Yes, hello. Everyone talk about this compact article, Jacob Savage, The Lost Generation, about the practice of DEI, essentially affirmative action, NEO, greatly reducing the numbers of younger white men and white-collar professions, but actually just special focus on Hollywood, academia, and journalism. And article does a fine job of counting the percentages. It's full of numbers, you know, and it's less effective when it fleshes out exactly what it means, what personal story is. And actually, I think articles suck, and I want to explain to you what's wrong with it. Welcome to Caribbean Rhythms, episode number 203. But first, I want to tell you some of my week's reverie's daydream. I was walking around, think about the passage from Xenophon,

Constitution of Sparta that I read to you before. you know where he talked about how older men should not just be entitled to steal all the Zoomer pussy because Zoomer girls want to be on Spartan Instagram with expensive wine from Chios to be seen by other Greek girls and be held in envy and so everyone pays attention to the first part of that passage that I read for you a couple of episodes ago where you have prescribed cuckoldry of of old, true men who want to hog up all the hot, young pussy for themselves, as you can see in our own time. And like Kurgis, this be the founder of Sparta, okay? He just claps back at them. No, you don't get the zoomer pussy. Young studs will still breed your wives by order of the state, because we need strong citizen soldiers.

You'll have to accept and them into your household, will add a man foam to your household wine. And this led to funny post by friend about Sparta poster Nico Manga say Sparta was a femdom looks maxing eugenic society with prescribed cuckoldry of the rich olds by young studs. They ritually declared war on the wholesome Pelasgian indios slave population see Socrates every year they declared war and were the most fierce warriors in Greece a vision into based world. And for those of you not in the know, fandom is a female domination fetish. It is all the rage now. Do you like this? But really the second part of that passage, if you remember, it's from the Constitution of the Spartans at the beginning. You can find it in full online. But the second part is so striking, you know.

It says that the man who wants to beget children but doesn't want to be a father can convince a woman of a fine family to bear his children if he can persuade her and her husband. So presumably then he would pay them some form of child support. It's not specified. So like, you know, can I use your wife as a vessel, which sounds insane to moderns, but maybe the Spartans in the other Spartans and the Spartan citizen class, the homoioi, they were called the equals. They were maybe more related to each other than normal. So you know, if it's your second or third cousin or such, maybe as a modern even you'd find that more acceptable or I don't know, maybe not. But basically is high eugenic measures because like Kurgis is saying, we want more children by high quality citizens.

And we're not going to select against instincts that are anti domestic, which is the very opposite of modern situation where any man who is not wholly committed to domestic life gets selected out. I keep telling you, formerly men did not even have to deal with the lives of tiny infants for the first few years and their incessant crying, whereas now, expected to play full house from before birth, go birthing class, breathing sessions, and so on with their wives. And so like Kyrgyz is saying, domestic instincts are okay too. That doesn't take away from the qualities of a soldier if he likes to play house with his wife. But the opposite is also good, and we won't just weed out fine men because they cannot take fatherhood.

So here's a possible solution, a wise and cold-eyed, eagle-eyed eugenic choice. And in this text also, or maybe it was another, I don't remember, it is said that in order to make a man more comfortable on his day of marriage, a Spartan woman, and yes the Spartan women were famously themselves the hottest in Greece, by the way, but also very independent, could own land, property, and businesses, but that on the day of marriage she would cut her hair short, put on rough robes, a man's military clothes, she'd cross-dress as a man basically, and enter her husband's bed discreetly so he would feel more comfortable. So it made me think of what if there was an update of this law for modern spurgs as opposed

for Spartans with their tastes, but what about for modern internet addict posters with Aspergers? Some call themselves incels today, although that's a false word, but to make them feel more comfortable with a young Trump-provided kind of anime wife where she meets him for the first time in bed, and they both are then by order or suggestion of a health department to communicate only through something like Twitter direct message or some other text message on another platform, even in the same bed, they continue for some time, communicate through only digital intermediary. And I think this would help also institution of marriage and so-called birth rate for use with Aspergers. In fact, I know of such people who can only enjoy erotic contact through video, even when they're in together.

I've met Japan's girl like this. Do you like this? It's a kind of innovation. Please watch the movie Audition, Takashi Miike, a great romantic date movie with your mistress or wife where you can see a psychotic girl capture a movie director, put him in a closet prison and feed him his own vomit and beer only for food. I'm sorry if this disgust you. This is never family show, put your children away. I was at a nice restaurant a few days ago and I felt like a steak and I ordered this bone-in ribeye thing. So you know as it's fashioned now, they bring it pre-sliced and often with a large steak that is good for sharing. But this time I start to think, and I don't remember if it was drunkenness or maybe the depths of nicotine poisoning again, but I start to think, could this be a form of, is

this a trickery so I object to waiter I say to him how do I know that these slices these disparate discrete pieces of meat I ask him how do I know that you have not collected them from other customers at this restaurant you know like leftovers and that they didn't eat and then you gave them a whole steak and they cut maybe they leave slices behind and you collected different ones from different leftover plate slice, and then you reheated and assembled them on my plate, making it look like. And he is taken aback for real when I make this suggestion. He gets angry at me, points to the bone, and I say, yes, I'm very aware bone is the whole and real at that part, but the slices may not belong to this actual bone section.

You could have collected them over time and now deceptively reassembled them on my plate. So you see, it led to a whole big thing and the chef comes out and everything. It was a scandal. And I mean to tell you that an East Bloc man who is very perceptive cannot catch a break. So anyway, regarding this article by J.Con Savage in Compact Magazine, massive exposure. And this is a good thing. I think if it gets people talking about anti-white racism and the destruction of meritocracy in general. But if you actually read the article itself, it's not about in general. It's a very inadequate article on the actual subject it treats, which is the arts and literature. It sucks, okay? Basically, the writer is complaining that he and his friends did not get jobs as time

servers in the arts, which okay, this just will not do. I wrote an entry on it on my blog substack. Maybe you read. I wanted to add to what I said there. The more I think about this article, angrier I get actually. I don't think it's good at all. Some of you are just so thirsty for any kind of exposure, anything you might think friendly takes and ideas you maybe are oblivious to how slightly wrong framing of a serious problem actually can spoil all of it. And in this case, article now getting amplified as a kind of victimization sob story and the left is responding by crowing, and by being abusive and laughing, and turning it back on you, where instead the focus should have been on their own manifesting competence, so then they have to be forced to defend that.

Because for all the evidence presented in the article, yes, regarding marginalization of young white males in these industries, and that's, I suppose, its real advantage, it's full of numbers that the writer obviously took a lot of effort to research, but there's There's little to no evidence given in this piece that things are made worse or different by that. In fact, there's some evidence to the contrary. Let me go on a slight tangent and give you a story. I know more than one man in the math and physics level type of sciences. If you are a conservative, you'd think those fields are immunized from DEI and affirmative action, but actually it's been very bad in that too for a long time, for maybe longer than 25 years.

Even in those fields, there is a slander of a sort assumed in this article and believed also by leftists who hate merit. A slander that goes something like this, that if you have a job, you should shut up because you've made it and you should be happy with that. So that's a kind of literal communism where someone else decides how much is enough for you and that it's somebody else's turn to succeed also. You have nothing to complain about. If you hog too much, too many resources, too much attention, you're taking them from someone else who would be sad. And that's how you end up with degraded arts and degraded science also. Because the purpose here, what concerns me isn't whether someone has a job so that they can have status and their mommy can get the vapors and feel proud. And if

And if you think that's the point of scholarship and the arts, you're a fucking Philistine. It's possible that in fact the genuinely successful to be, it's possible for the genuinely successful to be some of the most discriminated against. I can name at least three that I've known personally, again in the hardest of the hard sciences, physics and such, who solved open problems in their fields, problems that had been actually opened for decades. I'm not talking about irrelevant corollaries. I'm talking major things, you know, like Chinese science is like some inconsequential footnote to a corollary, and then you publish a paper and lo then, China now has a billion papers in the so-called hard sciences, except it's all crap. But this wasn't like that.

These guys had major results recognized in their fields, and some did it the romantic way that you may read about in books and short stories like I will discuss later on this episode. They went in the middle of nowhere with pen and paper. They were very young in their early 20s, sometimes just out of undergraduates, sometimes even still college students. They took road trip, got excited, got ideas for the passion of the material. And they had, excuse me, they had these achievements very young. And what happened after? Well, listen, I'll tell you what, but I know I need music's break and I'll be right back. Yes, I won't take more frequent music breaks, display nice musics on this show. But by the way, let me take a tangent regarding science and physics doctoral students because

series of murders you may have read this week, conspirator, the right wing dissident Twitter, and elsewhere going crazy over this girl murdered at Brown University, and then MIT scientist in nuclear plasma also killed. And that was the news for half the week they were chimping hard. I said nothing because I didn't know yet what happened. But they chimp over Oh, the left is going on a murder spree of conservatives and this. And it turns out it's not that at all. It's a personal story of a slighted physics student who killed his supposed rival. Maybe this girl actually did get caught in the crossfire by a complete coincidence. But what you don't know, maybe a real story here is that this is not unheard of in physics, especially often suicide used

to be what happened with physics grad students. But when it's not suicide, and with higher frequency than you might think in the 1990s and 2000s, you still had physics PhDs go postal and kill their dissertation committees. It happened a number of times. This happened because a lot of passionate, true believers, they go into physics and they're often men with dreams of becoming the next Heisenberg and Einstein. That's very often kind of committed, at least among white youths, white spergs who go into this. White and Jewish spergs go into it with dreams of becoming that. Then when it doesn't work out, that's a major blow to your identity. So you know, they chimp out like this guy did and kill people. And Scott Laughlin alert me to an article I will post for you, you can find on archive

because it's been deleted from internet. It's called Don't Become a Scientist by Jonathan Katz, a professor in physics at Washington University. I think from like 1999, it was on this professor's personal website, but they made him take it down. So, you know, it's a very difficult life, this whatever this guy was into. It can go wrong, complete, and then a life of darkness ending in murder, suicide. But by the way, Scott Laughlin, I'll repeat to you given our subject on this episode. Scott is genuinely, as far as I know, one of the best writers of our time, one of the funniest men. He has a whole bunch of articles you can find online. As far as I know, and maybe he didn't tell me, he's never once been approached for book projects or anything.

Not that he needs it now, and he's a hard science guy himself. And he has other, I think he was a physics PhD and experimental physics, and he has other project now, okay. He doesn't need to be approached for publishing book, but I hope he not offended that I'm going or he think that this is sob story on his behalf. But it's like, if you wanted real writers who are wildly funny, you had proof of concept in a number of people like Scott. But as far as I know, nobody approached him for anything ever. And that includes all the people praising this article now as if, you know, it's not like you didn't have exemplars of white male writers if you wanted, you could have invested in. Anyway, let me go back to my story. The hard sciences, right?

So these guys, they focused with passion and maniacally, these guys I knew, I don't mean the physics one, I mean the people I was talking to, the guys I knew who had concrete results in something that you can recognize as indisputably real, not humanities or such. But you know, conservatives love the hard sciences. So the right that these guys, they focused with maniacal hunger for the material, and confidence that they could solve these problems in this in their fields, and they did. And again, major problems, and you'd think they would be fast tracked, and given all the support, which is what any half sane society would do it instead, that life was a struggle. and to a large extent still is. So regardless you see on paper that they seemingly have secured positions at such laboratory or

universities but it's a disaster in the sciences and stories like this which somewhat others who've known people if you've been in around science people for a long time they can repeat to you similar stories because you multiply such things to the point where I believe American science and innovation Yes, it's been better than other parts of the world, but I think it's been significantly hampered over the last decades because of things I just said now. And that's what concerns me, that even very successful people have been discriminated against, unlike the assumption in this article that what matters is getting a fucking job. And the fact that while all this was happening you had, and this is a real example, at a

a certain major university, just to give you one example that come to mind now, there was a shibun professor who supposedly studied combinatorics, but had no real knowledge of that field. And her specialty was the logistics of airports or such thing. And it was people like this who are fast tracked instead. And they were the ones being given limited funding, resources, and attention. Yes, I'm sorry, people do go into the sciences and scholarship because they want encouragement and attention. And it's an insult when it's diverted instead to this garbage, including, by the way, at major labs and foundations, not just universities, but including at places like Microsoft and elsewhere before 2010. So if you wanted, you could easily compile a representative list of all this and concretely

show people the reasonable and unworthy things that have been funded at the expense of the better, you know, that was recognized by all to be better, nevertheless marginalized or made far more difficult than it should have and that's the kind of case you should be making because otherwise it sounds like you want to be the white guy who well honestly that uh okay the airport logistics thing is too absurd like that case maybe only a black woman could be given that position for that kind of thing but you see what i'm saying you want to be the white guy who does the 1000th study of barrio community organizing dynamics in a certain part of Chicago 1971 or 74 which is a typical dissertation topic from the last 30 years

or such garbage or that you would be happy with that you know if you if you had that job that you'd be happy with that which is the kind of message of this article that everyone is celebrating the emotional keystone is toward the end of this article where mr cabbage shows that what he regrets not doing with an anecdote about that he entered some TV writer's room at some point, oh so romantic, he wanted a job to, or some very lame stupid time machine show, you know, that the retired writers in this anecdote are discussing. And it's like, who would enjoy watching this show? You're supposed to think of someone else enjoying watching that show, because you wouldn't either. In other words, it's some crappy road Netflix type thing. So then the left is right to ask, what matters who does this?

When I say 80% of funding in biology went to AIDS research, maybe that's a kind of Trump exaggeration. Go ahead and look up how much it was. Yes, HIV AIDS, maybe it was not 80%, maybe it was 79%. But what are we doing here? Is the purpose to have some white dollar assigned to get funding for this HIV frivolous scholarship bullshit as opposed to a Hispanic dollar. Because either way, what happens is a worthy intellect is not going to get that funding for real research. That's my point. And that's what the article leaves out. Well, before 2014, I've made the case that if you control for Jews, for gays, for legacies and athletes, the percentage of straight white males, American straight white males at, for

example, Ivy or top schools in the undergrad student body was somewhere on the order of three to five percent, and I stand by that. And that's ethnic cleansing, well before this article claims that such things happen. And the purpose of me mentioning this isn't to dispute the timeline or to nitpick, well, it happened before, but to tell you that actually the kinds of white males who are then excluded after let's say 2010 or 2012 in Hollywood, and I'm sure there were exceptions. There are people also who maybe have top-level, takia, social discretion abilities. But I don't think it would have been me or my friends or anyone I admire capable of being in those fields at that point is what I'm telling you.

If you knew the kind of white males who were left over after that, it wasn't anybody doing good work. In fact, having been around those people, as I mentioned offhand in my article, I would have been very happy and I was looking to get a job in the Philippines or University of Manila. What I was looking to do before I published my book, a very hard workload for a professor, by the way, if you are an American professor in Poland or something, or especially something like Philippines or East Asia, it can be very hard. But I would have done it just to be away from these faggots who are whining in this article about being themselves later excluded. Actually, it was my dream to get a job at the Royal University of Bhutan, which I might still take that one now

now as a part time position, maybe I could not resist the exotic factor of it, maybe. But you see what I'm saying? It's a question of outcomes, quality of outcome, not even test scores, but outcomes, which this article doesn't focus on, but should have focused on decline in quality of outcome. And instead, it's about who gets a job to make a living and make their mommy proud. But it's not explained what the purpose of that job is, or why which then passes over the fact that well before the accelerated racist yes it was racist then to ousting that the racist ousting of younger white men following 2015 when it did accelerate but there were many prior such so what you're invited to applaud here its sympathy at the travails of like you know like the bad guy from excuse me like the bad guy

from spy game if you watch this movie with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt okay or like the boss from office space that's the type these these are the types mostly who were who you are invited to commiserate over in this article. It's like a lawyer for civil rights division for barrio immigrants and we don't want that lawyer to be a black woman or Hispanic we want that lawyer to be like a white guy like the guy from office space who's a faggot you know who would also attack you you see I mean I'm exaggerating a little bit but that's it's like do you applaud the Sonderkommando that type of thing you see so so those types then also got ousted in the 2010s from like academia and Hollywood and now let's bring out the violins so now I don't know this

writer of this article Jacob Savage maybe where that he was he did try to do things outside the studio system with his friends or maybe anonymously but that's not what it is in this article he may very well be a talented writer maybe Maybe he'll show it someday, produce something creative, but I don't know that. This article itself, the problem is that precisely on these matters of the arts, of literature, it's not really possible to separate the form, the presentation from the argument, like it would be if you had talked about law or medicine or such. My friend Stefan Ruitenbeek, who I mentioned on last episode from Kirak, he has a couple of tweets about this and it's just, the article is a boring series of numbers.

And then unfortunate life anecdotes, which by the way, that's another thing I won't discuss now. But the whole victimization narrative, actually the left largely discredited itself since 2009 by becoming exclusively a victimizer. I'll give you another short anecdote. I remember this Libtard girl I knew around then, 2009. Now this is serious hardcore libtard bitch. She's probably the kind who still wear a mask, okay? She had serious Trump derangement syndrome. And yet even a person like this, okay, she was not complete insane at the time. When I show her and at the time, 2009, the microaggressions thing was just coming out and I show her the microaggressions website. And even this kind of person taken aback and say, no, you must have made this with your friends.

You must have made this with your friends to discredit liberals. Even people like that saw at that point how disastrous this would be for the left, which it was. I mentioned briefly in my own articles that in the 1960s and 70s when blacks and Jews are being integrated, the primary focus was for blacks on their athletic success and for Jews on things like Like comedians, it was the Rodney Dangerfield archetype showing up, crashing wasp parties of stiff-colored, stolid people and making them look silly with Jewish humor. And that's what endeared the Seinfeld types and so forth. That's what endeared Jews more to the American people, more than the victimization narrative, which at the time, by the way, 60s and 70s, was not as big as it was later in the 80s and 90s.

Both that and the Kunta Kinta thing for the blacks, those were side stories. They were not the main course. And when these became the main course for the left and for their ethnic clients following 2009, it was a disaster, I think, mostly for all of them to the point where Americans who who are philosimitic and, you know, negrophilic, have become far less so in recent years. You know, Jews have become lame to the American increasing, not, I think it's still a philosimitic society, but have become increasingly that way, and black people have become increasingly uncool. I would say it's not only because of this, but this is part of the story, the kind of Tumblr, Facebook mix, vortex of victimization narratives, which the left now is left out at sea.

It's their very high difficulty getting out of this now. So anyway, but yes, unfortunate life anecdotes told to a violin in this article. People who are not giving careers, and it's possible that these men in the article may have been somewhat better than the minorities or women who did get those jobs. But there's zero evidence given anywhere that anyone had interesting ideas for art or shows or books that you would want to read, or that they tried to do something on their own, ever. I'm not talking for evidence that you have hidden Van Gogh paintings, but something, right, some proposal that you have in mind, projects, people who would have fun to read or watch. It would have been some proposal that you have, I don't know, it would have been stronger article, I think,

and possibly acceptable in this format, if it had been about a field like medicine or aviation, if you didn't want to get into that, but I mean, DEI in aviation and medicine, and there's already evidence of that, and it's waiting to be compiled, okay? In that case, you could have this type of thing, and with just some mentions, you know, like planes crashed out of the sky. But when you're making the case that you and your friends should have been given jobs as writers and artists for public display, It doesn't do to present no evidence that you would have done anything differently from what's around now. I mean, TV's quite bad now. It was bad before 2010, I have to tell you. And I'm sorry, this personal for me also, because there were many anonymous poster friends in 2016 who did make

such efforts to do things on their own. And in the era of internet and YouTube and such, and on On YouTube, you had major people who make stuff. Whatever YouTube influencer now is not showing Vagine and Bob's, it's white men. Like Survive the Jive, OK? And then much bigger ones like PewDiePie, right? And so there's no excuse, if you had a burning ambition to create art or express yourself, at least not to have tried, at least to have some come online, maybe, and to post under a frog avatar, which, you know, tweets in some way, if you do it well, it's its own art form, I think. I mean, LaRouche Foucault, Nietzsche, Lichtenberg, sometimes Schopenhauer, they were posters, okay? They were Twitter posters with many aphorisms. And a few frogs, quite a few frogs, a handful,

they elevated this consistently to a genuine art where they built up organic audiences. People who enjoyed, looked forward to reading what, you know, what is Haakon's and others, I don't want to keep saying names, I've told you some of their names before. What are they saying next? As far as I know, they were enjoyed by some of the gentlemen who are now wringing their hands over this exclusion depicted in this article. But although these men were the genuine thing showing proof of concept, they got zero support I can tell you, zero approaches, zero proposals, nothing, none of us got anything. So they did as much as a 20-year-old could do with limited resources and showed that they could char many. So like this poster, I give you an example, nigger in a chair, right?

That was his screen name. He was great. Wildly funny. He had to stop what he was doing because he got a real job. It's actually a great job genuinely, you know, the kind of job that like a Chinese mother would feel proud of. So I guess now he goes to libertarian heaven. But we, meanwhile, are deprived of possible movies that he could have made. And now Biden raped Greupers also, you know, before you weepingly wring your hands over this, why don't you offer money to Biden raped Greupers to make movies? And all it would have taken is one of these guys to offer, bigger than a chair, what was peanuts to them, I'm talking about people like Thiel and these billionaires, they could have changed some of these guys lives and then changed culture if they had done enough

times that with posters like that. And instead now I'm supposed to seal clap over the sad life stories of entirely theoretical writers who show no evidence, who you are asking abstract Hollywood to take a risk on and invest in to create entirely theoretical art that you transfer in your mind for other people to enjoy when you do not. And when you had the real article before you, and you passed up the chance to do so, to invest in them yourself. And that's many of the people applauding this article now. Published, by the way, by Compact Magazine, which is so resolutely hostile, actually, to me and my friends, they hired the very white Malcolm Cayune, you know, he's Swedish, so he must be white. No, he's a genuine Antifa, that's right, Antifa Mulatto.

Not that, you know, I praise the Mulatto nation, but he's this kind, okay, Antifa Mulatto. You can read his anti-white articles in Swedish if you want. You can look them up. Weirdly enough, the internet researchers never looked into that. But they hired him, Compact hired him specifically to fixate on me especially and my friends to attack us. So that's so far as Compact magazine support for new writers and so on goes. So thank you now. seal clap at a list of numbers by a guy who wants to write about time-traveling washing machines with retards for Netflix. So, you know, this is just another type of job, okay, I repeat. I think you're turning this article in your mind into another article you think was written about a more generalized story about anti-white discrimination.

But that's not what this is a special case where the framing makes it such that opponents can now legitimately ask, so what? What exactly would be different if the jobs went to you? If you don't focus on decline in quality of outcomes, this is always a legitimate question. If this article promotes discussion of anti-white racism more generally, okay. But I repeat that the purpose of the article is to stomp specifically for the status quo anti-2012 or 2010 in the arts, literature, writing, Hollywood. And if you want that reestablished, You are at the least highly misguided and most likely a Philistine. And something happened well before then, which in terms of outcome, final cultural product I mean, if that can be said to have anything to do with culture or even entertainment,

where it doesn't really matter then who produces it, where no men of any backbone were generally allowed in those studios by that time anyway, you know, or else the few who were had to practice ketman, taqiyya, deception to a degree that no one is suited for today in any case and that makes cultural enterprise an entirely captive counter-production. Well enough on this, I will be right back to discuss, by contrast with all this garbage, to discuss two good novels. I'll be right back. I read recently two novels back to back, Sentimental Education by Flaubert and The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Moam, one from 1869, the other from 1919, I think, novels which are both very good, the one much better than the other, and which are somewhat related to each other,

both related to what I'm talking about today, actually. Both are about aspiring artists in a way. And please don't listen maybe to these segments if you are about to read Sentimental Education Actually, you can listen, maybe I'll try to keep spoilers to minimum, but you can hardly talk about book or movie without spoiler. But if you read it in the more remote future, maybe you can listen. Anyway, look, I don't think you should read a book to be surprised by the plot. There's no real plot to Sentimental Education anyway, it's not traditional. It's a novel written in 1869 about France in the 1840s and tells the story of Frederick, a sensitive young man who's 18 years old in 1840. And for those of you who are politics obsessed and think political situation determines your

life, the book took place during two regime change in France, serious regime change, the revolution of 1848, which sets up second French Republic. And then the change of that into the French Empire in 1851-52, when Napoleon III came to power, although the novel doesn't get too far into this second change. But you know, entire government social upheaval full of sparks of revolution, very majestic. And yet, well I get to that in a second, I say the book isn't really about anything, it's about this generation, French life during this time that actually, so important decade but not a lot of people know anything about, and Flaubert achieved what every novelist great ambition dreams of. Basically tell the story of this generation. I have to say, I

walk from this book away in awe at his skill. Flaubert was obsessive about style. He would often rewrite the same page 20 times. He would sometimes walk around the whole day repeating the same word over and over, the sound of a word, to see if actually it fit in the sentence he wanted. And then he'd throw it away and he'd write. And it shows, it's one of the, it shows, it's some of smoothest reading I've ever experienced. If you want to be entirely imagistic like movie, it can flow. And that's the mark of consummate style in my opinion. One of the marks, it's actually what Somerset Moen, the other author I'll talk about again tries to do also, although less well, just clean, cinematic, unobtrusive reading.

Flaubert is called the realist, but that's to the extent he goes into, for example, minute descriptions of fashion, of clothing, of materials. He has special interest in these things, the materials used in interior designs, drapes and such, many of which words I didn't know. But on the first readings, you should not stop to look things up, I think. For many names of the time also, they have to do with news of the day that mentioned they're not essential to understanding the book or experiencing the cinematic quality. You can look them up on the second or third reading and you know it's just like such and such scandal mentioned in offhand of a political or social scandal in dialogue between characters. But you can get the context usually anyway, my point is.

But the amazing achievement he had, and I think Nietzsche at one point suggests this technique of novel writing also, Flaubert wrote in preparation for this book, separate biographies of the characters that appear in Sentimental Education, at least the major and mid-level characters, you know, and it shows what's astounding about this book is the richness of Paris' high-class social life retold to you in such a way that, right, the The human brain I think is built, women especially, but all humans, really to find details of social life endlessly interesting. And there's maybe not just one or two character psychological profile or quirks retold to you in this novel, but dozens that Frederick, the main character that he meets as he moves

up in French and Parisian society, and the depths, the texture of those inner lives, relationships. It's just an endlessly entertaining social drama really soap opera at highest level. I'm quite sure Mishima copied this book style almost exact I think to great success in quite a few of his novels especially his early one Forbidden Colors which though quite a different plot it also tells the story of a sensitive young man's navigation of high class social life in that case Tokyo in the 1950s and it also complete with Flaubert's flair for a minute imagistic description of women's clothing and interiors and such you know Mishima had special talent for that too kept kept at it throughout his life but in terms of the actual story such as

it is it's a classic Bildungsroman tale of education and moving up in society of romantic young man, usually from the provinces who comes to make it in the capital, in this case, he from French province comes to Paris with all kinds of high hopes and I'd say largely this same story told in Stendhal, the red and the black and Maupassant-Belani, but at moment between these three, I would say Flaubert, my favorite of the sensitive young man stories, but also maybe most poignant, most disturbing of the three, but low key disturbing. All three take place in special moral universe of Napoleon. You must understand this, you bastards, to understand spirit of 19th century French artists. And not only of French, but all the higher spirits of the 19th century from Goethe on

to understand Napoleon in a very crude way. Maybe think if like Hitler was as forbidden as he is, but also had less of the, let's let's say the overtly negative character that Hitler has in our time, then let's say if Hitler did not have some of the more unfortunate connotations not just of genocide but of let's say vindictive pointless genocide, I'm not saying you know for those of you who love Hitler that's you can dispute that but let's say he has that reputation but Napoleon didn't quite have that you know and let's say neither did he have the mark of a somewhat unsavory totalitarianism. He was considered a tyrant by some, but was also seen as avatar of freedom of liberation and progress. The actionaries hated him. And by the way, I think the Nazis

largely wanted to understand themselves as liberators also. That's another story. But it let's say another kind of say Hitler, because Napoleon was also seen as the Antichrist in his life and after and following this man who set others hearts on fire with spirit of freedom and conquest and adventure, and elevated the men of intelligence, bravery and use over all others. I mean quite concretely in his armies, it was a militarized society of adventure. As a result of the military life of France at the time, it was a turnover of an old, some of the aristocrats joined into it, but it was a time of opportunity for average men of extreme high ability to advance. And afterwards this was all suppressed. His name was unspeakable.

This type of life was disdained, and I think I read you a passage before from Stendhal about this, the feeling of degradation, of how a worse kind of man then came up instead through the society that followed the suppression of Napoleon and the restoration of a monarchy name only, but really it was a bourgeois, stolid society, a place that prized money, Philistine domesticity, low ambitions, and schemers, like the Count of Monte Cristo tells exactly the same story. And that's less overt, less explicit in sentimental education, but when you read this book, it's always in the background of it, especially for Flaubert, who was apparently consumed by hatred of the bourgeois. You see it on many pages of this novel, and that's kind of in a French artist, it's archetypal,

but in Flaubert more than others. It led to this famous passage from Nietzsche where he explains not only the French artist disdain for the bourgeois, but the new task that Nietzsche saw at hand. He say it's the more important task of revealing the subterranean motivations and the beings of the last man which are worse than the bourgeois. I will read you now this famous passage from Nietzsche. in France. And where else nowadays are there still any psychologists have not yet stopped enjoying, psychologists in France have not yet stopped enjoying the bitter and manifold pleasure they get from the betis bourgeois, the bourgeois stupidity. It's as if, but enough, by doing that they are revealing something. For example, Flaubert, that worthy citizen

of Rouen, finished up by saying, by the way, Rouen, city Normandy, this is where Flaubert lived for a while in Paris, then he retired back in his, I guess, hometown, Rouen, which was archetypal bourgeois place in France, a place of industry, bourgeois industry. So he was himself a bourgeois, but hated them. So he said, they have not yet stopped enjoying the bitter and manifold pleasure they get from denouncing the bourgeois stupidity. It's as if, but enough, by doing that, they are revealing something. For example, Flaubert, that worthy citizen of Rouen, finished up by seeing, hearing, and tasting nothing else anymore, meaning nothing else but his hatred of the bourgeois. That was his kind of self-torture and more refined cruelty. Now for a change, since this is becoming tedious.

I think Alan Bloom is right to point to this, saying Nietzsche declared 150 years ago that hatred of the bourgeois was already becoming boring. So he said, now for a change, this is becoming tedious. I recommend something else for our delight, and that is the unconscious shiftiness with which all good, thick, well behaved, average spirits react to higher spirits and the work they do. That subtle, barbed, Jesuitical shiftiness, which is a thousand times more subtle than the understanding and taste of these middle class people in their best moments, or even than the understanding of their victims as well. This is repeated evidence for the fact that instinct is the most intelligent of all forms of intelligence discovered so far.

Briefly put, you psychologists should study the philosophy of the rule and its war against the exception. There you'll see a drama good enough for the gods and divine maliciousness. Or to put the matter still more clearly, practice vivisection on the good person, on the homo bonai voluntatis, the men of good will, on yourselves. a very profound passage. Do you like this? Maybe to discuss in more detail another time. But there's plenty of that in this book, Sentimental Education, as my friend Leo Cesares remarks. He knows France better than all of us do. It's still the same among these stolid bourgeois families now in Paris, where you go to their parties and it's like, oh, I want you to meet my daughter and this kind of, you know, but anyway, Frederic comes to Paris as basically

a middle-class student of 18 years old, he's studying law, but he's had full of all kinds of ambitions to become a writer, an artist, to have great love affairs and so on, and there's the beginning of the book, a very touching and full of longing phase where he is making plans with his best friend from high school, named Deloria, also a law student, And they live together as roommates for a while in Paris, making all kinds of great plans together for the future, to conquer the art world and so on. It's a very hopeful, nice beginning. At the beginning of his novel, Frederick, on his boat home on the Seine, going back on break from school, he runs into a beautiful woman, Mediterranean visage woman, her name Madame Arnoux.

And while you can't say really the novel is about this, but it's the spine of it, the cutting ground of the novel is his infatuation with this woman. He falls in love with her and basically never, I mean with some twists and turns, but he remains in love with her for the rest of his life, though she's married to another man, Jacques Arnoux. Now, Jacques Arnoux, also central character in this book, was apparently based on a real life music publisher, arts manager, Maurice Schlesinger, a German man who moved to Paris, was at the center of much 19th century music art scene. He introduced Wagner apparently to all kinds of people when Wagner came to Paris, actually when this book is set in 1840, 1841, and this man introduced Wagner to Liszt and such and other Parisian

artists, artists living in Paris, and he was a publisher, excuse me, of many music great works, basically one of the spearheads, models of our art dealership, And in Sentimental Education, he's not depicted as a music publisher, but just an all-around, mostly visual arts dealer, entrepreneur, who's at the beginning of the book, a lively artist salon social life, centered around his house and his wife, which Frederick starts to take part in. And anyway, look, this is not plot description, and that's dull, but basically the plot is at once hard to describe that there in fact is any plot. but it's extremely intricate retelling of Frederick moving up and around this world of artists on one hand, and on the other hand the banking high bourgeoisie and so on of

Paris, which first he feels rejected by and then he somewhat charms them. But it's really the tale of this man's life, and it's told to truths and not to poetic necessity of his friendships, his relationships and romantic affairs. And yes, people at that time had mistresses, plenty mistresses, premarital sexors, and everything else. I don't know how both Liptards and wishful thinking reactionaries, they like to claim these things did not exist before 1960. The book, you know, there were at the time in Paris different grades of courtesan and prostitute that were socially accepted. I guess what happens as time goes by, though, and his time, Frederic's time in Paris is increasingly taken up by this, by social intrigue, by women, by affairs, by his attempts to advance

in law at first and later attempts, mostly successful, to secure large inheritance of his uncle, after which he starts to live high style in Paris. But in all this rich, colorful social life, then his artistic plans and dreams are actually in the end, barely tried out, briefly tried out, attempts and then forgotten, often abandoned. In large part, this man is the image of Plato's democratic man, right, it's often, say, reactionaries attack the democratic man, but it's not entirely an image that's so negative in Plato's Republic. The democratic man is just a kind of aimless use who, right, he's trying his hand at different but actually quite colorful and charming description and from one experience to the next sailing in this floating world of social pleasure and sparring and so on and

Rivalries over love and in the background is the ever-increasing ever higher volume political pressure happenings And I'd say it's probably some of the most vivid fiction political writing I've ever had the revolution of 1848 when it finally happens, among many sparks and fire, very, actually, cinematic climactic moment also in Frederick's own romantic life, a fraught affair he has with a beautiful courtesan. Actually, I'd like to read to you this passage I posted before. This isn't from the revolution scene, it's just when he's just meeting this other love affair, this courtesan, just so charming and like a movie montage, a perfect miniature description of a certain type of lovely woman I read for you now. He enjoyed going to Rosanette's house. This is his

courtesan girlfriend. He enjoyed going to Rosanette's house. They went there in the evenings when they left the club or the theater. They had a cup of tea or a game of lotto. On Sundays they played charades. Rosanette, who was more boisterous than the others, distinguished herself by her funny inventions like scampering around on all fours or dressing up in a cotton nightcap. She put on a leather helmet to look at passers-by through the window. She smoked Turkish pipes, sang Tyrolean songs. In the afternoon to pass the time she cut flowers from a piece of chintz, stuck them on her windows, painted her two little dogs with rouge, burned incense or told her fortune. Incapable of resisting an impulse, she fell in love with a trinket she had seen, couldn't sleep for wanting it and rushed

out to buy it, exchanged it for another, wasted dress material, lost her jewels, squandered money, and would have sold her chemise for a box at the theater. She often asked Frederick the meaning of a word she had read, but didn't wait for his answer, skipping quickly onto another idea, asking more and more questions. Spasms of gaiety were succeeded by childish rages, or else she sat dreaming on the floor by the fire, head down and hugging her knees, more inert than a torpid snake. She got dressed in front of him, not paying attention to his presence, slowly pulling up her silk stockings, then splashed water all over her face, leaning back like a shivering water nymph. And her laughing white teeth, sparkling eyes, her beauty, and her gaiety dazzled Frederick and set him on edge.

I don't know, I found that so simple moving, wistful, so powerful throughout the book. I had this feeling of longing and expectation and excitement Basically, you never get from novel written now or after 1950 with major exception being Mishima again who makes you feel just like that in books like Spring Snow and Forbidden Colors and certain other of his novels. Initially, I was going to do this show, this episode, to try to explain to you this problem of the contemporary novel and why even in its most successful exemplars like Willa Beck and Tom Wolfe never really manages to move you in this way. It's very hard to put your finger on why I wanted to tunnel into that I think I'll leave the Welbeck and Wolf show maybe for for next time because I want to read for you examples from there

what I think those and other novelists try and fail to be moving and it always has this this Glossy journalistic quality and in what I read for you I think is very moving but it's understated and as opposed to these contemporary novels where they They over try they strive to be emotional and fail, but when you read Flaubert or others from this time It's just as current-day feeling and alive and imagistic and it's its own kind of journalism in a sense I mean Tom Wolfe tried to copy this kind of social realism style and yet there's this other world equality to it It's hard to describe what it is There is a there's a hope for more behind the scenes somehow a promise the promise of happiness. That's the definition, you know, the definition of

beauty according to Stendhal. Anyway, not to get too poetic. I may not need to give you spoilers, I mean, because there is no reason for me to tell you exactly what happens at the end of sentimental education, except to tell you precisely because of its unorthodox plot structure. One of the most unpredictable books I've ever read. Unlike, for example, Secret Agent, I talked to you, this Conrad novel some episodes ago where I could predict what would happen there in the very beginning without by the way taking away from the greatness of that book either but in Sentimental you just can't tell at all what will happen next and Frederick the main character this kind of aimless but you can tell Flaubert loves him and basically throughout the book you're left in suspense seeing how

he'll turn out you want him to do well but what will come of him in his plans and I guess I can tell you somewhat it doesn't end tragically in some striving overwrought theatrical big way like a modern writer trying to do Romeo and Juliet double-birder or something you know but it's not a happy ending either in fact I'd say the last few pages of this book possibly greatest ending to a novel I've read yet it hits like truck leaves you moved for days after I'm still moved if I think about it in fact even the very last line of the book devastating unforgettable but let me just say although you can say this poignant and not really triumphant ending. Eventually, as you think about it, the really crushing thing for a modern reader is this, that if you just told

the facts of Frederick's life, what he lives through, the events he sees, but not just the political momentous events of his time, but what he himself does, the people he knows, it's a far far more colorful and consequential and fuller life than almost any modern man has. And yet it's it's still in a way, you know, so distant from what it could be and what he wants it to be that you know what this say about our degraded prison shit life okay but yes Frederick just in many ways throughout this novel he lives in a dream world his ideas of romance and what his life should be what women should be is a complete parallel world and conflict with reality in a way he's the ultimate idealist who refuses ever to compromise that's a theme of the book and you love you love him for it

Goncourt wrote a nice short. This Goncourt is the the founder of the famous French literary prize. I think actually Wellebeck won this prize, too. And he wrote a nice short letter to Flaubert. They were friends. He wrote praising this novel saying, you know, you did what every writer hopes to do. You told the story of your generation and in briefly describing the characters and who's a good and bad guy, guy. He refers to Frederick as having all the virtues and faults that make you miss your own life, you know, as you'd say today, have your life pass you by. Anyway, the descriptions of the political societies also in this hilarious, the depiction of the bourgeois, yes, as you might expect very negative, contemptuous. But don't imagine the book is written from the point of

view of, let's say, modern anti-bourgeois leftist artists, the depiction of the proto-Marxist and and the socialists of the 1848 revolution, who moused almost to the word the same platitudes and malignant sentimental vengeance as leftists do today. That portrayal is also crushing. It's not a caricature. It's very accurate. It just makes them look like complete fools and bastards, all of them. And basically the only other character besides Frederick who comes off completely well, well there are a few. There's a young girl he's almost betrothed to and so on. Frederick has many faults, but again, very lovable. But the other character, Flaubert praises very much in some indirect ways, a revolutionary, a kind of proletarian that Frederick and his law friends in the beginning of the novel,

they rescue him from a police station. And he stands maybe throughout the book as a parallel image of idealism, noble bravery and simplicity. But the rest of the leftists, I mean, come terribly in Flaubert telling. I don't know, I think after reading this book I'm at once in awe of what Flaubert could do and I'm terrified of writing my own novels that I had in mind. Seeing this achievement that I would want to emulate in some way and I feel complete unworthy, not his style or themes I mean, but it makes me wonder if the key to writing this kind of moving novel is just the immense work he put into it. It's gargantuan, frightening work. And the extreme immersion Flaubert achieved in his own mind, in this world he created,

the minute preliminary work he did in planning out, you know, not just character sketches but again biographies of all the characters and the obsessiveness on the perfection of his sentences and so on. So look, don't worry, there will be a second book coming soon, well, soonish. Not a novel, but like I said, a series of aphorisms on art and literature and such things that I, entirely new ones that I think you may enjoy. But anyway, I'll take a short break and I'll come back to talk Somerset Mowen and his book The Moon and Sixpence. I come back in a very different book I enjoyed casually as kind of serial, let's say you watch Star Trek, Netflix when you're watching meals or you're having meals in such times.

I enjoyed Somerset Mowen's The Moon and Sixpence, which is his retelling of the life of Paul Gauguin written in 1919, I think. So it's like 15, 16 years after Gauguin died, of whom one knew from his own time in Paris when he went there himself, I suppose, trying to become artist in stereotypical, I'll go to artist Paris. So this book may be some way cookie cutter version, cookie cutter artist genius rejecting conventional life story par excellence. But I have to say the golfing quality between this and Flaubert immense. So I know Taki, if you listen to my Moem episode, because I do like Moem's short stories and his kind of gay, cruel sense of humor. And I mentioned there that Taki Theodoropoulos, the Greek shipping magnate and paleocon who

has Taki's mag, Taki believes Somerset Moem, a writer of many tropical tales of the South Pacific and such, that he's the best stylist in English. And if that's true, I don't know. He certainly has clean, easy style. But if so, that is a demonstration of limitations of pure style, because there's no comparison here with the content of what's in Sentimental Education. Of course, it's books on somewhat different topics, but not that different. It's both about artists and such, mostly in Paris. But the depth of Flaubert's description of social life, the psychology and intricacies of the varied characters, and then there's that untouchable moving element that's all missing here to Ermoham's book, you know, reading back to back to Flaubert, it actually

felt claustrophobic, almost suffocating in its limitations. And there are much fewer characters, and there's too much focus sometimes on one or two uninteresting characters compared to the other book. And I don't know, look, let me just stop the comparison. But it's a stark comparison for me because here's Somerset Mowen telling story of an artist genius, actually he checks off what you'd think would be the emotional kind of adventure boxes that Flaubert doesn't bother to. And still the impact on me as a reader, you know, in its aesthetic page to page effect as well as the overall emotional impacts, it's so much less, I'm sorry to say, which isn't that you shouldn't read this book, but the thing is, The Moon and Sixpence is probably

as good as any contemporary book by Wellerbeck or Wolff and such. It's just that maybe after all the difference I seek between the 19th century great novels and what's around now is just indeed literary. Look, let me just leave that for another time. The story of Gauguin is instantly fetching to anyone with artistic literary dreams or sensibilities. Quite late in his life Gauguin, he was born in 1848 actually, died in 1903, but quite late in his life he left his job as a stockbroker, left his family, and decided to leave modern society, go to Tahiti in South Pacific, and left behind these instantly haunting, attractive, primitivist masterpieces. In any case, celebrate the erotic power of Tahitian women and tropical fruit and such. Tropical excellence indeed.

I think he's even on – Gauguin is on a naughty list of certain conservative commentators who criticize his primitivist abandonment of modern bourgeois Western modernity. They are absurd at times trying to tie him to the left. That's very false. I think that when people criticize Margaret Mead and say that her own trips to the South Pacific that she was romanticizing and making up stuff about the sexual freedom and habits of the islanders there. I don't think that debunking of Margaret Mead is true at all. I have to repeat this. This is also the impression not just of Gauguin himself, but of the offhand report from many other travelers in that region, and including you see this very easily in Moem's own stories. You constantly have missionaries chimping out about the sexual looseness of

the natives and how they are desperately trying to get them to a Mother Hubbard, right? Look up these dresses Mother Hubbard like kind of like not quite burka but kind of the absurd mini burka modest dress like we have to cool down these native girls because they're going around nude tropical excellent and it's just too sexy and Moam I think perfectly you know so I mean he captures the malignance of the missionary mindset when it's directed to the primitive peoples like like the Tahitians. Nietzsche is similar when he talks about the ancient Germans. I mean, it was probably perfectly suitable for the exhausted Mediterranean world that the late Roman Empire experienced as a genuine escape and salvation in that case. But then it turned

into something else and Nietzsche is telling into something vindictive and cruel and totally inappropriate environment when it's directed toward vigorous young people with healthy instincts. So you look now online and like half of these religious fanatics now are admitted porn addict gooners and ex-lots, you know, they're like gooners full of strife and ex-repressed homos and so on. Anyway, you know how it goes, but to go back to this book, Mohan changes the Gauguin story. Gauguin did not, in fact, in real life, just decided late age to abandon his stolid bourgeois life as a stockbroker and pick up painting suddenly out of a native love passion, totally irrational seeming for painting, and to leave his family unannounced.

He did some of those things, but he had actually been painting before in real life in impressionist style, which was avant-garde style for his time. And yes, his departure from a normal wage-cut life was apparently not as sudden and romantic as in this retelling by Moam. But really, there's no use debunking that Gauguin's tale is enduringly romantic and inspiring to artists for a reason. He certainly did live his dreams in that way, and it paid off in the creation of these masterpieces. I don't know if you love... I love him, though. I don't know if you like. I do love him. It's just my thing. at Gauguin and Henri Rousseau paintings all the time only. Henri Rousseau is another tropicalist, primitivist painter from, I think, around the same time.

It's maybe not as romantic a story, but he was a customs official, became a painter with no training at all. You look up his, you know, tiger becomes scare in tropical rain. The French just love these things, maybe for the same reason they love the mulattas, you know, but the Germans always made fun of them in cartoons. It's an old, you know, make fun of French jungle fever. But you have to love for the fact that hunger for travel, adventure, and exotic pussy has always been a huge charge, inspiration for the European men. And without being indiscreet, one of the science-men I mentioned earlier in this episode had some amazing results driving across Africa and such. With his permission, I will post a photo of his with twins from Malawi, pretty girls.

In this story by Moam, it's an English stockbroker, a rather spurg-like silent man who does not express himself well in speech, who just suddenly leaves his wife and children and is then tracked down by the main character. It's told from the point of view of this other aspiring artist, writer I think, in this book, chases him down in Paris on behalf of the aggrieved wife, finds him, and what follows I guess is a story of the same thing as in Sentimental Education, their kind of social life and kind of artist affairs and such in Paris. But as I tell you, it's uninteresting after reading Flaubert because the scale and depth is so much less from every point of view. It's just limited, like moving from, you know, moving to McDonald level quality literature compared to Flaubert.

But I like McDonald's sometimes, so I enjoyed reading this to pass the time while I was eating. The amazing fact, as I tell you, is that it has on the surface all the elements that to evoke emotion, but it doesn't do so. You have stories of betrayal of friendship and love, suicide of a woman widely in love, wild mad artist genius who abandons everything for his art, total devotion to his passion, who endures homelessness, poverty to paint, goes hungry to paint, ends up being hobo on ships to get to the South Seas, doesn't get more romantic than that and his time in Tahiti that's the best part of the book toward the end where he ends up producing paintings very much in description like Gauguin's has a local

native wife and lush tropical plenty mystery longing paintings and then ends up dying of leprosy which I guess is gross but literary and romantic and so I think in real life actually Gauguin died of morphine overdose. But despite hitting all these notes, including ultimate artistic triumph and success, despite personal privation and so on, in some ways it's the opposite of the story of Sentimental Education, but it just reads like it's a striving, it's a plain book on the level of, I guess, again compare enjoyment to watching a good TV series like The Shield. Actually that's a great TV series, but still, anyway. The title, The Moon and Sixpence, apparently Mohan got that from someone reviewed, like a critic reviewed his own book, Of Human Bondage.

Of Human Bondage is the book that made his name, made him into a famous writer, Somerset Mohan, and it was about the main character in that book, that his head was so far up in the clouds, looking at the moon, looking up so that he couldn't see how to pick up or make a sixpence at his feet, to make money at his feet. like that. In other words, that he was too great an idealist, too great an idealist to be of practical value and to make money and live. Which I guess appealed to Mohan's romantic, you know, it's very much actually an image from Schopenhauer that animals have their sight, their heads directed at the earth, the ground, because that's where the objects of use to the will lie, the objects of interest.

Whereas the artistic genius looks to the sky, the head and the intellect are separated from the interest, the petty needs of the will, and with his beautiful statements, the Schopenhauer beautiful statement about the Apollo Belvedere, you look at this statue, about how the head is almost, the neck almost independent, removed from the body. It's a beautiful image, but probably wrong, probably Nietzsche's criticism of this idea of art creation is correct, and it's a bit maybe too self-important as a title to this book, but you can tell, you know, what Somerset Mogham trying to, what he's trying to, the feeling he's trying to put into you with this kind of artsy aspiration and longing. It's too much on the nose. I think it doesn't move.

It manages to be actually less vicious anti-bourgeot than Flaubert, also too obvious, too pretentious, too, you know, I'll beat you on this head with this image of Bohemian pure artistic devotion and longing to art for art's sake that rejects comfortable bourgeois solidity and morality. I mean, it's maybe also that these themes have been overdone by now and have been done entirely by unworthy and pretentious leftoid pseudo artists so that you are bored of them maybe, but I really don't think it's just that. I think because Flaubert, you know, with his archetypal hatred of bourgeois reads as fresh and crushing as if it was new. It doesn't feel like he's treading ground, you've heard. But Moem's description of the pure artist feels kind of cardboard. So I don't know,

something happened to the novel. There's a lack of psychological depth to all of these writers. Moem is 1919, but it reads to me very much like a step of contemporary novelists above Soul Bellow and around the level of, let's say, Wellebeck and Tom Wolfe, but they're like cartoonists. Children playing at literature compared to Flaubert, Stendhal and Maupassant. I say also to Mishima. Anyway, I still recommend this book by Moen. Decent entertainment. If you like, you know, Tahitian boobah. He get nice Tahitian girl at the end. If properly turned into comedy, it could make pretty good color colorful movie but that said you know call me unfair it's just that this was standard okay the expectation that you're not going to be comfortable as an artist this was standard accepted thing and I'm

not saying again that everyone should be expected to be a go again and leave everything behind or to to have amazing paintings hidden in their closet but I I found the earlier things I talk on this episode offensive because there was just no claim or expectation in those articles that quality matters at all, that art or movies or such even have to be fun, that it's something you'd look forward to watching. The article I discussed was treated entirely like a job where you clock in and the triumph of philistism in our age is what I'm telling you, precisely why ultimately these problems are crushing modern nations. A people that is just a people that has no actual higher aspiration. And then you can stomp your feet all you want about that.

But the people won't seriously object even to replacement migration because they see no fundamental difference between themselves, their way of life, their longings and those of others, nor any place for culture or the higher things. And when you cannot square that problem with appeals to national identity, or even to religious belief or anything like that, it's just that the reduction of mankind to global homogenous tenement is consequent upon the elimination of these higher aspirations altogether. Not just in the arts, but even in the futurist will to great scientific and technological projects. Without the belief in higher types of life, it's all collapse in the morass of the primeval village hut life. Anyway, so it goes, maybe I write on that next. Until next week, Bap out!