Posts Tagged ‘ J.R.R. Tolkien ’

Cultural Marxism — Is It Here to Stay?

August 26, 2011
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Cultural Marxism — Is It Here to Stay?

If it does, you can blame … J. R. R. Tolkien? . . . one of the things that I talk about is what I like to call “West Coast White nationalism” because West Coast White nationalism, a lot of the people that I know on the West Coast who think in terms of a racially defined new order of society, you take one look at them and you think that they’re hippies or you think that they’re liberals. Their lifestyles and their attitudes embrace a lot of things like Eastern spirituality, and drinking fruit juice, and wearing sandals, and granola, and vegetarianism, and organic food and organic farming, all these sort of things that you think are kind of hippie things. If you look at the roots of a lot of the West Coast hippie culture and also the hippie culture in Europe for that matter, a lot of it goes back to Tolkien. What doesn’t come from the New Left, let’s say the Frankfurt School and things like that, a lot of it comes from Tolkien which is pretty much directly connected with European Traditionalism. — Greg Johnson According to this view, ’60s hippies took Tolkien’s “message of

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Prose & Poetry Update

May 31, 2011
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Prose & Poetry Update

Memorial Day has come and gone, but we remember those who gave the last full measure of devotion on behalf of America. Inspired by those memories, this week’s Update includes two poems that would not be were it not for those who died fighting WWI. In 1915 the London Spectator published “In Flanders Fields,” written by Major John McCrae, a surgeon attached to Canada’s 1st Field Artillery Brigade. Its closing isn’t what one might expect from a combat surgeon, especially when viewed through lenses created by films such as M.A.S.H., A Bridge Too Far, and Apocalypse Now. Rather than simply lamenting lost lives, Major McCrae challenges future generations to continue fighting so as to honor the memory of those who sacrificed themselves in battle. In response to this, Moina Michael penned “We Shall Never Forget.” We shall never forget the sacrifice our brave military men and women made on our behalf. Neither shall we forget to pick up “from failing hands” “the torch” and “hold it high.” “In Flanders Fields” In Flanders Fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the

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Prose & Poetry Weekly

March 14, 2011
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Prose & Poetry Weekly

“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt Short Fiction A Call to Prayer by Joy Wambeke ” ‘For the poor souls in purgatory,’ I heard my father mutter through clenched teeth. Through the shadows of the upstairs hallway, I could often see my father in my parents’ darkened room, his hands wound around his foot or grasping his knee. He always got ready for work at Sydney harbor in the dark so as not to wake mum. It was his habit to offer the inevitable bumps into furniture

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Prose and Poetry Weekly

March 7, 2011
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Prose and Poetry Weekly

Kicking off this week’s entry: Sir Walter Scott, “Chivalry!—why, maiden, she is the nurse of pure and high affection—the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant —Nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in her lance and her sword.” - from Ivanhoe: A Romance Short Fiction Favorite Son by Jennifer Haigh (from Virginia Quarterly Review) “Buck season opened-still does-on the Monday after Thanksgiving. In Bakerton it is a holiday of sorts. School was closed for the day, and I reported to Keener’s at 4 a.m. to serve eggs and sausages and countless cups of coffee to men in orange vests and jackets. Every table was full despite heavy competition from annual pancake breakfasts at the AmVets, the Elks, and the Moose.” Monkey and Man by John Warner (from Bull: Fiction for Thinking Men) “Now, let’s get going, because any minute the cops are going to show up and ask questions you can’t answer, which is going to make you look truly suspicious, and if you’re locked up you’ll never be able to prove yourself innocent.” “But I am innocent,” I told the monkey. “Don’t

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Prose and Poetry Weekly

March 1, 2011
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Prose and Poetry Weekly

Okay, so this post’s title might need some revision given that I’ve let a few weeks slip, but I think this week’s entry has some very interesting content, not the least of which is a link to Vigen Guroian’s article about Flannery O’Connor, in which Guroian notes, “Supernatural grace is not magic; it is not subject to human manipulation, or restricted to human needs. In an effort to impress this upon her readers…, O’Connor says that in her fiction she approaches grace almost negatively. In practical terms this means that the majority of her protangonists strenuously resist the action of God upon them. The lesson they learn, often through suffering, is that grace is God’s own free doing and can come upon anyone even in the face of his or her disbelief.” As a good friend noted, “So true, so true. Thank God this is true.” Without further ado here is this week’s, better late than never, selection of short fiction, commentary, reviews, and news. Short Fiction A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O’Connor ” “Listen,” the grandmother almost screamed, “I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I

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A Conservative Books Reading List

September 6, 2010
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A Conservative Books Reading List

Young America’s Foundation convened a panel on conservative books at the National Conservative Student Conference, held in early August at George Washington University in Washington, DC. National Review’s John J. Miller, Regnery Publishing President Marji Ross, and Discovery Institute’s Dr. Benjamin Wiker provided an extensive reading list for anyone interested in Conservative thought. The following are each panelists recommendations. National Review’s John J. Miller suggested, in the following categories: History of conservative thought Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George Nash The Constitution The Heritage Guide to the Constitution The Citizen’s Constitution by Seth Lipsky Ronald Reagan Lou Cannon’s President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime The President, The Pope, and The Prime Minister Reagan in His Own Hand – the book Miller most recommends in order to understand Ronald Reagan’s thought Marji Ross, Regnery Publishing President, noted that students  should read books they don’t agree with as well as those with which they do agree. Furthermore, there are no better sources to to study than Shakespeare and the Bible in order to understand almost any literary allusion. Ross closed her comments by telling students not to be an intellectual snobs. That is, “don’t disdain pop culture.” Her reading recommendations are in

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Steve Kilbey’s Intimate Musical Diary

May 25, 2010
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Steve Kilbey’s Intimate Musical Diary

Let me tell you a little bit about Steve Kilbey… A long, long time ago–in the late 1980s, to be exact–an Australian rock band called The Church were on their way to significant mainstream success, or so it seemed. They had made impressive inroads into the Billboard Hot 100 chart with a darn-near perfect psychedelic pop ditty called “Under the Milky Way.” Its equally strong parent album Starfish went gold–no mean feat in that era of Poison and Def Leppard. Just imagine it: there our antipodean heroes were, trudging out of the musical underworld like Orpheus, singing those beautiful songs, playing those beautiful Rickenbacker guitars, closing in on the taillights of the Cure, damnit. But something happened. Perhaps they turned to look back at Eurydice too soon, taking their eyes off the righteous path just long enough for grunge rock to sail on by and steal all the glory. In the Church’s defense, no one could have predicted the impending Death of All Melody that would overtake the world for the better part of a decade.  In 1988, they were an up-and-coming band with nothing but bright possibilities stretching before them. And during that summer, my friend Joe Carpenter and I became thoroughly besotted with the quartet, though

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KindlingsFest 2010: Where Art & Ideas Intersect with Spiritual

April 19, 2010
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KindlingsFest 2010 is a celebration of art and ideas where they intersect with the spiritual.

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James Bowman Denies Denying Artistic Standing to Tolkien and Lewis

March 15, 2010
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James Bowman Denies Denying Artistic Standing to Tolkien and Lewis

James Bowman has kindly responded to my comments on his assertion that “fantasy is not Art.” ‘Kindly,’ on second thought, might be stretching things a bit, given that he begins by marginalizing those who disagree with him as nothing more than blog-dwelling trolls*: You can imagine the reaction in the blogosphere— which, as you may or may not know, has way more Lewis and Tolkien fans in it than the population at large. I wonder why that is, by the way? I’ll bet there are far more readers of Mr. Bowman’s latest blog entry in the blogosphere than in the population at large, but I digress. After establishing a suitably dismissive tone with those lines, Mr. Bowman begins his defense with the following: I wonder if it is too late to protest that I did not say what Mr Crandall says I said. What I did say was that fantasy — by which I meant the fantasy actually being produced in our culture today, the fantasy of Avatar or The Dark Knight or that which is, in one way or another, merely derivative from Tolkien or Lewis — represents a break with the Western mimetic tradition to which the fantasies

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C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Are Not ‘Real’ Artists?

March 10, 2010
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C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Are Not ‘Real’ Artists?

Not according to James Bowman. They and numerous others create what Bowman dismissively refers to as “fantasy art.” And fantasy art isn’t Art. It always surprises me when I run across them, but I have to acknowledge that some folks just don’t like J.R.R. Tolkien. Shocking, I know. The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit. The Silmarillion’s mythopoeic tales. What’s not to like? Great works of art and creativity, right? Well, they might be creative, but they do not qualify as Art. Mr. Bowman is among that group of curmudgeonly scolds that just can’t seem to abide anything that smacks of fantasy. According Bowman, fantasy is not art, at least not in the sense that the term has been understood within the Western mimetic tradition going back to Homer. … Indeed, Western culture is so intimately bound up with the tradition of imitation in art … that the now more than century-long vogue for fantasy art, beginning with George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame and continuing through Lewis and Tolkien to the more unrestrained science-fiction and fantasy cinema of our own time, should be seen as a repudiation, conscious or unconscious, of that Western tradition

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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