Tag: Thomas Mann

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

The Stories

But the stories! What of the stories themselves? Rather than going over the inevitable Death in Venice, the minor “Louisey,”[1] or the pseudo-story (“A Day in the Life of Hanno Buddenbrook,” which is actually an arrangement of self-contained chapters from Buddenbrooks that Searls has perhaps cobbled together in hopes of enticing the sulky reader into tackling the Big Book), I want to take a look at the remaining two stories, one of which contains some surprisingly relevant bits about The Way We Live Now, and the other gives us a kind of con-man’s guide to Positive Thinking. (more…)

Thomas Mann: breakthrough Black [sic] author?

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories
Translated and with an introduction by Damion Searls
New York: Liveright, 2023

“It is really curious that a life of playing games and dreaming can — if only you go on with it long enough — lead to your being treated like royalty.” — Thomas Mann, author of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

“What a royal gift the imagination is, and what pleasure it affords us!” — Felix Krull, confidence man (more…)

Jean Raoux, Pygmalion Adoring His Statue, 1717

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Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971) are both concerned with love and the ideal. If you love cinema, you will love these films, which I would rank among the greatest ever made. They can teach us a lot about love, idealism, art, and different sorts of desire. Be advised that there are a great many spoilers ahead.

Vertigo is the story of John “Scottie” Ferguson (played by James Stewart), a San Francisco policeman who retires from the force after a deadly rooftop chase leaves him with severe acrophobia (fear of heights). (more…)

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Host Greg Johnson was joined by learned Counter-Currents writers Stephen Paul Foster, Mark Gullick, James J. O’Meara, and Kathryn S. on the last installment of Counter-Currents Radio to share their lists of five essential books every educated person needs to read — plus, of course, answer YOUR QUESTIONS — and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:05:00 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (more…)

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The sounds are strange to the Western ear, but undeniably, humanly compelling — a fact borne out by the hundreds of people who flock to Seattle from far flung locales just to hear these instruments.[1] (more…)

Christopher Ventris as Palestrina in the 2009 Bavarian State Opera production of the opera.

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Hans Pfitzner
Palestrina
Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, conducted by Rafael Kubelík
Deutsche Grammophon, 1989

Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina is one of the unsung masterpieces of twentieth-century opera. (more…)

Hermann Hesse with Thomas Mann and Jakob Wassermann in the Swiss Alps, 1931.

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Here is where Hesse meets up with Evola: the two post-First World War writers share a number of themes, though what Evola would have called their “personal equation” gave them decidedly different interpretations. Demian, for example, treats of initiation, paganism, esoteric knowledge, and construction of elites, in ways comparable to Evola’s personal investigations with the UR group;[1] but apart from Hesse’s overall Jungian lens, his war-derived pacifism would have disgusted Evola. And his Buddha “is certainly not the one depicted by Hermann Hesse in his novel [Siddhartha].” (more…)

Hermann Hesse with Miguel Serrano.

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

“It is fortunate you are not a historian,” Jacobus commented. “You tend to let your own imagination run away with you.”[1]

“Unfortunately, the deep writer and poet Hermann Hesse was falsified and vulgarized by a world in decline. He needs to be re-read today by the same eyes that were once shaken by his mystery.”[2] (more…)

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A. E. Ellis (Derek Lindsay)
The Rack (Restored Edition)
Introduction by Alan Wall
Ashgrove Publishing Ltd, 2016

Constant Readers will no doubt recall my enthusiastic review of Valancourt’s re-issue of this somewhat forgotten masterpiece of midcentury British fiction.[1] There I concluded that

(more…)

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Ludwig Klages
The Biocentric Worldview: Selected Essays and Poems of Ludwig Klages
Translated and introduced by Joseph Pryce
London: Arktos, 2013

Ludwig Klages
Cosmogonic Reflections: Selected Aphorisms from Ludwig Klages
Translated and introduced by Joseph Pryce
London: Arktos, 2015  (more…)

Michael Pacher, The Devil showing St. Augustine the Book of Vices, ca. 1480

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Alan Judd
The Devil’s Own Work
London: HarperCollins, 1991
New York: Knopf, 1994
Richmond, Va.: Valancourt, 2015; with an Introduction by Owen King and an Afterword by Alan Judd

Oh boy, another weird novella unearthed and republished by the folks at Valancourt![1]

Well, not really unearthed, as The Devil’s Own Work is a 1991 novella by Alan Judd which won the Guardian Fiction Award. (more…)

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Alfred Rosenberg
Memoirs
Ostara Publications, 2015

According to Joseph Kingsbury-Smith, who covered the executions for the International News Service, Rosenberg was the only condemned man who, when asked at the gallows if he had any last statement to make, replied with only one word: “No.”

If only he had kept his mouth shut in the first place! (more…)

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A. E. Ellis (Derek Lindsay)
The Rack
London: Heinemann, 1958; Richmond, Va.: Valancourt, 2014 (with a new introduction by Andrew Sinclair)

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer. — King Lear, 5.3.314

(more…)