With the quickening of the contemporary world, the new technologies and paths to knowledge that make it possible to witness everything under the sun and beyond before breakfast, it may seem we are in an age where everything is new. And yet even a brief survey of the contents spilling across the page-screens of today [...]
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 [...]
Now that the semester’s over and I have more time to read, I’m attempting to keep up on writing reviews of all the interesting fiction that crosses my path. As a writer, I try to focus on issues of technique, influence, and the relation of form to content, that you don’t typically find in the [...]
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 [...]
Friday, February 26, 2010
At its earliest recorded usage in the late 16th Century, the word “awesome” implied an experience that filled one with a profoundly reverential or dread-filled awe. The word “awe” itself comes from the Old Norse agi, meaning terror, and found its common sense of dread mixed with veneration when applied to the Old Testament God, [...]
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys David Foster Wallace’s Toy Cement Mixer “Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas [...]
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, critical theory, culture, fantastic, imagination, literature, manifestoes, modernity, Patchen, personal narrative, philosophy, religion, space, techniques, Ultimate Realism
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I’ve been doing a lot of research recently for an essay to submit to the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology, and have particularly grown fascinated by the scope of history, and particularly the birth of writing in the Mesopotamia river valley. Most well known is the Epic of Gilgamesh,a hero-myth written down in the 23rd [...]
Saturday, October 24, 2009
This post was supposed to be another collection of links, but that will have to wait, as I just learned that ufologogist and fellow blogger Mac Tonnies has passed away. While I never met Mac, and maybe commented on his blog once or twice, nor am I all that obsessed with UFOs (being much more [...]
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Also tagged aliens
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