Every so often I’ll nose around local message boards to take the pulse of my community, occasionally finding amidst the name calling and amusing Surrealist rewrites of Tubthumper something worth thinking about deeper. Today it was a thread on statements that invalidate arguments, most of which were expected, but a number of people seemed to [...]
The past few months I’ve been immersed in the canonical Library America edition of the collected works of Philip K Dick, consecutively reading The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Flow My Tears, [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
As a counterpoint to my earlier post’s suggestion that authors can mythically enter into the stories they tell , I thought it necessary to point out that a similar thing happens during the act of reading a story, that in fact reading is, by the nature of the imagination, always participatory. This point is probably [...]
In the 1940s, when Alejandro Carpentier developed his concept of Marvelous Realism, it was in response to the European Surrealists, who he saw as trying to hold onto an Old World magic that was rapidly vanishing into the logic of modernity. The New World, however, Carpentier felt, was still a fertlie ground for the exploration [...]
Over the decades I’ve been studying mythology I’ve looked at and rejected a number of definitions of what myth is and does. First off, the common notion that myth = falsehood doesn’t do very much for us, and is a relatively recent perspective stemming from the late 18th century move toward literal interpretation with the [...]
“What was unreal is real, what was real is unreal.” -Jung, from the Red Book Prior to the fantastic experiences he would later illuminate as the Red Book, Carl Jung considered himself a wholly rational man, a trained scientist and critic of Christianity and other forms of religiosity. Yet through his visionary adventures he was [...]
My roster of classes this spring semester contains Lectures in Literature (focus on Adaptation), Readings in Contemporary Fiction (focus on post-Boom Latin American literature), Bible as Literature, and Popular Culture. Though not typically themes I look at, it was interesting to notice that almost immediately each class’s texts (though not yet pop culture, though with [...]
[This is the first story generated by the now finished Unlimited Story Deck (beta version). The underlined words refer to the cards played.] I was at the bar writing when I was approached by a girl who didn’t look old enough to get in, but she was dressed like a hipster, so maybe that’s the [...]
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
As part of the current process of integrating my various creative works onto the Internet, I’ve decided to post some of the more interesting academic papers I’ve written over the last several years for school (backdated to when they were written, including a couple pieces of fiction, not including any work from the current semester): [...]
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Also tagged Beckett, Borges, Gaiman, hermeneutics, Joyce, Kafka, Lakota, literature, myth, Pynchon, ritual, school, Tolkien
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
I haven’t written much yet publicly on the new perspective or belief system I have been attempting to formulate over this past year, a perspective that I call Ultimate Realism, which is perhaps best summed up by the quote from Patchen’s Memoirs of a Shy Pornogrpaher: “Everything which man can imagine, dream, or conceivably want [...]
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Also tagged apocalyptica, atheism, belief, Clothey, culture, fantastic, history, imagination, literature, manifestoes, modernity, Patchen, personal narrative, philosophy, religion, space, techniques, Ultimate Realism
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