On Tuesday night I'm going to be talking about ephemeral kings as part of Moonlighter Presents at the Clocktower Gallery in Tribeca.

Onania by Jan Manski is opening tonight at the Rochelle School in Shoreditch and I have an essay in the catalogue.

'During a hunting trip with several fellow legislators and a lobbyist, for example, a rancher, an old friend, called Stevenson aside and told him that in one of the back pastures where the men were to hunt was an aged horse—an old family pet—so infirm that it should be destroyed. The rancher asked Stevenson to do it for him. Stevenson agreed. As the hunters’ car was passing the horse, he asked the driver to stop, and got out. “I think I’ll just kill that ol’ horse,” he said, and, taking aim, shot it in the head. His companions, unaware of the rancher’s request, stared in amazement. “Why did you shoot that horse?” the lobbyist finally asked. “I just always wondered what it would feel like to shoot a horse,” Stevenson drawled. Pausing, he stared hard at the lobbyist. “Now I’m wondering what it would feel like to shoot a man.”'

from Means of Ascent by Robert Caro

"I hold no brief for the pre-war Spartan training of the English upper class – or middle class as it is now the fashion to call it, leaving the upper to the angels – since in the ordinary affairs of a conventional life it is not of the slightest value to anyone; but it is of use on the admittedly rare occasions when one needs a high degree of physical endurance. I have been through an initiation ceremony on the Rio Javary – the only way I could persuade them to teach me how their men can exercise a slight muscular control over haemorrhage – and I thought it more a disagreeable experience than any proof of maturity. It lasted only a day and a night, whereas the initiation ceremonies of the tribal English continue for the ten years of education. We torture a boy’s spirit rather than his body, but all torture is, in the end, directed at the spirit. I was conditioned to endure without making an ass of myself."

from Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

"Education should be something of which a child can later say: if I survived that, I can survive anything."

from Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

I'm reading Master of the Senate, the third volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. Early on, Caro gives a short history of the senatorial filibuster, and it reminded me of what an unsatisfying film Mr Smith Goes to Washington is. (I love Jimmy Stewart, but I hate Frank Capra, apart from It Happened One Night.) First of all, we're supposed to see Stewart's character as a benign political revolutionary, but in that case he shouldn't be blocking just one corrupt bill, he should be effecting some sort of structural change which will prevent corruption from happening in the future. And, more importantly, we're supposed to applaud his desperate use of the filibuster, but in 1939 the filibuster was best known as way for Southern senators to block civil rights legislation, including anti-lynching laws. There is nothing heroic about a filibuster.

"In anatomy, the term tubercle may describe a round nodule, small eminence, or warty outgrowth."

"I encountered an impressive contemporary example of detailed oral history in a PaO village two days' walk east of Kalaw in the Burmese Shan states. At the end of the evening meal, a few villagers asked an elderly man to chant the story of U Aung Tha, perhaps the most famous PaO politician after World War II. U Aung Tha was murdered near Taunggyi in 1948 by unknown assailants. The recitation, which I tape-recorded, lasted more than two hours. Far from being the heroic, swashbuckling epic that I had anticipated, it proved, on translation, to be a far more mundane and exceptionally detailed account of the last days of U Aung Tha. It resembled nothing so much as a meticulous police report detailing when Aung Tha arrived in the village, his companions and what they were wearing, the color of his jeep,  whom he spoke to, when he bathed, when several men arrived to ask where they could find him, how they were dressed, the jeep they drove, what they said to Aung Tha's wife, where Aung Tha's body was found, what he was wearing, the identifying ring on his finger, the autopsy findings, and so on. At the end of the recitation, the singer admonished his listeners 'to take the  example of this true story in order to prevent loss or defect in everything.' It was as if every effort had been made, by scrupulously careful oral transmission over half a century, to preserve all the evidence and material facts intact  in case a serious police investigation ever took place! I was also surprised to learn that this singer and others throughout PaO areas were paid to chant this story of U Aung Tha's murder at weddings and feasts. Despite being short on histrionics and long on factual detail, it was a popular and revered story."

from The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C Scott

"In the late 1990s, a number of firms targeted the lucrative market of training young Muslims who were being recruited globally to join radical groups engaged in jihads, or “holy wars” in places such as Chechnya and Afghanistan. For example, Sakina Security Ltd. was a British firm that offered military training and weapons instruction to these recruits, as part of its “Jihad Challenge” package. The teaching included hand-to-hand combat techniques and how to “improvise explosive devices,” both of which had obvious utility in terrorist actions. Sakina was reported to have been affiliated with TransGlobal Security International. This was another British firm, which also reportedly ran military training camps (including teaching the use of machine guns) for radical Muslims. Similarly, Kelvin Smith, an American government employee, ran a side business (based in Western Pennsylvania) that provided military training to groups purporting to be headed to the fighting in Bosnia and Chechnya. The training even involved mock terrorist-type attacks on utilities plants. Smith also purchased assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition on behalf of the clients. Six members of the group trained by Smith later turned out to be members of al Qaeda, who were convicted in 1993 of planning a series of attacks around New York City. Smith, in turn, was sentenced to just two years for violating U.S. gun laws."

from Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by PW Singer

On Sunday I'm doing an event at the KGB Bar in the East Village with Lars Iyer and Emily St. John Mandel.

I wrote something about Beckett for The New Inquiry.

On Friday 10th February I'm speaking at a White Review event about Nicholas Chauvin at the Cabinet space in Brooklyn.

The website of The White Review have just published my essay on the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux.

I'm pleased to announce that Boxer, Beetle has been awarded the Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction by the Jewish Book Council.

Just now I was on the OED website looking up 'sleep' in the sense of 'this house sleeps five' when I came across this menacing citation:

1848    J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (at cited word),   She could eat fifty people in her house, but could not sleep half the number.

And that led me to an old American usage of 'eat' with which I was previously unfamiliar and of which every single example made me laugh:

1837    Crockett Almanac 17   Well, Capting, do you ate us, or do we ate ourselves?

1842    Spirit of Times (Philadelphia) 4 Mar.,   [The Bay State Democrat says that Mr. Dickens] has declined the invitation of the Philadelphians to eat him.

1855    ‘Q. K. P. Doesticks’ Doesticks, what he Says vii. 53,   I resolved‥to quit the premises of the Emerald Islander who agreed to ‘lodge and eat’ us.

a1860    Pickings fr. Picayune 47,   I was told you'd give us two dollars a day and eat us.

1889    J. S. Farmer Americanisms (at cited word),   A steamer is alleged to be able to eat 400 passengers and sleep about half that number.
1928    S. V. Benét John Brown's Body 367   You ought to be et. We'll eat you up to the house when it's mealin' time.

Admittedly, the third of those is a deliberate pun, although not, as you might think, a pun about cannibals: Doesticks (the humorist Mortimer Thompson) was staying in an Irish boarding house so plagued with mosquitoes that his hostess had 'nearly fulfilled the latter clause [i.e. to "eat us"] by proxy'.