Science as Enchantment: “…the new enchantment had its advantages, but it also has had tremendous costs, and the bills are still coming due.” The Crisis of 2025: “… it’s factually indisputable that Americans are a demoralized populace. You can see it in polls and the way people talk about their own country.” The Meta-Crises and…
Tag: poetry
w e e k e n d LINKS: Deathless Fame/Something Eerie at the Edge of Vision, Crisis
Ancient Pain: “[Anthony] Hecht’s influence on the lyrics of Steely Dan may be his most widely appreciated legacy today, given how few Americans read poetry anymore. The influence is obvious. Hecht was a formalist with a wry sense of humor. His poems are disciplined, articulate, and clever, always anchored to a moment, a place, and…
weekend links: twilight, starlings, gods
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…
Hung Upon the Torturing Tree
sharing more Chesterton, randomly A Prayer in Darkness, by GK Chesterton This much, O heaven—if I should brood or rave, Pity me not; but let the world be fed, Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead, Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave. If I dare snarl between this sun and…
The Sword I Swing Falls Shattering From the Sky
Sharing Chesteron‘s The Last Hero, just because. The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day, There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away, And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide, Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and…
ШЭԐԞЭИD LЇЙҚS: Engines of Wrath, Human Violence, De-Extinction, and the Lost Wilds of Earth
AI Pluralism: “We’ve seen in real life, in both legacy institutions and AI, that institutions tend to be captured by ideologies far more irrational, delusional, misinformed, and power-hungry than the average person. The technical details of AI make it so that it is asymmetrically easy to fight for AI to be open to customization and…
w̴e̶e̴k̶e̵n̸d̵ ̸l̶i̴n̸k̴s̶
#1: A General Theory of Collaboration: “Anyone who reads Vaclav Havel’s Power of the Powerless will be struck by Havel’s portrait of Czechoslovakia forty years ago—with its voluntary window-slogans; its endless parade of crusades; its inexorable machinery of human cancellation. Havel had the right strategy for the subjects of the total state. First, they must…
Barbaric, Vast & Wild
“Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.” –Denis Diderot pic.twitter.com/k2S8ncSS5V — C e r g a t (@EmptyCobwebs) May 3, 2019
Rest in Peace, Ken Nordine
Ken Nordine, 98, dies