Harper is here

Harper Mc Alpine Black is the shining new pseudonymous on-line identity of Dr R. Blackhirst, erstwhile academic in Religious Studies and teacher of the traditional Humanities at La Trobe University, Bendigo, Australia.

Dr Blackhirst, a student of Greek philosophy (Plato), taught in the 'Studies in Western Traditions' course at Bendigo and later in the Philosophy & Religious Studies course where he specialised in Islamic/West encounters. He is best known for his studies of the medieval Gospel of Barnabas. He also published in the Canadian perennialist journal, Sacred Web. Some of his work can be found in the book Primordial Alchemy & Modern Religion. Much of it is now to be recycled and offered through this web site.

When his old on-line identity became hopelessly compromised through the exploitation of promoters, and through mixing with bad company - an inevitable hazard in 23+ years in the modern Academy, from which he was finally retired through redundancy -  he decided it was time to start a new one. That's what you do these days. People hijack your on-line identity, link your name to all sorts of dubious causes, on top of the damage you do to your own reputation because the internet records every stupid idea you've ever had forever. In the end, you either pay reputation.com lots of money to sanitise and take back control of your identity, or you start again. Dr Blackhirst has started again. Although, in fact, Black is indeed his family name, as is Mc Alpine. (Harper is someone who plays a harp or, more to the point, someone who harps on about things.)

Harper Mc Alpine Black is very happy that he is not an academic. While he has to do odd jobs in the real world to pay some bills, he now devotes his time to gardening, cooking, writing short stories, reading, travel, reflecting and tackling projects like this unashamedly retrograde web log. His views on most things - but not all - are unfashionably neoreactionary slash paleo-conservative,  with an agrarian (but also cosmopolitan) outlook and a comprehensive rejection of Whig historiography. Reactionary neo-orientalist Platonic gardener -  he subscribes to that arcane worldview known as the alchimie primordiale. Much travelled, he likes art, tea, poetry, long walks and rainy nights. 

He nominates his position as officially independent and is not beholden to fashionable ideologies, least of all those which prevail in contemporary academia and progressive politics. He has a reactionary, nostalgic outlook and is happy to hold, and cultivate, views that are out of phase.