1,416 words
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea remains imprinted upon the mind long after one has read it. It is one of Mishima’s shorter novels, but its tightly-woven narration heightens the intensity of the atmosphere, simulating a taut bowstring upon readying an arrow.
The novel takes place in Yokohama, Japan’s leading port city, during the American occupation, and unfolds mainly from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy by the name of Noboru Kuroda. (more…)
1,062 words
Darkest Hour is the second film released this year on Churchill and the latest in an ever-growing list of Churchill-related films and television shows (around two dozen over the past decade). Like its predecessors, Darkest Hour rehashes treacly warmed-over clichés about its subject and glosses over the sordid truth about this murderous psychopath.
Jews in the film industry love Churchill because he serves as a real-life example of the “superhero who saves the world from Nazi villains” trope (more…)
2,042 words
In 1950, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji) in Kyoto was burned to the ground by a young monk. The temple had been built in the fourteenth century and was the finest example of the architecture of the Muromachi period. Covered in gold leaf and crowned with a copper-gold phoenix, it projected an image of majesty and serene beauty. It had been designated a National Treasure in 1897 and was considered a national symbol in Japan. (more…)
3,285 words
The discipline of gymnastics has its roots in ancient Greek physical exercises, but the father of modern gymnastics is widely acknowledged to be the nineteenth-century German gymnastics educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Jahn is credited with the invention of number of gymnastic apparatuses (the vaulting horse, parallel bars, balance beam, and rings), the founding of the first open-air gymnasium in Germany, and the popularization of gymnastics as a competitive sport. (more…)
1,932 words
Jonathan Bowden
Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics
Edited by Greg Johnson
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2016
Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics is a highly original book that contains the transcripts of nine of Jonathan Bowden’s orations: one on vanguardism followed by profiles of Thomas Carlyle, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Charles Maurras, Martin Heidegger, Savitri Devi, Julius Evola, Yukio Mishima, and Maurice Cowling. (more…)
John Powell
John Powell
3,292 words
The history of American classical music has been shaped by the quest to define the nature of American identity. Lacking the rootedness and history of Europe, we have been forced to mold a new identity as a nation. Likewise American composers have been faced with the task of creating an authentically American sound.
A number of American composers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held the view that American music must necessarily reflect America’s racial and cultural inheritance. (more…)
1,728 words
Roy Morris, Jr.
Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013
Oscar Wilde arrived in America in January 1882 as a young man of 27. Over the course of the next eleven months he would travel 15,000 miles across the country, delivering a total of 140 lectures primarily on the English Renaissance, the Pre-Raphaelites, and the decorative arts. (more…)
Giuseppe Verdi in Golden Gate park, San Francisco
Giuseppe Verdi in Golden Gate park, San Francisco
1,651 words
George Martin
Verdi at the Golden Gate: Opera and San Francisco in the Gold Rush Years
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
George Martin is an independent historian who has written a number of books about the history of opera (including a great biography of Verdi). His account of how opera and in particular Verdi’s operas rose to prominence in San Francisco during the Gold Rush years describes a fascinating but not widely known episode in the history of the American West. (more…)