In late 2011, I was hiking through rainforest in the hills above Chiang Dao in northern Thailand with a hundred or so twelve-year-old children, five or six other teachers and a Thai guide. The forest was quiet, apart from the whooping and chattering of kids happy to be away with their friends for a few […]
CATHY O’BRIEN AND THE GHOST OF DE SADE If a lethal text is one which destroys the mind of its reader, making it impossible to communicate the content of the text to others, The Trance-Formation of America by Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips comes as close as anything I’ve read. Such a controversial and widely-known […]
COFFEE WITH GIOVANNI BRIXTON, 2014 I’m sitting outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, one of the few places in London I enjoy. I lived here in the eighties, when the immigrant population was still predominantly Caribbean and Portuguese. Forty years on, I’m waiting for my daughter, all grown up and successful now. She slept at […]
This is my response to an essay by Joseph Atwill in which he applies his ‘Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah’ theory to The Tempest. https://thelethaltext.me/2016/07/22/very-like-a-whale/ Several of Mr Atwill’s followers have bleated at me that I can’t possibly judge the theory without reading the whole 300-page book. Since Shakespeare’s Secret Messiah mirrors the theory developed in Caesar’s […]
Photograph by Sam Sherratt ‘Once upon the throne of kings, there shall never have been a tyranny to equal ours, no despot shall ever have put a thicker blindfold over the eyes of the people; plunged into essential ignorance, it shall be at our mercy, blood will flow in rivers, our Masonic brethren […]
HAMLET Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? LORD POLONIUS By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed. HAMLET Methinks it is like a weasel. LORD POLONIUS It is backed like a weasel. HAMLET Or like a whale? LORD POLONIUS Very like a whale. HAMLET Or how about a […]
In Hampton’s Fancher’s original screen adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, Rick Deckard, a ‘blade-runner’ or police assassin hired to hunt down rogue androids, is instructed to go to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to test their latest model, the Nexus 6. His task is to find out whether his equipment, the […]
In his documentary series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004), Adam Curtis parallels the rise of militant Islam with the ‘neoconservative’ movement in America. Both movements, he argues, represent irrationalist reactions against secular democracy. The original neoconservatives, including Irving Kristol, Allan Bloom, and Paul Wolfowitz, came together as students […]
The Owl is in his leafy temple. Let all within the Grove be reverent before him. Lift up your heads, oh ye trees, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting spires. For behold! Here is Bohemia’s shrine and holy are the pillars of this house. Weaving spiders come not here. Hail, Bohemians! With the ripple […]
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, born in 1740 of a distinguished Provençal family, was not the man he wanted to be. For one thing, he spent half his life in prison, and for another, according to a police description of him, he was physically repulsive – short, pudgy, and ugly as sin. The sexual […]