Finished reading: The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han 📚

I waited too long after ready to fully remember my thoughts on this book, nor can I credibly claim to have definitely understood the entire argument. But I remember being glad I read it.

A certain flatness of modern life coupled with an ever-present mirror of self lead us to focus on achievement. Waging battles of our own creation and we their only casualties.

its inhabitants are no longer “obedience-subjects” but “achievement-subjects.” They are entrepreneurs of themselves.

Unlimited Can is the positive modal verb of achievement society.

Rage has a characteristic temporality incompatible with generalized acceleration and hyperactivity, which admit no breadth of time. The future shortens into a protracted present. It lacks all negativity, which would permit one to look at the Other. In contrast, rage puts the present as a whole into question. It presupposes an interrupting pause in the present.

The computer calculates more quickly than the human brain and takes on inordinate quantities of data without difficulty because it is free of Otherness. It is a machine of positivity.

One might also say that overexcited efforts to maximize performance are abolishing negativity because it slows down the process of acceleration.

for positive potency, the preponderance of positivity, only permits anticipation and thinking ahead.

Walls and partitions, the elements of disciplinary architecture, traverse the entire narrative.

“On errands of life, these letters speed to death”; this is the central message of the tale. All effort to live lead to death.

Less I means more world

As a character disorder, narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing “other,” ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other-and then it becomes meaningless….The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking always for an expression or reflection of [onself]….one drowns in self.

The real is a stay in the double meaning of the word. It not only offers interruption and resistance, but also affords stopping and support.

Deficit filled, apathy stimulated, impulses regulated, compulsion tamed—all of this has made dependency he flipside of depression. With the gospel of personal development on the one hand and the cult of performance on the other, conflict does not disappear; however, it loses its obvious quality and can no longer be counted on to guide us.

Now, the totality of capital, which seems to be absorbing everything, represents consensual violence.

Achievement society is the society of self-exploitation. The achievement-subject exploits itself until it burns out. In the process, it develops auto-aggression that often enough escalates into the violence of self-destruction. The project turns out to be a projectile that the achievement-subject is aiming at itself.
In view of the ego ideal, the real ego appears as a loser buried in self-reproach. The ego wages war with itself. The society of positivity, which thinks itself free of all foreign constraints, becomes entangled in destructive self-constraints. Psychic maladies of the twenty-first century, all display auto-aggressive traits. Exogenous violence is replaced by self-generated violence, which is more fatal than its counterpart inasmuch as the victim of such violence considers itself free.

Today violence issues more readily from the conformism of consensus than from the antagonism of dissent. In this sense—contra Habermas—one might speak of the violence of consensus.

The capitalist economy absolutizes survival. It is not concerned with the good life. It is sustained by the illusion that more capital produces more life, which means a greater capacity for living. The rigid, rigorous separation between life and death casts a spell of ghostly stiffness over life itself. Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving.

The inner logic of achievement society dictates its evolution into a doping society. Life reduced to bare, vital functioning is life to be kept healthy unconditionally. Health is the new goddess. That is why bare life is holy.

Finished reading: The Moral Equivalent of War by William James 📚

History is a bath of blood. The Illiad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism—war for war’s sake, all the citizen’s being warriors.

Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does any one deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are the soul of any patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance.

Its upshot can, it seems to me, be summed up in Simon Patten’s words, that mankind was nursed in pain and fear, and that the transition to a “pleasure economy” may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defense against its degenerative influences. If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now taking the place off the ancient fear of the enemy.

Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy.

Finished reading: Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau 📚

What would be the consequences of effecting this type of civil disobedience today?

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done for ever.

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

(Some might say this is how we got to where we are.)

Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue; for money comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him; it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it.

This pairs well with this quote from John Kenneth Galbraith:

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

Finished reading: War is a Racket by General Smedley D. Butler 📚

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people—who do not profit.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has been not to achieve disarmament in order to prevent war but rather to endeavor to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.
If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building a greater prosperity for all peoples.

The gas too high to fill the tank
One year cost more than did the car
Bus fare so high I gotta walk
Cost more to live than foreign war.

from Inflation Blues by Margaret Walker

Finished reading: Peace Is This Moment by Thich Nhat Hanh 📚

Finished reading: The Light Fantastic (Discworld, 2) by Terry Pratchett 📚

Forgot how fun Discworld is. I enjoy a story acknowledges the fourth wall.

Finished reading: Greenglass House by Kate Milford 📚

This was a fun read with my daughter. Well paced and a few beats that made me think of the Clue movie. Along with other movies I won’t mention so as not to spoil anything.

one drop of blues turning a paper clip
into three wings and a bone into revolt

from You Know by Jayne Cortez

A great poem and well worth a listen

The distinguishing mark of Man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.’

-George Orwell

Finished (re)reading: Animal Farm by George Orwell 📚

Revisited this book. Not (just) due to the current moment, but after hearing Dan Pink call it the single best book on organizational behavior.

The line in my earlier post is from the Borges essay The Wall and The Books, which feels like very relevant reading given the current moment.

Burning books and erecting fortifications is a common task of princes

from Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges 📚

I’ve tried starting Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges multiple times now and keep getting stopped by the first line of the first story because it’s just so good.

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

To arise one smoking spring
& find one’s youth has taken off
for greener parts.

from Look for You Yesterday,
Here You Come Today
in Transbluesency by Amiri Baraka 📚

Finished reading: The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han 📚

Finished reading: Work by Thich Nhat Hanh 📚

poetry, which is also a kind of glitch in what we know.

-Patricia Lockwood

Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.

…

You’re a nowhere man misfiring
the very essence of your life, flustering
nothing from nothing and back again.

from Dream On by James Tate

Complexity from Death Poems by Thomas Ligotti 📚

Whatever events may lead
to the last moment,
the finale is always the same:
simple heart failure.

And all the time you thought
that life was so complex.
It’s just the beat of a drum:
Th mp-thump.

As I said in my initial post, “not much happens” in A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, “but more than enough happens to be interesting.” 📚

Here’s what I highlighted as I read:

Then, like all people who give in too easily, he began to grub up a few restrictive clauses to recover face.

Must one excuse their defective sensibility towards their fellows because they are engrossed with God?

“People tire of color and shapes which stay in the same place. And they always believe that they have more time than they will have and that, someday, they’ll come on a weekday and have a proper look.” I should have said “we”—I’m just the same.

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

But that goes for most of us, doesn’t it? We look blankly at each other.

Now you know all about me. Go away: I’ve forgotten you already.

it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

You know how it is when a tricky job is going well because you’re doing things the way they should be done, when you’re working in rhythm and feel a reassuring confidence that everything’s unraveling naturally and all will be right in the end.

I would like to have examined it: I mean to say, almost everything has some purpose.

it had never occurred to me that too big a house might have the same appalling drawbacks as too small a one,

Our jobs are our private fantasies, our disguises, the cloak we can creep inside to hide.

like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole before beguiling you with its parts.

But there are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills.

It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

because people one doesn’t care for, even dislike, make most of us feel uneasy when they appeal against their sentence.

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

I don’t usually blog about the books I read with my kids, but I love this line from The Teeny-Weeny Unicorn by Shawn Harris 📚

Unicorns, like most living species, have no use for money

Premature from Death Poems by Thomas Ligotti 📚

When it’s all over,
they sometimes say things
such as “before his time”
or perhaps “too young.”

But the fact is this:
everything happens because
“its time has come.”
And the last thing
that happens to you
will always be “on time.”

No one is too young.
Nothing is premature.
Everyone, including you,
is right on schedule.

It’s true.

haiku from A Future Waterfall by Banʼya Natsuishi 📚

My haiku:
a little cedar
nine hundred ninetynine years old

3 Days, 9 Months, 27 Years by John Scalzi 📚

Theory is almost never practice.

It is psychologically important, when traveling through time, to have another human be the last and first thing you see.

We did it anyway, because humans can’t not stick their fingers into wall sockets

A scientist, however, knows that initial conditions are everything, and that small differences at the outset make for huge differences in results down the line. The observer and the observed always interact. Everything changes.

Variety is the essence of tourism.

It is pleasant to work with, and for, pleasant people.