Tag Archives: Apollo

Entropy, the Novel, and Nietzsche

At The New Yorker, Joan Acocella asks why novels, even great ones, so frequently have endings that sag. One of her examples is David Copperfield: The first half of “David Copperfield” leaves you gasping. You laugh, you cry, you think you’re … Continue reading

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Would Nietzsche Have Liked the New Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas?

Look at this quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873). It is Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian forces that lurk beneath our artistic and “illusory consciousness” (our Apollonian dreams of coherence and control; the … Continue reading

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Beauty That Is Also Repellent

Israeli artist Ori Gersht (b. 1967) says that one of the things he tends to aim for in his art is the foregrounding of beauty against a background of violence. In the video piece below, he sets up a traditional still … Continue reading

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Glamour Girl: Barack Obama Sings Al Green

Conservatives have never quite gotten President Barack Obama’s glamour. They didn’t understand the Beatles or JFK’s glamour, either. Or, rather, they got it, but didn’t like it. The same goes for Obama’s glamour. Maybe conservatives do get it, but just don’t … Continue reading

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Who is Dagny Taggart? Atlas Shrugged Part 1, the Movie, is Coming to Theatres April 15th

Atlas Shrugged Part 1, the movie (which depicts the first third of Ayn Rand’s famous novel of ideas) comes into general release on April 15th, and I must say that the following YouTube teaser clip posted by the film’s producers is … Continue reading

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Go with the flow? Six plausible options for dealing with change

What is the proper response to this burning, bleeding, milk secreting, honey babbling world? It seems to me that the range of responses are pretty limited, and can be boiled down to six plausible options: acceptance and celebration (go with the flow)  … Continue reading

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Apollonian Nefertiti Kitty Cats and Dionysian Band Boys

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“Another Woman”: An Obscure Woody Allen Film from 1988 That I Thought was Exceptional

My wife and I own—with perhaps the exception of one or two titles—all of Woody Allen’s films on DVD. That doesn’t mean, however, that we’ve actually watched all of them. We have favorites, for example, that have endured multiple viewings—Husbands and Wives and Matchpoint—and … Continue reading

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Heracles, Alcestis, and the Determined Human Heart’s Heroic and Relentless Path Through This World

Below is a fourth century Roman catacomb image of two courageous people who followed their hearts right into the very jaws of death: Heracles and Alcestis. The basic story from Greek mythology (and which Euripides made into a play) goes like this: … Continue reading

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The Devil Trying to Disrupt and Discourage the Heroic Vitalist

This Albrecht Durer drawing from 1513 made me think of John Calvin (who was born in 1509). I like Durer’s depiction of the devil on the left side of the drawing, with his Medusa-echoing snake hair and taunting display of … Continue reading

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Apollo Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Says There’s a Monolith on Phobos!

I count at least three American astronauts who take UFOs seriously: Edgar Mitchell, Gordon Cooper, and Buzz Aldrin. On C-SPAN, for example, Buzz Aldrin recently made the bizarre claim that Mars’s satellite, Phobos, has a monolith on it. A monolith?! I … Continue reading

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Irony, Eros, Thanatos, and Dionysus

Against this bucolic depiction, Dionysus, circa 70 CE, would soon be interrupting idyllic Pompeii with the volcanic eruption of Mt. Visuvius:

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Thomas Jefferson’s Second Birth, and the Intersections of Apollo and Dionysus

  Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? (John 3:4 KJV) I love this portrait of Thomas Jefferson. In good Neoclassical … Continue reading

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Our Daily Stanza: The First Six Lines of William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1807)

Today’s lines of poetry come from William Wordworth’s “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” (1807), and they make up the poem’s first stanza: I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, When all at … Continue reading

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Emerging from the Conformist Psychological Pain of the 1950s: See Here People Trying to Get Themselves Free by Shaking Their Bodies and Screaming at the Beatles

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Eros and Thanatos: A Gorgeous Image of Dionysus, Discovered at Pompeii, Standing Alongside a Tranquil Vesuvius BEFORE It Had Exploded

A two thousand year old image of Dionysus, discovered at Pompeii. Dionysus giveth, and Dionysus taketh away:

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Apollo v. Dionysus: The First Paragraph of Friedrich Nietzche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”

Friedrich Nietzsche (first paragraph of The Birth of Tragedy):   We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision, that the continuous development of … Continue reading

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Euripides’s “Bakkhai”: Is Dionysus Jesus?

Euripides’s “Bakkhai” is an extraordinary play, and functions on many fascinating levels. At one level it can be read as an indictment of rationalism, and a warning to the audience against atheism. Toward the beginning of the play, for example, … Continue reading

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In the California Summer, Van Gogh Meets General Motors

On an evening walk with my camara I saw a vintage, baby blue truck with a baby blue “Starry Night” sunscreen. It’s an odd combination: high art mass produced for casual visual consumption, and perhaps purchased at a museum store, contrasted … Continue reading

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Jacob and the angel–or Enkidu and Gilgamesh

The Gilgamesh Epic embodies the tensions between order and wildness, not in the gods Apollo and Dionysus, as Nietzsche claims that the ancient Greeks do, but in the god-like characters of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Gilgamesh is a city-dwelling ruler of a … Continue reading

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