Author: Thomas Fleming

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Fleming

28 Jul, 2016

The Visions Forever Green

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This is another review essay published in 1983, the year before I came to Rockford, Arnold Toynbee: The Greeks and Their Heritages; Oxford University Press; New York. Mary Renault: Funeral Games; Pantheon Books; New York. by Thomas Fleming Modern man seems haunted by the specter of Greece. Like memories of childhood, the visions of ancient Athens and Sparta hold a place in our minds, forever green.  It does not matter how we first formed the image—a translation of Homer, the illustrations in Bullfinch, the tales we had to translate in first-year Latin.  However we were struck, the Greeks inevitably become...

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Uncategorized

28 Jul, 2016

Writing and Reading Poetry, II: The Age of Lead

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II Let’s start with the one piece submitted in response to my challenge.  This comes from my former managing editor, Kate Dalton Boyer, who is still harboring some dark feelings about her former boss’s sloppy office. Doggerel for TF I know a man named Thomas, his desk will give you pause. If one inquires the reason: “Tace!” he’ll say.  “Because.” Beneath a Mac his thesis (of Grecian poetry) is propping up his keyboard and in danger from his tea. The office door won’t open –review books in the way– it seems another forty-two have just arrived today. The lamp’s a...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

27 Jul, 2016

Living in the Empire of Lies

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Julian Assange did his best to spoil the Hillary-fest being held in the renamed City of Sisterly love.  No sooner had Wikileaks released the DNC emails confirming the active collaboration of party leaders with the Clinton campaign than the state media attempted to divert attention from the fact of what the hacked hacks had actually done to ruin the Sanders campaign.  This is all part of a Putin plot to elect Donald Trump.  Why, it’s an outrage when one country tries to rig political outcomes in another. I could not agree more, which is why American administrations have never involved...

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Feature / Fleming

25 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood I.5 Revenge, Part D

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Christian Most Christians today are horrified by any thought of revenge.  Bring the subject up, and they are sure to quote, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” as if that were a sufficient refutation.  Far from being a repudiation of vengeance as something evil, the statement is a strong affirmation of vengeance as an instrument of the divine will.  Moral understanding of crime and punishment has certainly moved on since the writing of the Pentateuch, but if Christ was serious that he came not to overturn but to fulfill the law, then we cannot begin anywhere else, if we wish...

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Fleming / On the House

23 Jul, 2016

The Failure of Democratic Capitalism

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This piece comes from 1982, two years before moving to Rockford as Managing Editor of the magazine I would soon serve as Editor.  It is a slightly revised version of a review of Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.  The editors were so alarmed by the implicit rejection of classical liberalism that they felt it necessary to run  the usual “Michael Novak is a genius..” counterpoint along side it. Capitalism must be dead at last. Its demise has been predicted so many times—by Marx and his disciples, by fascists, and even by true believers like the ex-Trotskyist James Burnham—that many of...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

23 Jul, 2016

Munich–A City of Two Tales

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This just in: A bizarre incident took place this week in Munich.  Out of the blue, a typical German teenager quit spending his money on drugs and night clubs and decided to spend his free time and surplus cash on helping elderly people in a retirement home.  No one knows what motivated this eccentric behavior.  The young man had no known connections with any political movement advocating charity or welfare.  Found in his bedroom were various non-denominational pamphlets on how to practice charity.  All that is know of him is that he was brought up in the Catholic Church and...

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble / On the House

22 Jul, 2016

One More Reason I’m Glad I’m Not a Conservative

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When several people asked me what I thought of the Republican Convention in Cleveland, I had to answer truthfully that I had paid very little attention to the quadrennial shenanigans. Much of my time, this past week, was devoted to driving my broken-legged wife to medical appointments, the most serious of which was the three hour operation that took place yesterday.  The doctors are proclaiming a tactical victory, but recovery time is now being measured in terms of months rather than weeks, which puts our October program in Greece on hold. When I did have time to turn on the...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

19 Jul, 2016

Learning to Write and Read Verse

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Several readers and friends have asked me how to read poetry, and the questions usually take the form of asking my advice on this or that book on prosody or form or the history of poetry.  I invariably reply to such requests—as I also reply to requests for “one good book” on Greek drama or the fall of Rome or ancient rhetoric, by suggesting generally that is best to form one’s taste on the “classics” that used to be approved by the wisdom of our ancestors, the cut-off being World War I. In matters of writing—poetry and rhetoric, for example—I...

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Feature / Fleming

18 Jul, 2016

Properties of Blood, Chapter 5: Revenge, Part C

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Civilized people will never be impressed by any argument that seems to celebrate the morality of apes.  We are, after all, human beings who are, as Christians say, made in the image of God or, as Darwinists insist, the product of tens of millions of years of evolutionary progress.  It is a main thrust of philosophical liberalism (and of ancient Stoicism) that human beings have a duty to rise above not only animal but parochial and sectarian passions. I can almost hear the rumblings from the professors, social workers, and other right-thinking people:  ”If you once start conceding some legitimacy...