(@readliberties) — Bluesky Profile

2 weeks ago

Monster of the Enlightenment Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s...

" Whether del Toro intended it or not, more than anything the monster seems to imitate the stunted philosophical musing of Elon Musk." libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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2 weeks ago

David Foster Wallace and Democracy David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Desp...

"Fascism, especially if coupled with the methods of entertainment, offers the relief of passion so ferocious it blinds and hypnotizes supporters into waging war on their own society." libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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2 weeks ago

Klaus Mann, Anti-Fascist Enfant Terrible Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

Klaus Mann, Anti-Fascist Enfant Terrible
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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2 weeks ago

Klaus Mann, Anti-Fascist Enfant Terrible Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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2 weeks ago

Klaus Mann, Anti-Fascist Enfant Terrible Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

About 'Mephisto'

'"..whenever he’s onstage, he is deemed a lightweight and an artistic fraud. In the words of the theater’s director, he is “basically a trivial creature. Everything about him is phony, from his literary taste to his so-called Communism.”

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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2 weeks ago

If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar of capitalism, and the restaholics, whose highest ideal is slacking off and who seethe with resentment at those ruining the curve. Or so the two groups understand one another. Do we work in order to rest, or do we rest in order to work? Neither answer is very appealing. Working in order to rest sounds like a paraphrase of Freud’s death drive: as though, in an ideal world, we would just be sitting quietly, motionlessly, imitating corpses. Resting in order to work suggests the equally depressing thesis that the goal of a human life is to become a well-oiled cog in some kind of machine, a tool for the use of the leviathan called society. We need to work, because survival demands it, and we need to rest, because work is tiring, but are those two possibilities really exhaustive? Isn’t there a third state — one that we don’t need but freely choose? When I teach book ten of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I explain to the students that if they want to understand Aristotle’s concept of leisure — scholē — they need only look in the mirror. As students, they are leading scholastic lives, which is to say, lives of leisure. They balk at this: it might be true that the Greek word scholē is the source of the English “school,” but they cannot see how a lifestyle centered around grades and exams and being forced to read chapter after chapter of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics could count as leisurely. Like the workaholics and the restaholics, my students fail to leave room for a third possibility: when they deny that school is leisurely what they really mean to deny is that school is restful. And they are right about that, even on a capacious understanding of rest, one which extends well beyond sleep to include everything they classify under “self-care” — exercise, meditation, “me-time,” therapy, unplugging — as well as humor, games, trivial amusements or hobbies, vacations, and all those activities whose attraction lies in being “fun.” School is not like any of those things; it might sometimes happen to be calming or relaxing or amusing, but it is not that way essentially. But school is also not like work, not even if we have a capacious understanding of “work,” inclusive of training for work. We forget almost everything we learn in school, and even if we didn’t forget it, little of it would be useful to us in our jobs. Some people claim that school trains you in “analytical skills” or “critical thinking”; others say it instills the obedience and the conformity and the submission necessary for most modern jobs. If school does those things, it does them behind the scenes, while you are busy learning not how to be submissive or critical but how to understand calculus or economics or the causes of World War I. Just as playing video games would not be work even if it turned out that (unbeknownst to the players), it trained someone to have fighter pilot reflexes, school is not work even if you do end up with some abilities that are relevant for work. Aristotle is not stymied by our chicken-egg problem. Faced with the work-rest cycle, he sees a clear teleological winner: fun and relaxation are all for the sake of returning to work, and the reverse is simply not the case. Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity. Aristotle chalks up our affinity for relaxation to the lamentable fact that mortal beings are incapable of continuous activity: we need to take breaks from doing what matters to us. A person who worked in order to relax would be getting the proper order of things backwards, like a person who cooks dinner in order to go grocery shopping again. We shop in order to cook, and not vice versa. Likewise, if we see a person working, then relaxing, then working, and so on, the charitable interpretation, says Aristotle, is to assume that she is relaxing in order to get back to work. Relaxing activities may, at times, feel more enjoyable than the work they relieve us from; nonetheless, proclaims Aristotle “no one would live for the sake of trivial amusements.” The point of life can’t lie in the breaks we take from it. But now consider work — and I am using the word broadly, as a catchall to describe both what happens in the office and also all the various forms of biological or social necessity that show up in our lives as problems needing to be solved. Getting young kids dressed in snow gear, deciding which chores to do in what order, maintaining a friendly face at a social gathering: those can all be forms of work. Work is activity that manages constraints and tradeoffs to pursue goals of social value — which means the story can’t end there. The question remains: what are we working for? The answer cannot be more work, because that simply postpones the question, much less rest, which is done for the sake of work. There must be a human activity that is done for its own sake, and this activity has got to serve as the teleological lynchpin of the whole system. Aristotle calls it “leisure,” or scholē. What is leisure? The phrase “leisure time” is familiar enough, as is ### Subscribe Now #### Start a Digital Subscription Now Only $5 a month for full access to the _Liberties'_ digital archive and all future issues online. Subscribe Now #### Subscribe to Print & Digital Get a discount with an annual print subscription and you'll receive four beautiful issues of _Liberties_ , a free archival issue, and full digital access. Subscribe Now #### Register for a Free Sample Just enter your email to read one essay per month and receive our weekly newsletter. Register Now

https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/insearch-of-the-leisure-class/ (1/4)

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2 weeks ago

Enhance your #snowday by reading my essay on Klaus Mann's delicious antifascist novel Mephisto, a savage takedown of elite complicity that has no relevance whatsoever to contemporary America
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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2 weeks ago

Klaus Mann, Anti-Fascist Enfant Terrible Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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2 weeks ago

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3 weeks ago

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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3 weeks ago

Europe’s New Court Intellectual The name Giuliano Da Empoli might not mean much to American readers, but in Europe the Swiss-Italian writer has established himself as one of the continent’s most fêted political and intellectual comm...

For @readliberties.bsky.social I wrote about the favorite writer of Europe's political elites:

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Monster of the Enlightenment Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Gloire Days - Liberties Though democracy is ostensibly the opposite of monarchy, the mass culture that is American democracy has betrayed in every age a deep atavistic yearning for royalty. From the days of “King” Andrew Jac...

James Wolcott, superstar. Read these two recent pieces (if you can get past the paywall) to see what I mean. Where is this guy's Pulitzer for Criticism anyway?

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

libertiesjournal.com/articles/glo...

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1 month ago

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

Tell the truth Putin won't.
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Aliens Among Us “Our most sincere film can seem phony.” When François Truffaut wrote that in 1975 he could have been describing Hollywood’s long and largely sorry history of prestige pictures that, at least in the mi...

I was hooked by the phrase, "wild overpraise given to One Battle After Another, a puffed-up Spy vs. Spy strip," but I'm glad I stuck around for the rest.
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Monster Of The Enlightenment Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s...

A bracing reading of #Frankenstein that asks whether human beings can be trusted with what they create 🤖

— Elena Kagan, Liberties @readliberties.bsky.social

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

#booksky #movies #AI

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1 month ago

The Besieged 1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the ...

This is a phenomenal read.

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

The Besieged 1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the ...

“Hundreds of us had gathered there to share in her distress, and so none of us was alone...

'When the black cloud comes, if one flame flickers / We will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers'...

I am still screaming with them. So are you."

❤️‍🔥 #Grateful

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Secretaries of the Invisible - Liberties “I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing.” Czesław Miłosz begins one of his poems with this evocative declaration of artistic vocation. In this spare statement, the poet abandons any pret...

Who serves best doesn't always understand.

— Czesław Milosz

libertiesjournal.com/articles/sec... #booksky #writingcommunity

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1 month ago

The Besieged 1. In the late autumn of 1914, the German army waged all-out war against the small Flemish town of Diksmuide. Having failed to capture Paris before the arrival of British troops on the continent, the ...

Last year I set out to review Joseph Leo Koerner's Art in a State of Siege for @readliberties.bsky.social. That morphed into a study of how the First World War changed artistic expression, fascist art anxiety, and one year of bootlicking backlash in the USA: libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic... Good to keep in mind when observing our own leaders too.

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1 month ago

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

2 2 0 0

1 month ago

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

Consider how these fourteen characteristics align with Donny and his party—and that since the 1960s at least, the GOP have pushing same.
The GOP is a fascist party has been for a long time.
That the national Democrats are don’t fight this…
libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

Hidden in the Bourgeois - Liberties The hero of The Magic Mountain — the perfectly ordinary, blond, blue-eyed Hans Castorp — is the typological bourgeois male. I spent seven years writing a book about the novel of which he serves as pr...

At Liberties, the wonderfully eloquent Morten Høi Jensen wrestles again with the enigma of Thomas Mann, whose outward ordinariness allowed him to, as Mann perhaps flatteringly put it, "hide in the bourgeois realm without actually becoming bourgeois.” libertiesjournal.com/articles/hid...

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2 months ago

Eternal Fascism: Contemporary Russia in Fourteen Characteristics In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

"... the ratio of words written by Kafka to words written about Kafka is now estimated to be about 1:10,000,000. A symbolic punishment for a man who himself claimed to be “made of literature.” 🪳Kafka Inc., Jared Marcel Pollen. libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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1 month ago

In the mail, mentally-enriching new issue of @readliberties.bsky.social , featuring my meditation on The Poet as Seer: Miłosz and Merton 👁️

libertiesjournal.com

#LibertiesJournal #Miłosz #Merton #PoetryAsWitness #LiteraryCulture #SpiritualWriting

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2 months ago

Kafka Inc. Dr. Franz Kafka, as he is officially listed, is buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery, about a mile down the road from where I live in the neighbourhood of Žižkov. The greater Olšany Cemetery, which ...

Kafkology, Kundera contends, “produces and sustains its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka.”

libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

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