An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for September 6, 2020

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

• “Piranesi by Susanna Clarke review — the Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell author makes a triumphant return.” About Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, due out in a few days—”From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.”
• The Black Books, slipcased seven-volume set, by C G Jung; edited, translated and introduction by Sonu Shamdasani; &al., due out in October. “Until now, the single most important unpublished work by C.G. Jung―The Black Books. In 1913, C.G. Jung started a unique self-experiment that he called his ‘confrontation with the unconscious’: an engagement with his fantasies in a waking state, which he charted in a series of notebooks referred to as The Black Books. These intimate writings shed light on the further elaboration of Jung’s personal cosmology and his attempts to embody insights from his self- investigation into his life and personal relationships. The Red Book drew on material recorded from 1913 to 1916, but Jung actively kept the notebooks for many more decades. Presented in a magnificent, seven-volume boxed collection featuring a revelatory essay by noted Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani―illuminated by a selection of Jung’s vibrant visual works―and both translated and facsimile versions of each notebook, The Black Books offer a unique portal into Jung’s mind and the origins of analytical psychology. Facsimile reproductions throughout.”
• Tweet—”Upcoming Publications by Kamuret: Aleister Crowley’s Sword of Song edited by @richardkaczynsk and Women of Thelema: Selected Essays, ed by @Dr_ScarletWoman” Also “Publication Updates: The Sword of Song & Women of Thelema.” About The Sword of Song: Called by Christians The Book of the Beast, edited, annotated and introduced by Richard Kaczynski, due December 2020; and Women of Thelema: Selected Essays, edited by Manon Hedenborg White and Christian Giudice, due March 2021.
• Class War Reading List via email from Haymarket Books: “This Labor Day Weekend, in celebration of the radical history and future of the working class, we offer our Class War Reading List. All of these books are currently 30% Off. Also, get a free Ebook (where available) and free shipping on orders over $25 inside the US.”
• I was sad to hear that David Graeber passed away. Oddly enough, we were mutuals on Twitter for some reason I can’t recall precisely, but I’d interacted with him a bit. “David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59. The anarchist and author of bestselling books on capitalism and bureaucracy died in a Venice hospital on Wednesday.” Also “David Graeber, influential in Occupy Wall Street, dies at 59.” Also “David Graeber’s anarchism and the Occupy movement.” Also “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Check out Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, Debt – Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years, and more of his work.
• Those who would take us backwards are exploiting our fears
• BuzzFeed News: QAnon Is a ‘Collective Delusion’, Not a ‘Conspiracy Theory’
• Unflattering Photos of Fascists: Authoritarianism in Trump’s America by Christopher Ketcham, Jeff Schwilk, &c.—”Donald Trump is hated on the Left, but we owe him thanks for accomplishing what no other president has ever accomplished. He has brought into the bright light of day for the first time a quasi-fascist movement in the United States, the roiling ugliness known as the Amerikaner Trumpenvolk. One of the principle locations for quasi-fascist and fascist organizing in the United States in the last five years has been Portland, OR. Notably, local fascist and white nationalist groups have forged alliances with far right conservatives, members of the GOP, patriot militia members, Proud Boys, and extremist Christian groups like Patriot Prayer. When these clowns show up in public they mean to intimidate, they mean to spread violence, and they mean to recruit new members. They also make spectacles of themselves, which, thankfully, Jeff Schwilk is there to document. These candid, unflattering, moments captured by Schwilk allow us to gaze at these monsters not how they’d like us to see them, but in a pathetic light of their own making. Thirty photos are paired with essays skewering these Trumpenvolk, adding up to an entertaining, unique, and powerful indictment of the hate groups and haters operating in the U.S. today.” Also
• “American Christianity’s White-Supremacy Problem. History, theology, and culture all contribute to the racist attitudes embedded in the white church.”
• Racists politicized the US postal system when they burned abolitionist literature in 1835.—”In 1835, white supremacists feared the information Black people might be receiving. One-hundred eighty-five years later, the supremacists fear the ballots they are in all likelihood sending.” Let’s also not be quick to forget the fate of Ida Craddock, and the part politicizing the post had to play in her life too!
• “The new Pepe the Frog doc Feels Good Man is the most important political film of 2020. Even if you know the story, it’s shocking.”—”Weaving through the chronology, Jones’ film makes a case that Pepe isn’t so much a cautionary tale as a window into a larger, all-consuming digital dystopia. Today’s chaos agents use “negativity to brainwash men on the fringe,” and protect themselves through the protective bubble of irony. Feels Good Man suggests they might be impossible to combat. If people on the internet want to “warp reality” by electing the “personification of Pepe,” laissez-faire platforms help them organize and execute real-world plans. If they want to collectively destroy something, they will.” About Feels Good Man, dir. Arthur Jones, with Matt Furie, & c.—”When indie comic character Pepe the Frog becomes an unwitting icon of hate, his creator fights to bring Pepe back from the darkness. A Frankenstein-meets-Alice in Wonderland journey of an artist battling to regain control of his creation.”
• “The Atlantic tried to artistically show gender dysphoria on its cover. Instead it damaged the trust of transgender readers. A 2018 Atlantic cover story about families with transgender teenagers misgendered its cover model and crossed ethical boundaries in the process.”
• “Time flies, relatively speaking. The older you are, the quicker you count out a minute.” About The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur—”A tour of clocks throughout the centuries—from the sandglass to the telomere—to reveal the physical, biological, and social nature of time”. Anecdotally, for my own part, I find that time doesn’t feel quicker, but, wow, so many things in the past are now a lot longer ago than they feel they are!
• Love of Life—”For no one loves life so much as he who is growing old.”
• “Read an excerpt from Andrew Anderson’s The Ritual of Writing.” About The Ritual of Writing: Writing as Spiritual Practice.
• “Savage Pencil On The Underside Of Edwardian Culture. Legendary comic book artist and writer Savage Pencil discusses three Edwardian underground figures: Montague Summers, Austin Osman Spare and Louis Wain.”
• “American Greatness. Greil Marcus’s Gatsby and the end of tragedy.” About Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby by Greil Marcus—”A deep dive into how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive.”
• “Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice. It’s having a corrosive effect on American life — and hurting the Democratic Party.”
• What Liberals Get Wrong About Work. Unfettered markets and a rampant culture of meritocracy have eroded the rewards and dignity of work for most Americans. It’s time for a new ethic of ‘contributive justice.'”
• “Justice Rising. Meet the astrologers who search the skies for clues to earthly crimes.”
• “The Oysters That Knew What Time It Was. Scientists were convinced that biological clocks are predominantly driven by internal rhythms. There was just one problem—involving some mollusks and the moon.” Adapted from The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars by Jo Marchant—”An historically unprecedented disconnect between humanity and the heavens has opened. Jo Marchant’s book can begin to heal it. For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are–our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. It’s a disconnect with a dire cost.”
• How a Moment of Presence Changed My Life
• “Loafing with the Sissies.” About Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik—”The definitive biography of a fascinating and paradoxical figure, one of the most influential artists of his—or any—age.”
• “Meet the Man Who Spun the Media, Scammed Followers and Named Himself King. There is something eerily contemporary about the story of James Jesse Strang, a real estate huckster with monarchic ambitions, a creative relationship to debt and a genius for mass media.” About The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch by Miles Harvey.—”In the summer of 1843, James Strang, a charismatic young lawyer and avowed atheist, vanished from a rural town in New York. Months later he reappeared on the Midwestern frontier and converted to a burgeoning religious movement known as Mormonism. In the wake of the murder of the sect’s leader, Joseph Smith, Strang unveiled a letter purportedly from the prophet naming him successor, and persuaded hundreds of fellow converts to follow him to an island in Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king. From this stronghold he controlled a fourth of the state of Michigan, establishing a pirate colony where he practiced plural marriage and perpetrated thefts, corruption, and frauds of all kinds. Eventually, having run afoul of powerful enemies, including the American president, Strang was assassinated, an event that was frontpage news across the country. The King of Confidence tells this fascinating but largely forgotten story. Centering his narrative on this charlatan’s turbulent twelve years in power, Miles Harvey gets to the root of a timeless American original: the Confidence Man. Full of adventure, bad behavior, and insight into a crucial period of antebellum history, The King of Confidence brings us a compulsively readable account of one of the country’s boldest con men and the boisterous era that allowed him to thrive.” I’ve previously read The Polygamist King by John J Miller, and have quite a few highlights from which I’ve posted some quote on the blog, which is a much shorter work also about James Strang, so this new work caught my eye. “The astonishing story of James Strang—a religious rebel who became a figure of curiosity, sympathy, and murderous hatred.” There’s some allegorical stuff here about new religious movements, especially in the United States, that really struck me, so this new book may end up on my never-ending to-read stack.
• Tweet—”Dare to be a radical revolutionary optimist in a time of cynicism and disillusionment.”
• Warrior skeletons reveal Bronze Age Europeans couldn’t drink milk
• “Glacial meltwater lakes have grown by half since the 1990s. Satellite images track remarkable growth with local consequences.”
• “Three stars, warped rings may show how planets end up moving backward. Not every system is as neat and tidy as our Solar System.”
• “Scientists Found Rust on the Moon. That Should Be Impossible. Rust requires oxygen, water, and the right conditions, all of which the Moon lacks. So where did a newly discovered iron oxide come from? Earth is one possibility.”
• “An Unexpected Twist Lights Up the Secrets of Turbulence. Having solved a central mystery about the ‘twirliness’ of tornadoes and other types of vortices, William Irvine has set his sights on turbulence, the white whale of classical physics.”
• ‘It just sounds like a thud’: astronomers hear biggest cosmic event since big bang
• “TCL’s new paper-like display can also play videos.” Also “Engineers Have Figured Out How to Make Interactive Paper.”
• From the Hoist-By-Your-Own-Petard dept., Unintended-Consequences division. “FBI worried that Ring doorbells are spying on police”
• Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy
• Astronomers say they’ve detected the most massive merger of two black holes ever discovered
• 2 transplants, no cups? “Fecal transplants may reduce alcohol use, early research suggests.”
• “A.I. Tool Promises Faster, More Accurate Alzheimer’s Diagnosis. Stevens team uses explainable A.I. to address trustability of A.I. systems in the medical field.”
• UH Mānoa researchers predict location of novel candidate for mysterious dark energy—”Astronomers have known for two decades that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but the physics of this expansion remains a mystery. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa have made a novel prediction—the dark energy responsible for this accelerating growth comes from a vast sea of compact objects spread throughout the voids between galaxies.”
• A metabolite produced by the body increases lifespan and dramatically compresses late-life morbidity in mice
• Honeybee Venom Kills Breast Cancer Cells
• “Vanderbilt astrophysicist part of international team that discovered a gargantuan ‘alien’ black hole that challenges previous knowledge of the universe.” Watch.
• Ningbo Zhongshuge—”If the existence of bookstores is to prove its significance, Ningbo zhongshuge, as a cultural and creative space full of aesthetic creativity, has activated the cultural vitality of the city.”
• Demons of Change: Antagonism and Apotheosis in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism by Andrei Orlov
• The Self Possessed: Framing Identity in Late Minoan Glyptic by Caroline Tully, &al.—”A group of Late Minoan signet rings fashioned in precious metals and engraved with complex and evocative iconographic schemes appears to depict ‘nature’ or ‘rural’ cults enacted at extra-urban sanctuaries, and may have functioned as inalienable possessions implicated in the expression and maintenance of elite identities during the Aegean Bronze Age.”
• “An Occult and Filmmaking Obsession Leads Reyes to Baphomet Mountain.” Watch. “The film follows a bizarre religious zealot who entrusts the help of a hitch-hiking country singer in order to help find his younger brother, who he believes to be kidnapped by a cult that worships Baphomet somewhere in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. When the two lone travelers cross paths, their entwined fates will take them to the brink of sanity and illusion amidst the desert behind the City of Sin.”
• “Heresy Looks at Wicca and the Occult for FW20. Inspired by ‘Britain’s only native religion.'”
• “When the World Isn’t Designed for Our Bodies. A new book argues that disability is a social phenomenon, not a medical one.” About What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren—”A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all.”
• Leonardo da Vinci and the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting
• “Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Painter and Poet.” Check out the (Woman of the Golden Dawn) “Maud Gonne gone” portrait of Hermetic Library Figure William Bulter Yeats!
• The Fall of the Magician
• Visions of Divine Excess: The Possession of Noviadi Angkasapura
• Why We Choose This And Not That; Restoring A Baroque Painting Part 1
• Some good news, finally? “Watching porn isn’t bad for your sex life, study confirms. New research contradicts the common misconception that porn negatively impacts your sexual satisfaction and mental wellbeing.”
• “The Secret, High-Risk World of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Porn. In the frum community, porn and masturbation are banned and disdained. Still, a small group of amateur pornographers are risking it all to turn their neighbors on.”
• “The Making of an Incel. How misogyny in online forums turns into real-life violence.”
• “The Glory Hole Reopens. Public health officials and lonely quarantines have led to an unlikely sexual renaissance in the pandemic.”
• That’s not a glory hole, but, it’ll do! It’s A Social Distance Dream Come True! See How Centuries-Old ‘Wine Windows’ Are Making A Comeback
• Obsession and Desire in an Ancient Assyrian Library
• “The grim truth behind the Pied Piper. Writers like the Grimm Brothers and Robert Browning may have shaped the Pied Piper legend into art, but it turns out the story is likely based on an actual historical incident.”
• Weird flex, but okay. “Digital pregnancy tests are almost as powerful as the original IBM PC. A lot of computer to read an old-fashioned pee strip.” Oh, lame! “Unfortunately the chip inside isn’t programmable, so there’s no feasible way people can get Doom to run on these digital pregnancy tests.”
• ‘The future’s gonna be weird’: Musk says memories could be downloaded into a new body or robot
• John Cage: Crowds flock to hear song change chord for first time in seven years—”Fans have flocked to a church in Germany to hear a chord change in a song which lasts for 639 years.”
• “Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life. After more than a decade of writing life-changing advice, I know when to move on. Here’s what else I learned.”
• “The Absinthe-minded Professors of Violet Crown Spirits. Three Austinites are producing the first Texas-made absinthe.”—”‘A single glass of absinthe,’ as Aleister Crowley observed in 1918, ‘seems to render the breathing freer, the spirit lighter, the heart more ardent, soul and mind alike more capable of executing the great task of doing that particular work in the world which the Father may have sent them to perform.’ So – what’s not to be interested in?”
• “O coffee!“—Crowley. Circular Cup—”Circular Cup (formerly rCUP) is the world’s first reusable coffee cup, made from recycled single-use paper cups.”

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