“You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation. The phenomenon of Allen Ginsberg by Bruce Bawer, The New Criterion On Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, 1985. I’m so lucky to be nutty.—Allen Ginsberg, “Bop Lyrics” (1949) The very first poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947-1980 [1] seems, in a way, to prophesy Ginsberg’s entire career. It is titled “In Society,” and it dates… Read More “You can see God by sniffing the gas in a cotton.” — Allen Ginsberg

John Lennon and The Seductions of Beautiful Nothing

“Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream”—John Lennon Perhaps it is one of those curious fearful symmetries that the words of John Lennon quoted above are found in the Beatles’ album titled ‘Revolver’…and that he was finally gunned down, shot multiple times in the back by a “fan”. I grew up reading Kerouac… Read More John Lennon and The Seductions of Beautiful Nothing

The Perversions of Michel Foucault

Or, where the Left would take us. by Roger Kimball.The New Criterion. On The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Michel Foucault’s personal perversions involved him in private tragedy. The celebration of his intellectual perversions by academics continues to be a public scandal. The career of this “representative man” of the twentieth century really represents one of… Read More The Perversions of Michel Foucault

Dr. Arthur Holmes Lectures. A History of Philosophy.

Put the news aside for a time. If unhappiness is growing consider it a reset signal to return to philosophy where all education and earthly wisdom began. …This is an excellent series, very informative and very fair to Catholic, Protestant and Enlightenment philosophies. Thales to Sartre and beyond. 81 comprehensive episodes. One can learn something… Read More Dr. Arthur Holmes Lectures. A History of Philosophy.

Composers of a New Stairway

From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, Jimmy Page of Led Zeplin owned Boleskine House (See below) the former residence of occultist Aleister Crowley.[150][151] below. Sections of Page’s fantasy sequence in the film The Song Remains the Same were filmed at night on the mountainside directly behind Boleskine House.—Wikipedia Heart performs Stairway to Heaven at the Kennedy Center Honors for Led… Read More Composers of a New Stairway

Hegel, the Idolatry of the State,  and the Cunning of [his] ‘Reason’.

“Hegel is the ideological nexus where the Gnostic scientific dictatorships of Nazism and Communism intersect.” — Phillip and Paul Collins, The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship. “All the worth which the human being possesses – all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. … For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective… Read More Hegel, the Idolatry of the State,  and the Cunning of [his] ‘Reason’.

Rousseau on the Origins of Liberalism. Roger Scruton.

Excerpts from Roger Scruton’s 1998 New Criterion essay, Rousseau on the Origins of Liberalism “Rousseau’s attack on society in the name of ‘nature’ exemplifies what to me is the root error of liberalism in all its forms, namely, the inability to accept, or even to perceive, the inherited forms of social knowledge. By social knowledge,… Read More Rousseau on the Origins of Liberalism. Roger Scruton.