#c.p. snow
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A wagon creaked slowly, with the ungreased grating of dry wood on dry wood, and began to move about among the German houses to my left. My hair stiffened. The wagon stopped and then rolled a few more feet and stopped again. It appeared to be moving slowly across the front, near the platoon C.P.
I clenched my rifle and leaned back against the door sill, wondering what had come over the Germans and why they had come to life. A flare popped over a D Company outpost in a small factory five hundred yards down the creek. Deep in town, a German machine gun clashed with an American 50-caliber. A 105 shell whispered overhead and landed far behind the barracks square. The wagon began to move again, jolting and creaking and clattering among the cobblestone streets.
It must be the ghost that's followed us through Europe, I thought with a shiver, for the sound did not seem wholly real-who would have the nerve to walk a horse-drawn wagon along the front in a city under such heavy artillery fire?
The rumors and stories came back to me full force. I had heard Captain Nixon of Battalion S-2 discuss this wagon once. He claimed that it had first appeared outside Carentan, when the 2nd Battalion had one hedgerow and the S.S. the next. Every night they heard a wooden wagon moving about behind the German lines. They even heard the horse's neighing and clopping and the country jingle of his harness. "We put mortars and artillery on it," the captain had said, "but that damned thing just kept going."
Some of the men used to speculate about it. They thought that it was the ghost of a supply cart that had gotten a direct hit and that the driver was homesick for his old outfit. So every night he'd come back and visit his buddies on the line.
The 3rd Battalion reported hearing the same wagon in Holland, near Opheusden, where they had a terrible battle and many men were killed. British tankers who were with them heard it too. They said it was a curse on the Regiment, brought on by some of the things that were done to prisoners in Normandy, where viciousness reached its peak.
And when I was in the 7th Army's forward battalion replacement depot, an S-2 man from Regiment told me that the wagon had followed them to Bastogne. They heard it crunching in the snow, he claimed, but they never saw it or hit it.
Well, hell, there's nothing I can do about it. Thank God I won't make the patrol.
—Parachute Infantry by David Webster
#david webster#lewis nixon#band of brothers#wasn’t expecting a ghost story#imagining Nix told Dick about the ghost wagon
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"The ideology of Silicon Valley is clear: move fast and break things, scale at all costs, pump and dump. The lingering earth-flavored utopianism of the California Ideology softened the edge, and American two-party politics ensured at least a facade of responsibility, but both have largely fallen away over the past year.
I can point to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, tech company layoffs, general societal Jokerfication post-Covid and the takeoff of generative AI as proximate causes, but the root cause is an unsustainable concentration of power among frustrated young men; more specifically, among engineers.1
C.P. Snow famously described the cleavage between The Two Cultures in Western society, between science and the humanities. In 1959, Snow observed the social supremacy of the humanities—his argument was that they needed to learn to understand the other culture, for the benefit of society.
But now the engineers are in charge. Universities are STEM departments and professional schools, with humanities a luxury curiosity. Television and now social media has devastated literary culture. We no longer believe in the rule of law or in liberalism more broadly.
So now they’re openly talking about Accelerationism, “effective accelerationism,” even, leaping into the gaping hole in vibe space left by the implosion of FTX/Effective Altruism. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has been pushing this for many months, and yesterday released
“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”
The content is far too stupid to engage with; it takes 10x the effort to refute bullshit than to produce it. Instead, we should think about this document as post-textual. The medium is natural language, but what it encodes is not linear, conceptual reason but vibes. The concluding list of thinkers and fictional characters is simply a clout bomb.
This is a collection of tweets: pure discourse, responding to The Discourse that came before it. In contrast to the idea of individual agency at the heart of liberalism, there is no agency here: the writing is driven entirely by discourse and vibes. It is all implied by what came before it. None of means anything."
[...]
"But Andreessen is more interested in the right hand of cybernetics—he specifically and repeatedly endorses the philosophy of Nick Land, the most famous proponent of Accelerationism. I can’t believe it’s come to this.
Thiel famously said that capitalism and democracy are incompatible, and chose the former.
Land’s Accelerationism says that (techno)capitalism and humanity are incompatible, and yet he still chose the former.3
So make no mistake. Accelerationism is terrorism.4 It violates what Ortega y Gasset calls “man’s most fundamental right...the right to continuity.” Technological accelerationism aims to eliminate the human and instantiate the world of the inhuman functionary. The current rate of change is already incompatible with human dignity, and they want to speed it up. From the manifesto:
We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns.
For people who valorize “The Scientific Method,” they don’t seem to understand what a “Law” is. If this is a Law of Nature, it’s odd that humans have to “fulfill” it. If it’s a human Law, who passed it? Can we overturn it?"
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24 Reads in 24
Thanks @missgeevious for tagging me.
24 books I want to read in 2024:
This Sweet Magic by Kit Olmstead aka @mostlyinthemorning, who is publishing her first book!
Lyri by Lily Mayne (if this doesn't come out this year I may die)
Free From Falling by E.L. Massey (probably the only person who can make me go back to MF)
Justice by Lark Taylor
Impromptu Match by Lily Mayne
Rogue by Onley James
To Catch a Firefly by Emmy Sanders
Sons of Fallen series by Jaclyn Osborn (yes I am cheating)
All for the Game series by Nora Sakavic
Every Breath After by Jessie Walker
Teach Me by Neve Wilder
Dead Serious 5: Madame Vivienne by Vawn Cassidy
Eternally Blessed by Garrett Leigh
My Skin Belongs to You by Leta Blake
We Burn Beautiful by Lance Lansdale
The Only Light Left Burning by Erik Brown
Vitale Brothers series by Brea Alepou & Skyler Snow
The Bastard and the Heir by Eden Finley & Saxon James
Bad Wrong Things by C.P. Harris
Promises of Forever by Nicky James
Heartstopper Volume 5 by Alice Oseman
Danger Zone series by Ella Frank & Brooke Blaine
Alabaster Penitentiary series by Nyla K.
Eight Seconds to Ride by Ashley James
Tagging all the readers out there!😘
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Campus Novel Recommendation.
The Masters (C.P. Snow, 1951)
It is set in an unnamed Cambridge university in January 1937, against the backdrop of the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Paul Jago, the head tutor, informs the young law professor Lewis Eliot, the first-person and very reliable narrator, that the master, Vernon Royce, has an inoperable cancer. The main plot of the novel is the internal campaign and election of a new teacher by the thirteen schoolmates, and the contest between Jago and the biologist Thomas Crawford for the post.
PS: It has also elements of Trinity College.
#dark academia#light academia#rec#campus novel#lit#literature#edit#moodboard#aes#aesthetic#cambridge#oxford#30s
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Michael Bryant as Walter Luke in 'The New Men.' Shown in 1966 it was an adaptation of the novel by C.P. Snow and broadcast as part of the ITV Play of the Week series.
#michael bryant#lyndon brook#marius goring#the new men#itv play of the week#cp snow#troy kennedy martin#john jacobs
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i got home today, and it surprised me how incandescently happy it made me - my dad, waiting at the airport with chocolate eggs, with a blanket in the car and gas station hot tea; my mum, with lunch all ready, waiting by the gate in the rain and wearing her face-splitting smile she blames for her duck-feet wrinkles. my sister taking out all her new drawings and games and clothes and various paraphernalia "see? alex see? see, see, see?".
emotional bids everywhere - to which i respond, which i reflect in my own behavior. show photos, trade gossip, smack talk professors, talk about work, show progress - the attentiveness i missed so, which makes me buzz with energy and feel more alive than ever. after months of people i've been expecting validation from responding with disinterested "uhuhs" to my bids for connection, to have loved ones truly listening to me. willing to see me.
eliza waking me up at 2 am, simply saying "i want to talk". holding hands over the blanket. white wine and falling snow on the balcony in berlin. december 3rd - it's heather day. we dug through our luggage and exchanged sweaters - need to buy myself a new rubgy one from cos.
i love people loving me - i don't know if that's selfish. sometimes i feel like my heart might split from how much i love them. these days, more often than not, i just sat on the edge of my bed and allowed myself to feel all this love - mum, nonna, sara, dad, nonno, maia, tataia, grandmama, eliza, dani, teddy, rebeca, B, C, E, A - brought me to tears every single time. i treasure these connections so much, and i know they'll be the death of me - but for now, they're the life of me.
C.P. said i'm the kind of person who could learn to love anyone - even if just in a pitying way; said i'm too gullible to be narcissistic, and that had been weighing on me for a bit. he makes me cry every single session, seems to think i have all this raw potential and inherent goodness i don't necessarily see in myself - i'm rotten, i tell him, and he just laughs. "you would take on the pain of anyone you love". wouldn't we all? all this time, i thought i had a fetish for fixing people - he said "more like, a fetish for breaking with them". i enjoy myself when i reemerge victorious, i'm prideful of rebuilding myself every single time - "we don't have to demolish, alexandra - look how much of a skyscraper you are". all this wanting to meet people on their level is some mother theresa bullshit.
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History
November 5th - Remembered as Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, for the anniversary of the failed "Gunpowder Plot" to blow up the Houses of Parliament and King James I in 1605.
November 5, 1733 - The first issue of the New York Weekly Journal was published by John Peter Zenger, a colonial American printer and journalist. A year later, he was arrested on charges of libeling New York's royal governor.
November 5, 1911 - Aviator C.P. Snow completed the first transcontinental flight across America, landing at Pasadena, California. He had taken off from Sheepshead Bay, New York, on September 17th and flew a distance of 3,417 miles.
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Alredered Remembers Baron Charles Percy Snow, British novelist and scientist, on his birthday.
“The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it.”
― C.P. Snow
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Birthdays 10.15
Beer Birthdays
Doug Odell (1952)
Julie Nickels (1959)
Five Favorite Birthdays
Michel Foucault; philosopher, historian (1926)
Friedrich Nietzsche; German philosopher (1844)
Jim Palmer; Baltimore Orioles P (1945)
James Tissot; French artist (1836)
P.G. Wodehouse; English writer (1881)
Famous Birthdays
Italo Calvino; Italian writer (1923)
Richard Carpenter; pop singer (1946)
Chris De Burgh; rock singer (1948)
Sarah Ferguson; British royalty (1959)
John Kenneth Galbraith; economist (1908)
Samuel Adams Holyoke; composer (1762)
Lee Iacocca; businessman, Pinto-maker & apologist (1924)
Helen Hunt Jackson; writer (1830)
Tito Jackson; pop singer (1953)
Emerill Lagasse; chef (1959)
Linda Lavin; actor (1937)
Mervyn LeRoy; film director (1900)
Penny Marshall; actor, film director (1942)
Warren Miller; sports film director (1924)
Stacy Peralta; skateboarder, film director (1957)
Jean Peters; actor (1926)
Mario Puzo; writer (1921)
Tanya Roberts; actor (1955)
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; historian (1917)
Bruno Senna; Braziliam race car driver (1983)
C.P. Snow; English writer, physicist (1905)
John L. Sullivan; boxer (1858)
Virgil; Roman writer (70 C.E.)
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"..the cloak...of class shame..." #cpsnow #strangersandbrothers #1940club
With the final book I’ve read for our #1940Club, I’m very happy that I’ve managed to succeed with a plan which has been lurking in the back of my mind for quite some time! If you read my January post, you’ll have seen me pondering on 2023 reading and one idea I had was that I would like to finally embark on C.P. Snow’s “Strangers and Brothers” sequence, which I’ve had sitting on the TBR for…
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Flawed
Dear Caroline:
Ironies aside, I feel you hit the nail on the head with your short answer to this anonymous writing on the wall. As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been exploring quite a bit of moral philosophy lately. One thing that gets Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics together is their lack of an upper bound, which is something that I felt as unreasonable and blackmaily in the first part of Singer's book, and which creates an impossible standard from the point of view of which you will always be a 'defective altruist'. Maximizing utility ('the greatest good for the greatest number') or personal ethical worthiness/saintliness both follow a maximalist and implicitly collectivist view on ethics (as a Vulcan would say, 'The good of the many...') which I partially agree with but feel would be better balanced with a large chunk of deontology. Fixed rules might seem both arbitrary and lacking an unquestionable foundation, but at the very least, they put some fences to protect the individual's moral uniqueness and their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (I would add 'and to overall intellectual and personal flourishing' as it might otherwise not be included by some under the happiness heading), which feels also like what morality should be about.
It is true that at the end of the book, Singer backs down quite a lot (in a way that feels like a sales representative or a good cop/bad cop routine) and says that he will let us off the hook for a paltry 5% of our earnings, but I still feel uneasy by the chasm that the never-ending demands of personal sacrifice seem to open before our feet with this framework. I understand though that there's a space here for 'ethical cultivation' and improving yourself as a person, becoming more generous, disinterested, a 'modern saint' in a formulation from one of your borrowed posts, and that is also good.
While reflecting on this, C.P. Snow's classic on the Two Cultures came to mind. I was thinking that the Humanistic tradition seems more keen on the individual's self worth and cultivation, and of him/her as an end in itself, whereas the Scientific tradition is much more outward and society oriented, engineering practical improvements for the benefit of mankind. Arguably, pure mathematics would be close to the other side of the fence, which probably explains a lot of the attraction it inspires in my dark, patrician, G.H. Hardy-esque disdain for the useful. And even after my first steps in EA, I think I will have difficulty ever shrugging from my shoulders the mantle of 'defective altruist'.
Quote:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
William Shakespeare
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Literary history that happened on 15 October
#october 15#literary history#literary#history#literature#on this date#virgil#edward gibbon#neitzsche#p.g. wodehouse#stephen crane#joseph conrad#c.p. snow#john kenneth galbraith#mario puzo#busy day in lit history
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When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
C.P. Snow, Public Affairs, 1971
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Chris Wicking has contrasted two journalists turned writer-producer-director: Val Guest and Samuel Fuller. Fuller's work asserts an explosive American ambivalence between every individual's right to something like amorality (even madness), and the claims on him of a decency which is, perilously, expressed only as patriotism. Fuller, more challenging than Guest, asserts both claims at their most intense, whereas Guest soft pedals the claims of, and loses the variety of nuance within, the individual. Nor - disappointingly, for a journalist - does he show much of the seaminess, slovenliness and irresponsibility existing within and around the establishment and the 'decent' people, as everywhere else. Within its limits, however, 80,000 Suspects has a moral dignity and social sense very close to the documentary ethos and no less interesting. On its non-U levels, his calm, quiet pace and tone parallel C.P. Snow's. The ethos is screwed to its grimmest in Charles Saunders's The Golden Link (1954). A senior police officer (Andre Morell), a tired functionary, is so completely part of the police machine that when the evidence persuades him that his own daughter is guilty of murder, he imperturbably continues procuring her conviction.
Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England
#raymond durgnat#a mirror for england: british movies from austerity to affluence#chris wicking#val guest#samuel fuller#c.p. snow#charles saunders
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A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
The Two Cultures - C.P. Snow
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Michael Bryant as Walter Luke in 'The New Men.' Shown in 1966 it was an adaptation of the novel by C.P. Snow and broadcast as part of the ITV Play of the Week series.
#michael bryant#lyndon brook#charles kay#marius goring#the new men#cp snow#itv play of the week#troy kennedy martin#john jacobs
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