Monthly Archives: January 2020

a brief personal note

Posted on by
Reply

Apologies for not posting. I’ve been overwhelmed with work, not really that much but it exhausts me inordinately, so that I am often bereft of sense and will, the motion of the spirit stilled in me.

When I was younger, and toiled very grimly away in office hell, I nonetheless wrote a great deal both at work and in the evenings. My work now is intellectual; and sufficiently frustrating and fear-braced to drain me of ideas and language.

My Kindle broke last week and so I have more or less lost all the notes I took of my reading. In any case, I rarely read these days. I awake late, get slowly ready, then work until late evening, returning home at night. I am paid barely enough to survive.

I shall attempt to post more often but my head is often empty.

 

book report: The Hounds of the Morrigan

Posted on by
Reply

Pat O’Shea’s children’s classic, The Hounds of the Morrigan, published in 1985 after 13 years of writing and presumably rewriting and editing and authorial hardship. I read it a few times in my teenage years and revisited it over Christmas, to my benefit.

It’s a very good if not perfect or great work. Although its publication date coincides with the glut of´80s D & D Fantasy novels, it’s a very different beast: it could have been written in the 1950s, where it is set, in a barely-modern Ireland suffused with mystery and superstition and Gaelic divinities. The story is episodic and at times unsatisfying, as two Irish children basically hop from one mythic difficulty to another, each time helped out by Gaelic deities. However, it’s only unsatisfying if you’re reading it as a modern novel; if you read it as a typical fairy tale it’s perfectly enjoyable and indeed meritorious. It is a gorillion times better than the one drearily bearable Harry Potter book I endured. There are many fine mythic notes, e.g. as the children are being pursued by the eponymous hounds, they are warned to walk but never run if the hounds are within sight:

‘Hunting is one thing; catching is another thing entirely. You have a long way to go and you have started gently. Don’t think it is easy not to run. You are only thinking it’s easy because you have never been hunted by a beast of prey.’

‘Beast of prey?’ Pidge echoed with a shiver. ‘Are we prey?’

‘Not unless you run. Only if you run. You will be followed but not hunted, do you understand? You may run but never within sight of the hounds.‘

This explained for me something of Vox Day’s attitude. There are also some nice observations of human nature:

When a person lives in the country where the population is sparse, he doesn’t get much chance to study things like sneers. With so few people about, the one sneer of the week could well be happening in the far side of the parish and he’d miss it if he wasn’t there. On the other hand, there could even be six sneers per hour at the farm a half a mile away and he wouldn’t get the chance to see them. For as sure as anything, the ones who are good at sneering, become best at smiling when a visitor arrives.

I have had recent opportunity to observe Millennial/Gen X Irish and they are definitely different to the English; there is a certain fey note, an anarchic strain even as they are all seemingly one world government New World Order fans and think the EU and George Soros are the best things since sliced bread. It is sad to think that even now Ireland is being colonized by Arabs, Pakistanis, and negroes, and that (given birth rates) the country will be wholly non-white in a hundred years, the progressive Open Borders/Soros agenda having utterly destroyed the Irish beyond the wildest dreams of Oliver Cromwell – and that the Irish are happily acquiescent, indeed joyful about their extermination.

However, I also wondered if the mythic forms of e.g. the Morrigan and Cuchulain are so deep and so old that they will eventually reassert themselves. There is something intractable about the Irish myths, that I wonder if a mere generation or two of liberal degeneracy is enough to eradicate them; will the children or grandchildren of the current Sorosian retards be fighting a race war under the banner of the old Gaelic gods, cursing their idle, liberal forebears?

film report: Ford v Ferrari

Posted on by
Reply

A highly worthwhile, fun film which gave me a similar feeling to the most superficial level of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – a return to the days where America was white, and men were men, even if insufferably so. Bale is great as Ken Miles, a mid-40s Brummie car mechanic and occasional race driver, he even somehow manages to look like the man, and the accent is more (to my ears) authentically Brummie than most of the Peaky Blinders cast.

The antagonistic chemistry between Bale’s driver and Matt Damon’s Carroll Shelby, is the subtle heart; Shelby as a retired driver who has become something of a company man for Ford, but understands the Yeatsian passion of the true driver:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public man, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds

The race scenes are very well-done, Bale as a wiry, wrench-looking part of the car, with the utter focus of the true athlete or creator.

Women probably would find the film baffling, and expostulate, “Why do these stupid men risk their lives for a stupid car!!! Why don’t they have a nice cup of tea in a cat cafe and talk about nice things instead!!!”

So, a refreshingly manly film.

a song I suddenly like

Posted on by
Reply

The Tallest Man on Earth, ‘Hotel Bar’, another in a line of rock songs about hotels. I vaguely liked the tune but only after playing it for weeks did this line take me:

if it’s true we’re all just one

who do we turn to when the day is done

I think it’s a mistake to treat music lyrics like poetry, but all the same I think this is very fine. It captures a similar melancholy to Big Star’s seedy Motel Blues.

book report: Keepers of the Keys of Heaven

Posted on by
Reply

Keepers of the Keys of Heaven by Roger Collins.

This is more of a half- or failed-report, as I gave up 22% of the way through. It’s a history of the papacy, a topic that would be both challenging & promising for a historian, featuring as it does vast swathes of near-archival-oblivion, sundry tedious “waste of a pope” popes, but also marvellously hideous incidents and diabolical plots & poisonings.

Unfortunately, I found the book unengaging and at times outright badly-written. It is full of overly-long and overly-intricate sentences, e.g. “The peoples of the lands east of the Rhine in which the Anglo-Saxon missionaries worked had long been regarded by the Frankish kings as their subjects, even though this ceased to be a reality around 650.”

This was the sentence at which I decided to stop reading. It’s typical academic prose – gassy and bloated with clauses. The academic begins with an idea and then starts throwing more information in, like a man making a Negroni who decides to pour a bit of red wine in, why not, it’s a similar colour and has alcohol in it, eh?

It’s unclear if he means “Anglo-Saxon missionaries worked in all of the lands east of the Rhine” or “the Anglo-Saxon missionaries worked in some of the lands east of the Rhine”. From the syntax (I’ve forgotten the context, as I gave up on the book a couple of months ago, so I am working purely from the sentence construction) it sounds like “some of the lands” but I am unsure – it could be either.

In addition “this ceased to be a reality around 650”. What did? The work of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries? That’s the only thing which really makes sense to me, but to apply “this ceased to be a reality” here is awkward beyond belief. Yet what else could it mean? What else could have “ceased to be a reality”? That the people in these lands were perceived as subjects by the Frankish kings? But how can a perception cease to be a reality? It was always a perception, as distinct from reality, surely? Or does he mean that these peoples actually were subjects, and ceased to be so around 650, but the Frankish kings continued to perceive them as such?

This is typical of academic prose. Collins is undoubtedly far more learned (it’s pronounced /ˈlɜː(r)nɪd/) than me, and almost certainly far more intelligent, but he’s an academic and so cannot write English; and because I have to listen to mutilated English every day, I am disinclined to read it in my spare time.

The 22% I read was by no means bad, but there was no mastering vision to shape incidents & event, and perhaps for this reason the prose limps like a repeatedly sodomized tramp.

book report: Deliverance Lost

Posted on by
Reply

Deliverance Lost, by Gav Thorpe, another Horus Heresy book. It follows Corvus, Primarch of the Raven Guard as he attempts to rebuild his almost wholly-destroyed legion after Isstvan V.

I found it an enjoyable read, more so than other Horus Heresy books, as it deviated from the usual format; whereas most HH books begin in medias res with a hitherto unknown protagonist, who will die at the end, Deliverance Lost follows a known and to-survive Primarch and so there isn’t the usual “learning curve”, nor the slight frustration as characters in whom one has invested so much die in the last few pages.

There are also interesting interactions between the surviving Raven Guard and the Alpha Legion; the twenty legions each have their own special character; one can play “what if” games as with Shakespeare, e.g. what would happen if Richard II and Corialanus swapped roles, or (Harold Bloom) Othello and Hamlet.