Bakunin > Recent Status Updates

S.J. Perelman was apparently Henry Bears (the founder of the national lampoon) favorite humorist. I was surprised at how much I like Perelmans light and witty prose.

This collection of essays by Rand have so far provided me with a much better understanding of how she thinks.

Getting a bit tired of the author. I have never been a fan of relativism and find that his empiricism leaves a lot more to be desired by science.

"All over the neighbouring countryside were those sleepy hamlets and half-vacant villages, each with its Norman or Early English church of flint and stone. And in these churches a peculiar silence had been stored, along with the sweet damp smell of plaster, the mouldering prayer books, the embroidered kneelers and the Victorian altar cloths with their gold and emerald fabrics, like robes left [by] some angel" (p. 89)

"What they found [in modern England] was a machine, run on 'technologico-Benthamite' principles. True culture had been wiped out by a mass-marketed substitute, and real feelings replaced by sentimental fakes. As for 'life', you could only find it in the records of a vanished age" (p. 38)

I am fascinated by Scrutons account of England. It is quite unlike the nations which I have lived in (Sweden, Germany, China).

"The success or hatred that his work aroused would interest him for a short time; then he would sink into his usual mood of finding every enterprise absurd and steeping himself in this sense of absurdity. Magritte was that true Baudelairean hero who would amused himself all alone [...]"

Wow! Finally a kindred soul!

At times a trying jeremiad, but Hitchens does provide some interesting comments on pop or mass "culture" (his quotation marks).

A bit dry.