Self-Education vs. Higher Education
On the universal degeneracy of so-called higher education in the contemporary USA, I have made myself clear in any number of articles and essays since the mid-1990s. …
Robert E. Howard’s Conan: A Paracletic Hero?
Robert E. Howard (1906 – 1936) faded rapidly into obscurity after his self-inflicted demise in 1936 following the death of his mother from tuberculosis. Ironically, Howard’s reputation had…
Clark Ashton Smith’s Representation of Evil
Clark Ashton Smith (1893 – 1961) established his popularity among readers as a contributor to the pulp magazine Weird Tales from the late 1920s until the late 1930s, when he…
Poe’s Psychic-Atomist Critique of Wayward Modernity
Many people know of the “Big Bang” or singularity theory of cosmic origin, but far fewer know that the author of the singularity theory was a Belgian…
Earth Anew: Eco Music from Mahler to Rasmussen (Part II)
Part I of “Eco-Music from Mahler to Rasmussen” broaches the topic of the Weltanschauung in music. By “world view” is meant an adequate understanding of the cosmic complexity of life…
Earth Anew: Eco-Music from Mahler to Rasmussen (Part I)
Romanticism revived, or attempted to revive, the sacrality of the countryside, re-establishing the tutelary spirits of river, forest, grotto, and hill. As Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in Nature (1836), whose…
Living Out “The Bacchae” (America Burns)
Part I – The Bacchae. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in his Birth of Tragedy (1871), Euripides (480 – 406 BC), whose main activity coincided with the nihilistic destructiveness of the…
Eduard Tubin: Symphonist
Despite the advocacy of conductor and countryman Neeme Järvi and the determination of record-producer Robert von Bahr (founder of the BIS label) in the 1980s and early…
Visions of the Wasteland – Part II
Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) comments that in the Thirteenth-Century Quest of the Holy Grail, the wasteland motif has largely contracted into the figure of the maimed king. The…
Visions of the Wasteland – Part I
Homer bequeaths to posterity one of the earliest visions of a wasteland, anticipating T. S. Eliot by three millennia. Eliot, incidentally, acknowledges his debt to Homer by…
The Music of E. J. Moeran
The opening bars of Ernest John Moeran’s Symphony in G-Minor (completed in 1937) etched themselves in my memory when I first heard them in the early 1970s…
Vincent d’Indy, le Wagnérisme, and Tradition
Vincent d’Indy (1851 – 1931), a close contemporary of Sir Edward Elgar (1857 – 1934), studied under César Franck (1822 – 1890) at the Paris Conservatory. On…
Of Which We May Speak: Meditations on Irony
The intelligentsia professes an admiration for irony. In the 1990s the members of that class watched Seinfeld in first-run and they bought the program on DVD because…
Apparitions of the Gods: A Voegelinian Meditation
“The dove – the rood – the loaf – the wine.” Men know the gods because they have seen or intuited them, but not all men have…
The Tone Poems of Sibelius
In an increasingly ugly world the sources of beauty constantly increase in value but at the same time they become increasingly difficult for ordinary people to discover…