Interested to see what the future brings (and what exactly in MA you think would get you cancelled by the religious right! Though for what it’s worth I think this year perhaps pointed to an exhaustion of both right and left modes of cancel culture.) About Pollack-I read her Doom Patrol recently and recommend it highly, while I need to read that Jünger myself. With you (I think) on maximalist romantic realism, hope we all make it in the new year!!
Thanks, will definitely check out the Pollack soon! Re: MA, no spoilers but the experiment in syncretism gets pretty intense by the end, to the point of (I don't use this phrase in the book) "Jewish Christian Thelemism." And that I may make fun of the activist stuff at times but obviously don't go in for "a man's a man, a woman's a woman."
Northrop Frye has a pithy little negative review of On the Marble Cliffs and/or The Glass Bees, somewhere in the collected writings... Worth tracking down in a spare moment.
Thank you! I want to like Jünger because of the Anarch idea—he's on to something there—but I wasn't bowled over by either Marble Cliffs or Glass Bees. Maybe it sounds better in the original German, so to speak. Found the Frye on libgen ("Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs" [1948], in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, ed. Jan Gorak) and, as the children say, ijbol:
"Jünger has been prevented from writing by the occupation authorities, which seems a pity, as he is now evidently prepared to explain that the values of the liberal, Christian, and humanist traditions were right all the time. But a prophet has had it if he says, 'Follow me, and I will take you down to the still depths of the human soul, where you will be free from all the compulsions of waking life, free from God, from morals, from conscience, and from your duties to others; where you will have the heat of the blood instead of the dazzle of light, and where you will dwell in the nothingness at the heart of both nature and yourself instead of barking your shins over the outworks of reality.' And one's sympathy for him is a bit limited if, when he gets to this dark and godless world of blood, he turns around and says, 'Oops, sorry; we seem to be in hell: excuse it please.'"
Yes, exactly! I may yet get into him, being likewise intrigued by that variant on the them of "they that have power to hurt and will do none," but have not yet. Frye drollery--the mode of many of his best apercus--remains criminally underappreciated. His disinclination here to credit the recanting prophet reminds me--to hark back for a moment to one of our earlier exchanges--of a similar shrewdness, the more unusual in that it appears in a *recent* work of scholarship, in Matthew Mutter's chapter on Yeats in his Restless Secularism, in which the author--breaking with the scholarly consensus that praises the late-discovered liberal humanism of Yeats's "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," finds in it merely so much bad faith.
Yes, I think I read the Mutter—well, I read Mutter's very severe anti-magic piece on Auden anyway, if not on Yeats—and tend to agree. Another way to look at it is that the crypto-liberal humanism *is* the bad faith and vice versa, hence my relative appreciation, despite my dislike of psychology, for Ellmann's just saying, "Well, underneath it all he was only a sensitive boy," since what else can you say? You see this now on X, with its Musk-era right-wing center of gravity, all those ultra-right guys accusing each other of being sensitive boys underneath it all, the way the 2010s libs accused each other of being secret fascists.
Interested to see what the future brings (and what exactly in MA you think would get you cancelled by the religious right! Though for what it’s worth I think this year perhaps pointed to an exhaustion of both right and left modes of cancel culture.) About Pollack-I read her Doom Patrol recently and recommend it highly, while I need to read that Jünger myself. With you (I think) on maximalist romantic realism, hope we all make it in the new year!!
Thanks, will definitely check out the Pollack soon! Re: MA, no spoilers but the experiment in syncretism gets pretty intense by the end, to the point of (I don't use this phrase in the book) "Jewish Christian Thelemism." And that I may make fun of the activist stuff at times but obviously don't go in for "a man's a man, a woman's a woman."
Northrop Frye has a pithy little negative review of On the Marble Cliffs and/or The Glass Bees, somewhere in the collected writings... Worth tracking down in a spare moment.
Thank you! I want to like Jünger because of the Anarch idea—he's on to something there—but I wasn't bowled over by either Marble Cliffs or Glass Bees. Maybe it sounds better in the original German, so to speak. Found the Frye on libgen ("Ernst Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs" [1948], in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, ed. Jan Gorak) and, as the children say, ijbol:
"Jünger has been prevented from writing by the occupation authorities, which seems a pity, as he is now evidently prepared to explain that the values of the liberal, Christian, and humanist traditions were right all the time. But a prophet has had it if he says, 'Follow me, and I will take you down to the still depths of the human soul, where you will be free from all the compulsions of waking life, free from God, from morals, from conscience, and from your duties to others; where you will have the heat of the blood instead of the dazzle of light, and where you will dwell in the nothingness at the heart of both nature and yourself instead of barking your shins over the outworks of reality.' And one's sympathy for him is a bit limited if, when he gets to this dark and godless world of blood, he turns around and says, 'Oops, sorry; we seem to be in hell: excuse it please.'"
Yes, exactly! I may yet get into him, being likewise intrigued by that variant on the them of "they that have power to hurt and will do none," but have not yet. Frye drollery--the mode of many of his best apercus--remains criminally underappreciated. His disinclination here to credit the recanting prophet reminds me--to hark back for a moment to one of our earlier exchanges--of a similar shrewdness, the more unusual in that it appears in a *recent* work of scholarship, in Matthew Mutter's chapter on Yeats in his Restless Secularism, in which the author--breaking with the scholarly consensus that praises the late-discovered liberal humanism of Yeats's "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," finds in it merely so much bad faith.
Yes, I think I read the Mutter—well, I read Mutter's very severe anti-magic piece on Auden anyway, if not on Yeats—and tend to agree. Another way to look at it is that the crypto-liberal humanism *is* the bad faith and vice versa, hence my relative appreciation, despite my dislike of psychology, for Ellmann's just saying, "Well, underneath it all he was only a sensitive boy," since what else can you say? You see this now on X, with its Musk-era right-wing center of gravity, all those ultra-right guys accusing each other of being sensitive boys underneath it all, the way the 2010s libs accused each other of being secret fascists.
lol