquant to French readers in 1838. —Stendhal, Duchess of Palliano
I've fallen in love, or imagine that I have; went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don't need at all. —Leo Tolstoy (25 January 1851)
Reductory workshops strip the cosmos to such basics as their doctrines suppose there to be. Many poets and also some novelists attempt to do this in their work as well.
No worthwhile human achievement has ever been instigated on the basis of demonstrable cost effectiveness.
The coming Trump régime is more like Russia than you're likely to know: The jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish, in the end, only vassals and enemies; and the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other —George F. Kennan
French culture has radiated for so long it's a wonder humanity hasn't collapsed from sunstroke
The things that are not measured in intervals are three—kindness, empathy, and tenderness. Everything else is beset by intervals, meaning beset to temporary states.
Woolf must have been threatened / appalled by the astonishing brilliance & versatility of Joyce's prose, like nothing she could have written, or even, in her curiously disembodied consciousness, imagined. The sheer exuberance of Joyce's love of the physical life was beyond her. —Joyce Carol Oates
Everybody suffers under Multiculturalism, because Multiculturalism is no culture, it means that there is nothing to be loyal to, nothing to belong to. Any culture that wants to survive has to have an agreed culture and a common language. —Peter Hitchens
'καὶ τῷ δήμῳ κακόνους ἔσομαι καὶ βουλεύσω ὅ τι ἂν ἔχω κακόν' Oath of the Oligarchs—I will be an enemy to the people and contrive whatever harm I can against them.
Jabès, Edmond. Un Étranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format, 96 La plate vallée de la langue rêve de fôrets de haute futaie Jabès, Edmond. A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, 68 The shallow valley of language dreams of full-grown forests
The choice in internal accounting to give humanities departments no credit for the core classes and seminars they run—sometimes as overload—and thereby keep the university chugging along? That's a deliberate choice to undervalue them. 1/2
And while we all get patted on the head and told it's a great place to recruit students, other engines at the same university are pushing new students into STEM and pre-professional or business programs, so... as a result of costing nothing, humanities' tuitions generally subsidize STEM 2/2
This is why all those strings attached to university funding that are aimed at reducing the humanities are aimed at universities as a whole. It’s about pulling the rug from under the very idea what university is
University is a place of thinking dangerously. The responsibility to provide a framework for this lies with the humanities. All parts of the higher education landscape benefit from this contribution. Humanities make universities courageous
Make no mistake: the drive to defund humanities departments at universities is not a 'cost saving measure'. Their budgets are already minute. It’s about redefining what a university is and making it more difficult in the long run to offer students the necessary critical skills