Excerpts from the ‘Nihongi’

From a foot note by William George Aston, from his translation of the Nihon Shoki, (1896) a court history compiled before 720 on orders of the Japanese tenno and court, and containing both a highly skeptical history of the Gods and a careful and largely mythical history of the tenno, or Emperors, from 660 BC [...]

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Excerpts and Fragments, Unknown

He wouldn’t share with e., though she must have guessed < < I have > > that he had no direction but that which changed the city around him, though these boulevards, with the spire of her tenement behind him, were far too open.  Here, the dirt came down to wash, as the mandarin saying [...]

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Amin Maalouf, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong

     This slim book of sociological and philosophical musing, a gentle and intelligent polemic, attempts to answer why violence and the need to belong are linked together.  He notes, for instance, that violence is often committed by those whose identities feel threatened, citing the Okalahoma City bombings as an extreme and monstrous example of [...]

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Anti-socialism, German Style, 1913

Two news reports I recently stumbled upon while reading through the Fort William Times Journal.  Both of these articles fell in June 1913. The first is about anti-socialist police in Breslau, then a part of German Silesia, now Wroclaw in Poland, and in 1913 the German Empire’s sixth or seventh largest city, a major industrial [...]

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John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The back of this book tells me I will be intrigued and infuriated. I dare say they are right. John Gray is very well-read, expansively so, though this leads to a great deal of glibness that can be very distracting and arrogant. How is one supposed to react to a book that dismisses Platonic thought, [...]

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Modern Times

“I would say that the fascist agenda was Utopian, and that it adopted the cult of science. That’s what leads Hitler to try and breed humans and apes to try to create an oversized warrior or to send expeditions to Tibet to find a pure, Aryan race. I mean, that’s not science. It’s the cult [...]

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