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wdclarke.bsky.social
Dubyedee
@wdclarke.bsky.social
810 followers 220 following 740 posts
—Writer/border collie slave
—PhD English UWarwick 2009, PoliticalEcon & the Novel
—Published on Thomas Pynchon
—Blog: exploratory fic reviews, lit crit, political economy
—Two novels with @coronasamizdat.bsky.social
https://wdclarke.org Ontario, Canada
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wdclarke.bsky.social
(+ footnote #1 above):
1. A few months after I had resignexl the ministry, my good friend and academic colleague Tony Aspromourgos, uvx)n hearing about my ex- changes With Larry Summers, my sus- picion when he sent me this quotation from Senator Elizabeth Warren, &umented in 2014: late in ffe evening, Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want- But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But in- siders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don't criticize Other insiders. I had warnd John Cassidy (2014), 'Elizabeth Warren's Moment, New York Review of Books, Vol. 61 (no. 9), 22/5—4/6/ 14, pp. 4—8.
November 21, 2025 at 8:01 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
Found the actual passage
(interesting from what follows, just how many times Summers inserts himself enough into the story of the Greek crisis to merit mentioning in V's book [30!])
platter. Finally, after agreeing our next steps, and before the combined effects of fatigue and alcohol forced us to call it a night, Summers looked at me intensely and asked a question so well rehearsed that I he had used it to test others before me. I 'There are two kinds of politicians,' he said: 'insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak version of the truth. The price of their free- dom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, f)l- low a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? AEcess to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful and outcomes.' With Summers arrived at his question. 'So, Yanis,' he said, 'which of the two are Instinct urged me to respond with a single vwrd; in- stead I used quite a few.
November 21, 2025 at 7:56 PM
wdclarke.bsky.social
O bliss, Walter benjamin
("On Unpacking My Library")
O bliss Of the collector, bliss of the man Of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well- being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg's ' 'Bookworm." For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.
November 19, 2025 at 12:23 PM