Ummagumma

[ Read my Dostoevsky stuff. ] I couldn’t let this tour of the novel pass without a bit of history about it. This is mostly from Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time  but some other sources were consulted too. On June 8, 1880, Fyodor Dostoevsky stood before a crowd in Moscow and delivered the most celebrated speech of his life. The occasion was the unveiling of a monument to Alexander Pushkin, organized by the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature. The leading literary figures of Russia were present. The famous writer Ivan Turgenev spoke. Then Dostoevsky spoke. Turgenev's remarks were more formal for the occasion. His words chosen carefully and cosmopolitan. Pushkin was great, he argued, but regional — not quite Shakespeare, not quite Goethe. It was a defensible reading. The audience applauded politely. Then Dostoevsky got up. He argued that Pushkin embodied something no other nation's literature had produced: vsemirnost — universal responsiveness. The capacit...

Time to walk across the room to the other side. Who's in charge in Iran? Are we about to get a coup. Uh, I don't think so.  The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps ( IRGC ) have a tight lid on dissent. The Iranian military is in charge in Iran. I've been watching the IRGC operate for two months now and I haven't given them the serious treatment they've earned. The decapitation strikes. The new Supreme Leader mostly absent. The Strait closed. I tracked all of it from the outside but what is the view from inside Tehran right now. It's stranger than I assumed. Start with what happened to Iran on day one. Epic Fury killed or incapacitated most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic in a matter of hours. The precision was extraordinary. Khamenei — the new one, Mojtaba , elevated only recently — went dark almost immediately. Possibly injured. Possibly moved. Certainly absent from any public function. In forty-five years of the Islamic Republic, nothing like ...

Almost all of my video time is devoted to YouTube. I sponsor some content creators and I follow a lot on that platform. I pay a monthly fee for NO ADs. Everything is content now. One of the types of content I enjoy are first-reaction videos to songs I grew up loving. Watching them experience what I once experienced for the first time. It always puts a smile on my face. I was that way once. I especially enjoy compilation first-reactions, where 10-12 reactors have separately listened to a piece of music and someone edited their reactions all together as a highlight reel of listening to the song. These are usually great fun. Little wonder that the YouTube algorithm fed me the compilation for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s epic masterpiece “ Free Bird .” “Free Bird” (or “Freebird”) is an anthem from my early college years. I became aware of it in high school but it became an indelible part of my life during my first quarter in college. My roommate was into Lynyrd Skynyrd the way I was into Eag...

Six weeks of war. One day of talks. Neither side planned for more. It makes no sense to me. There was no deadline forcing a single session. The ceasefire had time on it. They could have planned a week of talks, staffed them properly, worked through the technical layers the way you actually have to. The 2015 nuclear deal took years. Instead they flew into Islamabad, talked for twenty-one consecutive hours like exhaustion produces wisdom, and left without a deal. Are the hotels that bad in Pakistan? Twenty-one hours is not a negotiation. It's a performance. Iran is playing its second hand after being dealt shitty cards to begin with. Iran's foreign ministry said so plainly afterward: no one should have expected to reach an agreement in a single session. Vance boarded Air Force Two, flashed a thumbs up at the cameras, and flew home. Look at the delegations. Iran sent seventy officials and experts — diplomatic, military, economic. The United States sent Vance, Witkoff, and Kus...

Something happened to you already. Before you noticed. Before anyone else noticed. Sovereignty — the old idea of a bounded, private self directing its own life from the inside out — is gone. Not eroding. Not under threat. Gone. It was gradually converted, during your lifetime while you were busy enjoying the convenience of buying what you want when you want it. Nobody directed this. There was no master plan. The Complex — the vast interlocking system of easy consumption and entertainment — doesn't have intentions any more than an asteroid does. It just does what it does. And what it does, systematically and without malice, is make you legible. Observable. Modelable. A pattern of behavior that can be targeted and predicted and nudged and engaged. It’s a world of Likes. Like. Like. Like. The history of lost privacy is the history of lost sovereignty. Not because privacy and sovereignty are the same thing — personal sovereignty was always larger than that — but because privacy was...

[ Read all my Dostoevsky stuff. ] Ivan's intellectual system rests on two propositions that are not separable. The first: without God, without immortality, there is no virtue — moral obligation requires a metaphysical foundation that does not exist. The second: therefore, everything is permitted. These are not nihilistic positions in the vulgar sense. Ivan does not celebrate them. He states them as logical conclusions he cannot escape. He is, in this sense, the most rigorous thinker in the novel. The Grand Inquisitor is the fullest expression of this system. It is a magnificent performance — controlled, relentless, a challenge Dostoevsky himself feared he could not answer. The Inquisitor tells Christ: your gift of freedom is too heavy; we have corrected your work. Christ says nothing. He kisses the old man. Alyosha, Dostoevsky's counterweight, responds not with argument but with his own kiss. Ivan recognizes it immediately as plagiarism from his own poem. Dostoevsky does not de...