Category Archives: Aesthetics

‘The Magus’ By John Fowles: A Sublime Work of Art

Aesthetics, Art, English, History, Literature, The West, War

It is remarkable how many individuals who cannot write, much less conjugate the verb to “spit” (past tense “spat,” in proper English), have attempted to review John Fowles’s The Magus.

Nick Dybek—Dybbuk, the possessed, is a better name for him—for example. No idea who he is but his grubby English alone disqualifies him from even glancing at this work.

I tried to grapple with The Magus (published in 1965, rev. ed. 1977) when barely into my twenties. I had just left Israel having returned to South Africa, so my command of English was not up to the task. I struggled.

The prosaic mind will not possess the necessary imagination and love of beauty for a book that brilliantly plays with your mind, but takes you through exhilarating labyrinths of art, history, the follies of mysticism and psychiatry, other mid-century fads of Europe and England; a lost natural world where the Greek Islands were pristine not yet swamped with smelly tourists; to metaphysics, political philosophy and the phoniness of dying for the state, for a peddled patriotism, not to mention the best description EVER of the killing fields and suicidal battle technique and posture practiced in World War One:

“…the whole butcher’s shop of war”. And, “I saw only Thanatos.” “A desert of the dead.”

Stunning writing (which only writers who craft sentences could appreciate). 

I feel good for I have used “Thanatos” in my book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, as the most apt concept to describe the drive of the white man who gives up his birthright. But I can understand the trouble an idiot reviewer would have, for most would be unfamiliar with the term and its provenance.

The Magus achieves the purpose of great literature:

If you can’t put down a work of over 600 pages—a novel has achieved its purpose. Of course, the English is exquisite and the author ever-so old Oxbridge educated. Not pretentious; just truly educated as once provided by a traditional, classical liberal arts education in the English Ivy League.

I think people who are pedantic and reductive in their oppositional inability to assimilate art and beauty will see all kinds of “isms” in this book: ” “leftism,” “postmodernism”. I disagree with such a miserable and immiserating approach to art.

Literature is either good or bad. It either takes you on a scintillating trip or mires you in dour tedium. The postmodernism tag, moreover, seems to be used as a cudgel by those who inhabit the American English department, or are of its mindset, where postmodernism was perfected—the kind of reader who has never read gorgeous English prose, and wishes to appear sophisticated by raping the literature with artificial constructs.

National Review pegged this old work correctly, as thoroughly traditional in its sweeping style.

For heaven’s sake: John Fowles was an English gentleman born in 1926. He described the mid-twentieth-century as “androgynous”! If our author toyed with the idea that the sexes had merged then; imagine his thinking had he lived today.  Nuance, folks, not labels.

I’m only on page 247 and may well regret my enthusiasm. But, for now, I second the august dust-jacket reviewers on my copy, from National Review to the Charlotte Observer, to that of New York Review of Books, whose verdict was:

* “One of the most ambitious novels of the decade….”
* “Brilliant and colossal….Impossible to stop reading.”
* “A marvel. John Fowles is a master of literary magic…”
* “The book is genius throughout and often beautifully written….”
* Mr. Fowles has accomplished an imaginative tour de force, comparable to the more exciting work of Nabokov, brilliant, elegant, inventive, profound without solemnity… It is an extraordinary novel…”
* “…Fowles writes his way beautifully through the demands of text which calls for every kind of descriptive passage.”

These are observations that could not be made today. The last is particularly smart, for the storyline and the breadth of the thing–The Magus–are formidable. The text—this grand superstructure—demands the bone and blood of the author, which it gets.

UPDATED: NEW COLUMN: Beethoven & Bach ARE THE WEST, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna

Aesthetics, Art, Conservatism, COVID-19, Critique, Culture, Music, Pop-Culture, Sex, The Zeitgeist

NEW COLUMN IS “Beethoven & Bach ARE THE WEST, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna.” It was a feature on WND, The New American, Unz Review and Townhall.com.

Now easily accessed and read on IlanaMercer.com: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/02/beethoven-bach-west-not-cardi-b-kanye-rihanna/

Excerpt:

…  THE ONLY SUBSTANTIVE CONSERVATIVE CASE to make over the Grammys is that it signifies the complete loss of immutable artistic standards. For while artistic taste is subjective and personal; artistic standards are everywhere and always objective.

Nobody looking at, and listening to, the 2023 Grammys should dare talk about beauty—of melody or movement—harmony (as in consonance and counterpoint), chord progression, and a facility with musical instruments, for these were nowhere apparent. Better melodic progression is to be found in “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and “Three Blind Mice.”

Nobody watching these erogenous-zone centered extravaganzas, for which the celebrity Idiocracy clapped like clapped-out whores, should dare conclude anything but this:

The Grammys were about the end of art—about the loss of all meritocratic, objective standards in art.

THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WEST is not to be found in the staged acts of ugly exhibitionists and filthy pornographers who bedeck our cultural and sporting events, the likes of loud, lousy Lizzo, a mountain of meritless flesh, and the Sam Smith Sicko—demented degenerates who are all engaged in publicly tolerated indecent exposure and tuneless yelping, that not even the Auto-tune magic software, the “holy grail of recording” technology, can correct.

THE MEANING OF THE WEST is not in this ghastly culture, in which our kids, liberal and conservative, are allowed to wallow, or in our ugly, grubby, tit-for-tat politics.

IT’S NOT in the Woke, postmodern perverts degrading the language, literature, music, art and sciences.

IT’S NOWHERE IN THE COVID CARTEL and its army of goons, medical and bureaucratic, devoid of intelligence and bereft of proficiency in anything but the use of force.

The aforementioned are imposters, interlopers; frauds, freaks and fetishists.

Beethoven is The West. It’s men like Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Debussy, César Franck, Dvorák, Tchaikovsky (a Russian homosexual, whose manly music could never be queered), Elgar, Fauré and more—they embody The West. They and the many young performers furthering their work, the work of the Lord, are examples of the best of the West. …

…READ THE REST. “Beethoven & Bach ARE THE WEST, Not Cardi B, Kanye, Rihanna” was a feature on WND, The New American, Unz Review and Townhall.com.

It’s now here, on IlanaMercer.com: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/02/beethoven-bach-west-not-cardi-b-kanye-rihanna/

Jeannie And Jared Kushner Always Part Of The Presidential Package (And On Taste)

Aesthetics, America, Celebrity, Critique, Donald Trump, Elections, Family, Government

TOLD YOU SO. In “Ron DeSantis Delivers First Principles In Action,” my latest column, as well as in the podcast preceding it, I told you that,

“A vote for Trump in 2024 is a vote for the Jarvanka organism, or familial mutations of it. The family will be back in the People’s House, minus the MAGA agenda.”

We learn that “Trump [is] trying to convince Ivanka and Jared to join his 2024 announcement, report says.”

He’s running.

“In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” Trump, 76, told supporters in a gilded ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

It so happens that the mercenary Jeannie and Jared Kushner have no use for The Don any longer. However, we heard that the first time around. Just before Jarvanka moved into the White House, we had been promised that the Trump kids would be staying out of politics and  running the business. My point being that the two will always be part of the deal; part of Donald Trump’s presidential vaudeville.

“Jeannie,” of course, is an allusion to a costume in a sitcom—one that a grown woman not featured in a play-play comedy, should not wear near a wedding. Seemed obvious to me.

A WORD ABOUT TASTE. Taste is class. Taste is the hallmark of culture, of refinement. To some degree, taste is subjective, but not entirely so. There are certain elements of style that are absolutely universal. The gilded Trump abode and the Trump weddings are gaudy nouveau riche in the extreme.

All that pale, sequinned, baby-doll Lolita pastels, coupled with garish over-painted faces, border on Liberace levels of tastelessness.

Kitsch:

Kitsch a la Kimberly Guilfoyle (with a touch of crazy):

If you want to know how to dress to perfection, look to Kate Middleton’s couture. Pricey for sure. Kate’s classic, classy high-couture. MORE:

* “I Dream of Jeannie” Image screen pic credit

Caitlyn Jenner’s Greatest Achievement

Aesthetics, Celebrity, Pop-Culture, Relatives, Sex

Caitlyn Jenner, as the Idiocracy in which we are mired is currently broadcasting, aims to become California’s next governor. Shrug.

What is her biggest achievement? Jenner, post gender-reassignment, still loves women.

Given the women who surrounded her—the Kardashians, in all their venom, vulgarity, vainglory and vacuity (my involuntary alliterative tic really got going there)—that is indeed a true achievement.