How to Philosophise with a Hammer

Posted on July 8, 2018 by leslie

Charles Krauthammer

How to Philosophise with a Hammer

By Ilana Mercer

The late Charles Krauthammer was right about the rules of good writing. The use of the first-person pronoun in opinion writing is a cardinal sin. To get a sense of how bad someone’s writing is, count the number of times that he or she deploys the Imperial “I” on the page. Krauthammer considered a single “I” in a piece to be a failure.

Only use “I” when the passive-form alternative is too clumsy. Or, when the writer herself has earned the right to, because of her relevance to the story. (The story itself, naturally, should have relevance.) The second is my excuse here.

As a legal immigrant to the U.S., now an American citizen, I have a right to insert myself into the noisy narrative. As a legal immigrant who was separated from her daughter, herself a legal immigrant, the onus is on me to share a scurrilous story that is part of a pattern. Continue reading →

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Killing Time

Posted on July 5, 2018 by leslie

Edvard Munch, Between the Clock and the Bed

Killing Time

Bill Hartley, on the weird world of the “Shut In”

Travelling at 49 mph on the bypass (it’s always 49 mph), the Skoda Yeti is heading for the supermarket. This is the vehicle of choice for a certain type of retiree. Squeezing out the maximum fuel economy irrespective of road conditions is a clue to the identity of the driver. Such people reportedly refuse to observe the wide turning circle of an HGV and will squeeze their car through an ever narrowing gap. The lorry driver then has to apply the brakes mid turn and is sometimes left wondering if his 38 tons was even noticed.

Later, Mr Retiree and his wife can be seen in the supermarket, forensically studying the sell by labels on various products, oblivious to the presence of other shoppers. This weekly expedition is likely to be one of the few occasions when the couple will routinely venture further than the local newsagent. Welcome to the world of the Shut In.

The term was originally coined in the US to describe persons who due to illness or gross obesity were confined to their homes. It is, however, as appropriate a description for a section of the British population and where it may ultimately lead isn’t edifying. Continue reading →

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Endorsing the Donald’s Creative Destruction

Posted on July 3, 2018 by leslie

Endorsing the Donald’s Creative Destruction

by Ilana Mercer

Big Media, the policy veterans and the chancelleries across Europe and Britain are constantly complaining: Donald Trump has had the temerity to defy their international order, summit—and seek peace—with their enemies, and mess with the multilateral maze they call agreements. He even declared, early in June, that the US would be far better off if it negotiated bilateral trade agreements.

Or, in Trump speak, “country-on-country agreements.”

But what do an entrenched punditocracy, a self-anointed, meritless intelligentsia (which is not very intelligent and draws its financial sustenance from the political spoils system), oleaginous politicians, slick media and big money care? They’ve all worked in tandem to advance a grand government—national and transnational—that aggrandizes its constituent elements, while diminishing those it’s supposed to serve. Continue reading →

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Saving America

Posted on June 27, 2018 by leslie

Top Vinyl Films

Saving America

By Ilana Mercer

By now, most Americans, for or against, get the idea. All an individual or family need do to live in America, and off the avails of the American taxpayer, is to arrive at an approved port of entry and “lodge a legal claim to stay.”

That’s it.

The same understanding animates an entire, parasitical industry that has arisen to coach the claimants in their claims-making.

The refugee and illegal-migrant racket sprung-up on the backs of the American people is Third World cronyism at its best. “The Trump administration plans to pay a Texas nonprofit nearly half a billion dollars, this year, to care for immigrant children who were detained crossing the U.S. border illegally, reports Bloomberg.”

Did you vote for that?

Brazen border-crossers “rarely hide from border agents,” for they know the rules of the game are that there aren’t any rules. Not for them, not for the lawless.

The law-abiding pay. Continue reading →

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Violence in a Civilised Society (1)

Posted on June 24, 2018 by leslie

Violence in a Civilised Society (1)

Part one of a two part essay, by Mark Wegierski

Organized social violence is only one of a panoply of coercive controls which society uses to “keep people in line.” A distinction may be drawn here between the use of coercive instrumentalities mainly for the maintenance of civil order, as in some earlier forms of liberal democracy, and their employment for the promotion of a given “world‑outlook.”

In classical liberalism, coercive instrumentalities are most often used for the sake of the maintenance of civil order and this is usually their sole “legitimate” justification. Even today, in many liberal democratic societies, it is usually the normative instrumentalities which are used to “induct” people into various shades of liberalism (most especially through the mass-media, and the mass-education of the young). However, one increasingly sees in supposedly liberal democratic societies that coercive instrumentalities are being used against such things as “hate speech”. The IRS scandal during the Obama administration in the United States is another example of coercive instrumentalities used against dissenters. And, more recently, the “surveillance society” has been instantiated more concretely that at any point in American history. Continue reading →

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Statius’ Silvae

Posted on June 19, 2018 by leslie

Statius, Musée des Augustins

Statius’ Silvae

Specifics regarding the life of Publius Papinius Statius (c.45 AD-96 AD) are for the most part derived from material in the Silvae. Scholars believe that Statius’ biography is recoverable. Perhaps, but most scholarly conclusions are of the speculative kind. The questions surrounding his date of birth and death have not resulted in secure answers. The birth dates vary widely over a decade long period. All statements that allege that ‘he probably did this or probably did that’ reveal little more than an author’s agreement or disagreement with certain passages or with a historian’s ingenuity with details: only in rare cases do the learned judgments bring us closer to the truth.

Indeed, the bare bones facts are these: he was born of Italian stock, educated well in Greek and Latin, won a number of prizes for his poetry, even married a widow with children, although he himself remained childless. Much else is debatable. His present fame now is attended by specific volumes of poetry yet extant: Thebaid, an epic poem based on the classic Seven against Thebes, another unfinished epic entitled Achilleid, and his Silvae, a five book series of verse compositions. Continue reading →

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The Party’s Over

Posted on June 16, 2018 by leslie

The Mexican-American Barrier

The Party’s Over

by Ilana Mercer

No good deed goes unpunished. Jeff Sessions wants to restore to America the “sound principles of asylum” and long-standing tenets of immigration law, abandoned by American leaders over the decades.

That makes the attorney general a Hitler, to use liberal argumentation. Condemned for all eternity.

As the left sees it, if America isn’t going to police the world; it must at least provide shelter to all people from unpoliced parts of the world. Continue reading →

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Aldeburgh Festival 2018

Posted on June 15, 2018 by leslie

The Mule Track, Paul Nash

Aldeburgh Festival 2018

Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk, concert given on Friday 8th June, reviewed by TONY COOPER

The ongoing theme in this year’s Aldeburgh Festival (the 71st) focuses on Britten and America reflecting the year of 1948 when the festival laid down its roots not only enriching the cultural life of Suffolk and its environs but the country as a whole.

Britten and Bernstein (the centenary of the latter’s birth falls this year) were both towering figures in the world of music working not just as composers, pianists and conductors but also as educators at a time when education was in its infancy in the creative world.

Both men were celebrated and revered and here their music can be heard side by side. Many connections resonate across this festival including the likes of Peter Grimes, W H Auden, the Revd Walter Hussey and their bosom friend, Aaron Copland, whom, incidentally, Britten met for the first time at the 1938 ISCM Festival in London where El Salón México and Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge were played at the same concert. Continue reading →

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What’s in a Name?

Posted on June 12, 2018 by leslie

Lohengrin, by Ferdinand Leeke

What’s in a Name?

Lohengrin, Romantic opera in three acts, music and libretto by Richard Wagner, directed by David Alden, orchestra of the Royal Opera House conducted by Andris Nelsons, Royal Opera, Thursday 7th June 2018, reviewed by LESLIE JONES

In expressionism, the presentation of the world is distorted for emotional effect. The buildings of the tiered sets that depict Antwerp, in director David Alden’s new production of Lohengrin, accordingly, are lopsided, even vertiginous, reminiscent of a recent staging of Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. The military costumes of the crowd, generally grey and drab, evoke the turbulent Europe of the post 1918 era. But also the Third Reich of the 1940’s, for in Act 1, an earlier German führer, Heinrich der Vogler (Georg Zeppenfeld), is recruiting troops to resist an invasion from the east. The Nazi/fascist sub-text is unmissable. As critic Richard Morrison noted in The Sunday Times, Mussolini once staged Lohengrin with 10,000 singers on a 300 foot wide stage. Continue reading →

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Antiquity Matters

Posted on June 10, 2018 by leslie

Achilles fighting against Memnon, Leiden Rijksmuseum

Antiquity Matters

Antiquity Matters, Frederic Raphael, Yale University Press, 2017, £20, 376 pp., $26.00, reviewed by STODDARD MARTIN

At first glance, this is a work of almost bewildering erudition. Reminded of Roberto Calasso’s Cadmus and Harmony, one prepares to sit back and enjoy a flow of superior knowledge, relinquishing desire for too many sign-posts and reposing faith in the pilot to steer the bark he sets us in towards a sound destination. Shoals and rapids will be crossed, and you may have to hang on. Indeed, at some moments, as in a riverine disaster film, survival may oblige you to bail out the bottom and caulk holes in the planks.        

Frederic Raphael is an author who has penned numerous screenplays, novels, studies of gestural romantics – Byron, for example, to whom he alludes, as befits what is in part a paean to Greece. Raphael came of age in an era when the fictive odyssey of James Joyce was seen as a ne plus ultra of the Word. Now ostensibly nearing his end – he is 87 – he does not have the time or urge to write for pedestrian intellects. Men of wit are his chosen: notably those trained in the classics, or at least familiar with them. A dying breed these days, they were alive and well when Wittgenstein impressed him at Cambridge; and nostalgia for the back and forth of ephebes and cognoscenti speaks through his remarkable book.

Continue reading →

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