#fred inglis

[henryhitchings]

In the spectacular society, the star has been appointed to perform our significant actions for us

Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity

[kunstmull]

Spleen

Spleen: melancholy with no apparent cause, characterised by a disgust with everything, in the work of Baudelaire.

But he later smoked hashish as a cure for ennui or accedie, the medieval sin of meaninglessness from which only the promise of travelling - towards the distant ocean, to the other side of the mountains - retrieved him, even though he hardly left Paris. His imagination was his prime refuge from ennui - the hard work and pure exhilaration of a good poem, escaping from self-loathing and the torment of contradictory feeling by catching and holding these awkward, private passions in a line.

-Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity

(It's funny. I read and read and read Baudelaire when I was a teenager, especially Le Fleurs du Mal, but the memory of it is pretty much gone. Perhaps I should revisit, because this is p much a GPOY of my life right now, except replace "stories" for "poems".)

[kunstmull]

Short History of the Feelings

The individual himself or herself is meanwhile increasingly in a hole. In this book, he or she scrutinises and revises the available states of feeling and not infrequently is at a loss to know what to feel. This gives birth to a familiar figure in our time which is the educated, intelligent person withdrawn from all social contact and commitment, frozen in a fearful condition of nonfeeling, locked into inaction. When the same condition repeats itself in a sensibility with fewer intellectual resources and in a person without even a job to provide a daily patterning of time, then the frozen sensibility may well break out into violent rages or uncontrolled hilarity precisely to force feeling of some kind into its veins.

-Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity

[musebaz-blog]

History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood

History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood This is the first biography of the last and greatest British idealist philosopher, R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), a man who both thought and lived at full pitch. Best known today for his philosophies of history and art, Collingwood was also a historian, archaeologist, sailor, artist, and musician. A figure of enormous energy and ambition, he took as his subject nothing less than the whole of human endeavor, and he lived in the same way, seeking to experience the complete range of human passion. In this vivid and swiftly paced narrative, Fred Inglis tells the dramatic story of a remarkable life, from Collingwood's happy Lakeland childhood to his successes at Oxford, his archaeological digs as a renowned authority on Roman Britain, his solo sailing adventures in the English Channel, his long struggle with illness, and his sometimes turbulent romantic life. In a manner unheard of today, Collingwood attempted to gather all aspects of human thought into a single theory of practical experience, and he wrote sweeping accounts of history, art, science, politics, metaphysics, and archaeology, as well as a highly regarded autobiography. Above all, he dedicated his life to arguing that history--not science--is the only source of moral and political wisdom and self-knowledge. Linking the intellectual and personal sides of Collingwood's life, and providing a rich history of his milieu, History Man also assesses Collingwood's influence on generations of scholars after his death and the renewed recognition of his importance and interest today.