Skip to main content

Hello Old Blog

 I've had this thing for years and haven't done anything with it. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago when my cat meowed at me until I followed him into the kitchen early one morning. There on its back in the middle of the room was a dying cockroach, probably the victim of the misdirected hunting instincts of our feline: he has no rodents to chase and he is above killing mere insects, usually only injuring them before meowing until someone comes to finish the creature off. After I was spraying some anti-roach spray in the basement another dead one turned up. While sitting in my home office afterwards I saw my icon of St John of Kronstadt and incredulously thought  of the phrase "icons and cockroaches" and how it should be an attractive metaphor for Russian history of even life in general and not just  a  description of things  that happen to be in my home at any given time. That led to "Hey, didn't I start a blog a while back named something like that"... and now here I am. 

I think there was some intent to talk about Russian culture or books on the blog, and thus stealing Trotsky's phrase about pre-revolutionary Russia and repurposing it seemed appropriate. There was also a vague notion that the phrase reflected life being both horrible and beautiful, though I live in America now and life here is usually too mediocre and beige to rise up to either beauty or horror the way it occasionally should. I think that's a paraphrase of something Leontiev said. There, we're back to Russian culture and literature. Maybe I'll make it a blog about books.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It Will be Fun and Terrifying

  I pretend to be obsessed with Russian history and social movements, but this volume has been sitting on my shelf for the past year and I still haven't gotten through all of it. When I first started reading about 90's Russia, National Bolshevism, and nationalist movements in general this was exactly the sort of book I wished existed and now it does. Some of Adam Curtis' journalism touches on some of the themes here as well, which for me boil down to: Russian politics are so much more interesting than ours. Not to live through ( though from where I live we seem to be inching our way towards a softer version of 90's Russia which might not be totally fair since I live in Buffalo) but as a political environment to study. For all of our fringe political thinkers and movements, nothing outside of the competition between the boring center right and the boring center left has any depth. We don't have intellectuals forming post-modern extremist movements based on self consc...

a double book review

Disenchanged Wanderer: The Apocalyptic Vision of Konstantin Leontiev.  by Glen Cronin. Published by Cornell Press. High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism.  by David Wills. Published by Beatdom Books. Adventures in Overthinking: Reactionary Russians and the Fall of Gonzo    I think you're supposed to read new books occasionally but as some of the poorly constructed paragraphs in the entries below imply, I don't do that very often. I've read two newish books recently, one the Leontiev biography I was losing my mind over a few months back and the second one a biography/literary analysis of Hunter S. Thompson. The latter joins a long list of books that have tackled Thompson but this is the first one I've read in a while that actually seemed necessary for people who like his books and take them seriously. The world doesn't need the 20th memoir by someone who hung out in Thompson's kitchen and thinks they're some kind of insider because they share...

BOOKS BOOKS BOOKS

 I recently spent a few days at one of those Getaway campground cabins that sit on top of trailers and had one of those awful travel moments where I didn't know what to read. I finished Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami  on my Kindle faster than I expected and wasn't really in the mood for the physical books I brought as back ups:  Simulacra and Simulation  and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above 1928-1941.  The latter I read years ago and still think of as a classic and I will certainly read again at some point, but it was not the thing to read while trying to distract myself from the types of thoughts that usually creep in around the evening time.  I bought Baudrillard's book thinking it might be useful to read something different from what I normally have my nose buried in - but French post-structuralism wasn't the ticket to distraction either. His ideas aren't really difficult to understand and there's some clever lines of thought ...