Category Archives: Books/Media

This review in one sentence: man, I wish this book was around six years ago.

Aaron Clarey (aka Captain Capitalism) is on a mission to save America’s youth from throwing away their money and time on useless college majors. That’s the purpose of Worthless; educate youth as to why most majors are worthless and expose the gigantic conspiracy to get young’uns to sell themselves into debt slavery for a Master’s in Puppetry.

Much of the content of Worthless is pretty standard fare for the kinds of people in this section of the blogosphere: most non-STEM degrees are a waste, any degree that doesn’t involve math is a waste, and the entirety of American academia is a scam designed to bleed students dry and enrich itself at any cost. What separates Worthless from the avalanche of “you stupid kids shoulda majored in something useful!” finger-wagging coming from the media today is that Clarey is blunt and sympathetic. He recognizes that while yes, teenagers are making dumb decisions, their elders (Generation X and the Baby Boomers) are actively encouraging them to make dumb decisions, either because they themselves are ignorant or they stand to profit off of those dumb decisions.

Smart as you may think you are, you aren’t the only one to come up with the genius diabolical plot to major in a cake subject and then somehow hope you land some kind of easy, government, non-profit type job. Matter of fact, two entire generations before you came up with that exact same idea! Millions of people before you also majored in Philosophy, Women’s Studies, Communications, English and all the other worthless degrees. Where do you suppose they ended up?

This is why Worthless is such a powerful and important book; it not only offers practical advice, it illustrates the big picture in an easy-to-understand way. Clarey doesn’t sugarcoat the truth, but he isn’t needlessly hostile or antagonistic either. Because of this, as Frost wrote last week, his book actually stands a good chance of altering peoples’ thinking.

My biggest beef with Worthless is a bit irrelevant to its purpose, but I’ll get it out there anyway. Clarey, like most writers on this subject, urges young college-goers to major in STEM disciplines or learn a trade because those are the only disciplines that are in any kind of demand. The problem is that if everyone (or a critical mass of students) were to follow this advice, we’d be back at square one; a glut of graduates, not enough jobs for them.

The ultimate problem here isn’t useless college majors, it’s the uselessness of college itself.

If the institution of college isn’t going to be burned to the ground, it needs to be radically reformed. Having a bachelor’s degree should not be a minimum requirement to enter the middle class, because only a small minority of the population needs to go to college (the ones majoring in something worthwhile). Kids interested in entrepreneurship should be encouraged to start businesses instead of going to college and so on. But again, since Worthless’ purpose is to advise kids on how to plan their futures, and not about reforming the American educational establishment, this is not that important.

Bottom line: if you’re a teenager planning on going to college, buy this book. If you have a son or daughter planning on going to college, buy them this book. If you have a friend or SO planning on going to college, buy them this book. It’s way cheaper than tuition and can be read in a single afternoon.

Click here to buy Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major.

Read Next: The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield

I credit this book with encouraging me to get off my ass and change my life.

The War of Art is a brief guide on overcoming procrastination and laziness on your way to accomplishing your dreams. Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy of artists as Resistance, a nebulous force that saps your will and prevents you from doing the things that you want to:

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace, or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

In a series of concise bullet points, Pressfield breaks down Resistance and why it is such an insidious and dangerous enemy. Overcoming Resistance is what separates amateurs from professionals. The final third of the book is dedicated to helping you cultivate the mindset to defeat Resistance once and for all. He gets weird near the end talking about the Greek Muses and whatnot, but his ideas work.

If you’ve wanted to accomplish something great but’ve kept putting it off, I urge you to read The War of Art as soon as you can.

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.

What Henry Fonda does, after puking into the toilet in his dressing room, is to clean up and march out onstage. He’s still terrified but he forces himself forward in spite of his terror. He knows that once he gets out into the action, his fear will recede and he’ll be okay.

Click here to buy The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle.

Read Next: Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce

The South African poet Roy Campbell (1902-1957) is a perfect example of how “great literature” is defined more by politics than by actual talent. While far from perfect, Campbell’s verse is energetic, masculine and passionate, a joy to read. Think Hemingway in iambic pentameter. But the reason you’ve never heard of him is because he made the fatal mistake of siding with the wrong group of thugs: he was a passionate supporter of Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War when every major literary figure was on the Republicans’ side. Merely because of this, Campbell was wiped from the public consciousness, condemned to languish in the backs of college libraries.

Of course, Campbell was a far more complicated character than his enemies made him out to be. A lifelong iconoclast and outdoorsman, he became notorious for attacking the racism of his fellow South Africans in his satirical poem The Wayzgoose; relocating to England, he became active in the Bloomsbury Group, the circle of intellectuals and authors that included Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, and Bertrand Russell. Tiring of their snobbery, Marxism and anti-Christian attitude (and upset over Sackville-West’s lesbian affair with his wife Mary), Campbell shredded them in another satirical poem, The Georgiad. Relocating to southern France and later Spain, Campbell and his wife converted to Catholicism and became Nationalists after witnessing first-hand the horrors of the Red Terror. Despite his fascist sentiments, he later enlisted in the British Army during World War II despite being well over the draft age, when the communist chickenhawks who had been agitating for war with Germany in the first place either fled the country (W.H. Auden) or slithered into noncombatant positions in the civil service (Stephen Spender).

So whatever you may think about Campbell, he was definitely difficult to pigeonhole.

If you want a comprehensive and unbiased look at Roy Campbell’s life and works, Unafraid of Virginia Woolf is your best bet. Author Joseph Pearce covers Campbell’s life from his childhood to his untimely death by car crash, extensively quoting from his poems and interviews with his daughters. The book also includes rare photographs of Campbell and his associates. While Pearce is overly critical of Campbell’s satiric verse, his treatment of the man’s career is unparalleled and worth a look.

Getting your hands on any of Campbell’s actual books is difficult nowadays as they’re all out of print. If you can, I recommend Selected Poems, a compilation of all his poems released before 1946 (just as well, as everything he wrote after that was forgettable anyway). Here are some of my favorites:

The Zulu Girl

When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder,
Down where the sweating gang its labour plies,
A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder
Unslings her child tormented by the flies.

She takes him to a ring of shadow pooled
By thorn-trees: purpled with the blood of ticks,
While her sharp nails, in slow caresses ruled,
Prowl through his hair with sharp electric clicks,

His sleepy mouth plugged by the heavy nipple,
Tugs like a puppy, grunting as he feeds:
Through his frail nerves her own deep languors ripple
Like a broad river sighing through its reeds.

Yet in that drowsy stream his flesh imbibes
An old unquenched unsmotherable heat-
The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,
The sullen dignity of their defeat.

Her body looms above him like a hill
Within whose shade a village lies at rest,
Or the first cloud so terrible and still
That bears the coming harvest in its breast.

The Sisters

After hot loveless nights, when cold winds stream
Sprinkling the frost and dew, before the light,
Bored with the foolish things that girls must dream
Because their beds are empty of delight,

Two sisters rise and strip. Out from the night
Their horses run to their low-whistled pleas—
Vast phantom shapes with eyeballs rolling white,
That sneeze a fiery stream about their knees:

Through the crisp manes their stealthy prowling hands,
Stronger than curbs, in slow caresses rove,
They gallop down across the milk-white sands
And wade far out into the sleeping cove:

The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death:
Their lips, whereon delicious tremours hiss
Fume with the ghostly pollen of their breath.

Far out on the grey silence of the flood
They watch the dawn in smouldering gyres expand
Beyond them: and the day burns through their blood
Like a white candle through a shuttered hand.

Mass at Dawn

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.

Autumn

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.

Already now the clanging chains
Of geese are harnessed to the moon:
Stripped are the great sun-clouding planes;
And the dark pines, their own revealing,
Let in the needles of the noon.

Strained by the gale the olives whiten
Lke hoary wrestlers bent with toil
And, with the vines, their branches lighten
To brim our vats where summer lingers
In the red froth and sun-gold oil.

Soon on our hearth’s reviving pyre
Their rotted stems will crumble up:
And like a ruby, panting fire,
The grape will redden on your fingers
Through the lit crystal of the cup.

Click here to buy Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell.

Read Next: Anonymity is for Guys with Something to Lose