2,730 words
I know a kind person who has achieved a lot. We first met 40 years ago, although for many years we were not in touch. Then we remade contact, and now I don’t think we’re friends anymore. He found my political incorrectness hard to bear. (more…)
2,353 words
Philippa Jayne Langley (Sally Hawkins) is an office frump in Edinburgh — and a depressed one. She is passed over for promotion because she isn’t charming enough, which is true. She dresses like she gets her clothes from a bad aunt’s closet, her hair is clipped, and her doleful eyes suggest a mousy wife whose marriage to John (Steve Coogan) is in freefall. Her two sons are obsessed with video games, and her husband openly tells Philippa that he has a mistress. This is not done out of bitterness; for all their marriage’s failings, John and Philippa are honest and rational. They may not be happy, but they are decent in the old English way. (more…)
Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury
Unknown artist and date, The Pilgrimage to Canterbury
4,059 words
Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)
There’s an old story within a story told by a pilgrim knight about ancient Thebes and two Theban cousins named Arcite and Palamon.[1] According to everyone who knew them, no two warriors were more perfect. (more…)
1,306 words
“I have often thought it might be amusing to write a humorous essay on how to recognise the Dark Ages when you are in them.” — Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943)
If personal bankruptcy happens, as they say, slowly and then all at once — is it not unreasonable to expect that poverty of spirit, of community, of nation, and of civilization should follow a similar pattern? (more…)
2,182 words
Hollywood gave Shakespeare fans a Christmas present: a new version of one of the Bard’s most iconic and gripping tragedies. Although the plandemic delayed production by four months or so, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth was released on Apple+ on December 25. According to IMDB, it should hit the theaters on January 14. Variety reported that a sneak preview in September was a hit at the New York Film Festival, which had just cautiously reopened: (more…)
Cracker wannabe Hasan Piker.
Cracker wannabe Hasan Piker.
2,239 words
In a world where the biggest racial slur is “white,” it seems fruitless to argue whether “cracker” is also a racial slur, since no one who isn’t a liar would deny that it’s a contemptuous term aimed exclusively at white people. Anything white is bad, so “cracker” is even worse.
Then again, we also live in a world that’s one giant gas chamber of gaslighting, where whites not only are the sole race capable of racism since they alone hold institutional power — a power so indomitable that they can hardly even mention being comfortable that they’re white without having their lives destroyed — (more…)
Richard II, the English monarch whose missteps inaugurated the decline of respect for royal authority in Britain.
Richard II, the English monarch whose missteps inaugurated the decline of respect for royal authority in Britain.
2,247 words
Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)
A “Cony Struggling in the Net”:[1] The Plantagenets vs. the Plantagenets
Legendary for its blizzards and blood, the fifteenth-century English conflict known as the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) was poetic in name and savage in fighting. Medieval warfare was the most physically brutal form of battle Westerners in their long history have ever fought: huge, murderous fistfights of chaos and close combat in which few were afforded a “clean” death. (more…)
Kay Nielsen draft of a shipwreck, ca. 1940
Kay Nielsen draft of a shipwreck, ca. 1940
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…)
John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889.
John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889.
1,766 words
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! (more…)
1,941 words
“To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies – and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? (more…)
5,930 words
So Stephen Spielberg is remaking West Side Story.
Let me guess, Stephen. You believe that in the era of Trump, this classic tale of nativists versus immigrants — and about how “we should all just get along because we really aren’t all that different when you really think about it” — is more relevant than ever. Did I guess right, Stephen? Did I?
