I always try and see the Perseid meteor shower each August for years now, catching them in various intense situations – being the only one to see them, glimpsing through stormclouds and moonlight, suddenly lying on the concrete to stare at the burning rain – almost a ritual in honor to how spectacular the Universe [...]
[Warning: Potential Spoilers Below!] Last year when the reimagined Battlestar Galactica came to an end, there was a wide ranging response mostly peaked by WTFs at the deus ex machinas, Baltar’s referral to God or gods as an explanation of plot events, and, perhaps more agonizing, the impossibility of knowing whether Kara Thrace was really [...]
Short and sinister like one of Edward Gorey’s abecedariums, infamous freethinker and Islamic Scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson presents in Abecedarium a poetic, anarchic, and occult meditation on the original Egyptian-Semitic meanings and magics behind each of the symbols that eventually became the English alphabet. Deeply researched but thankfully void of any academic skulduggery, Wilson’s Abecedarium [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The other day for the final in my Lectures in Literature class on adaptation, I wrote an essay that managed to articulate ways in which myths can be lived by the people who tell them. As opposed to someone like Milton, who uses mythological themes and characters in an old way, that is, as historical [...]
In my popular culture class we’ve begun discussing freakshows, from the old carnival sideshow to the more contemporary versions of talkshows, tabloids, and some reality TV; a cultural form that essentially profits from the exploitation of abnormality and difference as entertainment. While with advances in scientific knowledge and individual respect such spectacles no longer rely [...]
In German legend, the doppelgänger or double-goer is a ghostly version of oneself who follows us like our shadow. When it appears however, the doppelgänger becomes a harbinger of death, pointing Shelley to his drowning in the Mediterranean, or a portent of the future, like Goethe meeting his future self on the road to Drusenheim. [...]
The other day I finished moving into a new apartment in the Friendship neighborhood, and in the morning after my first night there I looked out my third story window and was shocked to realize that the view corresponds almost exactly to the view from the window of the house I lived in years ago [...]
Friday, December 11, 2009
I finally started reading the text of Jung’s Red Book last night, and it is as revelatory, revolutionary, and vitally important as I suspected it would be, not just in terms of Jung’s psychological theories but in taking a stance for a broader spiritual approach to reality that is even more lacking now than when [...]
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, critical theory, Gaiman, Joyce, Kafka, Lakota, literature, myth, Pynchon, ritual, school, Tolkien
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Monday, September 21, 2009
I discovered yesterday that Mercury’s been in retrograde since the 7th until the 29th, which can help explain some of my current frustrations with not being able to write or otherwise express myself clearly. Riding my bike around after finding this out, I was somewhat relieved to know it was “only the planets” moving backwards [...]
