Some Wednesday Readings - March 12, 2025

Britain: Multiculturalism contra justice – Sam Bidwell at The Critic Magazine. 

Shrouded Veterans: Destitute Cavalryman Plagiarizes Mark Twain – Frank Jastrzembski at Emerging Civil War.

 

Hermitess and Green Man – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Time Keeps on Slippin’ – Joe Duke at Front Porch Republic.

 

What’s a Trade War and How Did We End Up in One? – Tim Challies.

 

We’re All George Smiley Now – Ana Siljak at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

After Romanian Election Mess, The West’s Foundation is Crumbling – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.

 

25 years on: how Somerset House became a center for contemporary art – Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper.

 

March 11: The Telegram That Won the War – Lincoln Demotes McClellan – Jason Clark at This Is the Day. 

 

Photograph: Somerset House in London by Robert Bye via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Thursday Readings

One of the main characters of my new novel Brookhaven has been a major admirer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow since he was a child. It’s unusual, because the character is born and raised in Mississippi, and abolitionist Mr. Longfellow was not a popular poet. And Longfellow’s poems, in fact, play a not insignificant role throughout the entire book. 

We recently rewatched the Angel Films movie “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” which tells the story of Longfellow and his family during the Civil War, and how he came to write the poem that became the Christmas carol. The movie takes only minor liberties with the real story. Some years back, Meg Groeling at Emerging Civil War told that story, and it’s every bit as fascinating as the movie.

 

The Other Christmas Truce – Joanna Guldin at Military.com.

 

The Cross and the Machine – Paul Kingsnorth at The Free Press.

 

York Buildings Stairs and the Watergate – A London Inheritance.

 

The Bard at Christmas – Jaspreet Singh Boparai at The Critic Magazine.

 

Boat Prayer – Karla Van Vliet at Every Day Poems.

 

“In the Bleak Midwinter,” poem by Christina Rossetti – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The First Noel – poem by Seth Lewis. 

 

Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January1863 by Daniel Masters – review at Civil War Books and Authors.

 

Photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about 1860.

Some Tuesday Readings - Dec. 26, 2023

The Journey of the Three Wise Men – Douglas Murray at The Free Press. 

Our godless era is dead – Paul Kingsnorth at UnHerd.

 

Heartbeats at Christmas – Jacob Phillips at The Critic Magazine.

 

Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter 1993 – poem by Jane Kenyon at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Ruddy Glory: The Resonance of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer – Joel Kurz at Front Porch Republic.

 

The Ultimate Christmas Gift – poem by Susan Jarvis Bryant at Society of Classical Poets.

 

The Ghosts of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

 

Photograph: Entrance to the Oxford Arms, from “The Ghosts of Old London.”

"Savage Gods" by Paul Kingsnorth

Some writers never get over writer’s block. Paul Kingsnorth turned into a personal, high readable memoir. 

Savage Gods, published in 2019, is a memoir, a meditation, a search for understanding, a discussion of writing and words, and a reflection about a father, concisely presented in a 2 126-page book. But don’t let the short length mislead you. Thinking I might read it in a day, I was surprised to find myself rereading, reading slowly and carefully, and thinking about the other writers and thinkers Kingsworth was quoting and discussing. The expected one day gave way to four days.

 

But for a writer, it’s time worth spending.

 

Kingsnorth and his family moved from England to the west of Ireland. He considers the move part of the compelled restlessness he’s maintained in his adult life, a restlessness that is more like a hunger for place, and belonging to a place. He’s brutally honest about himself; he understands that the desire to disrupt his own life is somehow intrinsic to his writing, He considers what it is that writers do, this appropriation of words to create something. And he considers how words, those “savage gods,” as he calls them, have directed his life.

 

And then he experiences the time when the words stop, even when they’re not supposed to. And that leads to a meditation upon silence. 

 

Paul Kingsnorth

He draws upon thinkers and writers as diverse as Russell Means, the Native American activist; the culture of the highlands in Papua New Guinea; mythologist Colin Campbell; the poet R.S. Thomas; cultural ecologist David Abram; D.H. Lawrence; Rainer Maria Rilke; and many others. Kingsnorth is searching here, and he mines the experiences and words of other writers and thinkers to understand what is happening in his own life.

 

Kingsnorth is the author of three novels, The Wake (2015), Beast (2017), and Alexandria (2020), and a collection of poems, Kidland: And Other Poems (2011). He’s also the author of three non-fiction works: One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (2003); Real England: The Battle Against the Bland (2009); and Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (2017). He blogs at The Abbey of Misrule. He and his family live in Ireland.

 

Savage Gods tells a story, the story of a writer experiencing a struggle. It may be a struggle ostensibly about writer’s block, but it is really a larger struggle, and a larger story, of self-understanding.

 

Related:

 

Beast by Paul Kingsnorth.

 

Paul Kingsnorth: The Poetry of the Future Landscape.

 

Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth.

"Alexandria" by Paul Kingsnorth

It’s almost a thousand years in the future. Because of an unnamed climate catastrophe, there’s little of humanity left. There are small communities, like the one living in what used to be known as the English Fens in Suffolk. No one calls it the English Fens. Or Suffolk. Or England. Those names are forgotten. A few other communities live their entire lives on boats. The communities of land dwellers and boat dwellers do not mix. 

This one in the Fens at one time had scores more people. But gradually they left; a better description might be that they were persuaded to leave by what’s known as a Red Stalker, a human being seemingly without skin. They were convinced to leave their physical bodies behind and join Alexandria. Little is known about Alexandria; even the stalker has never been there (if he convinces his quota of people to leave, he, too, gets to go permanently to Alexandria. 

 

But dreams are coming to the community in the Fens. And the old man known as Father is sent west to the place to learn what will happen. He’s soon followed by a young man, Lorenso, who I miserable because of his great love for the one younger woman remaining in the community. Her name is sfia; she is married to nzil and the mother of five-year-old El. One other resident remains in the community, the dreamer who’s dying of old age.

 

Paul Kingsnorth

Alexandria by Paul Kingsnorth is the remarkable third novel in the trilogy that began with The Wake and included Beast. The language of these novels takes some getting used to; it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read in English, including the spelling and punctuation. I found The Wake difficult and had to stop. Beast was much easier. And Alexandria ended up being accessible as well; I may be ready to return to reading The Wake. But this is not affectation on the author’s part; the language fits the novel and is what one might expect hundreds of years after the breakdown of civilization as we know it.

 

Alexandria is remarkable for the compelling story it tells, and the great theme Kingsnorth has been developing in his fiction and non-fiction. It’s the theme of “the Machine,” that society is utilizing technology to transform itself, and the transformation is not leading to a better place. In fact, it’s leading to a dehumanizing place, a place that ends with society’s death. 

 

Kingsnorth is the author of the two novels, The Wake (2015) and Beast (2017), and a collection of poems, Kidland: And Other Poems (2011). He’s also the author of three non-fiction works: One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (2003); Real England: The Battle Against the Bland (2009); and Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (2017). He blogs at The Abbey of Misrule. He and his family live in Ireland.

 

Alexandria was published two years ago, yet it seems like it is written today (and perhaps tomorrow). It is a story of how technology encroaches and ultimately embraces and becomes everything, offering its own kind of salvation. But it contains with in it the seeds of its own destruction. 

 

Related:

 

Beast by Paul Kingsnorth.

 

Paul Kingsnorth: The Poetry of the Future Landscape.

Paul Kingsnorth: The Poetry of the Future Landscape

British writer Paul Kingsnorth is best known for two novels, Beast and The Wake, and a collection of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. I’ve read and enjoyed Beast; it is a novel of frequent run-on sentences and no quotation marks, about a man living alone in a landscape devoid of people but with people’s artifacts remaining. I’ve started The Wakethree times, this novel of an Anglo-Saxon landowner seeking revenge on Norman invaders. It’s partially written in Kingsnorth’s version of Old English; it also lacks quotation marks and capital letters. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, and I’m determined to make a fourth attempt to read it.

This unconventional form for his novels is of a piece with Kingsnorth’s environmental philosophy, articulated in a statement called The Dark Mountain Manifesto written with Dougald Hine in 2009. The manifesto serves as a kind of constitution for the Dark Mountain Project, self-described as “an international network of writers and artists searching for new stories for an age of upheaval.” It is a dark mountain for a dark view of what the future holds, coupled with what that future will require if individuals are to survive.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Beast” by Paul Kingsnorth

Edward Buckmaster has been living alone on the northwestern moors of England for “five seasons.” He keeps largely to himself, even from the reader; we don’t know much about until; later. ‘From the east I came to this high place,” he says, “to be broken, to be torn apart, beaten, cut into pieces. I came here to measure myself against the great emptiness.” What we don’t know is whether that great emptiness is what he came to or what he came from.

For five seasons, he lives his chosen life. And then comes a storm. When he awakens, he finds himself in the yard outside a farmhouse; he’s seriously injured with what looks like a broken knee, severe pain in his chest, and five claw marks across his stomach. He’s also disoriented; everything seems strange, including the sky, which has become entirely white. He hears no birds, and no other sounds.

Beast by British novelist and writer Paul Kingsnorth is one of most unusual novels I’ve read. It’s the second in what Kingsnorth calls the “Buckmaster Trilogy” (the first being The Wake) but it’s a standalone novel. The time for the narrative is likely contemporary, but the only clues are a reference to a sleeping bag and a bottle of pain relievers. Beast has many of the trappings of a dystopian novel, but it’s not one in the commonly understood sense. The dystopia seems to lie more inside Edward Buckmaster, a man who thought he knew what he was doing but finds himself unmoored and untethered.

After a period of recovering from his injuries, Buckmaster goes walking to find other people and to find food. But he only finds two things: an empty church dating back to Anglo-Saxon times and a glimpse of a large, dark animal moving quickly across the unpaved road. The church offers no answers, so he goes looking for the beast, as it calls it, mapping out a grid on a map that will allow him to search one square mile every day.

Paul Kingsnorth

Buckmaster will indeed find the beast, but not when or where he’s looking for it.

Kingsnorth is the author of the two novels, The Wake (2015) and Beast (2017), and a collection of poems, Kidland: And Other Poems (2011). He’s also the author of three non-fiction works: One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (2003); Real England: The Battle Against the Bland (2009); and Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays (2017).

Beast is a one-character story often told in broken and run-on sentences and without the use of quotation marks (since Buckmaster rarely actually speaks, the quotation marks aren’t needed). It’s about a man’s relationship to the land and with himself. It’s about both exterior and interior landscapes. It’s about finding peace.

It’s a strangely beautiful story.

Top photograph, an aerial view of the moors near Oxenhope, England, by Richard Horne via Unsplash. Used with permission.