LINKS: Sin as Punishment; Biosecurity; Second Fathers
tundranaut
Alan Moore’s Best Writing Advice — Start with Short Stories:“…he said that one of young writers’ biggest temptations today is the idea that they’ll create a gigantic epic that will end up as a movie or TV franchise, making them rich and famous. And that’s a terrible way to learn the craft.”
Conditions of Production: “Production is not preference: form is either forced or it is given. The difference determines what, if anything, can be inhabited, governed, or thought. Where nothing resists, nothing can be known as produced, enacted or acted upon, answered for, carried forward—nothing holds. What follows proceeds from this.”
Fifteen Years of Dreaming About a Place I’ve Never Seen: “Something entered my life with the force of weather, and I was not wrong to fall before it. The heart may fasten itself to what is truly beautiful and still ask of it what only the eternal can give. Thus, its restlessness is not proof that it has desired falsely, but that it has mistaken a sign for the infinite. The proof lies in the direction of the longing. In my life I have turned it toward a hazel-eyed girl, a faraway country, a blue river, a silver fern. Each received it for a time, and each answered with some genuine beauty. Though all proved too small for the whole of what we were made for.
Icarus Descending: “St. Augustine said that sin is its own punishment. [Anthony] Fauci’s diary reveals no awareness that the media was using him as much as he was using them, or that he served as a cardboard cutout—and now the fall guy—for a biosecurity and pharmaceutical apparatus that leveraged the crisis to achieve its own political and financial aims. He remains puzzled as to why countless Americans view him with contempt. As he is falling, Fauci still thinks he is rising. To become incapableof experiencing warranted shame or justified humiliation, as unpleasant as such experiences may be, is already to be in some kind of private hell—locked in the prison of one’s own mind with no ability to even see the bars. I would suggest that this might be a worse punishment than federal prison, where a man at least has the opportunity to come to terms with the truth about himself before it’s too late.”
The Aura Farming Manifesto: “Aura is the fusion of your external world with your internal one. How you dress, speak, move, how you wake. How you walk to buy bread. How you hold silence. Nothing is neutral. Every moment is an opportunity, not vanity. The universe reverberates what you put out. Broadcast weakness, get devoured. Broadcast a king, watch doors unlock before your hand touches them.”
The Foreman: “For a mentor to inflict pain and duress upon his student would be cast as abuse according to our liberal sensibilities. But such impulses should be resisted, lest we forget the important self-transformation which occurs in such a relationship. Such an encounter with a second father may very well be the crucial trial needed to turn a boy into a man. The absence of, and credulity towards, such encounters in the modern world, is a crucial reason that so many boys fail to attain maturity. It may be the lack of genuinely masculine mentors—and not mere performers—that has drawn us into a crisis of masculinity.”
The Great Gig in the Sky: “Has any genre of music ever suffered so cataclysmic a decline in popularity as progressive rock? Disco comes close: in 1979, a shock-jock DJ named Steve Dahl blew up a crate of records by the likes of Chic and The Bee Gees in front of 50,000 excitable haters at Chicago’s Comiskey Park Stadium. But by the mid-Nineties, disco was back in style and Barry, Robin and Maurice had been thoroughly rehabilitated. Prog’s redemption arc is a lot more complicated. Certainly, there’s an annual Caribbean cruise where surviving stars of the genre perform their classics to aging fans, and in 2026 you can see Rush in concert or buy a new album by the latest incarnation of Yes (which contains no original members). But compared to disco, prog rock is a decidedly niche taste — like building model railways.”
The Metaphysics of Gas Stations: “Every gas station has heraldry. Texaco’s star. Shell’s scallop. Sinclair’s green brontosaurus (my favorite as a kid). The Chevron bars. The BP sunflower. Kwik Shop’s simple name. The great orange disc of Gulf, which no longer exists in most of the country, but whose color still means gasoline to anyone over fifty. These are sigils. They function the way coats of arms once functioned for noble houses and patron saints once functioned for parishes; they tell you whose protection you are under, whose territory you have entered, whose standard flies above the canopy. Americans have loyalties to gas station brands that they cannot fully explain, preferences inherited from fathers who had preferences inherited from their fathers, passed down like devotions. Some even swear by the fuel consistency between heralds, as if speaking of alchemic potency.”
Toil and Transcendence:“The contrast between one who resists suffering and one who embraces it is stark. It is a distinction between those who grasp the spiritual import of work and those who do not. I wager that a host of societal problems and personal afflictions in the modern world result from a decadent aversion to suffering. I speak not only of surface level problems—for these are real, but issue forth from a far more fundamental malaise: the lack of existential, metaphysical, and ontological grounding which true and pure suffering imbues.”
