Monday, November 30, 2009

Where are the right-wing writers?

It's a common supposition on both left and right that everyone in the arts is a liberal, lefty, communist, or fellow traveller; at most there's one or two exceptions writing from a conservative position. Thus, Tony Kushner in Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy has Laura Bush say:
The liberals may have nearly all the poets and painters and everybody else but WE have Dostoevsky and he obliterates the whole kitandkaboodle, we have Dostoevsky and so we win.
But is this the full story? For your consideration, I present the following. From libertarians to upper-class high-church snobs, with a smattering of one-nation tories, Nazi sympathisers, and the unprincipled rich, here's a list of notable novelists, poets, and a few other literary types of a rightist persuasion.
  1. Kingsley Amis - despite early socialism, he moved rightwards through his life to become a curmudgeonly conservative
  2. Martin Amis - in recent years has followed his father's path, with his views on Islam condemned by many left-wingers; also anti-communist, writing books about Stalin
  3. Jeffrey Archer - popular novelist and former Conservative Party MP; also convicted perjurer
  4. Honoré de Balzac - royalist and chronicler of a society in decline
  5. Hilaire Belloc - the poet and writer, known for his verse for children, was an admirer of fascism and especially Mussolini; he was a devout Catholic and has been accused of anti-semitism
  6. Saul Bellow - a youthful leftist he moved to the right, was culturally conservative, opposing political correctness and multiculturalism
  7. John Betjeman - a small-c conservative: an admirer of the English upper classes, a campaigner to preserve disappearing aspects of England, scornful of mass culture, and a Catholic
  8. William Peter Blatty - the Exorcist writer is a donor to the US Republican party
  9. Robert Brasillach - French novelist and journalist who collaborated with the Nazis
  10. Rupert Brooke - upper-middle-class poet known for his patriotic World War One verse, although he also moved in liberal circles
  11. John Buchan - the author of the 39 Steps was an MP for the Unionist Party in Scotland (which later merged with the Conservative Party), a keen imperialist, and has been accused of racism
  12. Jorge Luis Borges - the Argentinian postmodernist was an admirer of Latin American dictators, including Pinochet
  13. William F. Buckley, Jr - writer, tv presenter, and occasional novelist, a leading intellectual of US Republicanism from the 1960s to the 2000s
  14. Roy Campbell - South African poet and Catholic, he moved to Spain in the 1930s and supported Franco (unlike most writers who went to Spain); turned against the Bloomsbury group after his wife had an affair with Vita Sackville-West
  15. Orson Scott Card - best known for science fiction novels such as Ender's Game, he is also a pro-Republican commentator and a Mormon
  16. Thomas Carlyle - Scottish historian, satirist, and essayist who distrusted democracy and modernity, and believed nations needed great men to lead them, writing an admiring biography of Frederick the Great
  17. Willa Cather - a novelist who was conservative both in aesthetics and politics
  18. Louis-Ferdinand Céline - the modernist novelist was an anti-semite and supporter of Vichy France
  19. François-René de Chateaubriand - French royalist and a devout Catholic
  20. GK Chesterton - humorist and Christian apologist, converted to Catholicism; George Orwell accused him of writing "endless tirades against Jews"
  21. Agatha Christie - reactionary conservative who portrayed a bygone England, her early books included various racial caricatures
  22. Winston Churchill - winner of Nobel prize for literature for his non-fiction, and Conservative prime minister
  23. EM Cioran - Romanian philosopher and essayist, a pupil and follower of far-right philosopher Nae Ionescu
  24. Tom Clancy - popular spy novelist, has donated large amounts of money to the US Republican party
  25. Robin Cook - the thriller writer, not the deceased British Labour politician, is a Republican donor
  26. James Fenimore Cooper - wrote widely on political matters, influenced by Jefferson, notably supporting the landowners in the New York Anti-Rent Wars in the 1840s and 50s
  27. Patricia Cornwell - crime writer and Jack the Ripper enthusiast who has made large donations to the US Republican party, despite being a lesbian who has spoken out for equal rights
  28. Noel Coward - naturally conservative, author of comedies about the upper middle classes, although he was an agnostic
  29. Michael Crichton - climate-change denialist who satirised political correctness and accused liberal magazine editor Michael Crowley of being a small-dicked paedophile
  30. Ian Curteis - British writer whose play about the Falklands war was allegedly a victim of censorship by the left-wing BBC
  31. Robertson Davies - Canadian novelist with old-fashioned literary style and reactionary politics
  32. Benjamin Disraeli - Conservative prime minister and novelist, the father of moderate one-nation conservatism
  33. Michael Dobbs - conservative politician and prolific novelist, best known for Francis Urquhart books
  34. John Dos Passos - modernist novelist, initially a communist, he moved all the way across the political spectrum to become an admirer of Joe McCarthy
  35. Feodor Dostoyevsky - a reformer in his youth, he later moved to the right, seeking to defend the traditional Russian spirit
  36. Mircea Eliade - Romanian fiction writer and philosopher of religion, a fascist in the 1930s
  37. TS Eliot - former banker, socially and politically conservative, also accused of anti-semitism, said: "I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics"
  38. James Ellroy - critically acclaimed crime novelist has expressed right-wing authoritarian viewpoints, e.g. defending the LAPD over the Rodney King beating, but elsewhere claims this was just controversialist nonsense
  39. William Faulkner - although a liberal in his attitudes to race, the Southern US novelist is generally judged to be overall conservative
  40. Julian Fellowes - a writer whose subject is the English upper classes, his Conservative politics are no great surprise, and he's often on lists of celebrity Tory supporters
  41. Fillià - Italian futurist writer and painter known for his religious art, had links with fascists
  42. Frederick Forsyth - the British thriller writer has long been a supporter of the Conservative Party
  43. George MacDonald Fraser - the author of the humorous Flashman novels was a military man and a traditionalist in many areas of life, prominently campaigning against the metric system
  44. Robert Frost - American poet of conservative political views who became a national treasure and spoke at Kennedy's inauguration; he played at being a farmer but earned his money from teaching
  45. JW von Goethe - romantic conservative, admired the upper classes, and opposed the numerous revolutions of the late 18th/early 19th centuries
  46. Terry Goodkind - Ayn Rand-influenced sword and sorcery writer with enormous sales
  47. Knut Hamsun - Norwegian Nobel laureate (Hunger) and later a Nazi sympathiser
  48. Robert Heinlein - right-wing libertarian militaristic writer of (mostly) intelligent science fiction
  49. Hergé - Belgian comic-book writer of conservative politics, accused of racism and collaborating with the Nazis
  50. Michel Houellebecq - anti-political correctness, anti-Islam, anti-women, for his admirers he offers a critique of modern liberal humanism
  51. Ted Hughes - misanthropic violence-loving nature poet who detested modern life and became poet laureate and friends with the Queen Mother
  52. JK Huysmans - in his early life, a writer of Zola-influenced liberalism, he dallied briefly with fin de siecle decadence but converted to Catholicism and became a conservative
  53. PD James - English crime novelist and a Conservative peer in the House of Lords
  54. Antony Jay - Thatcherite writer of satirical sitcom Yes Minister
  55. Ernst Jünger - German writer who glorified the military following World War I and opposed democracy
  56. Jack Kerouac - the beat novelist moved right in the 1960s, supporting the Vietnam war, becoming friends with William F Buckley, and returning to the Catholic faith he was raised in
  57. Rudyard Kipling - poet of British patriotism and imperialism, defender of the British soldier
  58. Dean Koontz - thriller writer and supporter of US Republican party
  59. Philip Larkin - his posthumously-published letters revealed a racist, misogynistic, right-wing private man, while his poetry showed a kindlier backward-looking conservatism
  60. DH Lawrence - novelist and poet had liberal views early in his life but later moved towards fascism
  61. CS Lewis - Christian apologist and a moderate conservative, though he avoided political association and refused a CBE from Churchill
  62. Wyndham Lewis - influenced by the Futurists, he was briefly a supporter of Hitler, and often anti-semitic
  63. Liu Xiaobo - the Chinese writer, poet, and Nobel Peace Prize-winner was an admirer of George W Bush and a defender of American imperialism who criticised John Kerry for being insufficiently right-wing; also anti-Islam
  64. Mario Vargas Llosa - once a supporter of Castro, he became a free-market centre-right politician, while defending human rights, and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of Peru
  65. André Malraux - the novelist, art historian and resistance fighter fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, but in the 1960s he served as Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Cultural Affairs
  66. Thomas Mann - a supporter of the Kaiser in his youth, he moved in a liberal direction during the Weimar republic
  67. FT Marinetti - Italian proto-fascist poet, active as both an artistic and political leader; he split with Mussolini because he felt the Fascist party was too backward-looking
  68. Allan Massie - Scottish conservative historical novelist and journalist
  69. HL Mencken - satirist who opposed the New Deal and hated Franklin Roosevelt
  70. Stephenie Meyer - Mormon vampire novelist of conservative views
  71. Yukio Mishima - right-wing anti-democratic Japanese novelist and playwright who attempted a military coup
  72. Marianne Moore - like many in Pound and Eliot's circles, she was right-wing, a defender of American capitalism
  73. Iris Murdoch - a youthful communist and populariser of Sartre, she seemed to move rightwards, and like Ayn Rand was a fan of strong-willed almost demonic men; her philosophy focused on topics such as moral virtue; she opposed literary experimentalism, and demanded striking miners be shot
  74. Vladimir Nabokov - a conservative aesthete who fled Stalin's Russia
  75. VS Naipaul - Indo-Trinidadian Nobel laureate, conservative, accused of disliking the third world and Muslims
  76. Flannery O'Connor - Catholic moralist who mocked the godlessness of modern life in grotesque fiction
  77. Alexander Pope - conservative satirist
  78. PJ O'Rourke - satirist of right-wing sympathies
  79. John Osborne - angry young man who turned into a cantankerous old man
  80. Luigi Pirandello - experimental playwright allied himself with Mussolini, although his supporters claim it was purely from self-interest
  81. Ezra Pound - sophisticated and erudite aesthete, accused of being sympathetic to Mussolini in World War Two and imprisoned
  82. Anthony Powell - his Dance to the Music of Time chronicled rich English bohemians and he was an upper-class conservative
  83. Marcel Proust - upper-class aesthete, although homosexual, came from a conservative background; he avoided politics and his political position is contested
  84. Ayn Rand - popular philosopher and author of very long novels, known for her defence of entrepreneurs and for championing reason over emotions
  85. John Crowe Ransom - conservative US Southerner, involved with the Southern Agrarians (backward-looking pro-Confederate grouping) for a time
  86. Tim Rice - the lyricist, writer, and TV personality has supported the Conservative party for ages; he also does a lot of good work for charity
  87. Walter Scott - Scottish historical novelist of Tory sympathies, active in conservation but condemned by Mark Twain for romanticising war and chivalry; while pro-Jacobite and romantic about Scottish history he also defended the union with England
  88. Moshe Shamir - Israeli novelist, playwright, and politician, moved from early socialism to right-wing Likud and Tehiya parties
  89. Alexander Solzhenitsyn - the Soviet dissident had an understandable hatred of communism; on his arrival in the USA he allied himself with the neo-conservatives who believed the Soviet Union was the gravest threat to the USA's existence, and called for its destruction
  90. Nicholas Sparks - the author of drippy romantic fantasies donated to Republican senator Elizabeth Dole
  91. Gertrude Stein - collaborated with Vichy France; claims that she called for Hitler to be given the Nobel Peace Prize were probably a joke
  92. Wallace Stevens - insurance company executive who wrote abtruse modernist poetry
  93. Tom Stoppard - playwright is generally reckoned to be slightly right of centre despite his human rights work; an anti-communist long-associated with east European dissidents
  94. Jonathan Swift - conservative, devout Anglican satirist, converted from Whig to Tory
  95. Allen Tate - American agrarian poet, who later became a Roman Catholic and a legendary womaniser
  96. Alfred Lord Tennyson - the poet laureate was a traditional English gentleman who celebrated military virtue and the chivalrous middle ages, but was more liberal on some causes - he refused a baronetcy from Disraeli and was agnostic
  97. Hunter S Thompson - a libertarian and great believer in gun rights, although he hated most Republicans (despite a grudging respect for Nixon)
  98. JRR Tolkien - deeply conservative and strongly Catholic throughout his life, he supported Franco in the Spanish civil war, although he hated Hitler for perverting northern-European myths and traditions
  99. John Updike - novelist who wrote about suburbia with a conservative viewpoint
  100. Robert Penn Warren - poet, critic, and novelist (political satire All the King's Men), who had links with the Southern Agrarians but moved left and later became a father figure of American liberalism
  101. Keith Waterhouse - the author of Billy Liar was a Daily Mail columnist for decades until his death
  102. Evelyn Waugh - satirist of the British upper classes and author of Brideshead Revisited, a right-wing Catholic
  103. AN Wilson - British novelist, biographer, and newspaper columnist for the right-wing press, of firmly Conservative views
  104. PG Wodehouse - although he satirised British fascism in the 1930s, he did broadcasts from Nazi Germany in World War Two, and has been condemned as a collaborator; certainly a small-c conservative
  105. Tom Wolfe - satirist, journalist, and winner of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, an admirer of George W Bush and long-time Republican
  106. William Wordsworth - a radical in his youth, he became more conservative as he got older, repudiating his initial support for the French Revolution and eventually becoming a member of the establishment
  107. WB Yeats - Irish nationalist and mystic, a Nobel laureate for his poetry, who became increasingly conservative and eccentric and even flirted with fascism
Some suggestions from: Sans Everything, Ranker, WP, Bookslut, Iain Dale, BBC, ChuckerCanuck, Daily Mail, LibraryThing.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Top Ten Internet Hoaxes

MSNBC has produced a list of the 10 most heinous hoaxes on the Net. The list doesn't appear to be in order.

Twitter/Facebook AMBER alert: people broadcasting fake alerts about missing children over Twitter and Facebook.

Bonsai Kitten: fake images of a kitten in a bottle, complete with instructions on how to make your own. The American Humane Society and the FBI investigated it.

Epilepsy Forum Raid: Hackers got into the websites of Epilepsy Foundation of America and the British National Society for Epilepsy, filling them with rapidly-flashing images. It has been blamed on Anonymous (best known for their anti-Scientology actions), 7chan, eBaum's world, and the Internet Hate Machine.

Bigfoot's body: Two men in Georgia, USA, claimed to have bigfoot in their freezer, and sold the corpse to a man from Indiana for $50,000.

Changing pi: Mark Boslough wrote an April Fools story in 1998 about how Alabama legislators were going to change the mathematical constant pi to 3.

Save Toby: In 2005, some people announced they had found an injured rabbit and restored it to health. The heartwarming story changed tack when they said they'd cook eat it unless people donated $50,000.

Myspace Suicide: 13 year old Megan Meier met a boy called Josh on MySpace. They exchanged emails and she fell in love with him. He broke it off a month later and she committed suicide, hanging herself in her bedroom on 16 October 2006. But Josh never existed: Lori Drew, the mother of a girl who knew Megan, created the fake profile and Drew and others used it to send Meier abusive messages.

419 Nigerian scams: The classic get-rich-quick scheme, where someone emails to say that they've got $100 million in an African bank account and with your help they can get it out. Just send some money to help. And your bank details... In 1995, an American who went to Lagos after one of these schemes was murdered.

Work-at-home scams: Another age-old trick: just send money and we'll tell you how to earn $$$ from your own home. Whether the method involves setting up your own work-from-home scam will vary.

Facebook hoax on TechCrunch: Facebook tricked technology news website TechCrunch into believing Facebook had added a "fax this photo" feature to every photo on Facebook.

(Via Museum of Hoaxes, who suggests they missed manbeef.com, Marry Our Daughter, and "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad, then he knocked up my sister!")

Thursday, November 5, 2009

We Live In Ethiopia Now

The Guardian has a feature on Josh Harris, an early and eccentric internet millionaire who funnelled his profits into massive art projects. He founded a company called Jupiter Interactive and a website pseudo.com for streaming audio and video. He offered sex chat and streamed audio programs on subjects such as video games over dial-up connections, later moving up to video. The company went bankrupt in the first dot com crash in 2000.

What's more interesting is how Harris managed to spend $80m he earned from his businesses. He was obsessed with the ability of the internet to broadcast people's lives in real-time audio and video. One project of his, called We Live in Public, involved him and his girlfriend broadcasting every action from dozens of video cameras in their luxurious Manhattan apartment for 100 days. Their relationship broke down under the stress.

He was also known for wild and eccentric parties, including his event marking the end of the last millennium, Quiet: We Live in Public, which involved a group of people living for a month in a Broadway warehouse, with all their actions broadcast on pseudo.com. The premises included "a shooting range, ... a banquet hall, theatre, temple, club, giant game of Risk, and a public shower area, all covered by cameras", as well as lots of drugs and sex. To explain this, Harris referenced his New York predecessor Warhol: "I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That's where we're heading, whether we like it or not."

Ondi Timoner has made a film, called We Live in Public, about Josh Harris. After spending the early 2000s running an apple farm in Columbia County, NY, Harris now lives in Sidamo, Ethiopia, where he is apparently CEO of an organisation called the African Entertainment Network. Pseudo.com now offers a range of music videos for online viewing.