A while back I made a vow to ignore the pulsating mediocrity of our degenerate film industry and embrace film classicism. This hasn’t exactly panned out how I envisioned it, as there’s only so much scratch you can throw around for Criterion Blu-Rays when you have mouths to feed. However, a flash sale enabled me… Read More Old Favorites: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood
It’s the ending, really. I did not see that ending coming. I should have: it’s on theme. This wasn’t going to be an upbeat ending. That’s not what DT does. Still, though. It was a bit like a mallet to the face. I cannot recommend this book to anyone who has a sunny, cheerful worldview.… Read More Finally, Some Good News: A Brutal Destruction of the Modern Age by Delicious Tacos
More Properly, he was Droll, i.e. curious or unusual in a way that provokes dry amusement. I think ol ‘Honore invented the style of feigned ironic detachment in order to draw a laugh. In the years that followed, he delivered up countless towns in Asia and in Africa to sack, fell upon the miscreants without… Read More Balzac Was Funny
The best part of doing this podcast is the way the scrum of conversation keeps bringing up new ideas. Episode 5 gave us the General Theory of Creative Bloat (successful franchise = abandonment of editorial control), which gets mentioned again here. But this time we came up with what I call the Pie Theory of… Read More Shallow & Pedantic 7: A Fistful of Samurai Pies
A very long essay on Medium.com by Gerald Crayon, describing how the pretentious rhetoric of the Academy, their overheated logorrhea (which differs from Corpo-Babble only that it is more polysyllabic), serves to empty the culture of its meaning. The logic goes like this: Academic Jargon is deliberately obfuscatory, in order to gatekeep the positions. Crayon… Read More Storming Mottes & Baileys
Back when I first conceived The Meditations of Caius Caligulia, I had a list of books I wanted to read to give me inspiration and background. Writers have to be readers, and I had the broad strokes of what I wanted to do, without the details. Details are key. So I needed to read, at… Read More Ovid, Virgil, and Lucretius Walk Into a Palace…
I have a nicely-bound, Heritage Library edition of John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid by Virgil. I’m working my way through it, or at least the first 4 books of it, as research for the deep edit that’s going into The Meditations of Caius Caligulia before I publish it. It also makes for a fun… Read More Enough Was Said T’inspire a Better Mind – On Reading The Aeneid
Twitter impresario Mencius Moldbugman stomps on the Last Film in Theaters with both feet. Apparently Nolan has been utterly corrupted by his early Hollywood success and is now incapable of directing something better than mediocre (which is kind of the vibe I got from Dunkirk). Apparently Tenet is two hours of rampaging nonsense. I don’t… Read More “Tenet” is Bad, “Sound & Fury” is Good
The self-described “horrorist” Zero HP Lovecraft, aka The Only Man On Twitter Worth Reading, submits to a blog interview. He has much to say on many topics, including “wokenes” and the “school of resentment”, post-modernism, “desire machines” and his own work, and a hose of others. I invite you to read it in full, but… Read More Literature in the Age of Zero HP Lovecraft
Running through The Birth of Tragedy is rewarding so long as you recognize that Friedrich Wilhelm was not primarly speaking to you. Rather, like a Cassandra howling at the walls, he was denouncing the folly of his own age, which we, not living in or even properly remembering Wilhelmine Germany, have no reference point to… Read More The End is Never The End: Nietzsche and the Temptation to Prophesy
Content Blues 