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Monthly Archives: May 2011

Generalism Is a Particularism

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Self-proclaimed “generalists” are often actually just experts in things that don’t customarily hang together. A fellow who is well-read in the history of chess, military tactics, the French Revolution, and astro-biology, and who uses these miscellanies in a systematic way, such that his expertise in one affects his opinions in another, will likely be classified [...]

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He’s Probably Right

Monday, May 2, 2011

I’m guided always by the divine Oscar Wilde—like myself a sublime discipline of Walter Pater—who said, “Literary criticism is the only civilized form of autobiography.” I would say, “The only civilized form of biography is literary criticism.” (“The Anatomy of Influence,” an interview w/ Harold Bloom.)

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The Internationale

Sunday, May 1, 2011

As is my custom, I’m posting my favorite version of the Internationale to celebrate May Day. Arise, ye victims of oppression! Coincidentally, I’m going to be regaled by my wife’s reading of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution as I drive to Boston next weekend.

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