Tag: Tom Wolfe

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Architecture as a profession seems a very abstract concept in these technocratic times. Remote, intellectual, and almost esoteric. But unless you happen to be standing in a desert, or some Arctic tundra (and I’m amazed you can get a signal if you are), then architecture is all around you. You can see it everywhere you look. (more…)

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And they’ve all gone to look for America.
Simon & Garfunkel

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Those of us who are not American but have an interest in the state of Western culture have of necessity spent a great deal of time trying to understand Americans. (more…)

4,675 words

One of Tom Wolfe’s most celebrated books, A Man In Full, concerns the nature of masculinity. Of course, that remarkably brief take is rather like saying that Crime and Punishment is about the practical limits of utilitarianism. There’s quite a lot going on in it, which is to be expected since it’s a little longer than Dostoyevsky’s classic. Therefore, I won’t get too far into my usual blow-by-blow. I’ll proceed after the premise with a thematic analysis of this classic from 1998. (more…)

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There are many good reasons to oppose a Kamala presidency, chief of which are open borders, her support for disarming lawful citizens, and the fact that we can expect more anti-white diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies from the ultimate DEI hire. Further, foreign leaders would take her less seriously than even the average voter does. (more…)

Felicia & Leonard Bernstein with Black Panthers leader Donald L. Cox in January 1970. (Image source: GetArchive)

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They [the Black Panthers] exist as a continual barometer to measure ourselves against — both in terms of lessons that have been garnered as well as challenges in terms of where we can improve and deepen our analysis. — Ainslin Pulley, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Chicago

The place had sunk back into its wonted quiet. The blended murmur of the unceasing city, which during the party had been shut out and forgotten, now penetrated the walls of the great building and closed it once more upon these lives. (more…)

2,547 words

Tom Wolfe
The Painted Word
New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1975 (many editions since)

Long before he died, Tom Wolfe deeded his archives to the New York Public Library (NYPL). When he passed on in 2018, the NYPL put up a little “pop-up” exhibition in commemoration. It would have been bigger, but the Library had just done a slap-up interview and celebration with Wolfe a year and a half earlier, and had mounted another small display of Wolfeiana a year before that. (more…)

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Dwight Macdonald (ed. by John Summers)
Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
New York: New York Review Books, 2011

Long before Paul Fussell’s Class, or Jilly Cooper’s Class, or such dubious offerings of social criticism as The Preppy Handbook and The Yuppie Handbook, we had Dwight Macdonald’s Masscult and Midcult, a long essay originally written for the Partisan Review and published as a slight volume in 1961. More recently (2011) it was republished as a New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics title, bound together with an Introduction by Louis Menand and a collection of pointed and frothy Macdonald writings from the same era, originally published as Against the American Grain. (more…)

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In the early 1980s I was involved with the startup of a “humor magazine” that never went anywhere after its colorful-but-vague pilot issue. Apart from a couple of National Lampoon veterans, we were mostly post-collegiate types, full of quirky, off-the-wall ideas from our own days at colorful-but-vague college humor mags. It was around this time that one of my colleagues mentioned, as a bit of curious arcana, that he had heard that somewhere out there was a racist humor magazine. (more…)

Mau Mau leaders.

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Introduction

It can be instructive to look at the racial politics of 50 or 60 years ago, so here are three illustrative episodes. The first section below paraphrases six pages of Tom Wolfe’s essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (1970). The second summarizes Wikipedia’s article about the Black Power movement (1965-c. 1985). The third gives an account of Afrocentrism (1970 to date). Each shows us a precursor of Black Lives Matter. (more…)

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The Secret History, originally published in 1992, was Donna Tartt’s first novel, and I admit I approached it backwards, reading her novels The Little Friend and The Goldfinch before tackling this one, which will complete my reviews of her works on this site. It is a compelling and masterfully written tale. Tartt’s style is dense and beautifully descriptive, with passages such as:

My path took me beneath a row of apple trees, full-blown and luminous, shivering in the twilight like an avenue of pale umbrellas. The big white flakes drifted through them, dreamy and soft. (more…)

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Tyler Cowen & Daniel Gross
Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022

The identification and proper allocation of talent is essential to the success of any organization. Hiring the wrong people is costly, especially for groups with limited capital. It would thus behoove White Nationalists to become amateur talent-spotters and students of human behavior. The book in question is a solid starting point. (more…)

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Visiting an art gallery in Washington, DC long ago, I gazed at amorphous shapes for a good while. Some abstract art is good, speaking directly to the subconscious mind, but this stuff just wasn’t doing it for me. The only message I got out of it was a mild scolding from my superego about wasting a few bucks. However, one exhibit in the entire exhibit actually looked like something. That’s probably the reason why it’s the only item I remember. In fact, it was obvious that some effort went into making it, setting it apart from much of the other Entartete Kunst. (more…)

2,418 words

Tom Wolfe
The Bonfire of the Vanities
New York: Bantam, 1987

When the Left finally gets around to banning (or burning) classic novels, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities will likely be on the top of the list. Unlike Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bonfire’s great sin is not merely being linguistically taboo but substantively taboo as well. (more…)