A long blogging absence. Its strange how this desire for self-expression, or at anyrate for self-recording, waxes and wanes. Partly because it's not focussed I guess: it doesnt have an obvious point, in the way that writers diaries usually do for instance—they record usable material, even a weirdly inexpressive one like Evelyn Waugh's. And then I leave for London next Monday and won't be doing much blogging there I guess. Probably the real diary writer writes to find, which must also mean to invent, themselves too. I'd like to do that, but maybe I'm too much here already. Or there's not enough of me for it work like that.
But then the original idea of this was to record consumption, as a kind of corrective or penace for consuming. And I have bought an ipod this week (useful when travelling??), spending much of the last couple of days transferring music onto it...and a bunch of books at Strands...the last time I was in NYC I avoided it, and it's really not a shop I like, there are so many books there, and so many books no-one really wants, that literature itself seems to lose some of its value, but this time, with an afternoon to kill in the Village found myself there and none the less bought about three hundred dollars worth of books almostnone of which are necessary to anything I want to think or do, at least right now. Yet I was delighted to find a volume of Bishop Warburton's letters to his publishers and other literary figures...who's Bishop Warburton???...the mid eighteenth-century divine who dominated the establishment intellectual life of his time, an overbearing, pompous man, who sucked up to Alexander Pope, edited his work argubly against its true spirit, and a polemicist for the confessional state. As I argue in an academic essay, he helped produce sentimentalism or at least Sternean sentimentalism in reaction to him....he's important because he represents a way that modernity did not proceed....the other books more for collecting: and one time in this space I'd like to try to figure out

Went to the launch of Iain McCalman's book on Cagliostro at the Australian Ambassodor's very grand house at DC the other day, after an afternoon spent shopping in Dupont Circle. (Books, records including three of those amazing Proper/JSP box sets: but are ten cds worth of the Carter Family in the thirties too much of a good thing???) It was fun: I only met one other academic there, otherwise mainly Embassy staff and an assortment of the rich and connected. Had a brief conversation about Rupert Murdoch's brilliance with a Murdoch fan (who turned out to be the Australian's Washington correspondant, a bitter-sweet admiration) , and another more contentious conversation about the costs to New Zealand of its anti-US (or, rather, its less than totally enthusiastically US) foreign policy. This with a very smooth expat (he left NZ in the early seventies) who, so his card says, heads up an international investment firm.
In the world of the liberal-arts academy views like this have become impossible: our world is more or less defined against the hegemony of the market, and of the US's global power. Partly this division has to be structural: an effort by the weak and beleagured humanities to define a territory and a project for itself. But it's not only structural. If the contents of the humanities canon contain any kind of purposiveful ethical charge, it's an anti-populist one. And it stands for the autonomy and self-sufficiency of cultures. Or seems to. Didn't the humanities by and large support imperialism? And fit in easily with racism? As the conservatives like to remind us, there's a generational thing going here too: the humanities are now dominated by people who were young in the sixties and seventies, when youth culture had almost no connection to policy-makers (except in attempts to reform or resist them), and pretty much rejected the terms in which formal government and business proceeded. Liberal obsolence before our time.

At any rate it's refreshing to talk to people coming from somewhere else, and hear frank and innocent expressions of something like the conservative, establishment point of view. And why exactly are they wrong? I guess at the heart of at all, and past all questions of social justice and rights and diversity and so on, I'd say that they lack guts and imagination.