The last of the European pagan traditions died out in the Middle Ages. People no longer believe that thunder is the result of Thor banging his hammer or that the Sun is the wheel of a cosmic chariot travelling across the daytime sky. But there is one pagan belief that has remained widespread to this day: the belief that the Full Moon makes people go crazy. (more…)
Tag: William Shakespeare
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4,669 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
Stefan George’s Dead Poets Society
The chapters about Stefan George (1868-1933) and those of his inner circle are the most interesting and even-handed of the book. Unlike Nietzsche, George was not primarily a philosopher, but a poet. His verse, however, was deeply influenced by French symbolism, as well as Nietzsche’s muscular ideas that emphasized will, vigor, and a profound dislike of both bourgeois conservatism and egalitarian progressivism. Höfele claims that “the native idiom” of George’s poetry doesn’t translate well. (more…)
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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
Andreas Höfele
No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016The hardest book reviews to write are those that deal with material that I have enjoyed, but cannot recommend. This is the case for Andreas Höfele’s No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Höfele teaches English literature at Munich University, and he has written other books and articles on Elizabethan and Victorian stagecraft, as well as six novels. (more…)
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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…)
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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…)
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“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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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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…)