THE FOUNDING OF CLASSICALS INC.
From The Jolly Roger to Classicals Cafe.
The Spirit of the Millenium's Renaissance
Often enough it occurs that we receive inquiries regarding the nature of our founding that it merits a brief narrative. How was it that three small-town midwesterners came down with sea fever, journeyed eastward to the intellectual seaport of Princeton, ran the blockade, and dedicated themselves to lives of the mind? By what elements of Providence were we called upon to preserve the better parts of our beings in immortal words? When did we awake from a dream of a renaissance to find ourselves afflicted by that haunting American Spirit. That rugged Spirit which inspires youths to set aside more worldly pursuits and become defenders of the Great Dead, pursuers of the ungraspable phantom of life, and fishers of men? How was it that we envisioned a world which lay beyond the postmodern fog, commissioned a literary warship, signed aboard over 20,000 intellectual rebels, and set sail to find the virgin literary frontier and establish a classical context? For only within a classical context did our words have a chance of resounding. Words are only as good as the context in which they are penned, and contexts are only as good as the words penned within them.Elliot "Ahab" McGucken, Drake "Red Avenger" Raft, and I, Becket "Bluebeard" Knottingham, hailing from Ohio, Wisconsin, and South-Dakota, showed up as freshmen at Princeton with little more than a profound love for literature, embroidered with a subtle Puritan lust for all things gothic and profound, like her enchanting smile and ineffable poise. The three sonneteers became inseperable friends after meeting on the J.V. tennis team and then writing songs and skits for and acting in the Princeton Triangle Club. General Washington's words do well to capture the essence of the profound camraderie felt between the chief literary officers of the Good Ship:
My first wish would be, that my military family and the whole army should consider themselves as a band of brothers, willing and ready to die for one-another.It was late one rainy April night, after a rehearsal for the spring Triangle show, that the spirit of The Jolly Roger was conceived, and so it is that we believe the spirit begins at conception. We were hanging out, sitting upon the props on center stage in McCarter Theater, when Drake produced a copy of Moby Dick and began reading aloud from "The Lee Shore." I remember this one alternative girl, Tia, popped her head in the back of the theater asked us what in the world we were doing there so late, and Elliot told her we were holding a secret-society meeting. Drake told her we'd let her in if she humbled herself before Melville's literary supremacy, whereupon she laughed and took off to go tack up some more posters or catch South Park or something. And so we founded a secret society dedicated to living the vanquished literature of the Great Books, which eventually evolved into a Chapel Hill grunge band for tax purposes when we all headed South to the Research Triangle as graduate students. Boy, did we rock. What the Beats did for poetry, we did for grunge. Probably our greatest album was "Alternative Girls." You've most likely heard the title track on your college station-- it's the one that goes "Alternative girls never know my name, alternative girls are the ones who dress the same," but it's pretty difficult to make out the words in the song, as we were trying to sound authentic. It was pretty autobiographical, though.
Then, in 1994, the spirit manifested itself as the world's largest literary warship, flagship of the renaissance generation, The Jolly Roger, dedicated to restoring Law and Order to literature, and reuniting Words with Plot, Character, Structure, Form, Content, Meaning, and Divine Glory. While sailing aboard the Roger, we settled the world's largest virtual classical community upon several websites, some of which were recently reviewed in a cool article in The New York Times. Music couldn't capture the Apollonian concepts that we had been born to express, such as Fidelity, Prudence, Commitment, Character, Virtue, Loyalty, and Reverence, and we found ourselves far more at home upon this profound new medium rooted within the printed word, the World Wide Web. And besides, grunge wasn't ours-- it was pretty much the corporate pagan's, and it wasn't too much fun working for them, having to follow all their stringent marketing-manager rules and conforming to their aging, nihilistic mindset, so we quit.In the near future, as we boldly captain the flagship of our generation's aesthetic renaissance, we hope to open a chain of Classicals Cafes/Bookstores, resembling the one pictured above, which can be enjoyed at 667 West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC. We're not interested in making a lot of money, or anything, but we think it'd be cool to foster a more profound culture. We recently entered a new-ventures competition in the Kenan-Flagler business school, as the business school is next to the physics department, and we thought we'd say "hi." We presented our maverick business plan, explaining that we expected to be paid in poetry, as it's the most profound and enduring currency that has ever been printed upon paper, but the professors' and judges' foresight did not encompass eternity, and we finished second. But as is so often the case, that which is not approved by the reigning expert's imaginations is approved by Natural Law, lifted by the Invisible Hand, and realized by Providence. CONTINUED...
© 1997-2005 Raft, Knottingham & McGucken. All rights reserved. Looters will have their throats slit.
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