I really need a week’s break, at this point. Some things just aren’t quite working out for me.

I’m trying to push my way through The New Wittgenstein a collection edited a few decades ago by Alice Crary and Rupert Read. It’s an interesting volume, with some interesting essays, particularly in the first half of the book. But it’s very difficult to focus on at the moment. I also think that it was perhaps unwise of the editors to include an essay by P. M. S. Hacker that seems to completely destroy their claim to textual fidelity. (But that’s a problem with Wittgenstein and Marx scholarship. As interesting as the exegetical work can be, claims to usefulness are rarely well-founded on textual fidelity. Marx and Wittgenstein are both worth struggling with and through, but calls to return to the ‘real’ text are frankly silly.)

I also read Edmund White’s Our Young Man and mostly enjoyed it. It’s quite funny at points.

I’ve also made my way through Robert Manne’s On Borrowed Time, a collection of essays from around 2018 by a “leading public intellectual” in Australia (I didn’t even know we had those!). It’s not really worth reading, unless you, like me, have a perverse interest in following the historical development of a sort of centre-left ‘common sense’ over the past decade or so. Manne makes some quite accurate predictions, but I think that there’s just too much of a Marxist in me to really recommend him. Likely worth keeping up with, just to see what’s in the air.

Finally, I watched Louis Theroux’s documentary from earlier this year, The Settlers, as its now on ABC. It’s worth watching, though it didn’t really raise any new points for me personally and most people interested will likely already have seen it. It is interesting to watch Theroux though. I think he’s probably a good representative for how some liberals have begun to feel over the past three years. It’s a shame that they didn’t start to feel this way a lot earlier.