saavedra77 | Do You Know What It Means ...?

nice article. . . so who is the king or queen of the "kingdom of the wicked?"

I'm surprised I don't get that question more often: "Kingdom of the Wicked" is a loose translation of what ancient Jews called the Roman Empire, and it's the title of an Anthony Burgess novel about the conflict between the Empire and early Christianity. Basically, it's a comment on the tenor of the times we live in, in which (to paraphrase William Butler Yeats) it seems to me that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity." Hence also my "Nero" icon, which I use for most of my politically-orieted posts.

Cool. So many historical and literary references you got going there: We had to read "The Second Coming" for British Lit II. It's cool 'cause I get what you mean . . . "the centre cannot hold." Modernism, once you get the ideology behind it, makes the literature much more layered and understandable (though, I still DON'T get "The Wasteland," though its first four or five lines have grown on me and come to me at random moments. It's supposed to be THE poem that one initially hates, but then it haunts you, supposedly . . . your response is interesting, too, because I am taking a british Romanticism course and we are discussing the political climate after the French Revolution and are studying the pamphlet wars between the liberals and conservatives. Anyway, the similarities to our own time are uncanny . . . there was widespread surveillance going and opposition to the administration was dealt with by mud slinging and being called unpatriotic. Amazing, huh?

As for Anthony Brugess, I read "A Clockwork Orange" and saw the movie. I know both are supposed to be cool and hip and all, but I didn't like either. I was sixteen at the time, so maybe that's why. But I like Bret Easton Ellis; he reminds me of Burgess and his disatisfied youth.

Alright. Talk to you soon.

Do you plan on coming to LA anytime soon?

Those pamphlet wars gave us Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" and Paine's "The Rights of Man," didn't they? Very interesting exchange.

I've only seen Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange--I've never gotten around to the book to Burgess' book, in part because the film is so bleak ...

Kubrick's Clockwork seems at first to be a fairly standard conservative reaction to '60s youth culture, to the "me" generation, & a warning about where the following generation would go to out-rebel their parents. The adults in the film are pretty self-involved--dissolute--but the kids are an order of magnitude worse: nihilistic, destructive.

And then there's the state, which is a 1984-like totalitarian enterprise which has uses for thugs like Malcolm McDowell's character ...

What separates the film from the standard conservative critique of the '60s, though, is the way that Church authority is involved with the Orwellian state, and the way that Biblical accounts of righteous slaughter help turn the protagonist into a thug for the Man. This part of the film seems to short-circuit the standard conservative jeremiad against modern culture, suggesting that social order is built on disorder--which is more in keeping with left-wing moralism. But by combining the right-wing and left-wing jeremiads, Kubrick gives us a society in which morality is nowhere to be found. Like I said, pretty bleak, right?

History has a way of catching up to this kind of dystopia, though, doesn't it? The "me" generation are getting ready to retire, most of the people posting on here were born after the '60s, and our streets haven't been completely taken over by nihilistic thugs. There is a certain echo of Clockwork in the transition from the hippy '60s to the more anarchic, aggressive, sometimes nihilistic punk movement in the '70s--which in some cases dovetailed with extreme politics, in the U.K., but was more of a cultural thing, a fad. You could paint the gangbanger thing in the U.S. in similar terms, except that urban gangs have been part of the U.S. scene since the 19th century, really ... They hardly grew out of the '60s or some general moral decline.

I guess that you could make a case that Clockwork's portrait of state-sponsored or religiously-inspired thuggery has some resonance for our times--but these problems seem to have been with us for virtually all of recorded history.

Long digression aside, I really do like Burgess' historical fiction: Kingdom of the Wicked retells the Book of Acts and First-century Roman history with a more secular eye, although it's marred somewhat by the author's own investment in Pauline Christianity (Paul's interpretation was at first only one of several circulating around the Mediterranean, although it later became the source of both Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism--hence, Christianity as we know it).

Nothing Like the Sun is good, too: it's an imaginative life of Shakespeare, reconstructed from what very, very little we know about him. It's really moving, rooting Shakespeare's poetic imagination in a reconstruction late 16th/early 17th century private life. Really, I think that this is Burgess' best book--at least, of those I've read ...

And do I plan to come to L.A.? Not at the moment, at the moment! So far, the furthest south I've ventured into Cali is Santa Cruz. I'm not sure that L.A.'s my kind of town, really: I really hate driving ...

We are reading those two in class (Burke and Paine; and Mary Wollstonecraft.) Yeah, and a deconstruction of Burke will yield an unexamined (on his part) and debatable premise: that monarchy is always good, as if kings have always been good throughout history. Monarchy is a bad form of government. I mean King Louie was a murderer, and his taxation was awful, and I'm sure I don't need to list for you the kings throughout history, and their goverance, to prove the point.

(The working class, or peasantry, have always got it bad in this form of government. It was with the rise of the bourgeouise middle class that their numbers began to unify; they, the masses, had become stronger . . . )

Basically, Burke attaches this inherent, transcendent quality to tradition; as if tradition itself is enough to disqualify any attack on it.

I do like Burke's writings on the sublime and the beautiful.

As for Burgess: still don't want to read him. But your break down sounds cogent. Wait, wait . . . that book about Shakespeare sounds really good . . . I have to look into it.

Well, if you're ever in Southern cali, look me up.

I'd definitely like to see Seattle one of these days.

Yeah, that's my reading of Burke, too, more or less.

I will let you know if I ever make it down to Southern Cal, though!

& if you make it up to Seattle, come in the summer: it's gorgeous here, when you can actually see the mountains, lakes, & Puget Sound; the rest of the year is the rainy season, never very cold, but the gloom keeps you from seeing the city's surroundings.

Thanks for this article. I hope you don't mind, but I passed on the link.

Not at all--I picked it up from

betwana, myself.

Do You Know What It Means ...?

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