August 29, 2009

Romanitas.

“When we think of Alexander, the figure we’re thinking of is a Roman construct, tailored to Roman tastes and suited to Roman needs…”

The prose of this review of The History of Alexander by Quintus Curtius Rufus appears to have been accidentally dipped in mescaline.

It’s still a fantastic meditation on empire, emulation, ideology, and how the Romans’ civilisation-spanning inferiority complex may have totally screwed up the intellectual legacy the classical world left behind for Western culture.

The implications of which actually are mind-blowing, I guess.

August 28, 2009

Nouus Orbis.

The lovely Maira Kalman on discovery, citizenship, and migration in the story of American democracy.

One million people became citizens of the United States last year, compared to 660 000 in 2007; 2.4 million in total between 2006 and 2008.

I think that, buried in the immigration statistics compiled by the Department of Homeland Security, there must be enough individual stories of nightmares escaped and American dreams won (or lost) to keep a thousand Joseph O’Neills busy for the next thousand years.

Which puts this news in world-historical perspective.

August 24, 2009

Thamus and Theuth.

This is the first memex post. You can read about the memex’s purpose here.

In Phaedrus, King Thamus and the Egyptian god Theuth argued about the value of writing for memory preservation. Both King Thamus and, later on, Jacques Derrida said Theus’ invention inherently only allowed the transmission of the appearance of wisdom and memory, not their reality.

Which is a very good argument to bear in mind when you start blogging, I guess. But then, why would any king want his subjects to be able to write?

I hope you enjoy reading this memex.