At his new "Right-Wing English Teacher" YouTube page, Andy Nowicki discusses the two generally acknowledged giants of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and their vastly divergent perspectives on modernity and its discontents.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
DANTE'S BEATRICE: A DEATH IN JUNE
Over seven centuries ago, the most famous literary muse of all time—namely Dante Alighieri’s beloved Beatrice—ascended to her eternal glory. Dante followed his muse into the bourn of the undiscovered country three decades later, but not before composing a host of works which testify to the full extent of the Beatrician influence on the Dantean imagination.
CELINE AS AN EXPRESSION OF JEWISH POWER
Despite his notoriety, Céline still makes the "top ten" of most lists for greatest French writer of all time, though there have been attempts to discredit and erase his towering presence from world letters. According to Haaretz, "Céline, who died in 1961, is considered the second most widely read author in France after Marcel Proust."
THE 'GORE VIDAL' YOU CAN'T TALK ABOUT
If one takes a truncated view of American politics, one can be forgiven for believing that Gore Vidal was a simple liberal. His works suggest such. The City and The Pillar, one of the first novels to deal with homosexuality, seems to argue that gender is a simple social construct. (Vidal disliked the term “homosexual” but he exemplified the hedonistic life style with his many partners, claiming he slept with over a 1000 men and women. A figure I don’t much doubt.)
HAWTHORNE AND LOVECRAFT: TWO WHO RODE THE TIGER
 |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne |
by Ben Welton
Americans are supposed to be energetic. After
all, we “went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in
between” because of our relentless drive for expansion and profit. The American caricature, so idolized and reviled throughout the world, is a loud creature with a fondness for action and a devotion to extolling the virtues of thinking big and making quick money. According to Louis Hartz, author of The Liberal Tradition in America, “irrational Lockeanism” is our
prevailing credo, with both liberals and conservatives essentially agreeing on
the soundness of liberal democracy and global capital. A good Cold War liberal,
Hartz (and generations of leftists after him) believed that a genuine and
unique American right did not and could not exist. The left has all the best
ideas, after all.
ALT-RIGHT ART
Left-liberal attitudes and habits of mind may at one time have been radical, provocative, and gutsy, but today they are staid, stale, conventional, and boring. Any honest contemporary cultural Marxist will have to admit that, politically speaking, his side now holds all significant power. Those who openly decline to subscribe to the ideological establishment's point of view on such matters as race, gender, and sexuality have in effect committed social suicide; having put themselves utterly at the mercy of the powers-that-be, such unfortunates have left themselves open to attack by legions of official Zeitgeist-enforcers and their numerous toadying minions.
REVIEW: BOBOS IN PARADISE: THE NEW UPPER CLASS AND HOW THEY GOT THERE
by David Brooks
284 pages
Reviewed by Brett Stevens
The maturation of the “Me Generation” who brought us the shift to liberal-leaning regimes across the West received little coherent exposition before this book. However with Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, David Brooks explicates the rise of BOBOs — “bourgeois bohemians” — as a fusion of 1960s values and 1980s methods.
In exploring this fusion, Brooks carefully and humorously reveals the underpinning of the ideological motivation of these people, which is 1968 itself — albeit tempered with a taste for what we hoped won the Cold War, which is the cornucopia of the fruits of personal liberty and free markets. the “bourgeois bohemians” are actually hybrids of yuppies and hippies.
This group appeared in the 1990s and that is where Brooks centers his book. In his view, they came to power as a replacement for the old WASP hierarchy in America. While that ancient regime operated by knowing the right people, and having the right family, this new regime accelerates those who have the right education, the right careers and the right beliefs and lifestyle choices. Brooks shows us a new elite trying to justify itself with claims that it morally deserves what it has.
In exploring this fusion, Brooks carefully and humorously reveals the underpinning of the ideological motivation of these people, which is 1968 itself — albeit tempered with a taste for what we hoped won the Cold War, which is the cornucopia of the fruits of personal liberty and free markets. the “bourgeois bohemians” are actually hybrids of yuppies and hippies.
This group appeared in the 1990s and that is where Brooks centers his book. In his view, they came to power as a replacement for the old WASP hierarchy in America. While that ancient regime operated by knowing the right people, and having the right family, this new regime accelerates those who have the right education, the right careers and the right beliefs and lifestyle choices. Brooks shows us a new elite trying to justify itself with claims that it morally deserves what it has.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, FOUNDER OF NEOREACTION
With Michel Houellebecq in the news for his novel, Submission, it makes sense to remember his roots. He has made his name writing about the tedium of modern life and fleeting glimpses of beauty, truth, and purity that tempt people from it. His usually tragic characters cannot realize that beauty because of their broken psychologies and neuroses.
Houellebecq burst onto the scene in 1997 with Whatever, a cynically humorous book — think Louis-Ferdinand Celine or William Burroughs — about the failure of modern life. The characters struggle through pointless and boring jobs, alienating sexual relationships and dysfunctional families, all while wandering through a 21st-century dystopian wasteland that is both beautiful in its ruin and crassly plastic in the assumptions through which most people survive.
PODCAST 34: DREAMS OF DYSTOPIA
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| Ann Sterzinger |
Alternative Right assistant editor Andy Nowicki chats with author Ann Sterzinger.
Topics include Ann's recent experiences as ex-editrix of Takimag and Trigger Warning; her soon-to-be-completed magnum opus LYFE, a futuristic comedy of a world (and moon) gone wrong; and the strangely hypnotic appeal of reading dystoptic fiction, i.e. books detailing perfectly awful future societies. Ann and Andy also broach the topic of Rachel Haywire and the Alt-Right's occasional obsession with Jews.
Topics include Ann's recent experiences as ex-editrix of Takimag and Trigger Warning; her soon-to-be-completed magnum opus LYFE, a futuristic comedy of a world (and moon) gone wrong; and the strangely hypnotic appeal of reading dystoptic fiction, i.e. books detailing perfectly awful future societies. Ann and Andy also broach the topic of Rachel Haywire and the Alt-Right's occasional obsession with Jews.
AUTHOR 2 AUTHOR WITH TITO PERDUE
by Andy Nowicki
On Saturday, March 7, it was my honor to attend a banquet in Atlanta, Georgia, honoring the great Southern author Tito Perdue.
At the event, organized and hosted by Counter-Currents editor Greg Johnson, Mr. Perdue delivered a memorable speech, in which he laid out a delightfully whimsical, savagely fantastical vision of the future, which closely resembled the bizarre and wondrous dystopias he concocted in his recent novels The Node and Reuben (the latter of which I had the privilege of helping to edit for Radix). Read Tito's speech here.
To help commemorate the man who whose literary greatness will one day surely be acknowledged – and whose novels will be required reading in freshman-level English classes once this present darkness is dispelled and civilization finally gets re-established – I am re-running this conversation I had with Tito in early 2013, in which I queried him concerning his then just-published The Node, and during which I had the privilege of him querying me about my much-lesser work Under the Nihil.
REVIEW: BLOOD IN THE SQUARE
by John Bean
Ostara Publications, 119 pages
Available for purchase from Amazon here
Reviewed by Mike Newland
Few reading this will have direct experience of living in the earlier 1960s – let alone that distant time shortly after the end of WWII.
Much of it to those who were there seems like a dream so great has been our disillusion as the high hopes of sunlit uplands dissolved into a decaying country of which we are being dispossessed. But to understand the now we need to grasp how we got to where we are and how it could have happened.
John Bean’s new novel is shrewdly set in the world of Britain just before our accelerating fall.
Much of it to those who were there seems like a dream so great has been our disillusion as the high hopes of sunlit uplands dissolved into a decaying country of which we are being dispossessed. But to understand the now we need to grasp how we got to where we are and how it could have happened.
John Bean’s new novel is shrewdly set in the world of Britain just before our accelerating fall.
"COLLETTE'S DREAM MAN" BY ANDY NOWICKI
“Andy Nowicki is a master at using beautifully crafted prose to illuminate the ugly, the painful and the agonized.” –James LaFond
THE SELF-INFLICTED MISERY OF "LES MISERABLES"
You’ll have heard by now of “dindus” and the “gentle giant” who wishes to “turn his life around.” Although now almost always Black, the origin of this archetypal object of liberal leftist sympathies was the character of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s famous novel, Les Misérables, which has also been made into one of the longest-running musicals of all time as well as a movie or two.
Valjean is described as a stout, hardy man of great muscular strength, whom we are made to feel has been unjustly imprisoned for merely stealing a loaf of bread and then only because he was starving. Our hearts are supposed to bleed for him and then burn with a sense of outrage at the terrible injustices of the world.
But, just how true is any of this?
A NOVEL IDEA ABOUT NOVELS OF IDEAS
by Ryan Andrews
If personal anecdote is poor evidence of a more universal truth, then fictional anecdote is even worse, and the foundation of a great novel deserves better.
So I propose that there is a place for direct, sustained, quantitive analysis/argument in literary fiction.The main characters and their immediate story need not, and absolutely should not, be touched by this. But the establishment of setting is also important, and this ought to be done, well, with direct, sustained, quantitive analysis/argument.
HEART KILLER NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK
Andy Nowicki's 2012 novel Heart Killer, published by ER Books in electronic format, is now also available in paperback form, courtesy of Hopeless Books.
PODCAST 15: HOPELESS BOOKS
JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT BY LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
New Directions (Reprint edition)
464 pages
Available for purchase from Amazon here
Reviewed by Matt Forney
Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, better known by his pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline, was one of the great writers of the 20th century. His novels profoundly explored the nihilism at the heart of Western modernity. To commemorate his birthday, we publish once again Matt Forney's classic review of what is considered his greatest work.
Four years of college taught me that not only does the ivory tower have no idea what makes good literature, they couldn’t care less; they’ll erase truly talented writers from the history books if they wander off the plantation. Case in point: the 20th century’s most reviled and imitated novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ask an English professor about Céline and half of them will have no idea who you’re talking about, and the other half will react like you just snapped off a Hitler salute. I still remember how my junior year Early American Lit professor reacted when I told her I was reading Rigadoon: ”Wasn’t Céline a Nazi?”
Four years of college taught me that not only does the ivory tower have no idea what makes good literature, they couldn’t care less; they’ll erase truly talented writers from the history books if they wander off the plantation. Case in point: the 20th century’s most reviled and imitated novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Ask an English professor about Céline and half of them will have no idea who you’re talking about, and the other half will react like you just snapped off a Hitler salute. I still remember how my junior year Early American Lit professor reacted when I told her I was reading Rigadoon: ”Wasn’t Céline a Nazi?”
SEA CHANGES: AN INTERVIEW WITH DEREK TURNER
by Andy Nowicki
The fact that Derek Turner’s magisterial Sea Changes is a deeply “relevant” novel ought not to fool the potential reader into thinking that it has the typical earmarks of a “timely” read. Though its multifaceted, intricately-weaved storyline perfectly embodies the “ripped from today’s headlines” cliché, Sea Changes also has the feel of a timeless work, written less for the day and more for the ages.
Indeed, though Turner is writing about events and phenomena that many find enraging—politically-correct British ethno-masochism, mass Third World immigration and the concomitant mounting threat of white extinction in England—Sea Changes is notable for not reading as an angry or incendiary novel. Those expecting a crudely cartoonish anti-anti-racism screed a la The Turner Diaries are sure to be disappointed. Though Turner clearly means to skewer and savage the anti-“racist” (read: anti-white) cant-driven dogmas and smelly little orthodoxies that saturate our era, he does so in a most elegant and compassionate manner, with malice towards none except the unforgivably disingenuous.
BEAUTY AND THE LEAST
Alternative Right co-editor Andy Nowicki's new novella Beauty and the Least is now available for purchase. Published by Ann Sterzinger's Hopeless Books, Nowicki's new work is a horrifically fantastic, torridly twisted tale of desperation, obsession, surprising seduction, ambiguous intentions, and murderous consequences.
Beauty and the Least can be purchased in paperback or on Kindle at Amazon.com.
Below is a Youtube promo, in which the author reads selected passages from his book.(The excerpted text follows beneath the video.)
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