Posted in Miscellany, Reading on February 25, 2007 | 5 Comments »
Found this news clipping while ferreting in the archives, tacked to a memo forwarded onto the Home Office — clearly some British colonial had found it as hysterical as I did. Roughly translated from Chinese.
THE CHINESE CREDO
28th April 1932
That the Chinese Civilization is superior to that of the West, because it is spiritualistic.
That the Chinese [...]
Posted in Philosophy of History, Historiography, Links, Reflection, Thought Drafts on February 23, 2007 | 9 Comments »
A while back, vis-a-vis Borges, I wrote about lifelogging without knowing there was a name for it. Today I realize it was prescient — people have been experimenting with lifelogging, going around with audiovisual cameras slung around their necks like slack nooses, recording every minute of their lives. Apparently scientists have been talking about doing [...]
Posted in Links on February 22, 2007 | 5 Comments »
having started this historically focused space, I naturally spent a little time checking out the rest of the historical blogosphere. Almost immediately it struck me how overwhelmingly Ameri-centric the ’sphere is; so many of the best, most frequently linked and prominent blogs are almost invariably history-writing coloured with (often partisan) analyses of current American politics. [...]
Posted in Philosophy of History, Historiography, Thought Drafts on February 20, 2007 | 6 Comments »
I dragged myself out of bed to a 9 AM lecture on Nietzsche, a fruitful endeavour resulting in certain epiphanies about the steely sides of Nietzschean morality, but particularly on his relationship to history.
for Nietzsche the source of human problems and resentment is time — the fact that time creeps by inexorably for every being, [...]
Posted in Reflection, Skillsets on February 19, 2007 | 7 Comments »
I wish I didn’t have such neat handwriting. Half my time inspecting archival documents is spent squinting (in vain) trying to decipher what these long-gone personages have indecorously scrawled all over these official documents. I love the feel of old paper and the deliciously tactile sense of the past one gets from rifling through old [...]
Posted in Philosophy of History, Historiography, Reading, Thought Drafts on February 15, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
In I suppose much the same way that pregnant women suddenly see other pregnant women everywhere, today I chanced upon a little more clarity on historical materialism in (of all places) one of Chesterton’s magnificently snide essays — ‘The Sun Worshipper’, the one that begins as follows:
There is a shrewd warning to be given to [...]
Posted in Philosophy of History, Historiography, Reading, Thought Drafts on February 14, 2007 | 1 Comment »
I spent today in bed with Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Marx & Engels and a wonderful essay by John Brewer, and discovered that they were all pleasantly related.
Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History were frustratingly tantalizing — in stanzas of aphoristic brevity, they put forward dense, unfleshed ideas that resonate powerfully but resist full and [...]
Posted in Current Issues, Reflection, Thought Drafts on February 13, 2007 | 8 Comments »
the New York Times ran an article today on one Marcus R. Ross of Rhode Island University, who submitted a geoscience Ph. D. dissertation on the disappearance of mosasaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago, while simultaneously holding to the view that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.
It [...]
Posted in Popular History, Historiography, Reading on February 12, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
this book — the story of the conception, genesis, derailing, struggle and eventual completion of the first Oxford English Dictionary — is really a model of popular history for me. intensely readable, excruciatingly erudite in a really humble way. it is a tour de force, but very quietly. most significantly, it doesn’t cite sources, [...]
Posted in About on February 12, 2007 | 13 Comments »
simply speaking, I am a historian keeping track of my own history. my quest is, as always, vigilance and refinement of my craft, and the painstaking pursuit of erudition. and I need a less popular, more focused space to do this in. this blog will frequently be very academic, mostly in the historical sense, and [...]
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