Christianity is Not Monotheistic: “…angels were made to sing. Specifically, to sing the cosmos into existence. That’s why the medievals organized them into ‘choirs.'”
Cormac McCarthy’s New Books of Revelation: “Everyone easily notices the Old Testament style, but rather than saints and gods, we encounter simple men who are driven by an instinctive solidarity for those other men who know just how brutish life is in its essence.”
Humiliation: “There is no silence like a moment or two at twilight, in the gloaming, when everything just stops for an instant. The world feels pregnant, a belly full of possibilities. Some nights like a first time hind, her fawn wet and gentle and utterly contained within itself. Some nights like those aggressive bellicose calves that dance in circles, shaking off the redness of their entrance, tossing their back legs and bucking with no rhythm. But the nights have become flat now, like the world has given up and the impish little gods which make each day different are hiding in the rushes, hiding in the caves.”
Kit Carson on the Astral Plane: “It’s not so much that the gods will wreck you — it’s that, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you will wreck yourself. Throughout history, virtually every culture on earth has learned this lesson the hard way — that’s why they developed rituals in the first place. Algonquin pipe ceremonies for tobacco, Berserker Viking battle preparations, Shipibo-Conibo ayahuasca circles, Druidic mushroom trances — from Siberia to Sao Paolo, the list of ritual practices for managing altered states of consciousness is too long to list. Fundamentally, drug use needs ritual. In one civilization after another across all times and places, cultures understood that these experiences must be carefully managed and integrated because these substances provided benefits if handled properly, and damage if not. The historical record is clear about what happened to the individuals and cultures that allowed rituals to deteriorate into anarchic bacchanals.”
The Children Are Going Feral: “To really become a bird, you must slow down. To fly away, you must first be torn apart. You won’t find what you’re looking for as a starlet, but as a starling.”
The Final Triumph of Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023): “Cormac McCarthy has a dark and disturbing vision of the human condition. If you’ve seen the movie of No Country for Old Men, you already have gotten a taste of this. So you shouldn’t pick up any of his novels unless you’re ready for a tough ride in the saddle.”
There Once Was a Man: “While modern writers bellyache about ‘writer’s block’ or the limitless distractions of social media, [Charles] Willeford went through two wives and all the bureaucratic nonsense of the Air Force and still wrote his first books. ‘Proletarian Laughter,’ a book of poetry, was published during the swan song of Willeford’s Army career, while ‘High Priest of California,’ Willeford’s first novel, ‘Wild Wives,’ and ‘Pick-Up’ were all published during the last years of Willeford’s Air Force stint. And what novels they are—’High Priest of California’ is the story of an amoral car salesman who lusts after married women in San Francisco; ‘Wild Wives’ is a slim and efficient private eye tale centered around a potentially insane woman; and ‘Pick-Up’ is a beautifully written caper featuring a mixed-race couple trying to get their slice of the pie in underworld San Francisco.
Why AI Will Save the World: “…technology empowers people to be more productive. This causes the prices for existing goods and services to fall, and for wages to rise. This in turn causes economic growth and job growth, while motivating the creation of new jobs and new industries. If a market economy is allowed to function normally and if technology is allowed to be introduced freely, this is a perpetual upward cycle that never ends. For, as Milton Friedman observed, ‘Human wants and needs are endless’ – we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market economy is the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could conceivably want, but never all the way there. And that is why technology doesn’t destroy jobs and never will.“