A Critic's Critic

Edmund Wilson.

Ramazan Kareem!

In the School of Ramazan, the Murshid is suffering, the Murid a chrysalis, waiting to be born.

Iraq

Land Of Poetry.

As Ramazan Approaches

Think on this:

"Is it decisive after all that we arrive at that view of God, world, and reconciliation which makes us feel most comfortable? Rather, is not the result of his inquiries something wholly indifferent to the true inquirer? No, only truth--even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly. Still one last question: if we had believed from childhood that all salvation issued from someone other than Jesus--say, from Mohammad--is it not certain that we should have experienced the same blessings? ... Faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire ..."

~F. Nietzsche, Letter to his Sister (1865), tr. W. Kaufmann.

Dialectical (Not Vulgar Or Mechanical) Materialism

So long as we are bound to the earth, we must acknowledge the material base that supplies the theater of all meaningful and effective action on this planet. But consciousness takes on a life of its own and its effects upon the material base are not negligible. That is the underlying premise of Dialectical Materialism--our debt to Hegel.

The Frankfurt School

A history.

Lenin Studies

Read more here.

Marshall Berman

Modernism In The Streets.

The Radical Poet

Nazim Hikmet.

The Radical Thinker

For Humanism

Now.

Absent Unflinching Intellectual Honesty, We Are Lost...

For Benjamin, history was not...just a sequence of events without sense. Rather, narrative sense had been imposed on those events--that was what made them history. But imposing meaning was hardly an innocent act. History was written by the victors and its triumphalist narrative had no place for losers. To tear events out of that history as Benjamin did and set them in other temporal contexts--or what he would call constellations--was both a revolutionary Marxist act and also a Jewish one: the former because it sought to expose the hidden delusions and exploitative nature of capitalism; the latter because it was inflected with Judaic rituals of mourning and redemption.

~ Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 19.

Istanbul

City of the world's desire.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

The Great Library Of Alexandria

Mostafa El-Abbadi.

The Literature Of Resistance

Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh.

Historical Materialism

Walter Benjamin.