That Only America Could Have Produced: Chambers, Schlesinger, Nixon, and Hiss
By Scott Seward Smith
Among the multitudes that America used to contain were Whittaker Chambers and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. A few months ago I happened to reread both Chambers’ autobiography Witness and Schlesinger’s Journals 1952-2000 one after the other. These two men are of different generations: Chambers lived from 1901 to 1961 and Schlesinger 1917 to 2007. They are of completely different temperaments, milieus, politics, and tastes. But there are some fascinating overlaps that have some bearing on the difficult passage we are traversing today as a nation. Both were superb writers.
Revealing ‘The Great Amputation’ of Postmodernism’s Triumph
I Wanna Get Anagogical
By Scott Seward Smith
The most important piece of writing of the past decade to me is an article written last year in Modern Age by Ewa Thompson, “The Great Amputation: Language in a Postmodern Era.” It is important because it identifies the key to our modern stupidity.
This stupidity is increasingly irksome in the way that it has seeped into political decisions that affect our lives. Thompson’s discovery is even more profound, however. She explains one of my great frustrations: when we have literally at our fingertips the entire record of the greatest thoughts of human history, why do we not use them to help solve our problems, understand each other better, or merely delight in the play of genius? Why, furthermore, do we in general not contribute to them? Why are we becoming sub-literate? As Thompson writes: “words are losing their power to convince, console, and elicit joy.” As someone who takes literally Faulkner’s injunction that man is immortal because he alone among animals has an inexhaustible voice, the disempowering of the word is a matter of grave significance.
‘What Realm of Supreme Values Will Be Capable of Uniting Europe? Technical Feats? The Marketplace? The Mass Media?’
Europa Europa
By Scott Seward Smith
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.
Whither the Schools and Colleges?
By Robert Arrington
I don’t want to get involved in the re-opening debate in this column, except to say that I’m for it, but want it handled in stages and with care. This column will address education only, with an emphasis on colleges and universities.
A Universe without FTL
By Tamara Wilhite
FTL stands for faster than light travel. This is one of the standard tropes of science fiction. It may involve warp drive that turns space travel into an analog for ancient sea voyages, or the trip may be instantaneous once you’re far enough from Earth’s surface. However, faster-than-light travel will require the discovery of new laws of physics that may not exist. This leaves us with the other options for traveling in a universe without FTL.
Django Unchained ’s Bleak Racial Vision
By Shant Eghian
In an interview years before he made Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino said, “[I want] to do movies that deal with America’s horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like Spaghetti Westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they’re genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it’s ashamed of it, and other countries don’t really deal with because they don’t feel they have the right to.”
Tarantino called this new genre the “Southern,” as opposed to the “Western.” And just as the Spaghetti Westerns from the Sixties (Westerns made by Italian directors) were often quite violent (at least, for the time) to portray the rugged realities of the Old West, Tarantino could bring his signature style of violence to this new genre in a way that displayed the awful exploitation and racial hierarchy that was the nexus of the Antebellum South.
This is Part 2 in an ongoing series analyzing Quentin Tarantino’s filmography. For Part 1 on Inglourious Basterds click here.
Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Fantasies
By Shant Eghian
I like Quentin Tarantino. His films, often laced with profanity and brutal violence, have witty dialogue, interesting characters, and can make mundane events such as dinner at a diner endlessly entertaining. It was for this reason that I decided to watch Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s gory revenge thriller about a fictional group of Jews that succeed in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
Why I Choose Star Wars Over “Real” Life
By Magnus O'Mallon
Recently I had to choose which movie I was going to see. There was a variety of choices—war, a sex scandal, a generic action movie. Let me tell you what I seek from art: an experience of the ideal, a feeling of spiritual replenishment through the sight of human greatness. Now you know why I chose Star Wars. I will elaborate, quickly mentioning that, throughout this article, I’m drawing heavily on the aesthetic philosophy of Ayn Rand.
I do not seek out characters I can “relate to”, but I do seek out characters I understand, with the heroes’ greatness or the evil they vanquish on full, naked display. I do not seek out the everyday world, I see that every day. What I seek is Romanticism.
Do not tell me that the art of something like Star Wars is silly because “real life isn’t like that”. What Star Warsrepresents is real life, in essence. Star Wars represents the essential differences between good and evil, and does it with great consistency through each aspect of the film: in terms of the characters’ goals and actions, in terms of the characters’ looks, in terms of the characters’ dialogue, in terms of the music. Notice the colours of the villains: black suits and masks, fiery red lightsabers, the sterile uniformity of the stormtroopers or the lifeless grey of the Starkiller base. Notice the colours of the heroes: beautiful people wearing brighter and varicoloured clothing, blue lightsabers, their base amidst a lush forest. This is not a blind resort to a cliché; it is a subconscious pull towards one of the most important functions of art: to present the essentials of existence through a recreation of reality.
Why Disney shouldn’t remake Home Alone and how you can make it more relevant for the 2010s
By Kyle Britain
Disney owns the entertainment multiverse. If they haven’t already popped out some animated or kids show about some age old story, they will at some point. Yet the big trend in the entertainment industry is to try to remake any old thing. Disney now is trying with Home Alone. That’s a mistake, but there are ways to make it more relevant for the modern day.
Why A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life are the Same Story
By Shant Eghian
Every December, I make it a point to watch Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Clive Donner’s version of A Christmas Carol. In my opinion, they are the two greatest Christmas movies ever made. But after watching them this past year, I realized something; both movies are telling the exact same story, inverted from each other.
