Literature / Uncategorized

The Hunger for the Heroic

 

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From Burroughs' Barsoom series, which also included A Princess of Mars

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

This week the text in my course on “Science Fiction in Literature and Film” is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first-published work, A Princess of Mars (1912 – original title, Under the Moons of Mars). The protagonist is John Carter, formerly of the Army of Virginia under General Lee, who, succumbing to a paralyzing gas in an Arizona Cave circa 1870, wakes up on Mars and begins his rise through the strata of Martian society. He finds a helpmate in the beautiful and resourceful Dejah Thoris, Princess of the Twin Cities of Helium. It is essentially a chivalric romance on another planet. Predictably, the women in the class speak out positively in praise of the novel, which they like a good deal more than they liked The World Set Free and The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells or Last and First Men by W. Olaf Stapledon. They do not consciously realise how opposite to the feminist values that they have learned elsewhere A Princess of Mars is, but they intuit it. The men like Burroughs too. A couple of years ago I wrote an article (it appeared at The Brussels Journal) on “Edgar Rice Burroughs and Masculine Narrative.” 

 I believe that college students are starved for moral narrative, of the kind once offered by Howard Pyle. There is nothing PC in Burroughs, but the characters male and female are independent, decent, loyal, resourceful, stalwart, and courageous.

(more…)

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November 8, 2011
Howard Pyle / Uncategorized

Pyle in His Studio, 1898

    HERE IS A photo of Howard Pyle taken by C.P.M. Runeford in 1898 (courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.) A reader named Jim writes: Growing up, my mother read me stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood, and I loved the Howard Pyle illustrations. I assumed that everyone was read these stories, along with Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now I realize how lucky I was.

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November 8, 2011
Howard Pyle / Uncategorized

Pyle on Imagination

 

Delaware Art Museum

 [“We Started to Run Back to the Raft For Our Lives,” Howard Pyle, 1902. Courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum.]

I was looking up this painting by the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, whose centennial I have been honoring in recent posts, when I found a blog devoted to the artist. Under a reproduction of this Pyle illustration of “Sinbad on Burrator” by A. T. Quiller Couch in Scribner’s Magazine for August 1902, the blog’s author Ian Schoenherr quotes this letter from the artist to William Merchant Richardson French, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, in June 22, 1905. These words express what every great artist knows, that though art depicts reality, its main source of knowledge is unseen:

…I think you may easily see that in the making of a successful picture, the artist must compose and arrange his figures and effects altogether from his imagination, and that there is very little opportunity in the making of such a picture for him to copy exactly the position of a model placed before him in the lights and shadows which the studios afford. Nor is it likely that he can find any background to copy accurately and exactly into such an imaginative picture. (more…)

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November 8, 2011
Uncategorized

Laugh Until You Weep

 

cain-accuser 

IF AT LEAST one of the major comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live does not do a send up of yesterday’s press conference by Sharon Bialek then the entire comedy establishment is bankrupt and derelict in its partisan duty to make fun of Republicans.

Here we have a woman effusing sensuality with tousled hair, dangling earrings and heavy make-up who stands before the nation and says that many years before, when she was presumably much more attractive and effusively sensual, she went out on a dinner date alone with a business associate who had just told her he had upgraded her hotel room to a suite. Then – horrors! – after a number of drinks together and a romantic evening in an Italian restaurant, he put his hand up her skirt and moved her head towards him.

“How could this happen to widdle ol’ me?! I was only looking for a job!”

Not only is Cain’s accuser a joke, but Cain himself (if what she says is true, and it appears to be true) is a joke. Who wants a man guilty of such reckless, illicit behavior in the presidency? I don’t.

(more…)

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November 8, 2011
Literature / Uncategorized

The Theology of Charles Dickens

 

Fagin in his cell; George Cruikshank
Fagin in his cell; George Cruikshank

ONE OF MY favorite works of literary criticism is G.K. Chesterton’s book on Charles Dickens. I recommended it to a reader and in return received this excellent essay. 

Greg Jinkerson writes:

I took you up on the advice to read Chesterton’s Charles Dickens, the Last of the Great Men. What an inspiration. It became obvious after one chapter that I would need to read all of Dickens. There is nothing quite like the experience of having Chesterton point you to the wonders of other writers and areas of thought. His encomium to Dickens is exemplary in this regard. It is almost a hagiography of Dickens; or perhaps I should say a theology of the world Dickens created. (more…)

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November 7, 2011
Uncategorized

“I Hereby Pledge to Be Selfish and Un-Feminine for the Rest of My Life”

 

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ACCORDING to The Sydney Morning Herald, the Girl Guides of Australia are looking to improve their image in the face of declining membership. The organization is seeking advice for changes to its traditional pledge: ”I promise that I will do my best: to do my duty to God, to serve the Queen and my country; to help other people; and to keep the Guide law.

Here’s what I propose instead: “I promise that I will do my best to be selfish and un-feminine; to keep the Guide law and to use this invaluable experience as a credential.”

(more…)

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November 7, 2011
Feminism / Uncategorized

Remaining Steadfast in the Face of Criticism

 

THE HOMEMAKER today, unless she is wealthy, often faces a hostile environment. Not only does society at large continually celebrate careerism and refuse to grant the full-time mother and wife moral support, but friends and relatives may criticize her or refrain from any enthusiasm for her way of life.

At Home Living, Lydia Sherman encourages women at home to turn their minds from all this. She writes: (more…)

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November 7, 2011
Sexual Harassment / Uncategorized

Victims of Sexual Harassment Piling Up in the Streets

  ACCORDING to the American Association of University Women, an organization that neatly refutes the eighteenth century reformer Mary Wollstonecraft's idea that education would elevate women, nearly half of all high school students in America have been subject to "sexual harassment." “It’s pervasive, and almost a normal part of the school day,” Catherine Hill, the director of research at the association, told The New York Times. What will the future hold for the harassed? The university women recommend that each school have a "coordinator." But, I thought Stalin tried that and it didn't work. Schools should shut down immediately to prevent this plague from spreading.

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November 7, 2011
Uncategorized

A Few Words on the Women’s Franchise

 

AT VFR, Lawrence Auster argues that the women’s franchise initially had little noticeable effect on political life, but has been progressively damaging. (The politicization of women, I would add, has deprived natural feminine preoccupations of dignity and led to the trivialization of women’s work.) Mr. Auster writes:

There are many examples of the deleterious effects that the women’s franchise and the assumption of political power by women have had on politics. Think of the mob of Democratic female House members like a bunch of crazed Bacchae climbing the stairs of the U.S. Senate in October 1991 demanding the destruction of Clarence Thomas. (more…)

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November 5, 2011
Howard Pyle / Uncategorized

Pyle on the Rush from the Stock Exchange

  THIS IS Howard Pyle's illustration, The Rush from the New York Stock Exchange on Sept. 18, 1873. It appeared in Scribner's Magazine in July, 1895. Pyle, who lived from 1853 to 1911, was one of America's most popular illustrators. His works were featured in Harper’s Monthly, Collier’s Weekly, St. Nicholas, and Scribner’s. He also illustrated works of myth and fiction, including books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain. He wrote his own fictional works for children, such as Men of Iron and The Wonder Clock. Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother, “Do you know an American magazine Harpers Monthly? There are wonderful sketches in it … which strike me dumb with admiration … by Howard Pyle.” November 9 is the hundredth anniversary of Pyle's death. A major exhibit of his works opens at the Delaware Art Museum on November 12.

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November 5, 2011
Nature / Uncategorized

Winter in Autumn

  THE NORTHEAST storm I wrote about earlier this week was unquestionably one of the most unusual weather events in recorded history of the region. As a reader describes here, some people have been without power for the entire week. The heavy snow destroyed or damaged many trees.

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November 5, 2011
Uncategorized

More on Life Outside (and Inside) the Mainstream

 

A.M. writes:

It seems impossible to be genuinely traditionalist without attacking that to which contemporary society gives unanimous assent. For instance, we often hear of some “pro-family” organization protesting a television show. That television can be anything but anti-family is a farce; it has been known as a “vast wasteland” for over a half century, yet these clowns go on owning sets and vainly trying to sanitize their content. They buy a viper and then have the audacity to complain that it has a venomous bite.

I am reminded of a personal episode, where I was not truly friends with anyone around me; I started to ask, “what is wrong with me?” Of course, I could’ve very well been to blame. But as soon as I changed my choice of company, I began to make friends. As long as I had remained, however, I felt bizarre and odd. As with your comment about parades, we live in a society where we must pay tribute to the macabre, and disdain the good and the beautiful. If we don’t, we are, mongoloids, philistines, or fascists. (more…)

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November 5, 2011
Sexual Harassment / Uncategorized

Sexual Harrassment and Cain

 

ANN COULTER’S column on the controversy over Herman Cain is very entertaining. She writes:

To have been accused of sexual harassment in the 1990s is like having been accused of molesting children at preschools in the 1980s or accused of being a witch in Massachusetts in the 1690s. (more…)

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November 3, 2011
Lesbianism / Uncategorized

The Mother as Kidnapper

WHAT CAN one say about a society in which a "family" court seriously entertains a child custody dispute between two women and then grants sole custody of the child to the non-mother, thus inciting the mother to flee with her daughter to a foreign country, risking arrest for kidnapping her own child and causing the Christian missionary who arranged her flight to be arrested as a kidnapper too? Such is the tyranny of state institutions over the family. The mainstreaming of lesbianism inevitably results in the mainstreaming of ugly lesbian battles.

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November 3, 2011
Howard Pyle / Uncategorized

Pyle with His Children

  HERE is the famous American illustrator Howard Pyle on the beach with his children in 1897. I will be featuring more of his illustrations in the next few days in honor of the hundredth anniversary of his death on Nov. 9.

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November 3, 2011
Architecture / Small Houses / Uncategorized

Homes on Three Continents

 

MR. T. writes:

I have been reading your delightful blog for many months, but this is my first comment.

Your post and thread on small houses resonated deeply with me. I grew up in the U.S.A., in a medium-sized house, but have lived most of my adult life in Hong Kong. Property here is expensive in a way only people in the ritziest environs of Manhattan can imagine. My wife, daughter and I live in a flat that’s listed at about 900 square feet, but all Hong Kong people know that’s a fiction. The ‘building area’ for a Hong Kong flat includes a share of the elevator lobby, windowsills, walls, and other unusable space. Our actual living area is closer to 600 square feet.

In this space, which might well fit in toto within a McMansion’s living room, we have a kitchen, two bathrooms, a living room and three bedrooms. As you can imagine, none of these rooms is very big, and a couple of our bedrooms would be derided as inadequate as closets in the U.S.A. (more…)

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November 3, 2011