Provocative idea found in an old Zero HP Lovecraft essay in The American Mind: What does the divine care for “new paradigms,” for gay portrayals of “the human condition?” Art which has Man as its object is folly, and this is the reason for its permeating ugliness; Man without God is ugly, and the only… Read More The True Audience of Art is God
Will not explain. Just kidding. I first read Brave New World while in college, and it remains both more plausible than 1984 and less terrifying. There are those who say that Brave New World should be more terrifying, precisely because it’s a seductive dystopia. Which, I get. But both of them are prophetic in their… Read More Aldous Huxley is Cool
A long essay, but worth your time, which dovetails nicely with other things I’ve written on the subject. Our Cranky Professor lays out three “approaches” to aesthetics/beauty: The Psychological Approach – In which one experiences beauty as an individuated response to the appearance of a thing. A Flower is Beautiful. The Rational Approach – An… Read More The Three Tiers of Aesthetics
An intriquing passage from On Art and Life, which nicely explains the aethetic rut that modern art has fallen into: …that great art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as of every other art, consists in saying new… Read More Notes on Ruskin: Modern Art is Anti-Art
Much of Ruskin’s On the Nature of Gothic involves a pre-Marxist critique of industrialization. I’m not sure if it qualifies as being From the Right, as I’m not certain of Ruskin’s politics, but it reads very Romantic, which is at least half a Reactionary movement. The old-school Romantics and Goths gazed back at pre-modern “natural”… Read More Notes on Ruskin: The Absurd Rule
I don’t know what caused Penguin to introduce a Great Ideas series, or by what criteria they determine what ideas are great. I do know that I read Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life, and I enjoyed the packaging as much as the philosophy (Stoicism is a useful ethos, but hard to expand upon. It’s… Read More Notes on Ruskin: The Geography of Gothic
In Ruskin’s On Art and Life, discussion of the features of Gothic archtecture lead to a passage nicely prophetic: From these facts, we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dead architecture; and of… Read More Brutalism’s Anti-Aesthetic.
My initial plan was to make changes to this site subtly, but visual issues with the theme required a new look, and when combined with the scale of the changes I’ve made on social media, that became more appropriate. So, in brief, let me relate what’s happening: My Tumblr blogs are deleted. Every Damn CD… Read More The Grand Deletion
I’m the sort of guy who likes minimalist covers. A single image, one or three colors, something striking, a bold font. I like seeing those kinds of books. I like buying them. One of the things that hold me off from a lot of Fantasy literature, especially the Pulp kind, is the genre of cover… Read More Cover Aesthetics
A thought about my most recent review: I don’t tend to like things unless they stand out from the herd. Call that elitism, call it snobbery; I don’t care. I can’t pretend to like things I don’t like. One thing I feel obligated to point out is that I detest snobbery. Snobbery is close-minded, passive… Read More Of Snobbery and Boredom
Content Blues 