Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"[Slatter] looked at Dick, who was sitting staring down at this hands, and it was impossible to see what he was thinking, or whether he had noticed anything at all."

"'Class' is not a South African word; and its equivalent 'race' meant to her ... the amorphous mass of natives ..."

"Social capital isn't manifest only in someone connecting you to a friend or passing a resumé to an old boss. It is also, or perhaps primarily, a measure of how much we learn through our friends, colleagues, and mentors." - Aren't we dangerously close to habitas here?

"Yet the message of the right in increasingly: It's not your fault that you're a loser; it the government's fault."

"...the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with southern blacks arriving in Detroit." - his interesting observation is that in America class is becoming more important than race.

'A beheading': just when you think the violence cannot get any more sickening, a first person account.

"As a religious man, he conceded, this was problematic. Islam did not sit well with Pastunwali's obligations to violent revenge." - maybe Trump should have looked at this angle when he was formulating his travel ban.

"and I said, "Bastard! Get that ack-ack and fire back!"'' - when I watched 'East is East' I assumed George Khan 's enthusiasm for calling his offspring 'Bastard' was due to him learning English informally. It seems it's a standard term of address in Pakistan.

Butt and Bhatti: very glad I do not live in Pakistan

In this interaction with managerial habituses, monetarists reinterpreted their ideology as budgetary retrictionism - a clumsy reduction of neo-liberal ideas to 'monetarism'

When Imre Nagy ... was reburied in June 1989, the event was attended by relatively few people mostly middle-aged or older. For the younger generation, this was nothing but an internal communist dispute. - wasn't this where Orbán made his speech?

The dividing line between Left and Right, then, was actually a rather a narrow; for some, 'the people' were the workers, for others, ... the unspoiled soul of the nation, primarily the peasantry; which was counterpoised to the sinful and often alien or 'ethnic' elements which dominated urban life.

This influence and the common bond of 'Bildung' explain why ... the Prussian or Austro-Hungarian civil servant had strong affinities with the bourgeois form of life...they believed the governments under which they served were vehicles of reform, change and modernization.

[Goethe] emphasised that 'Bildung' was initially an aristocratic ideal of a well-rounded and harmonious development of the personality, which could be sustained in a bourgeois society.

One distinquishing characteristic of modern Central European history is that from the mid-nineteeth century onwards, the expansion of the education system preceded the development of markets.

Similarly, cultural capital has to be 'recognised' in order to become effective. Those who exercise symbolic mastery can do so only if they manage to persuade others of the validity of their truth claims.

People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief that makes things happen. - True story

"There are clouds, between us and them," pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black moustache, a large dusty black, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum sidings and roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after... - Apart from the obvious racism, isn't it poorly researched? Isn't Isten another name for Jehovah?

"...his nose buried in Gravity's Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother's death into London during the Blitz..." - It will be a struggle; Gravity's Rainbow starts three years after the Blitz, during the V2 rocket attacks on London.

"It's still true. Jesus. His death did in an instant what he'd spent the last few months trying to do." - this novel's blind spot, you can't write a novel about beings that are sustained by our faith in them, a novel that is set in America, without mentioning the number one American God. Europe however...

"The best thing about Robbie was that he was SOMEBODY" - I'm bored with colourless protagonists. Does this mean Gaiman is too?

Historical Experience seems to indicate that hitherto no stable stratification has ever existed in which cultural capital was the doninant form - democracy, theocracy?

The flow of money gradually came to function, in part, as a substitute for the flow of loyalty....but, from the start feudal alliances were held together by ties of money and monetary obligations. - The flow of money into non-money and back into essential to the business cycle. Similarly, money flows into education and entertainment to build cultural and social capital.

while nobles are obliged to engage in 'conspicuous consumption' to maintain their status honor. - I failed here.

In both cases their claim to power and prestige was based on the unique prestige accorded to 'men of ideas' in Central Europe. -.novelists?

So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride.

Central European technocrats [1990s] and managers are not imbued with reasons of state...and their typical approach has been ... the hands on fine-tuning of the transformation process.

"...in most cases of the diffusion of capitalism, the need for imitation is recognized by elites interested in protecting and developing the 'national economy' (although in some cases they turn out to have used political office merely to accumulate private wealth)" - presumably this justification fails when the proceeds of office are shipped out of the national economy.

...historians and sociologists have identified a number of strategic research sites where ... either capitalism emerges without the leadership of a propertied bourgeoisie in the transformation process ... or that capitalism currently functions in the absence of clear indidual owners.

...we want to add another dimension to the idea of path dependence in which people's world-views, biographies, and social structure are viewed as fundamentally connected.