Customer Reviews

Jollyroger.com: Navigating an American Renaissance

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Jollyroger.com is an unnavigable site that has never appeared to be updated regularly. It was one of the first sites I found when I came online three years ago, and I've continued to look in on it because it tends to come up in search engines all the time.

Jollyroger.com features dozens of discussion forums that no one posts in - they steadily filled up with junk posts and spam for years. It's a ghost town. Apart from the forums, the site was distinguished by several manifestos proclaiming the 'www renaissance', but they were years old and no cultural renaissance appears to be taking place on the web.

After watching this huge site sit there gathering dust for two years, I suspected that the entire thing was some kind of put-on, maybe bait to attract page hits for advertisers. But now I find this book praising the importance and achievement of jollyroger.com. Who on earth are these people? After seven years they are still complete unknowns to most of the net community, yet they continue to proclaim themselves leaders of a 'renaissance'.

I really liked jumping around in this book, from the poetry, to the prose, to the political essays. I especially enjoyed A NANUCKET GHOST STORY, tehir Declaration of Independence, and the story about selling poems on Wilmington Beach. I think the crew did a great job in explaining a lot of Western Traditions which haven't gotten quite so much attention at colleges these days, as they have been displaced by postmodern variants. They bring the concepts to life in a language aimed at our generation. They have created quite an empire at jollyroger.com, and this book is a great tribute to what they have built. It's their greatest hits in a sense, and I highly recommend it for anyone who has ever picked up and read a Great Book. If all the modern grunge/ironists bore you, then you'd enjoy this. I hope they wite out more.

This is embarrassing.

As a longtime subscriber to JollyRoger, I find much of this work deeply disappointing. The current philosophical struggle for the very soul of Western Civilization is too often presented here as merely a function of greedy publishers and snooty academics. Sadly, the problems facing the dreams of the Founders, among others, run far deeper than what is discussed at cocktail parties or cool on campus. Reading this work, one too often gets the impression the gentlemen of JollyRoger are using a machine gun to swat misquotes. They too often address the effects, not the cause. After all, is it really that difficult to pick on the moronic, self-reinforcing assumptions of Ivy League professors, or the greed and short-sightedness of corporate middlemen? I think not.

The boys even have the laughable temerity to demonize "liberals." To suggest that the cancers of postmodernist thought and situational ethics which infect virtually every aspect of our civilization could be reduced to a mere political affiliation is absurd, and the partisan rancor serves only to detract from the vital, essential message of the work. Ultimately, love and compassion, and the recognition of the uniqueness of each individual human is, and must be, at the core of all Western enlightenment. The sweeping generalizations and bitterness here reduce what could have been a nobel manifesto to a mere political polemic.

Keep chasing that whale, boys.

Well, the jollyroger.com boys are doing their job. I enjoyed the diversity of literary styles within this epic, from poetry, to philosophy, to cultural commentary, to short stories. They're doing their job, but where are the contemporary scholars, editors, critics, and hypesters? Somewhere in the sixties literature was transformed into a fashion, and the classics were thrown out along with decent manners, deep humour, and the basic common sense which all classics pay homage to. On with the renaissance--may common sense, exalted beauty, and classical themes prevail once again in our contemporary literature!

As an industry insider, I must say that this book is ahead of its years. What really hit home were the apt characterizions of the incestuous corporate publishing house that is known as New York, which, as the book suggests, is dominated by little middlemen who are not authors, nor humble editors, but who are merely MFA's who're most interested in hanging with the MTV crowd at Simon & Schuster parties. As this book so definitively illustrates, most contemporary books have the same general liberal themes of decline and debauchery, whether you're reading Eminem's "Angry Blonde" or Joyce Carol Oates's "Blondie." There has always been a market for making dull-witted pessimists feel like they're smart, and sad to say, that's the market that most houses seek to serve, whether with insta-hipsters like Eggers or with Wallace's "Infinite Crap." Somewhere along the way they substiuted the word "ironic" for "moronic," about the same time they substituted publicity departments for plots.

So why am I working in publishing? Because "In the Beginning there was the Word, and the Word was God." Because of books like Jollyroger.com: Navigating an American Renaissance, which now and then grace the slushpile. And of course all the lock-step marching chicks in the corporate/editoral management at my house passed on the book last year, but there's no greater crime than being ahead of your time in this industry.

I hope to found my own house in the future, as I think there's a huge market for an intelligent conservative message which is aimed at gen-x and gen-y, and I wish the crew Godspeed in taking us beyond the circular whirlpool of liberal editors, publishers, marketers, and CEOs who are quite frankly boring the rising generation to death. In a way, such a transition must be an outside job, as no conservative would be given a job in the mail room of any of the major houses.

I have yet to witness anywhere in the popular culture where Emerson, Melville, Jefferson and Thoreau walk alongside G'n'R and Eminen, and where the classics are given their due as the eternal popular culture. There's a great diversity of tone and tenor throught the varied chapters of fiction, poetry, and philosophy, and the authors are best when they are entertaining and enlightening with their branded traditional poetry, rather than ranting about the postmodern liberal domination of popular culture and the university. But even the rants are good, and a lot of fun, and certainly nowhere near as vulgar as Eminen and his popular brethern. I always thought the National Review should publish more poetry and fiction, and if they ever do, I know where they can find it.

The book spans a nebulous array of topics, which would detract from its strength if it weren't for the fact that life in the year 2000 spans a nebulous array of topics. There's a resounding, honest freshness to these words, as they constantly aspire towards the deeper truths and a dream of a renaissance, and I suspect that these qualities will carry these sentiments far, throughout both space and time. It seems that perhaps more than anyone else these days, they're using words for what words are best suited for: awakening our deeper selves.

I'm a bit more of a pessimist than they are about cultural matters, but I hope they're onto something, and the book at least inspired me to dust off the classics that were sitting in my milk crates up in the attic, from college. And for that, I am indebted to the noble crew of The Jolly Roger.

I was enthralled to find the website and then the book which is a compilation of essays from the jollyroger.com network, as well as quite a few extras. Basically the "Good Ship" perceives postmodernism's destructive tentacles reaching out through all aspects of culture, and they architect a plan to build lighthouses in the postmodern fog utilizing yesterday's Great Books, and thus navigate an American Renaissance. Written incomplete defiance of the snarky insiders and the prevailing MFA fashions, this book affirms that Great Literature springs eternal. In the deep of night is when our dreams are born anew. From essays stressing honest business practices, to poetry expressing deeper, truer love, this books speaks to the practial idealist in us all.

I have yet to witness anywhere in the popular culture where Emerson, Melville, Jefferson and Thoreau walk alongside G'n'R and Eminen, and where the classics are given their due as the eternal popular culture. There's a great diversity of tone and tenor throught the varied chapters of fiction, poetry, and philosophy, and the authors are best when they are entertaining and enlightening with their branded traditional poetry, rather than ranting about the postmodern liberal domination of popular culture and the university. But even the rants are good, and a lot of fun, and certainly nowhere near as vulgar as Eminen and his popular brethern. I always thought the National Review should publish more poetry and fiction, and if they ever do, I know where they can find it.

The book spans a nebulous array of topics, which would detract from its strength if it weren't for the fact that life in the year 2000 spans a nebulous array of topics. There's a resounding, honest freshness to these words, as they constantly aspire towards the deeper truths and a dream of a renaissance, and I suspect that these qualities will carry these sentiments far, throughout both space and time. It seems that perhaps more than anyone else these days, they're using words for what words are best suited for: awakening our deeper selves.

I'm a bit more of a pessimist than they are about cultural matters, but I hope they're onto something, and the book at least inspired me to dust off the classics that were sitting in my milk crates up in the attic, from college. And for that, I am indebted to the noble crew of The Jolly Roger.

Well I first found the site while researching a paper on Herman Melville, and I remember the first night I stayed up reading the poetry and prose communicating the bold new visoion of a renaissance in American Letters. It seems the literary world, for numerous reasons, is one of the last bastions of postmodern hipsterism. I just can't see too many bright, entrepreneurial individuals going after an MFA. Instead they'd use the tuition to launch a website and business devoted to the Great Books, like the jolly roger lads have done.

This book presents a brief history of their accomplishments via poetry and prose, interspersed with fan mail. The authors also have the foresight to characterize their uphill battle, as they know that by exposing the self-indulgent shallowness of pomo hipsterism, they'll make many enemies in the MFA world--the clubby world of liberal insiders who control the presses, the corporate conglomerates, the editorial rooms, the literary journals, the literary agencies, and the magazines. Without the internet, the jolly roger could not be, and thus the renaissance would have to wait. The entire MFA country club isn't going to enjoy the renaissance all that much, as it will translate into less money in their pockets as their literary bureaucracies are exposed.

Well that's what I got out of the book, but the book expresses it a bit more eloquently. The Truth Will Set You Free. But it ain't ever easy. Godspeed!

I am very glad to be able to come to the aid of humanity by telling them to avoid this billious turkey and the website that inspired it. These Princeton dorks believe in their own press maninly because they write it themselves. Their site is a wasteland of tirede cliches and agit-prop all except for the wit and wisdom of Phil O. Soph). These studs take themselves far too serously BUT their main refrain is to gain as much ad revenue as they can before the IRS nails them to a tree. It would be great if this book sank into the fathoms of iliiteracy where it belongs...overblown, sanctimonious and a true threat to America as we think we know it...blah !