An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for July 7, 2020

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• Writing Ritual: channel the creative occult w/ Pam Grossman & Janaka Stucky; July 11—”Pam Grossman & Janaka Stucky will teach participants how to use ritual, meditation, and witchcraft to generate writing in any genre.”
• The unexplored side of Swami Vivekananda, his love for food
• Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism by Marquis Bey, from AK Press, due August—”Anarcho-Blackness seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Bey addresses this lack, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of Black feminist and transgender theory, he explores what we can learn by making this kinship explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter. If the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously.” Also.
• “The Third Promise. Can Judaism’s indigenous core help us rise above the damaging politics of our time?”
• “Night train to Lisbon.” Mention of “metaphysical Fernando Pessoa”
• “Deceptively Bright, in an Up & Coming Area.” About Bunker: Building for the End Times by Bradley Garrett, due August
• “He Made Stone Speak.” About Michelangelo, God’s Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece by William E. Wallace.
• “Core of a gas planet seen for the first time.” Also “A remnant planetary core in the hot-Neptune desert.”
• A Behemoth –“That Brings an End to Time and Space and the Laws of Physics”
• Experiment confirms 50-year-old theory describing how an alien civilization could exploit a black hole
• ‘Black neutron star’ discovery changes astronomy
• The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism
• Day Oscar lost his bearings—”Consider the case of Oscar Wilde’s testicles, a reader tells me, which scandalised Paris for 50 years. After the foppish aesthete died in 1900, Jacob Epstein created a monument for Wilde’s tomb at Père Lachaise, but the genitals on his winged sculpture were thought to be trop grands and in August 1914, when perhaps they had more pressing things to worry about, French officials had them covered with a bronze butterfly. This was duly stolen by the occultist Aleister Crowley, who wore it as a necklace.”
• Killjoys—”The virtue of the primitive Christians, like that of the first Romans, was very frequently guarded by poverty and ignorance.”
• How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat—”It has become clear, in these last decades of decadence, decline, towering institutional violence, and rampant bad taste, that American life is stuck somewhere inside the Paul Verhoeven cinematic universe.”
• Horror movie fans coping better with the coronavirus, study finds
• China Confirms Case of Bubonic Plague In Inner Mongolia
• Black Death ‘cast 500-year shadow’ over German life
• Inside #WitchTok, Where Witches of TikTok Go Viral
• “Most Farmers in the Great Plains Don’t Grow Fruits and Vegetables. The Pandemic is Changing That. Amid massive tracts of wheat and corn destined for global markets, some farmers are planting cover crop mixes designed to be harvested by their communities.”—”In addition to ease of planting, chaos gardens crowd out weeds, encourage beneficial insects, increase soil moisture retention, and more.” HT Nick Offerman
• Divers find evidence of America’s first mines — and skeletons — in underwater caves
• “DNA Linked to Covid-19 Was Inherited From Neanderthals, Study Finds. The stretch of six genes seems to increase the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus.”
• What sex ed can teach us about getting people to wear face masks
• Hubble just snapped one of its greatest images ever
• How conspiracy theories emerge—and how their storylines fall apart
  The

• “Pandemic Is the World’s Long Overdue Reality Check. Populists came to power peddling political fantasies—but the coronavirus has broken the fever.”
• “Whose Lincoln Memorial Is It? Last Fourth of July, Trump turned it into a stage set. Already this summer it’s become a tug-of-war between left and right. Sacrilege? Actually, the monument was built for this.”
• “America’s Glorious Celebration of Grievance. The Fourth of July is festive so long as you don’t dwell too much on the main message of the Declaration of Independence.”
• The little-known story of the only woman who “signed” the Declaration of Independence
• “Happy Independence Day America, Your Birth Chart Is a Mess. The astrology of July 4, 1776 and what it means for us today.”
• ‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?’: Descendants Read Frederick Douglass’ Speech
• Image of Thomas Jefferson alongside Black descendant holds ‘a mirror’ to America
• ‘An Extraordinary Moment’: Angela Davis Says Protests Recognize Long Overdue Anti-Racist Work
• “The Secret Economics of a VIP Party. There’s an invisible system behind every £100,000 bar tab and its currency is pretty women.”
• Why Hotel Rooms Have Bibles
• Have You Seen This? Take a trippy step inside Van Gogh’s paintings
• Complete Syd Mead Interview
• Pandora’s Box Opened in 2020

This post was possible because of support from generous ongoing Patrons and Members of the newsletter. Both Patrons and Members get Omnium Gatherum posts delivered immediately and directly to their email. On the blog, this will be exclusive to Patrons for one year, after which I’ll make it publicly available to everyone so they can see what they’ve been missing.