well

So this new book on debt is ok so far and I'll learn things and have thoughts to think through.  Fair enough - not a classic.  But it is useful to see that the moral valence of indebtedness in general is both ambivalent and not worse than that of the creditor.

the chicken did

A new book on the history of debt?  Yes, please.  I haven't started yet, but apparently it's going to say that debt came before currency, and even before barter, in human history.  (The usual notion is that barter came first, then currency addressed barter's limits, and currency enabled complex movements like debt and credit.)

So I'll wait to see what the book says.  But for now, just the idea is exciting and plausible.  A goat, field or hour of labor can be borrowed even more easily than it may be bartered.  And a pre-existing debt would expand the range of goods a creditor might feel willing to accept.  Indeed, it might expand that range all the way across to a token.

It also addresses the economy of prophesy and religion, which is never a matter of barter, but always of promise (that is, of debt).

Can't wait to start this book! (Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.)  Hopefully it won't disappoint.

know

Experience beats intelligence nearly every time, although not by a mile.  Novel situations demand intelligence.  Indeed, much of the value of intelligent experience is to see the novel aspects of an otherwise long-experienced situation.

poking

I would guess that the first function of an intelligence agency, even after it becomes capable of spying, remains the work of finding and sifting information that is simply out in the open.

presentation

Fact + force = truth

Myth has greater impact than fact over certain parts of every human mind, and over certain human minds.  And these are significant parts and many people.

Facts must be made weighty, given the stained glass coloring of awe, the distant quake of canonnade, rolling into position.  Or else they are only facts.

ˉ ˘ ˉ

Now is our glorious summer made a wintry discontent.

(By the way, note the special metrical qualities of discontent, particularly at the end of sentence.)

more gravity

One source of intellectual lift is a desire to impress others, the sense of an audience - mating displays, as it were.

gravity

I always have felt the need to be both substantive and connective in my writing and even thoughts.  But this can leave me feeling mentally sticky - glued down - weighted.

makes the whole world kin

Just an hour at a major international gateway - I spent one at JFK's Terminal 4 yesterday - and you see that what business enables is the travel of families, of loved ones, of others of one's tribe and place.  It is beautiful, although in cold fact it is only the releasing of tensions caused in the first place by commerce, and by the same means.

more Warren

Remember that this is still, basically, the working off of a housing bubble atop a consumer credit bubble.

Warren

To be governed by the people is to be governed by what governs the people.  And that may be many things, and shift for any given people over time.  Fortunately a governing desire to live is more or less a popular constant.

think again

Middlemarch has long been my nominee for the finest work originally written in English.  But I wonder, on this re-reading, whether Eliot would agree.  I think there is more than narrative voicing behind some of the doubt the narration betrays.  Eliot seems ever to be shoring up her entirely sound literary structures.  It is strange to see the Rock of Gibraltar, buttressed.

middle age

Eliot describes the lost radiance of a character not by saying she had "dimmed" but by describing her as "rayshorn" - that is beautiful.

bridges falling down

Rioting and looting are mere criminality?  Not so.  It is theatrical criminal behavior: an acting out of unposessed power, apparent solidarity, unfulfillable appetites and greed.  They put upon their heads the ancient crown of stones, because it is has presented both itself and a stage, upon which, one may feel momentarily that one is not a eunuch, a crowdsman, almost an animal, although yesterday and tomorrow and tomorrow, one is.  Rioting is a sort of public masturbation, and as empty and offensive - and telling - as that.

parch

My mind has gone rather terribly dry.  There must be the right sort of water around here somewhere.

subway types

Guys - busboys, deliverers, construction laborers - earnestly writing in little spiral-bound lined notebooks, in big round block letters, with a blue ball-point pen.  Not studying or communicating, just writing to - well, what?  I tend to think of these as calmly-contained but inwardly passionate people.  Or hotly intelligent without much scope for opportunity of thought.  Self-contained or context-bound, that is.  A small whorl of inner life.  Comparatively talentless brethren of Emily Dickinson, but brethren all the same.  That last sentence could be applied to me, I suppose, though none of what preceeded it.  Makes the whole world kin - the subway, I mean.  That and unfounded assumptions about others.

take 3

No, your opponents are not crazy.  Their arguments are tactical and they are fighting an adjacent battle.

kept

Would you be king?  Then make a small kingdom.  But make it here in the world, even as expressed fiction, and not internally.

next

The political situation is an improved reflection of, the electorate.  Nothing has happened that would have been avoided, or even been as good, if the people ruled directly.

oh, for a...

I return to reading Middlemarch, and feel the sort of despair that comes in the presence of beautiful greatness.  If Eliot is human, how can I be?  Or so runs the feeling.

say

The more intelligent you are - or more precisely, the more often right you actually are - the more aggressive you should be.  Do not hide your light under a bushel basket.

day

I would be far more intellegent, were it mine to give myself.  But would the world not be a happier, even better place if we were all less intellegent?

risk

I know my limits too well, because it is in my knowing them that they have their being.

pointing

Most rudeness is symbolic violence or exposure.  Or, most politeness is symbolic nonviolence and covering.

ask again

Having worked with a client to get him ready for a cross-examination, I can say: interrogation can be a beautiful thing, in itself, and wonderful for truth-seeking.

Hamilton

One thing I just realized: each institution (House, Senate, Executive) acted in the debt ceiling wrangle exactly as designed.

dew

Mortality is the genesis of youth.

yesterday

And the people will, as always, luxuriate in insulting their representatives, deplore what had to be done, and wallow in their sovereign laziness and stupidity.  I'd rather be governed by the worst twenty congressional representatives - freed from the constraints of the people - than be governed by the people.  Except for one, sufficient matter, that makes a democracy supporter of me, after all: our system suppresses domestic bloodshed with great success.