It’s 11.30am on Friday, June 23, 2023. I’ve been rifling the archives and punching in keywords for the past few hours. Suddenly I’m excited. I’ve found a report in a copy of Variety Magazine dated July 27, 1927. It’s unlikely to have been seen by another pair of eyes for close to a 100 years….
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Like Kant at the Church Steeple
The Catholic ‘Americanist’ priest, Isaac Hecker, believed that when Kant had asked the question, ‘what can I know?’ and answered it with, ‘I can know nothing’, he was in fact supporting the only logical conclusion there was to his scepticism: the existence of God. Life without God in this world was anchored in shadows and…
The Pink-Suited Polytropoi – The Philosophy of Nietzsche and The Great Gatsby
He waved his hand toward the book-shelves. They’re real … absolutely real … have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real … It’s a bona-fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness!What realism! — The…
A Circus Comes to Town — Gatsby, Gurdjieff and The New Romanticism
In 1907, Alfred Richard Orage, an acolyte of Nietzsche, would write an influential essay for The Theosophical Review in which he made an appeal for a ‘New Romanticism’: “Romanticism is in essence an attempt to escape from the compulsory vision of things as they are, by imagining them to be what they are not.” Orage,…
I Am Kloot – Sky At Night
You can’t polish a turd. Whoever said that? Were they onto something or were they just talking shit? The reality was something we knew all along: the turd was quite happy feeling shit. When you’ve been unceremoniously squeezed out of someone’s arse and suffered the ignominy of being chewed up, absorbed and subjected to the…
Trotsky in Brownsville, Brooklyn, February 1917
The mystery is not why Trotsky was at the reception in Brownsville, Brooklyn but who had arranged it. The staff members of Forverts, including its editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, were based predominantly in Manhattan. Ludwig Lore, another of his regular contacts at Forverts, was holed-up at 55th Street, some six miles west in Borough Park. Furthermore,…
Unravelling Trotsky’s New York Visit, Jan-March 1917 – Part I
An article written by rights activist, Henry Moskowitz, in February 1918, said that to understand Leon Trotsky’s infamous sudden visit to the Lower East Side of New York in January the previous year, you also had to understand the local landscape upon which his “powerful figure” was “silhouetted”. Its streets “were black with men, women…
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at the Embassy Club, London
During their stays in London in 1921 and 1925, their London host, Shane Leslie, introduced Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to an illustrious parade of British dignitaries that included his aunt, Lady Randolph (Jennie) Churchill — the New York-born mother of Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, and Leslie’s cousin, Winston Churchill — and the…
69 Love Songs: L.D Beghtol talks Magnetic Fields & Three Terrors
It’s hard to believe, but this interview is now some 25 years old. It was given by Beghtol from his office in Manhattan, and published just a month before 9/11. It was after that, that the world changed forever. For the many who have probably forgotten, Beghtol provided several of the standout ‘turns’ on The…
The Barbara Lopukhin Kidnap Plot
Little more than a year after the Russian Free Library’s Alexei Teplov found himself dodging spies in Hastings, the seaside resort and its neighbour Bexhill on Sea, would feature in a more sinister tale of counter-espionage, when the daughter of the former Director of the Department of Police (Fontanka) in St Petersburg and Kishinev, Aleksey…