The Arts and Culture

“Envying the cruel falcon”: The Anti-Liberal Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Part One of Two

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Only the most ardent followers of the right wing nationalists, the lunatic fringe, and the most ardent of Roosevelt haters could, after reading The Double Axe, welcome the return of Robinson Jeffers.
                              St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1948

In two previous essays I explored the nature of academic ethno-activism in the deconstruction of the cultural legacy of the Modernist poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Such deconstructions, which are ongoing, target the posthumous legacies of creative thinkers deemed by the current dispensation to have held quasi-Fascistic socio-political views. The essays on Eliot and Pound were intended as broad overviews of this process of deconstruction, emphasizing the scale of successive critiques and, to some extent, illuminating the psychology of those behind them. Analysis of the actual poetic content produced by those creatives was peripheral. This was partly because, although they have been subjected to withering criticism with the ultimate intention of consigning them to distant memory, neither Pound nor Eliot have yet disappeared entirely from view, and their works continue to be widely sold in bookshops, studied in colleges, and read in libraries. Thus, while Pound and Eliot are being “phased out” culturally, or held up as examples of “bigoted old White men,” the depth and intensity of their fame have meant that they continue to put up a spirited resistance to being forgotten.

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), the subject of this essay, has found this task much more difficult. Despite once adorning the cover of TIME magazine (April 4, 1932), Jeffers’s fall from grace began earlier, and has been more complete. Studied only rarely in colleges and almost entirely exiled from bookshops and popular discussion, Jeffers and his poetry are a niche literary interest at best. Even within our circles, aside from a single lecture by Jonathan Bowden (which takes the form of a brief cultural biography and glosses over the content of Jeffers’s poetry), he remains largely ignored or unknown. In part to rectify this, the focus of the present essay will be mainly on the poet’s biography and content, with the deconstructive element relegated to the background.

There are a number of reasons for Jeffers’s descent from the heights of popularity, and these reasons make both the man and his work an interesting study. Within a decade of his appearance on the front cover of TIME, Jeffers found himself pilloried as an isolationist opposed to American involvement in World War II, and even as a “fascist sympathizer” who produced “unpatriotic verse.” Jeffers had attracted increasing interest, and then suspicion, from liberals who reacted with horror to his scathing rebukes of, and deep pessimism towards, their schemes for “human improvement.” A close inspection of the reclusive Jeffers’s works revealed a man railing against the decadence of the inter-war period. Piercing that maelstrom of cultural degeneration, his poetry was a furious cry against cherished concepts like “equality,” “progressivism,” and “social justice.” In Jeffers’s unflinching vision, God and Nature were intertwined, inseparable. Man was “nature dreaming,” and the further Man distanced himself from Nature, natural instinct, and natural law, the further Man descended into weakness and decay. Violence, of a noble, natural kind, is glorified in Jeffers’s poetry, as is normal, healthy, and natural sexuality. Read more

“What’s Up, Dr. Mack?” Martians Go Home and the Ordeal of Civility

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Martians, Go Home
by Fredric Brown
Dutton, 1955; Bantam, 1956
Ballantine Del Rey, 1976
Gateway Essentials, 2011

“But wherever they arrived and however they were received, to say that they caused trouble and confusion is to make the understatement of the century.”

Many a science fiction book or film has a theme, or a debate therein, dealing with the question of whether “aliens” who are advanced enough to master space travel would, ipso facto, “come in peace.”[1] Are they like E.T., or Klaatu, or more like the Martians of the Wars of the Worlds of Wells and Welles?[2]

But what if they were smart, and indeed not warlike, but instead, just really, really annoying?

Such is the premise of this pulpy little novel by Fredric Brown,[3] whose alien visitors are described by Wikipedia thus:

The story begins on 26 March 1964. Luke Deveraux, the protagonist, is a 37-year-old sci-fi writer who is being divorced by his wife. Deveraux holes himself up in a desert cabin with the intention of writing a new novel (and forgetting the painful failure of his marriage). Drunk, he considers writing a story about Martians, when, all of a sudden, someone knocks on the door. Deveraux opens it to find a little green man, a Martian. The Martian turns out to be very discourteous; he insists on calling Luke ‘Mack,’ and has little in mind other than the desire to insult and humiliate Luke. The Martian, who is intangible, proves to be able to disappear at will and to see through opaque materials. Luke leaves his cabin by car, thinking to himself that the alien was but a drunken hallucination. He realizes that he is wrong when he sees that a billion Martians have come to Earth.

And here’s some more very suggestive details about these alien visitors:

They consider the human race inferior and are both interested and amused by human behaviour. Unlike most fictional Martian invaders, the Martians that Brown writes of don’t intend to invade Earth by violence; instead, they spend their wakeful hours calling everyone ‘Mack’ or ‘Toots’ (or some regional variation thereof), revealing embarrassing secrets, heckling theatre productions, lampooning political speeches, even providing cynical colour commentary to honeymooners’ frustrated attempts at consummating their marriage. This nonstop acerbic criticism stops most human activity and renders many people insane, including Luke, whose stress-induced inability to see the little green maligners divides opinion on whether he should be considered mad or blessed.

If this seems somewhat familiar, you may have had the misfortune of seeing the 1990 film, directed by David Odell and “starring” Randy Quaid and Margaret Colin — a movie so bad it hasn’t seen a Region One DVD release.[4]

But let’s stay with the book. Again, it may seem somewhat familiar, but for another reason: read with a Certain Eye, there are plenty of clues that these Martians are rather Semitic. Read more

Wagner Reclaimed: A Review of “The Ring of Truth” by Roger Scruton, Part 2

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A scene from Neil Armfield’s 2016 Melbourne production of The Ring

Go to Part 1.

“Sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage”

Productions of The Ring in the modern era have invariably sought to satirize the drama to subvert the message Wagner attempts to convey. Scruton observes that, notwithstanding the increasingly tiresome preoccupation with dissecting the tetralogy for anti-Jewish and proto-fascistic themes and images (and counteracting them), The Ring is also, on a more basic level, problematic for opera producers because its “world of sacred passions and heroic actions offends against the sceptical and cynical temper of our times. The fault, however, lies not in Wagner’s tetralogy, but in the closed imagination of those who are so often invited to produce it.”[1]

The template for modern productions was set with the Bayreuth production of 1976, when Pierre Boulez sanitized the music, and Patrice Chereau satirized the text. Scruton notes that:

Since that ground-breaking venture, The Ring has been regarded as an opportunity to deconstruct not only Wagner but the whole conception of the human condition that glows so warmly in his music. The Ring is deliberately stripped of its legendary atmosphere and primordial setting, and everything is brought down to the quotidian level, jettisoning the mythical aspect of the story, so as to give us only half of what it means. The symbols of cosmic agency — spear, sword, ring — when wielded by scruffy humans on abandoned city lots, appear like toys in the hands of lunatics. The opera-goer will therefore very seldom be granted the full experience of Wagner’s masterpiece.[2]

This certainly describes the Ring I attended in Melbourne in 2016. While the soloists and the orchestra were excellent, Neil Armfield’s postmodernist, Eurotrash-inspired production detracted from the power of the music and drama. Following established precedent, Armfield set much of the action in a space akin to an industrial wasteland. He lampooned the heroic forging scene by setting it in a tawdry apartment replete with fluorescent lighting, microwave, bar fridge and bunk beds. Fafner (meant to have transformed himself into a dragon) was depicted as a transvestite-like figure smearing make-up on his face and later appearing naked on the stage (see the lead photograph).

Productions like these deliberately sabotage Wagner’s attempt to engage his audiences at the emotional level of religion. They let “sarcasm and satire run riot on the stage, not because they have anything to prove or say in the shadow of this unsurpassably noble music, but because nobility has become intolerable. The producer strives to distract the audience from Wagner’s message, and to mock every heroic gesture, lest the point of the drama should finally come home.”[3] Read more

Toward the Future We Have Yet to Shape: A Review of Mjolnir 4: The Wedding March

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dscn0089

Mjolnir 4: The Wedding March

So many magazines become formulaic by Issue 3, let alone Issue 4. Mjolnir Issue 4 –subtitled “The Wedding March”—is not one of them. Mjolnir never has been. It is always a delight to receive the latest copy, not knowing what interesting words and pictures wait inside those full color glossy covers.

Not to say that Mjolnir is chaotic or haphazard—far from it. Editor Dave Yorkshire does a splendid job of keeping to his original statement of intent: to publish true Eurocentric traditional art forms, and he has managed to do it for four issues so far, remaining elitist and illiberal in the best possible manner. (I see in his editorial that he is testing the waters of YouTube via the Alt-Right channel Millennial Woes, and also checking out the feasibility of holding regular Eurocentric Cultural Festivals—both of which I am sure Mjolnir will successfully navigate in due time).

The essence of “The Wedding March” is summed up nicely in the final sentence of the editorial: “If European Man is to survive, he must embrace a future that is vernal rather than autumnal, that promotes life, birth and rebirth, and marriage as the sacred pact that binds this continuum that stretches from the prehistoric past into the future we have yet to shape.”

We’ll skip over my contributions to this issue, only noting that I contributed poetry as well as a short story, and turn first to the literary contributions of others. And there are many to savor, from all areas of the European literary triad: fiction, drama and poetics. Contemporary poets Ellin Anderson, Eliza Witte and Dorin Alexandru; nineteenth-century narrative poet Thomas Ingoldsby (pen name of Richard Banharm, in case you wanted to know), fiction writer Ann Sterzinger,  and Dave Yorkshire himself with another ultimate gem in the form of a parody/drama.

Contents and sculpture by Vig

Contents and sculpture by Vig Scholma

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Woody Allen’s Café Society

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cafe_society

“I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.” [i] — Joel Stein

Woody Allen’s crepuscular film Café Society (2016) is as boring as it is instrumentally instructive as a testament to Jewish cosmopolitanism, domination and reshaping of American values and culture. Set in the 1930s the film centers on Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), the youngest son of a New York Jewish family, who leaves his father’s jewelry business for Hollywood. If Fellini used Mastroianni, as an idealized surrogate-self, Eisenberg is used rather as Allen’s mirror image, neurotic, shlumpy, physically weak, lascivious, overtly sentimental but quick-witted, clever with high verbal acuity – a certain Jewish je ne sais quoi.

Jesse Eisenbert, Kristen Stewart, and Woody Allen in Cafe Society

Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, and Woody Allen, on the set of Café Society

The conflation of Dorfman and Allen is made even more obvious with Allen’s voiceover narration throughout. The Dorfman family trio functions as a trio of Jewish stereotypes, his elder brother a gangster, his sister married to a Marxist intellectual, and both he and his uncle settled in the entertainment industry. Radical intellectualism and entertainment are a microcosm of the Jewish cultural enterprise, and the explicitly crude expression of usurious tendencies in the gangster are a stand-in for a still-common Jewish phenomenon of exploitative business practices (see Andrew Joyce’s “Jews and Money Lending: A Contemporary Case File”).  Each of these enterprises supports and affirms the other.

Continuing with the Jewish stereotypes, Allen intersperses scenes with Jews who fleetingly pass off stock tips, whispering in an ear at a party – implicitly showcasing ethnic networking. Read more

What to read? (Part 6): A White Character Survey; Envy in Literature and Politics (Part 2)

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saraceni

Carlo Saraceni (“The Fall of Icarus”) 1606, oil

Physical blindness and the verdict of ignorance, meted out to envious politicians in Dante’s epic poem, can often be bliss.  Eyelessness can have advantages, as demonstrated by the blind, poor, uneducated, self-effacing, albeit very intelligent seer, Tiresias, who is brought to the court of King Oedipus, only to announce to him his eyeless future of blind destiny (vv 364-377).

For that matter willful ignorance and dismissal of the brainwashing curriculum in the modern educational system in the US and EU can be a sign of a healthy state of mind. What on earth is to be seen in the political process in multicultural America and Europe today? What good can be learned in multiracial colleges in Europe, whose program consists of lessons on White man’s guilt? For centuries, in order to avoid envy-inducing temptations, high-IQ young introspective White European males opted for monastic life. The harmful side of monasticism was that it prevented good genes to be passed on to future offspring, thus leaving the political arena open to an array of genetic and character misfits: the bad, the ugly and the envious.

Lengthy is the list of authors, usually associated with the heritage of cultural conservatism, who have prodded into the roots of envy-driven politicians. Highly envious politicians are usually very cunning individuals, with above average IQ, possessing, in addition, good skills at camouflaging their moral sleaziness with an aura of tearful humanitarian palaver. They also excel at expressions of sympathy for the plight of their future prey.

This brings to mind is the huge literature on so-called Jewish social mimicry, aka “trickster-do-good-Jews” (“Mauscheljuden”), popularized in National Socialist Germany by the works of Theodor Fritsch and Arthur Trebitsch, and scores of other writers. Read more

What to read? (Part 5) A White Character Survey: Envy in Politics and Literature (Part 1)

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gericault

Théodore Géricault, “Envious woman,” oil 1822

Among Europeans, since antiquity, envy and jealousy have been main driving forces in the political process, resulting in a treasure trove of different literary genres. All European languages make a fine distinction between envy and jealousy, although both notions often overlap. The Germans have an additional nuanced word for this character aberration, i.e. “Schadenfreude,” a compound noun literally meaning when someone rejoices over someone else’s bad luck.

Today, the notion of schadenfreude may apply to Whites who savor the professional failure of their racial next-of-kin. Schadenfreude has been for centuries a dominant feature among White intellectuals, rulers and politicians, although for obvious reasons, none of them has ever been eager to publicly admit this character defect. Outbursts of poorly concealed envy can be observed today among a number of White nationalists, White self-appointed leaders, and White spokesmen, faking sympathy and compassion for their better-skilled rivals on the one hand, yet gleefully gloating in private over their next-of-kin’s minor faux pas on the other. Over the last half a century envy and jealousy have been the prime reason for the lack of unity among so-called White movements and parties in Europe and the USA.

The most glaring case study of the destructive envy can be observed today among individuals critical of celebrity billionaire Donald Trump and his beautiful wife and intelligent, attractive children, who in turn are now being assaulted by a lethal barrage of pathological envy and jealousy, not only by predictable envy-ridden non-White detractors, but also by more intelligent, jealous White rivals. The late French-Romanian philosopher of gloom and doom, Emile Cioran, a household name among Alt-Right and New-Right intellectuals and sympathizers, describes political rivalry as just another shorthand for the envy contest.

More or less all humans are envious; politicians are absolutely envious. One becomes envious insofar as one can’t stand anybody next to himself or above himself.  Engaging oneself in a project, a project of any kind, even the most trivial one, means sacrificing oneself to envy — the supreme prerogative of all humans (French original, p. 1009).

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