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Modernism is a reactionary culture, a fact that I demonstrated by pointing in detail to the works of a dozen leading Modernist figures including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Pablo Picasso, and others. In all of these writers and artists, there was a similar rejection of all that is truly modern: a democratic capitalist society in which ordinary citizens seek freedom and opportunity for themselves and their families, including economic, religious, and political liberty.

In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described...

One of the most important poets of the 20th century April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s, My...

The Hollow Men Mistah Kurtz-he dead    A penny for the Old Guy   We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar   Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;   Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us — if at all — not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men...

No one knows the Texas AirHogs quite like Larry Green. Over the team’s eleven seasons playing baseball, the 61-year-old Green has missed only five home games in Grand Prairie... [...] The Texas AirHogs are members of the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball, a federation of twelve, mostly Midwestern, teams unaffiliated with Major League Baseball. Inning breaks are punctuated with water-balloon-toss competitions and mascot races. The level of play is good, but with more overthrows and rundowns than you’d find on an average night at a big-league ballpark. Admission starts at $8 for adults, the parking is free and convenient,...

The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot (1939) is one of most creative and fun collections of poetry ever written in the English tongue. With splendid illustrations by Edward Gorey, the book is very short -- only 56 pages. The genius of this collection of 15 playful poems on the adventures of anthropromophic cats is that Eliot beautifully describes the many "personalities" of cats -- and humans, for that matter.  Reading this is a cat lover's must. These poems are part of our culture already: they inspired the Broadway musical CATS, for instance.  And the...

In his little book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, published many years ago, Henry James has the following significant sentences: “The charm [of Hawthorne’s slighter pieces of fiction] is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of man’s soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it.” The interest of this passage lies...