Two adjectives to desciribe contemporary democratic state capitalism

irresistible; insupportable

Zillow

On first playing with an iphone. Utterly exhilarating, the way that playing with my first Macintosh was around 1984 I think, or the first time I opened a web browser—Mosaic—in 1993. In each case, the first moments of fiddling about showed that important aspects of life were going to change radically and forever and for the better. The world had instantly a new size and scope (smaller and bigger); whole orders of chores had disappeared.
With the iphone, amazing as the device immediately is, it's not quite as sudden as that: it's possibilities become apparent more slowly. Take Zillow, one of its apps. It shows you on a map what real estate is for sale whereever you are as well as the value of every house on any road you're travelling through (or anywhere else come to that). It turns space into a series of dollar signs.
When you click on a dollar amount, an address and photos of a house appear: interiors and external views. So it's a medium for fantasies. It becomes easy, irresistable, to wonder, What if I were to buy this? What if I were to live here? A map dotted with dollar amounts, especially if not formidable ones, opens the door to a new life. Like novels might.

Critique of satisfaction

Hulme's concept of a "critique of satsifaction", which is related to the religious notion of the "vanity of desire". (See Collected Works, 210-11). This is not what I mean by living apart.

Secularism and mountaineering

Were the 19thc and early 20thc English mountaineers often programmatic humanists, climbing for secular spiritual reasons? I am thinking of Leslie Stephen and I.A. Richards. If so, do traces of this link linger? Petrarch, the great Renaissance humanist, is often thought of as the first modern (i.e. aesthetic) alpinist. Shelley's Mont Blanc is clearly another important moment in the connection between anti-religion and climbing. There are probably secondary sources on this which I'd be interested in knowing (googling doesn't reveal anything): if not there's an excellent article for someone.

After Lukács

Have been reading Karl Mannheim's Habilitationsschrift on Conservatism,one of the founding document of the sociology of knowledge. It was written under the spell of Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and is a really remarkable book, it deserves to be better known. Basically it attempts to connect different ways of thinking and experience to particular social groups and to understand the transformations and purposes of these ways of thinking and experience in relation to a Weberian/Marxian understanding of capitalist, rationalist modernity. Methodologically, it reminds me a great deal of another book written from a Lukácian perspective, Lucien Goldmann's book on Pascal, The Hidden God, which also takes the social position of particular groups (whether estates or classes or professional formations) as determinative of their mode of thinking and feeling (their ethical dispositions). Goldmann is a more sensitive analyst of actual modes of thinking than Mannheim, but he doesn't use an equivalent of Mannheim's broad stroke account of modernisation. A great deal of the Frankfurt school is already in Mannheim. I haven't read his most famous book Ideology and Utopia but apparently its English translation is a travesty because Mannheim acceeded too broadly to the requirements of the coldwar social sciences for empiricism.