Tag: Fenek Solère

1,746 words

“My favorite singer out of all the British girls that ever were.”

— Robert Plant

I first came across the name Sandy Denny on the liner notes of the classic Led Zeppelin IV. (more…)

1,278 words

A new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in quantity hitherto without example.

— Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (more…)

1,704 words

Claude Sarraute: “And what, in your opinion, is the tragic element of our epoch?”

Céline: “Stalingrad. There’s the catharsis for you. The fall of Stalingrad was the end of Europe. There’s a cataclysm. The epicenter was Stalingrad. After that you can say white civilization was finished, really washed up.” (more…)

3,323 words

Owen Barfield
History in English Words
New York: Doubleday & Company, 1926

In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty.

— Owen Barfield (more…)

826 words

Even on the waves there is fighting
Where fish and flesh are woven into sea
One stabs the lance while in the army
Another throws it into the ocean

— “Reise Reise” (2004) (more…)

909 words

“Sure,” they say, “he flirted with far-right politics when he played in Peste Noire, but he’s changed.”

— Mainstream fans defending Neige’s musical heritage

French band Alcest is one of the premier exponents of the blackgaze scene. (more…)

2,295 words

“Stern and unbending Toryism has never paid dividends to the Conservative Party, nor in practice when in office has the party ever taken that line.”

 — Robert Norman William Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Major (2011) (more…)

375 words

“You fight for your own country, and your own group, and your own culture, and your own civilization, at your own level, and in your own way. And when someone says apologize for this or for that, you say: No. I regret nothing!”

— Jonathan Bowden (Credo) (more…)

Praça Do Comércio

2,483 words

“John of Gaunt’s speech having shown that patriotic verse can be poetry of a high order, Pessoa in Mensagem showed this still to be true. Most of the poems also go beyond patriotism: those in which King Sebastian figures are metaphors for the religious quest, and those about the ordeals of the seafarers dramatize the poet’s inner perseverance.”

— Jonathan Griffin (Introduction to Mensagem, 2007) (more…)

1,686 words

“The James Dean of French Fascism.”– Alice Kaplan, author of The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2001)

Such a description of the puny, bespectacled, and boyish-looking poet — especially coming from the daughter of a Nuremberg prosecutor — seems to be either thinly barbed facetiousness or malignant irony. (more…)

2,560 words

“But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”
–  Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)

The Coronavirus pandemic has rather put me in mind of Albert Camus’s classic allegorical book about the pestilence that struck the “ugly and smug little port town” of his native Oran in the 1940s. The plague is a metaphor that Camus rather unsubtly intended to represent the growth of National Socialism (more…)

966 words

“What is in store for my children tomorrow?”
— Steiner, from the movie La Dolce Vita (1961)

I was staying in Neive, a tiny red-roofed Piedmont village caught in a time-warp, where the traditions and ingrained habits of centuries, like the rolling vine-clad hills, remain unchanged. (more…)