“I think a woman wants not to be treated as some sort of exotic subspecies by a coke-addled creep like Freud.” — Natalie Haynes, on BBC Radio 4’s Museum of Curiosity, when asked to respond to Freud’s claim that women were ultimately unknowable and their wants a mystery to men.
“Marx was not an empiricist. Marx did not think you could gain access to the truth by gaining bits of data from experience and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time, this makes for a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense. The whole idea of common sense was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order has turned its construction of reality into an apparently ideologically neutral set of ideas, which are then taken as givens for the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things which are in fact evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, in Marx’s view, will always confirm the status quo.” — John Lanchester on Marx, in a talk available as a podcast from the London Review of Books.
“
Hello Sean,
In the past you’ve shown interest in Crowded House, so we thought you’d like to join us in celebrating Sting’s dynamic solo career!
” — Fuck. Off.“In a model that is the norm in Sweden and other parts of continental Europe, but alien to English-speaking countries, this will be an all-rental private neighbourhood, run and overseen by a private company […] The company wants you to be in a neat, clean, pleasant environment. And it very much wants you to have fun. Those things that normally just happen in life will be carefully managed from above […] Presumably, it also means keeping out cheque-cashing shops, Internet cafes, bookmakers and the other detritus of the British shopping street, as well as the sort of down-at-the heels characters who make urban life colourful but challenging.” —
Before I had read even one word of this piece, it was laughably easy to guess which country had given permission to this terrifying ersatz simulacrum of a “neighbourhood.”
I’m thinking of creating a new blog: “1980s’ Yuppies with Entitlement Issues.”
Larkin on vinyl (Taken with instagram)
I know it is incredibly passé to post cartoons about work but this really sums up how I have been feeling recently.
“The happiest moment of my year is about three hours before the first race at Cheltenham on Tuesday; queuing behind Alan Brazil for my, but not his, first pint of Guinness of the meeting.” — Charlie Brooks, arrested Tuesday morning alongside his wife Rebekah on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, a little more than three hours before the first race at Cheltenham.
I remember Gielgud’s controversial Casual Wanker at the Old Vic.
He’s playing who in the movie?