When I was a boy my parents would take me to the cinema. (That’s the Proustian opener out of the way). It would be either my father or my mother but never both, as I had brothers five years younger than me, identical twins, and my parents would take turns looking after them (and they were a handful) while the other one took me to see a movie. I remember seeing Walter Matthau in the movie Prisoner of Second Avenue with my dad, and both my mother and I being scared out of our wits seeing Carrie. I also remember classic Disney films. (more…)
Tag: literature
-
In 1962, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine was published and immediately praised. One critic compared it to To Kill a Mockingbird, which had been published in 1960. Like Harper Lee’s book, The Moonflower Vine was the only work of its author. The novel was loved, revered, then went out of print. To Kill a Mockingbird, as we all know, is probably taught more in schools than the Bible and, to the progressive set, it is a kind of Bible.
-
1,910 words
Knut Hamsun’s 1917 classic Growth of the Soil seems to defy the fundamental conflicts found in most fiction. It is a mystifying novel. One can pigeonhole it as modern with its use of stream of consciousness, flashbacks, and other literary techniques. It’s also considered part of a literary movement called Norwegian New Realism, which was highly influential beyond Norway in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Most interesting for dissidents, the novel reflects the near mystical connection Man has with the soil, consecrated through hard work and family. (more…)
-
8,057 words
Prologue: The Styx
The half-light of an autumn evening reflected off the Old River and into the face of the boatman. Over and under each subtle ripple and eddy, his eyes darted here to there so quickly that his gaze seemed fixed. As if he took in the whole broad sweep of the Thames with a hungry look-out. Next to him, and charged with steering the dinghy, stooped a young girl, his daughter. She “watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But in the intensity of her look, there was a touch of . . . horror.” (more…)
-
170 words
William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, and politician, was born on this day in 1865. One of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century, Yeats’ life and work straddle the great divide between Romanticism and Modernism. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
In life and in art, Yeats rejected modern rationalism, materialism, and egalitarianism. He saw them as coarsening and brutalizing.
-
6,074 words
It was a dark and soon-to-be stormy night on the Gulf Coast some years ago, when my other half and I sat on our porch chairs, gazing toward the sea. He held a cigarette — a bad (thankfully short-lived) habit he’d picked up during his year-long research sabbatical in Valladolid; paired with his fedora, I’m sure he knew that it lent him a (pretentious) air reminiscent of interwar Europe (more…)
-
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French novelist, essayist, and physician Louis-Ferdinand-Auguste Destouches, who was born on this day in 1894. Céline is one of the giants of 20th-century literature. And, like Ezra Pound and so many other great writers of the last century, he was an open and unapologetic racial nationalist. For more on Céline, see the following works on this website: (more…)
-
8,839 words
On April 19, Counter-Currents instituted a paywall for articles and podcasts that will be made freely available 30 days later. This article by Kathryn S. was one of the first items to go behind the paywall, and is now one of the first items to be released to everyone else. More information about how to get behind the paywall can be found below. (more…)
-
7,655 words
The Sphinx-riddle. Solve it, or be torn to bits, is the decree.
— D. H. Lawrence
A question, readers: what is the most profound of all human activities? With the previous sentence, I’ve already provided the answer, for it is the question itself — the thing that drives all exploration and philosophy. How can philosophy (or any knowledge) exist without first the riddle, the profound need for the answer? (more…)
-
3,233 words
A thought has been lurking in the back of my mind for some time.
In terms of fiction, and even outside it (with the notable exception of H. P. Lovecraft), were certain authors reflexively embraced as soul mates by white conservatives and racialists, in reality . . . anti-white — out of “principle,” opportunism, or just unconsciously? (more…)
-
8,691 words
This past winter I lost my last grandparent — the most stubborn one, still to the end a strict English schoolteacher after having long since retired from the profession in the 1970s. She suffered through the desegregation years while working at Marshall High and was never dishonest about the experience. She possessed that combination of Southern decorum and irascible (and accurate) bluntness, which gave her the ability to reduce anyone, including 250-pound, six-foot-three black football players, to tears. (more…)
-
The events of January 6 have been called an insurrection, a riot, an assault on democracy — the epitome of white supremacy, revolution, anarchy, elements of a coup d’etat.
One word they haven’t been called is rabble, which is almost a term of honor, and honorable terms aren’t what the state or its servitors want passed on. Honor, you say? Rabble? (more…)
-
7,971 words
Twentieth Century Studios is threatening to release a remake of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937). And if Kenneth Branaugh’s previous outing as the Hercule Poirot character in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express was anything to go by, best to avoid it. (more…)