Homeless Jack on “Grabbing Some Pussy”

We discovered this piece scrawled on some foolscap left on our doorstep, an all-lower-case Kerouac-style stream of consciousness rap, and offer it as we found it. by H. Millard trump is an american original and a throwback to the days when americans were bursting with confidence and energy and the sheer joy of freedom and life itself and  roark and Continue Reading →

Pauline Kael: One Against the Herd

Selected Writings of Pauline Kael; Library of America, 2011 Pauline Kael: Alone in the Dark; Brian Kellow, Viking Adult, 2011 by Ron Capshaw FOR CONSERVATIVES, PAULINE KAEL IS notorious for her much-quoted comment about her astonishment that Nixon won the 1972 election since “everyone I know voted for McGovern.” Despite this prime example of the liberal whose worldview is confined to Continue Reading →

Head of the Whole Business

Red Conspirator: J. Peters and the American Communist Underground by Thomas Sakmyster; University of Illinois Press, March 2011 $50.00, 312 pages, including 6 black & white photographs reviewed by David Chambers FROM AUGUST 3, 1948, until today, America has had to wait to learn more about the head of Soviet espionage in Washington during the 1930s. On that day, Whittaker Continue Reading →

What is Poetry?

Poetry is an art much neglected — or mangled — by the anti-Western ideologues that dominate what remains of our culture today. But it is an integral part of our civilization, and we are incomplete without it. by Martin Wright Sampson, Professor of English Literature, Cornell University I REMEMBER that as a small boy I used to wonder what there Continue Reading →

H. L. Mencken at Full Throttle

Honeyed and abrasive: the irrepressible journalism of the ‘Sage of Baltimore’ and American Mercury founder by Michael Dirda H.L. MENCKEN (1880—1956) is often smilingly referred to as the Sage of Baltimore (especially in Baltimore), but during the first third of the twentieth century he was the most outspoken, irrepressibly contrarian literary and political journalist in the United States. As the Continue Reading →