The notes in which I collect pieces from different sources and reassemble I normally entitle ‘fragments’. Not this time. These are not fragments, but sounds and echoes. Put aside the banal hot takes about chatGPT and listen: there is plenty else to hear. Crack crack. Things are breaking. Not unimportant things. Basic infrastructures and core services. States. And not in one or two places.

Last week marked two years of this Substack, so it seemed like a good moment for a brief update and review of the project. The original aim was for it to be a ‘thought sketchbook’, and that is roughly how it has developed.

Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’ (1919): - Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Nineteenth Century’ (1922): - Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and poverty’ (1933): - Stefan Zweig, Diary (Autumn 1939): - René Char, Hypnos (1946):

Australia’s Lowy Institute has just released its 2023 Asia Power Index. Like all such exercises, it is presented to have that feel of it being objective and scientific. It is full of numbers and measures, percentages and tables. In the end, it is effectively just a measured set of judgements, and it can be helpful in that regard.

Noah Smith tells us: Martin Wolf is comfy in his ‘90s time-warp: And don’t worry, the gliberals have not yet been replaced by GPT, although you have to feel that day is getting close. Timothy Snyder announces: And Timothy Garton Ash looks towards a great European future: One does not need to venture far to find similar content. Remember what Francis Ford Coppola said: The Marvel model extends to thinking about politics.

A collection of fragments related to the writings of Franz Kafka. If he was able to see aspects of the world taking shape a century ago, what might his work suggest now? It strikes me that it has to do with that space where absurdity and brutality meet.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorism 125, ‘The Madman’, The Gay Science [1882]: - Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers , Part 3, Chapter XLIV, ‘Disintegration of Values (6)’ [1931-32]: - Ezra Pound, ‘Canto CXIII’ [1969]:

Evil might seem like a strange topic to be commencing the year with, but I have been finishing an article on this elusive theme and these notes are consciously untimely. It is a difficult, awkward topic, weighed with religious and mystical connotations, it does not fit well with many contemporary frames.

A passage taken from a draft of Part IV of TS Eliot’s, The Waste Land , which has just marked its centenary. The final version of the ‘Death by Water’ section was considerably shorter, and generally considered better for it, but I must admit, I do like this bit where the sailor unexpectedly meets his end by an iceberg. It feels like an appropriate image as we approach the end of a year marked by surprises.

This is the penultimate piece for 2022, and is meant as a companion to yesterday’s note. I am in the final week of teaching an undergraduate course on peace and conflict. One of the starting points for it is a recognition of how deeply war has shaped, and is present, in how our world is structured. War is productive in the sense of producing outcomes. This might seem obvious, but it can be oddly overlooked or underappreciated.

Quotes taken from ‘Putin’s war’, New York Times (16 December 2022). Leo Tolstoy, Bethink Yourselves (1904). Ken Jowitt, ‘Undemocratic Past, Unnamed Present, Undecided Future’ (1996). Ken Jowitt, ‘Setting History's Course’ (2009). Adam Curtis in The Guardian on his recent series, Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone (2022). Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground (1864).Subscribe now