According to early reports, Yesterday's Black Friday broke all sales figures records, up 14.5% on last year. A festival that started in the USA, coming as it does the day after Thanksgiving, it is now consuming Europe. And that is indeed the nature of the beast: consumption. It is perhaps the first festival that was founded on the religion of consumerism. Such a quasi-religious festival had to have been born in the Anglosphere, where capitalism is bound to the Reformation and the ensuing Puritan tradition that gave birth to economic and social liberalism. Was it not that theologian beloved of the American descendants of Scotsmen and Northern Englishmen, John Calvin who said, 'Greed is good, greed works'? Something like that anyway. I'm glad we got shut of them after the Restoration. Anyway, Black Friday is now being exported. Even in the usually anti-capitalist France, Black Friday has been promoted relentlessly this year. The French term for this is 'vendredi fou', although it tends to be kept in English in line with the European Union's attempt to reduce all European languages to dialects of English, although the Wikipedia site claims this is translated as 'vendredi noir', showing again how that site is written by spergy but dim sixth formers.
A few months ago, I had the honour of being contacted by the artist, musician and poet Robert N Taylor, who enquired about the possibility of me contributing some poems to a forthcoming anthology of the Red Salon Poets, a collective named after Robert and his wife Christina's sitting room. Naturally, I was only too pleased, and sent several poems to his wife Christina Finlayson Taylor, who was editing and also contributing to the collection, which she and her friend and fellow poetess Juleigh Howard-Hobson had named We've Seen the Same Horizon. Perhaps the greatest absence in the collection is some poetry by Robert himself, who provides a foreword, but this is not to detract from talents like Christina and Juleigh. I knew Juleigh's excellent work even before she appeared in Mjolnir Magazine, but Christina is a revelation to me, and her poetry is up there with the best I have seen. There are few who can write a convincing sonnet these days, but Christina is among them.
A discussion I had with Greg Johnson of Counter Currents and John Morgan
of Arktos. Please bear in mind that John and I were on the beer until
the wee small hours the night before.
The fourth edition of the White Eurocentric arts magazine is now available for purchase at http://www.mjolnirmagazine.com The magazine features artwork by Vig Scholma and Gary Persello, as well as handicrafts by his wife Bonnie van Hall. There are short stories by Juleigh Howard-Hobson and Ann Sterzinger, the latter's novel NVSQVAM also being reviewed by Nick Walsh. Then there is poetry by Ellin Anderson, Eliza Witte, Dorin Alexandru and Juleigh again. Our blast from the past is Thomas Ingoldsby and there is a short play and a review of John Lash's The Hero: Manhood and Power by me.
