Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
God’s Funeral
Hardy is dead, but is God?
(by A.N. Wilson) A beautiful & rich review of Victorian and Edwardian thinking, as God’s life support was unplugged and how later generations may come, in time, to feel the need to apply resuscitation. As Kenneth Clark observed, heroic materialism and Marxism aren’t enough. We need something more.
Continue Reading →The Glass Bead Game
(by Hermann Hesse) Hesse’s ideation of his own life as a monk is a heavy but worthwhile read.
Continue Reading →The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress
(by Beryl Bainbridge) An odd, slight, oddly touching and slightly naff story of a road trip to oblivion, culminating in the death of RFK; but is the dysfunctional, libidinous Rose ‘the girl in the polka dot dress’ who exclaimed, ‘We shot him!’ as reported in the LA Times on 6 June 1968? Bainbridge’s last, almost finished novel is, unlike The Original of Laura, worth reading.
Continue Reading →The General Strike
(by Julian Symons) 13 May 1926 – the General Strike in Britain ended this day. People thought Marxism was through in Britain as a result but like Mao in exile, it would return. Calling a strike requires keen judgment because the reaction of the public as a whole might be sympathetic, hostile, or mixed. One example is the pilots’ strike in Australia in 1989, which resulted in the pilots, and their union, being blown out of the sky. Another famous campaign was the Miners’ strike of the mid 1980s in England, when organized labour found out that the majority of the…
Continue Reading →Annabel Lee, Miranda & Stevie
Annabel Lee, Miranda, Stevie, and Lesley (image by Stephen Reid)
Greetings and a warm welcome to Lesley’s blog, the part of The Varnished Culture which is girly, crafty and sort of ethereal. Our muses are Stevie Nicks, Joyce Carol Oates and Lily Cole. Our poem is “Annabel Lee” – a poem by Edgar Allen Poe – Stevie does an otherwordly,
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