119 words / 1:01:56
You can order Spencer J. Quinn’s Critical Daze here.
Spencer Quinn joined Greg Johnson to discuss Critical Daze, the second book in his No College Club youth fiction series. It is now available to download or listen to online.
Topics include:
1:16 – How did Spencer come about starting this series of young adult novels?
3:20 – The synopsis of The No College Club.
11:00 – A spoiler-free summary of the sequel, Critical Daze.
16:10 – Does Spencer think that young Americans shouldn’t go to college?
23:50 – The problem of feminism.
30:15 – What’s in store for The No College Club series.
42:25 – Spencer’s literary influences.
46:51 – What’s the market like for young adult novels these days?
57:27 – Where to find Spencer Quinn’s work.
To listen in a player, click here or below. To download, right-click the link and click “save as.”
7 comments
I can’t write fiction but I did enjoy John gardner’s Art of Fiction. I’m not a practitioner, so I’m not sure how much it would help a real writer, but I do like his book Grendel. Read the Anglo Saxon poetry like deors lament for full effect!
Spencer’s new book idea reminds me of the relationship between Simone Weil and her brother Andre. Andre Weil was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, and they were from a family of wealthy Jews. Simone was mediocre in math and she lamented her exclusion from the true knowledge. But she did become a noted philosopher. I actually prefer her take on the relationship between Christianity, paganism and Judaism better than that of nietszche. She was a beautiful soul.
One time when the family went to Japan to accept the Kyoto prize for math, Andre told his mother and sister at breakfast: “ I want you to understand that you are here solely on account of me. There is no quality which either of you possess that could cause you to be so honored.” lol! Please don’t make any inferences. Maybe Spencer could use some of that for his book.
Thank you for the interesting anecdote. I just might steal it for book 3.
Good conversation.
20′ minute mark: I took ballroom dancing classes in Pasadena, CA as a young woman. Loved it. Love to dance. Loads of fun. But most of the guys were gay. I had better luck socially on the hiking trails.
I am torn between college or no college for young women. It depends upon the young woman and the support system (blood family) she has to help her navigate the university terrain of b.s.
Most of my peers that married and had children in their 20s divorced in their 30s and 40s. And the others who are still married have weird marital dynamics. None of them are Lefties. I don’t think Gen Xers fared as well in life as some like to think. There seems to be a lot of pain and confusion about love, and not just romantic love.
I strongly recommend young men (and women) to wait until 30 to marry and have children. It is very, very important for men (especially) to find their feet and their purpose in life first. I think males need theirs 20s to sow their oats. I’d advise them to take the time to find the most suitable life partner. Quality of character matters, regardless of the socioeconomic situation. “Become the man you are meant to be and seek a woman who is worthy of all you have to offer, not just a woman who wants babies with you.” This goes for the gentleman mechanic as well as the lawyer.
A wise and thoughtful young woman (college or no college degree) should desire to find the best man she can to provide her a stable home and a meaningful life, and good children (meaning, good genes). This takes time, and discernment and discrimination. She needs to become mature enough to really know herself and work through unrealistic romantic notions about relationships and marriage and money. He’s not going to fall out of the sky and land in her lap, and she is not going to find him at the local club or bar in a drunken stupor. It takes effort. But it starts with her. She needs to become a mature woman in heart and mind if she is to find the right man, the one to be her protector, provider, and the father of her children. And if she is an independent and or adventurous spirit, and not a home-body, she still needs to know herself well enough to find a good man who is right for her. This rarely happens for anyone in their early-to-mid 20s anymore. Perhaps in past generations it happened, but we live in a more complicated, complex, and confusing world than our grandparents did. And we certainly are more isolated socially than Whites used to be.
Hopefully young people are reading material such as the works by Spencer J Quinn and other C-C writers to provide clarity (and to cultivate courage) as they pursue their paths and partners.
Whatever they do, young people need to find a partner who is civilizational-aware, and race-aware. There is no happy or promising future sourced in willful ignorance.
Thank you for this, DF. You have inspired me to write further on this topic. Look for an essay from me on women and college in the next month or two.
I hope all is well with you.
I don’t think we’re in a position to quibble at this point. Just so long as our people are marrying white and having kids at all is ahead of the game for us. Just so long as they are not changing their gender or marrying odd mystery meat is a win.
I can’t agree. As for girls in college, I just look at the statistics. University education for women is correlated with childlessness, loneliness, depression, diagnoses of mental illness, psychiatric drug prescriptions, and I think alcoholism too. And if they navigate all that they’ll probably graduate deep in debt, and expecting a career. Once they go into a career their chance of marrying and having children drops further.
Even for boys, unless they have some particular talent they should probably avoid university. Back when university students had an average IQ of 130, our universities turned out great men, but when the average student IQ is a mere 100, the universities must be dumbed down a great deal.
A woman’s “desire to find the best man she can” is a problem. The simple fact is that only one woman can marry the best man, and generally there is stiff competition for the best men, and if she holds out for the few best men – as opposed to taking one of the many good men – she’s likely to waste her fertile years and ironically end up setting for less than she could have gotten in her prime, or worse, end up alone. Women’s standards have become ridiculously inflated, where you can often calculate that their stated minimum requirements rule out over 99% of men. That might be okay if they were in the top 1% of women themselves, but typically they are not. It makes no sense for a woman at the 60th percentile of attractiveness to be holding out for a man at the 99th percentile.
Surveys consistently show that while men hardly care at all how much money their wife makes, the great majority of women demand men who make significantly more than they do, and the more money women make, the greater the effect becomes! Rationally, a woman who makes a lot of money can afford to choose a man based on other criteria, but that’s not how it works, so by going to university and starting a career, women only tend to raise their financial standards higher and higher. When you add in the pressure to delay childbirth during the career-building stage, it’s disastrous for marriage and fertility rates.
Sociologists tell us that the #1 way to lower fertility is to educate women and get them into the workplace. (Typically they’re talking about getting high-fertility countries under control.) The second best way to lower fertility seems to be delaying the age of first childbirth. Waiting until 30 to get married (which most women will interpret as ‘start looking for a husband’) consigns a woman to having few children at best.
But if those are the best ways to lower a nation’s fertility, then I can only assume that the best way to raise a nation’s fertility is to do the opposite: get women out the workplace and out of universities, and tell them to get married in their early-to-mid 20s at the latest.
But I do support women being able to have careers – after they raise a couple children. (I expect, though, that once they do that, going out and working will seem much less attractive by comparison.)
Even if marrying early makes it more likely to divorce, it’s better to have healthy fertility and a divorce problem than a death spiral of low fertility. (And despite women marrying later and later, divorce rates are only increasing. Our ancestors married young and rarely divorced, so it is possible. One solution is simply making divorce harder by reversing no-fault divorce policies.)
Great conversation, as always. Thank you, gentlemen. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book, and the second just came in the mail the other day. Mr. Quinn is a fantastic example to follow, for all our men and women interested in writing fiction. We need to be writing stories!
And we don’t need our literature to have an overt message (although of course I’m not against this). The spirit of our people comes through. Today, many white women who are basically apolitical still read Jane Austen, the Brontes, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, etc, because those books were created by other white women. Though many would deny it in our current climate, there is a racial component to why they’re drawn to these authors. Their work describes a healthier, whiter society. The same goes for the continued appeal of old Hollywood films.
And it’s the same with our male writers. Rudyard Kipling and Jack London were not consciously thinking about being ourguys, all day every day. Much of their work is not explicitly about racial issues, but that kindred spirit still comes through and is still powerful to our men today.
A lot of anti-white messages in fiction don’t beat you over the head, but they’ve had a devastating effect for decades. But it goes both ways. And I’ll say again, Mr. Quinn does a good job of this; strive to write well and tell an engaging narrative, before anything else.
Comments are closed.
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.