Übersetzt von Deep Roots
English original here
Ich möchte den Fußspuren von Jonathan Bowden folgen und Rasse und Ethnizität im Kontext der Marvel-Comics diskutieren. Read more …
Übersetzt von Deep Roots
English original here
Ich möchte den Fußspuren von Jonathan Bowden folgen und Rasse und Ethnizität im Kontext der Marvel-Comics diskutieren. Read more …
One of the more interesting things about the pulp star Doc Savage, the man of bronze, is that he carried out operations on the brains of criminals in order to correct them. These exercises in popular culture — the 181 pulp novels written by Lester Dent — are thus one of the most basic advocates for eugenics throughout the 1930s and ’40s. Read more …
German translation here
I’d like to follow in the footsteps of Jonathan Bowden and discuss race and ethnicity in the context of Marvel comics. I used to be a collector, and, ironically enough, share with Bowden an appreciation of the Zukula’s daughter story. There are some who believe that this topic is merely “juvenile drivel,” but I disagree. Read more …
Wyndham Lewis’ novel Tarr (an anagram of both “art” and “rat”) appeared first in 1915 as the Great War was raging, and it remains one of the great exercises in hard-boiled psychology. Most behaviorist prose tends to be shunted aside into genre fiction such as adventure and perhaps the noir detective novel. Read more …
1,127 words
Francis Pollini’s Night was published by Olympia Press around fifty years ago and deals with the Korean War, but it is still relevant for all that. It concerns the Communist brain-washing techniques used by the Maoist Chinese forces on American prisoners of war during that conflict. These were based on various behaviorist ideas which were very much in the air at that time and were used extensively by the KGB, CIA , MI6, the French secret services, and other parallel or adjacent bodies. Read more …
970 words
Greek tragedy is all but forgotten in mainstream culture, but there is a very good reason for looking at it again with fresh eyes. The reasons for this are manifold, but they basically have to do with anti-materialism and the culture of compression. To put it bluntly, reading Greek tragedy can give literally anyone a crash course in Western civilization which is short, pithy, and terribly apt.
Let’s take — for purposes of illustration — the first part of the Oresteia by Aeschylus, which concentrates on Agamemnon’s murder by his wife Clytemnestra. Read more …
935 words
For a brief period in the late 1990s there was an attempt to demonize T. S. Eliot as an anti-Semite. This opinion was most ably canvassed by Anthony Julius’ T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, but the attempt failed, and Eliot’s reputation as a poet now stands even higher than ever.
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s most controversial book was the collection of essays drawn from a series of lectures he gave in 1934 called After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. Read more …
Wyndham Lewis
The Apes of God
The Apes of God happens to be one of the most devastating satires to be published in the English language since the days of Dryden and Pope. It appeared in a Private Press edition (prior to general release), and at over 600 pages it was the size of your average London telephone directory. Read more …
The Incredible Hulk is a Marvel comic which has been running for nigh on fifty years in a relatively unchanged format. In this review I will concentrate on liberal and illiberal or authoritarian and libertarian strands which co-exist within it. Most people are dimly aware (if only from Hollywood’s version) of Doctor Bruce Banner’s transformation into a green behemoth and fighting machine as a result of his exposure to gamma radiation from an atomic bomb test. Read more …
Judge Dredd is the publishing phenomenon of British comics during the last thirty years, if not more. Nearly all of the strips have been written by John Wagner under his own name and a variety of aliases, while a great number of artists have worked on the sequences. Read more …
1,117 words
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the enfant terrible of modern or post-war German cinema, was born in 1935 of vaguely upper class stock. His father owned landed estates in Eastern Germany before the war and his son lived in Rostock until 1945. Read more …
1,074 words
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is probably the most important political novel of the twentieth century, but the Trotskyite influence on it is under-appreciated. The entire thesis about the Party’s totalitarianism is a subtle mixture of libertarian and Marxist contra Marxism ideas. One of the points which is rarely made is how the party machine doubles for fascism in Orwell’s mind Read more …
862 words
Sarban was the Persian pseudonym of John William Wall (1910–1989), a relatively obscure British diplomat in the Middle East, who wrote five volumes of Gothic stories, short novels, plays, and the like. These were gathered together in the books Ringstones (1951), The Sound of his Horn
(1952), The Doll Maker
(1953), The Sacrifice
(2002), and Discovery of Heretics
(2010). Wall wrote relatively little and was a perfectionist who never expected publication. Our main point of departure will be The Sound of his Horn. Read more …
Few films have been pilloried quite as much as Mel Gibson’s Passion, yet when I last checked it was one of the ten most financially successful films of all time. Read more …