Category Archives: Literature

Updated: The Magic Of MacNeice

Aesthetics, Art, English, Literature, The West

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Beauty is the best antidote to politics, my daily drudgery. The poetry of Louis MacNeice is a salve for the soul. It inoculates against the Maya Angelou bastardizations. (She was court poet to the Clintons.)

From “Louis MacNeice From Cradle to Grave“:
The final poem in Louis MacNeice’s collection Plant and Phantom (1941) is the lyric, “Cradle Song”:

Sleep, my darling, sleep;
The pity of it all
Is all we compass if
We watch disaster fall.
Put off your twenty-odd
Encumbered years and creep
Into the only heaven,
The robbers’ cave of sleep.

The wild grass will whisper,
Lights of passing cars
Will streak across your dreams
And fumble at the stars;
Life will tap the window
Only too soon again,
Life will have her answer –
Do not ask her when.
When the winsome bubble
Shivers, when the bough
Breaks, will be the moment
But not here or now.
Sleep and, asleep, forget
The watchers on the wall
Awake all night who know
The pity of it all.

Update: Please people, this post was about transcendence. I mean, I’m no poetry expert, but I know beauty when I read it. That’s why I like MacNeice. So I beg of our reader hereunder, spare me mumbo-jumbo. Give us “Snow,” rather, will you, please?

VD on the V Factor

Feminism, Gender, Literature, Political Correctness

My colleague Vox Day has this to say about “the Silly Sex”

“…This reminds me of my favorite game with female writers. From the time their first column appears, count the number of columns they write before mentioning their children, (if they have one), their husband/boyfriend, (if they have one), or their cat (if they lack the aforementioned accoutrements, they’ll DEFINITELY have one).

The Over/Under is usually around four. A woman who can resist referencing her personal life for more than ten columns will often turn to be very good, while you know it’s going to be a short and ugly run when she’s working in references to her ‘life-partner’ with whom she shares Moggsy and Mr. Tiddles, in the very first one.”

Another signal to head for the hills is the double-barreled surname; that’s usually a give-away: you don’t want to read the stuff penned by a woman by the name of, say, Pamela Kester-Shelton.