Behold, the first video I’ve made for this Substack! You get to see my nice new haircut. Sorry for such a dull background, but that’s the best I could do given the light in this apartment at the moment. In the clip, I read a very interesting passage from * What’s Bred In The Bone*, the second novel in “The Cornish Trilogy” by the Canadian master Robertson Davies.
In the passage I read, the setting is a Bavarian castle in the 1930s. The protagonist, art student Francis Cornish, is working on a secret project for British intelligence, alongside his teacher, an Italian named Saraceni. They’re doing this in collaboration with the Countess who runs the castle. She is an anti-Nazi aristocrat. Their project is to fake Old Masters and put them on the market to sell to Göring, both to cheat him and to get actual Old Master paintings out of Nazi hands and into the West. In the novel, Göring wants to repatriate German art for the planned Führermuseum.
Cornish has moral qualms about art fakery. This leads to a fascinating discussion between master and apprentice about the meaning of art. Saraceni is a Catholic, which informs his metaphysics, and his discussion of why Art matters — and why modern art misses the point of Art. Give it a listen. I hope it inspires you to buy the book — but if not, I hope it inspires some interesting discussion in the comments section
Over a decade ago, I wrote a defense of reading Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. I gave it a title that went something like “Good Lessons From A Bad Book.” By “bad book,” I wasn’t complaining about the quality of the translation (though it was poor) as much as the fact that parts of the book were unambiguously racist. This is what gave the 1973 French novel its taboo reputation. I had read the book in the midst of Angela Merkel inviting over one million Middle Eastern refugees into Germany. This sounded like the controversial novel’s plot, so I read it.
What I found was shocking: despite some racist (certainly by our standards today, though perhaps not as much by 1973’s) material, overall the book told shocking truths about mass migration. The real villains of the novel weren’t the migrants, exactly, but rather the European ruling class which was so besotted with white guilt that they refused to defend their own civilization from being overrun. I recommended back then that people swallow hard and read the book, despite its difficult-to-take passages, because it is telling us something we need to know but don’t.
Today, 11 years on, four of those years having been spent in Europe, I can even more strongly recommend *The Camp of the Saints. *Reality vindicates its dark prophecy daily — and there’s a new, much better translation out. Refusing to do so because there are a few racially offensive passages is like refusing to pay attention to the old farmer telling you that the bridge ahead is out, because he happened to drop the n-word in his warning.
I say all that as a preface to this. Yesterday one of my college professor contacts who keeps me up to date on what’s going on among Kids These Days sent me ▶this 16-minute video by a podcaster named “Tom Foe.” It’s hard to hear, but I’m telling you,** we need to listen to it. **My prof friend said Foe is really popular among the white males in his classes. What makes it even more chilling is that everything Foe says about the evil of the leftists who celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk in public is … true. And of the Lindsay Clancy cultists as well. (There are f-bombs here, so be warned, but you need to listen to 𝕏this apparently well-off middle-aged white woman praising child-murderer Clancy as “goddess incarnated” and the avatar of a “divine feminine uprising”.)
I can’t say that Foe is wrong either about the lack of effectiveness of right-wing politicians. At dinner Saturday, my interlocutor said he has a son in his twenties who “has fangs out for Trump.” The man said that young men in his son’s age cohort hate Trump, consider him a failure and a traitor. And they are full of Jew-hatred. The Jews have become in their minds the top scapegoat. This is Germany 1929 stuff. I’m telling you this because I’ve done the reading.
(The discussion continues below for subscribers.)
