While filling out the "profile" section for this blog, it occurred to me that it might be a useful exercise to elaborate the extent—and so the limits—of my interests more fully, as an indication of the sorts of things I might want to write about. These take in: Economics and political economy; maths in economics; methodology in the social sciences.
Politics, political sociology, political philosophy (favourite philosophers: Marx, Montaigne, Locke).
History (European, Russian, Ukrainian, Byzantine; Austro-Hungarian; the Renaissance; the Enlightenment; fascism; socialism; humanism; history of the UK; history of London; ancient history, especially of Rome; history of science and technology); historical materialism; the history of imperialism and theories of imperialism.
Novels: of the English, my favourite is Wuthering Heights, or perhaps Pride and Prejudice; of the American, USA by Dos Passos, or Fiesta by Hemingway—or, from my youth, Kerouac's Desolation Angels ("that part of the green he was that was given moving juice", he says at the top of the mountain of a caterpillar he spots on a leaf there); of the Russian, Platonov's The Foundation Pit, a savage satire of Stalinism and the power of jargon to oppress; also German (Kafka) and French (Proust). But I like classical science fiction too, especially Philip K Dick and Ray Bradbury.
Poetry: in English, my favourites are Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake and Shelley; I'm also inordinately fond of Milton's Paradise Lost. Of the moderns, I'm especially fond of Patrick Kavanagh, the crazy Catholic mystic. Of the Americans, I like Walt Whitman, "a Kosmos", and Allen Ginsberg. From other countries: Blok, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam of the Russians; from elsewhere: Brecht's Poems 1913-56 (I've had this book since I was 16 and my copy is now held together by a pair of yellow-luminous shoe laces), Erich Fried (100 Poems Without A Country), Attila József (the greatest proletarian poet), Dante, Lucretius (De Rerum Natura), Yehuda Amichai, Irving Layton (sexist, but he has classical poise).
Favourite Shakespeare play: Hamlet, I'm afraid.
The films of Bergman (of the not so well-known ones, the one I like the most, I think, is Shame, a political drama about the impact of war or violent civil disruption on personal relations), Tarkovski (Solaris and Ivan's Childhood), Pasolini (The Gospel According to St Matthew), Rossellini (Rome, Open City); Visconti's The Leopard, with Bert Lancaster as the philandering old patriarch, the Prince of Salina; old Hollywood films (The Maltese Falcon); superior-quality Soviet propaganda films (eg The Dawns Are Quiet Here); Laurel and Hardy films (Sons of the Desert); Edgar Reitz's Heimat 1, 2 and 3 (number 2 is the greatest long film of all time, and the part with Reinhardt in Venice is an astounding film in its own right, comparable with anything at all, so far as I'm concerned).
And only recently I saw Csillagosok, Katonak ("Staries, soldiers", I think, but translated as "The Red And The White") by Miklós Jancsó, a profound and unusual film with almost no dialogue or soundtrack, about the Russian civil war and its cycles of meaningless, arbitrary violence. Very memorable.
Also: Dekalog, which is, of course, stupendous stuff (the one about killing is a brilliant polemic against the death penalty—though it is not only that; but I like the last one best, about the brothers' stamps). Oh, and the Iranian film, Where is My Friend's House?, which has fairytale-like or "oral" visual elements in it, such as the repetition of the image of the zigzag path between villages. Plus two heartbreaking Iranian-Kurdish films, A Time for Drunken Horses and The Blackboard.
Music: Nick Drake, Magazine, The Stranglers, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Shubert (especially the majestic 9th), Shostakovich, Nirvana, Urusei Yatsura.
Languages: I took a crash reading course in Hungarian at university (now mostly forgotten, sadly), and I've been studying Russian on and off for a while now.
I also take an interest in English grammar and comparative world religions.
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