American Prometheus: “There are earth energies emanating from places across [New Mexico] that are healing and raising consciousness — Taos even has an audible hum. The official nickname of New Mexico is ‘The Land of Enchantment,’ and it enchanted the young [Oppenheimer]. The other meaning of enchantment — that of alchemy/magic/spirituality/occultism — also applies to…
Tag: death
weekend links: death cults, wilderness, eternal tension
Beyond Thaumatophobia 3: The End of the Age of Reason: “[My father, a] lifelong materialist…was startled one day to hear his mother’s voice from the ground floor of his house, calling his boyhood nickname. That was a bit of a surprise, since she was 300 miles away at the time. Startled, he went to look,…
Tuesday Links: A Dragon with its Wings Ripped Off, Noetic Gnosticism, and the Brood of the Abyss
AI and the Return of Creative Elitism: “We’ve found a way to automate the parrots, and in doing so we will dash the dreams of mediocre thinkers everywhere who had been prospering under an illusion that they were creative. It will end the glut of mediocre art by finally, thankfully, making the chaff redundant so…
Mid-Week Links: Shatter Zones, Cultures of Refusal, Glory
A Far Away Planet to Which I Would Never Return — The vanishing horizon line of Terrence Malick‘s BADLANDS: “Kit is a trash collector by trade, Batailling against the solar surpluses reclaimable in the culturubble, throwing away items of no-to-low utility, revealing how even The Outsider can only seek emancipation from materialism in refuse materials,…
Weekend Links — Hyperobjects, Temporality, and the Book of Job
Magonia As Hyperobject: “If the UFOs are psychic devices, then the real question is not about the devices or machines themselves, but what they serve as such equipment.” Metacosmos: “Behold the time machine called ‘metacosmos’ that pounds on the fabric of reality. The machine does not travel, it prints a timeline, and the world moves. Unceasing,…
WEEKEND LINKS: Siberia, Nicolas Cage/Nick Cave, the Cathedral, and Rebellion Against the Playbook
Have You Ever Met Nicolas Cage?/Do You Ever Add an Untrue Component to a Story to Make it More Interesting Than it Actually Is? (Nick Cave/The Red Hand Files): Suddenly, a security guy in a dark suit with an earpiece and shades steps out of nowhere and asks me if I’m Nick Cave. I say,…
Rest in Peace, Mark Lanegan (1964-2022)
Nick Cave has a nice tribute to Mark Lanegan at the Red Hand Files: As a frontman, I move around a lot on stage, I can’t help it, it is a habitual nervous thing, a kind of neurotic compensation for a voice I have never felt that comfortable with. But watch Mark, watch how he…
weekday links
Spenglerian Moments, Borders, and the Rise and Fall of Kingdoms (The Outpost): Since the publication of The Decline of the West in 1918, Oswald Spengler’s theories of civilizational decline have never truly gone out of fashion. War, Plague, Death and Conquest: no civilizational end of cycle is without its godly scourges. Kingdoms rise and fall,…
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A weekly compendium of links. An Interface Theory of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon: “Interface Theory’s creator, Dr. Donald Hoffman has suggested that phenomenon like synaesthesia may be instances of evolution at work, a kind of real time tinkering of the interface to see what works and what doesn’t via mutation. In that light, it’s not hard…
“…remember to die”
Simon Sellars on pandemic paranoia, self-eradication, and a taxonomy of writers: Propped inside the plague’s dimensions, Twitter is a sinkhole. Nothing escapes. Under isolation pressure, the mirror is polished and archetypes revealed. Older writers with ailing, vulnerable bodies set fire to their life’s work in the service of staring at death. Younger writers lament their…
Pandemic Inventory
Seems like a lot of people are taking inventory of their pandemic experiences, so I will too. (As someone on Twitter recently joked, citing Garrison Keillor: Nothing happened to me, and now I’m going to tell you about it.) Like millions of others, I spend a lot of time alone these days. Don’t my lonely…