This makes me want to do something extremely nice for my husband and child for not inflicting something like this on me. I’m not inflicting it on them either, so they must really appreciate me, as well.
May you all be safe!
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Continue reading →: Political Horizon
What interesting things happened on our political horizon in the past week?
This is for my show.
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Continue reading →: Unlikeable Traits
There’s nothing I dislike more in people than helplessness and self-infantilization. This is why I write obsessively about it in my research.
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Continue reading →: The Woodpecker Foreign Policy
Only absolute morons keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result:
Russians have demonstrated in every way possible that they don’t want a peace deal. Yet with the insistence of a schizoid woodpecker, the Trump administration keeps trying to engineer one. It’s a closed loop. No external information is allowed to seep in.
It’s the same with Iran.
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Continue reading →: Heart and Hearth
One part of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine that I really like talks about the increasingly frequent prohibitions on lighting fire in the fireplace of one’s own house. This was done in many parts of Canada, for example, and in Ireland where Kingsnorth lives. Kingsnorth is a lifelong conservationist and even a former Green. But he realizes that these prohibitions are not about nature.
The hearthstone has deep connotations in every European culture. Everybody knows the expression “heart and hearth” or its equivalent in their own European language. Our civilization arose from our capacity to survive and thrive in cold weather. The fireplace, thus, had a cosmological significance across time for Europeans, Kingsnorth explains. It symbolizes the warmth of the household. Somebody needs to stay at home and keep the fire going for those who go out into the cold. “She who guards the hearth” is how Ukrainians refer to a woman*. We say that a woman is the heart of the family because a child’s heart begins to beat under her own.
There’s a lot more to it though. Remember how we talked about focus? We are all in a battle against the technology that tries to destroy our focus, disperse our attention, and steal our capacity to create. Do you know what focus means in the Latin original?
It means fireplace.
If you’ve ever stared into a fireplace, you know why. In our shared European past, the hearth was a point of convergence, a place where the family gathered for warmth, companionship, and stories. We can gather around a fireplace. Or we can stare at individual screens that prevent us from focusing on our own thoughts.
“Lose your fires, and you lose your focus as a culture,” Kingsnorth says.
Thousands of years of cultural memory come alive for a descendant of Europeans who gathers firewood, chops it up, brings it home, and starts the fire. The fragrant smoke, the crackling logs, the jumping flames — all of it awakens the memory of the chain of generations before us that made, smelled, and saw the same fire. You can’t substitute for that with an electric fireplace.
This is what’s being taken from us. Our hearth, our home, our cultural memory. We are being deracinated and de-cultured.
*We say it with one word. Its the translation that’s clunky, not the original.
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Continue reading →: Book Notes: Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLarenI’m a literary critic. I can’t like a book if it’s not well-written. There’s no consideration of political usefulness or ideological affinity that can vanquish my desire to read beautiful texts. This is why I am happy to report that in Edward McLaren’s novel Bothelford’s Gone I finally found a right-wing text with artistic value.
Bothelford’s Gone is not a political manifesto or a propaganda screed. It’s a work of art that is as complicated as the world it describes. It’s a Bildungsroman whose teenage protagonist tries to grow up in a world that ditched the idea of growth in favor of mindless, aggressively pursued change for its own sake.
McLaren’s diagnosis of Britain’s (and, by extension, the West’s) ills is neither shallow nor simplistic. The writer correctly intuits that what the Right urgently needs is a philosophy of the times. We need to explain the degradation of our reality, from the devastation of the natural world to the fraying of social bonds, in ways that eschew both convoluted conspiratorialism and superficial sloganeering. The novel is promoted as the first literary portrayal of Muslim rape gangs in Britain, and it is absolutely that. It is also much more.
Bothelford’s Gone portrays Britain as being profoundly spiritually unwell. Families fall apart, culture disintegrates, and meaningless licentiousness overpowers people who are glued to their screens in search of pornified titillation. Before Jack and Agatha, the novel’s teenage protagonists, were brutalized by foreigners, they were betrayed by their own self-indulgent and careless parents.
The novel leaves you wanting to think deeply and obsessively about the reality it portrays. This is how real art works. It becomes part of you. You go into the world, carrying it inside you and touching others with the traces of the art that transformed you. The concept of shared culture has disintegrated into volitional content with everybody consuming—and what a word this is!—their own, highly idiosyncratic list of cultural products. We don’t vibrate in sync because we don’t hear the same music of words, images, and rhythms. Whoever manages to overcome the isolating tendency of our times will win the future. Culture is only that if it is shared. We need to come together over real art.
Bothelford’s Gone is a good place to start.
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Continue reading →: The Fastest Battlefield Gain
Once again, thank you, Elon.
It was really dire before he got involved and shut down Russians’ comms. I was completely desperate in early February. I thought Ukraine wouldn’t survive the month. And then there was this dramatic improvement.
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Continue reading →: Another Quote from Bothelford’s Gone
Please enjoy another quote from Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren. Jack Grundon is a teenage boy who becomes a pariah after attacking the Alawite rapist of his classmate Agatha:
His father: what did he have to say about his father? The man had secured a livelihood without maintaining a marriage; in any other historical context but the modern one, Jack wondered, would it have been conceivable that his life was something other than a failure, a shame? And now that shame had deepened because of Jack, his actions, and because John Grundon, his father, was no longer himself anymore but the one responsible for raising him: Mad Jack, the undesirable lunatic who had squandered, all in one go, his serious chance of getting into a good university and due to striking Basil, the reputation of his entire family. Even if all the accusations of his assault on Agatha were cleared up, that stain would linger. ‘Funny how everyone pretends that
honour doesn’t exist’, Jack thought to himself, ‘but as soon as you embarrass yourself in the wrong way—not by molesting a girl, but by acting against the one inconveniently responsible—suddenly it’s the Victorian Age again…’0 -
Continue reading →: Travel with Kids
People are discussing on social media whether it’s possible to travel internationally with small children. And yes, it’s possible but a more important question is whether it’s necessary. Children don’t need it. It’s done exclusively for adults. We’ve traveled internationally with Klara. She tolerated it as a form of eccentricity in which her parents engage for incomprehensible reasons. I don’t experience any need to pretend that she benefitted from it in a way she wouldn’t have from spending that time at home with her parents.
I’m fairly well-traveled but I don’t see why people turn travel into some sort of a meaning-conferring activity.
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