Author Archives
Scott Seward Smith
‘What Realm of Supreme Values Will Be Capable of Uniting Europe? Technical Feats? The Marketplace? The Mass Media?’
Europa Europa
Some weeks ago, before the lock-down became tortuous, my beautiful niece asked me to write her a short story about a man who is left at the altar by the love of his life. She was turning twenty and this was the present that she wanted from me. Maria and I have played these literary games since she was a teenager. I love the fact that though she is a child of her time, and fully conversant with social media, she also likes to read and write.
The short story was an opportunity to play with a plot I have been imagining for sometime: a somewhat lonely, young courtroom artist who gets involved with a woman that he paints during a trial. I have thought of doing a novel where the woman is involved with a drug-smuggling gang.
Welcome to Hegel’s Apartment
A new series of essays on culture and philosophy from Liberty Island literary novelist Scott Seward Smith
Nietzsche mocked Hegel by saying that the latter thought Western civilization had reached its pinnacle in his Berlin apartment. Being forced to spend more time of late than usual in my New York apartment, I’m kind of with Hegel. My wife and I, regrettably, have no children. Our apartment is spacious enough for us. We are not only comfortable but happy in the space we have created. I am surrounded by my books, photographs, some works of art. A few months ago I bought a CD player in part to listen to a Great Courses set of CD’s on understanding classical music. Western civilization may not be at its pinnacle in my apartment but I get what Hegel felt and what Nietzsche mocked.
Chapter 1 of Red Line Blues: The Passion of Owen Cassell, Closet Conservative
Discover Scott Seward Smith’s new literary novel!
Pick up Red Line Blues: The Passion of Owen Cassell, Closet Conservative by Scott Seward Smith, now available on Amazon.
On Conservative Antiheroes
In Defense of the Flawed Protagonist
In her Political Writing 101 column here on the Liberty Island website, Jamie K. Wilson argues that conservative writers “need to unashamedly embrace the epic hero”. “I get tired of antiheroes.” she writes. “They are the damaged and suffering heroes that SJWs wish they could be.”
I thought of this advice in light of my own forthcoming novel from Liberty Island, Red Line Blues: The Ballad of Owen Cassel, due out in November. My hero is clearly not an epic hero. He is much closer to the “damaged and suffering” heroes that Jamie disdains. I sat down to write my novel with a particular purpose: to challenge the prevailing sense in mainstream culture that someone with conservative views cannot be complex, let alone cultured. Conservatives are always corrupt, ignorant, and bigoted. If they have some redeeming features to them, they become liberals in the end (like Scott, in Woody Allen’s “Everybody Says I Love You”, whose conservatism turned out to be the result of a brain tumor). Thus was born Owen Cassell—an alcoholic, divorced, disillusioned lapsed Catholic and failed professor, who is nonetheless highly intelligent, charming, well-traveled, and sensitive. His problem is that he falls in love with a younger woman who is liberal.
