An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for November 18, 2020

So, yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of the first documented case of COVID-19. Today is Alan Moore’s 67th birthday. Coincidence or conspiracy?!

Yeah, okay, so this week I finished a first draft listen to Magick, Music, and Ritual 15 playlist! I’ve also got a playlist for the Subscriber and Patron exclusive This Is Not An Hermetic Library Anthology Album -2. As I’ve mentioned, MMR15 is smaller than I’d hoped, but it turns out the TINAHLAA -2 is bigger than I expected. I guess, in a way, these things work out. I’m honestly just super happy that there’s a full release this year. I’m not going to lie: I was thinking of giving up on the project if this year didn’t happen. Still lots to get ready, but my plan is to release TINAHLAA -2 as a Thanksgiving gift, for everyone on Bandcamp and Patreon, prior to the usual December release date with MMR 15, for everyone and the world, on the library’s birth anniversary. It’s looking, and sounding, good!

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

• New release from Hermetic Library Fellow Michael Osiris Snuffin: The Complete Conjuring Spirits: A Manual of Modern Sorcery [Amazon]—”Improve your life with the art and science of sorcery! The product of a decade of personal research and experimentation, The Complete Conjuring Spirits contains everything you need to know to communicate with Archangelic, Goetic, and Enochian entities.” This is an improved and updated edition of a work that was previously published.
• Virtual screening from Modern Films and Treadwell’s on Nov 23, Luxor, directed by Zeina Durra, with Andrea Riseborough and Karim Saleh. “When British aid worker Hana returns to the ancient city of Luxor, she comes across Sultan, an archeologist and former lover. As she wanders, haunted by the familiar place, she struggles to reconcile the choices of the past with the uncertainty of the present.” Also free Q&A—”Join us for a special free Q&A event with the British filmmaker Zeina Durra, who will discuss her new feature film, LUXOR, starring Andrea Riseborough and Karim Saleh.”
• Consider also Treadwell’s other upcoming online events, such as “Heavenly Alchemy – Alchemical influences in Shakespeare“, “Marks against Evil. A lecture on the magical symbols carved on buildings to guard against the Evil Eye and witchcraft”, “Witchcraft with Mars. Seminar-class on working Martian magic, with both theory and practice”, and more.
• Weathering the Storm, a free anthology from Moon Books. “Written in three parts, psychological, spiritual and practical, Weathering the Storm is an anthology offering support to those of us who are isolated or vulnerable.”
• 3698 – Stoicism and the Good Life, an online course for Winter ’21, via University of Toronto. “Stoicism can teach us techniques to tolerate pain, conquer anger, relinquish fear, and live a life of virtue and fulfilment. Through contemplative exercises and journalling, we’ll study the ancient Stoic philosophers in a pragmatic way. We’ll learn about their concept of the good life, eudaimonia, and we’ll see how for 500 years it guided important classical figures like Seneca, the tutor of Emperor Nero, Epictetus, a freed slave, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.”
• “Local artist pays tribute to Portuguese icons in new exhibition.”—”A new exhibition by Portuguese artist Jorge dos Santos, which pays tribute to some of Portugal’s biggest icons including poet Fernando Pessoa and Fado singer Amália Rodrigues, will be unveiled on November 27 at the Adérita Artistic Space gallery in Vale do Lobo.” Partially about library figure Fernando Pessoa.
• “Is Yeats The Prophet Of 2020? What dark forces did William Butler Yeats see coming?“, an episode of a conservative / libertarian podcast called The Rabbit Hole about library figure William Butler Yeats.
• “Hyperspace“—”If one were therefore to look at this from a Magical perspective, one would have to say that if the Universe is inherently Hyperspatial, then the Creator of the Universe must be a Hyperdimensional Deity. Hence, when we try to represent this Hyper-God using lower-dimensional symbols, we must accept the inevitability of failing to capture a fully accurate picture.”
• Greek Poems to the Gods: Hymns from Homer to Proclus [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Barry B Powell, due April 2021—”The ancient Greek hymnic tradition translated beautifully and accessibly.”
• “Freemasonry in Sweden” in Henrik Bogdan & Olav Hammer (Eds.) Western Esotericism in Scandinavia
• “Best Friends Uncover Comedy Gold: Tangent Avenue Podcast“—”On the podcast, the hosts talk about a wide scope of topics ranging from the creation of hentai to the death of Elisa Lam, and sometimes about famous people they find interesting like Aleister Crowley.” Check out Episode 5: Big Papa 666 & Episode 6: More Sex Magic!
• Philo of Alexandria: On the Contemplative Life. Introduction, Translation and Commentary. [Bookshop, Publisher] by Joan E. Taylor and David M. Hay, volume 7 of the Philo of Alexandria Commentary series. “On the Contemplative Life is known for its depiction of a philosophical group of Jewish men and women known as the ‘Therapeutae’. Yet the reasons for their depiction have been little understood. In the first commentary on the treatise in English for over 100 years, the social, cultural and political background of the times in which Philo lived are shown to be crucial in understanding Philo’s purposes. As Alexandrian Jews were vilified and attacked, Philo went to Rome to present the case for his community, faced with intense opposition. Side-stepping direct confrontation, Philo here cleverly presents the Therapeutae as the pinnacle of excellence, most especially in their communal meal, while ridiculing his accusers in a stinging parody of a festive banquet.”
• An Imaginary Trio: King Solomon, Jesus, and Aristotle [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Yaacov Chaya Shavit Naor. “This book focuses on places and instances where Solomon’s legendary biography intersects with those of Jesus Christ and of Aristotle. Solomon is the axis around which this trio revolves, the thread that binds it together. It is based on the premise that there exists a correspondence, both overt and implied, between these three biographies, that has taken shape within a vast, multifaceted field of texts for more than two thousand years.”
• Sacrifice in Pagan and Christian Antiquity [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Robert J Daly—”Acknowledging the difficulties posed by an overwhelmingly Christian scholarly narrative around the topic of sacrifice, Daly specifically sets out to tell the non-Christian side of this story. He first outlines the pagan trajectory, and then the Jewish-Christian trajectory, before concluding with a representative series of comparisons and contrasts. Covering the concept of sacrifice in relation to prayer, ethics and morality, the rhetoric and economics of sacrificial ceremonies, and heroes and saints, Daly finishes with an estimation of how this study might inform further study of sacrifice.”
• Esoteric Knowledge in Ancient Sciences, TOPOI – Dahlem Seminar for the History of Ancient Sciences Vol. II [Pre-print PDF] edited by Markham J Geller and Klaus Geus, from the Max Planck Institute.
• “The Many Lives of Adrienne Rich. Praised by W. H. Auden as neat and modest, she vowed to be passionate and radical instead.” About The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Hilary Holladay—”The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet.”
• “Useful Books. The past and present of self-help literature.” About The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Beth Blum—”Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day.”
• ‘Dazed and Confused’ and Hooking Up. Dozens of beautiful young actors. Nighttime shoots. Hormones aflutter. In this exclusive excerpt of ‘Alright, Alright, Alright,’ a new oral history of the ’90s classic, discover how the set of Richard Linklater’s ‘Dazed and Confused’ was a hotbed of horny future stars.” Excerpt from Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Melissa Maerz—”The definitive oral history of the cult classic Dazed and Confused, featuring behind-the-scenes stories from the cast, crew, and Oscar-nominated director Richard Linklater.”
• “The Plot and the Argument: Philosophy as a Narrative Affair.” More about Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] By Wolfram Eilenberger—”A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century.”
• “The Fiction of American Democracy. Great writers have always challenged us to measure the compromised reality of politics against our national ideals.”
• “Rising Above a Flood-Tide of Writers. Monetizing old publishing models in the 21st-century fame machine.”—”… why notions of ‘taste’ developed as a tool for finding the right words to read. The answer, in a nutshell, was twofold: the newfound freedom of print and the rapid decline of the patronage system.” “Is the future of paid writing on the internet a return to the past? Will the major hosting platforms serve as de facto critics, channeling and shaping taste, or is there a new lane for writers who can singlehandedly form and foster ‘public taste’ when there are an infinite number of publics?”
• “NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 Astronauts Arrive at Space Station, NASA Leaders and Crew to Discuss Mission” Also watch “‘A lot of firsts on this flight’: NASA and SpaceX shoot for history”
• “Texas astronomers revive idea for ‘Ultimately Large Telescope’ on the moon.”
• “The first complete family tree of our home galaxy.”
• “Chimera Painter is a demo that lets you run wild by drawing out creature shapes that become fully fleshed out by our CreatureGAN machine learning model, which was trained on hundreds of thousands of 2D renders of 3D creature models. You only tell the model about the body parts in your creature and watch as it decides how to finish it for you. Painting is a highly creative, iterative process. What can we create when we start thinking about machine learning as a paintbrush?” Also. Also.
• “HES funding for project looking at Calanais standing stones.”
• “Why a Newly Approved Plan to Build a Tunnel Beneath Stonehenge Is So Controversial. Proponents say the tunnel will reduce noise and traffic, but some archaeologists fear that it will damage artifacts at the historic site.”
• “Stonehenge was part of a multi-monument complex. Here’s how it fit together. Archaeologists are beginning to piece together the complex relationships between Stonehenge and other Neolithic sites on Salisbury Plain.”
• “Fishermen discover ancient fossils dating back eight million years.”
• “Ancient Greek god’s bust found during Athens sewage work.”
• “Don’t Worry If You Can’t Sleep Through the Night. For Thousands of Years, Humans Slept in Two Shifts. Evidence suggests that humans’ sleep was once disjointed, but researchers can’t quite figure out why.” I’m always curious to hear more about this 2nd sleep idea that seems to have existed, apparently mentioned in various literary works (including Shakespeare), and yet has been mostly forgotten.
• “Consider the Giraffe.”—”Throughout history we have tried, with more enthusiasm than accuracy, to explain how something so mixed and miraculous came to be.”
• I’ve seen this movie and read this book. It doesn’t end well. “Uh-Oh, Scientists Used Human Genes to Make Monkey Brains Bigger.”
• “How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps. A Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads is one of the apps connected to a wide-ranging supply chain that sends ordinary people’s personal data to brokers, contractors, and the military.” Also tweet thread. Also tweet—”Systemic, algorithmically enabled, literally militarized Islamophobia.” Also “Muslim Pro Stops Sharing Location Data After Motherboard Investigation. Muslim Pro said it will no longer share data with X-Mode, whose customers include U.S. defense contractors.”
• “Sleuths uncover hidden trove of Isaac Newton’s world-changing Principia.”
• From the Icarus dept: “Vincent Reffet: French ‘Jetman’ dies in training accident” Also “Up, Up, and Away! BMW Designworks’ First Electric Wingsuit Can Fly Up to 186 MPH.”
• “St Petersburg University scientists discover a new mineral that looks promising for producing batteries.”
• “Once the Disease of Gluttonous Aristocrats, Gout Is Now Tormenting the Masses. It can be tempting to ascribe the affliction’s prevalence to our current climate of indulgence, but that’s not the full story.”—”It has come for genius and aristocrat, conqueror and king. Like a succubus, it descends at night, first as a fevered dream, then pain in darkness, the body turned rude animal, reduced to its lowest, humblest extremity: the foot, red and swollen, throbbing like a heart. You are left to hobble, if that; the flutter of a bedsheet over the distended foot is anguish enough, let alone the full weight of the body bearing down. To take a step is to see the abyss.”
• “Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic. Now students are fighting back.”
• “Alexa can now guess what you want before you even ask for it. Alexa’s engineers have developed a new capability that lets the virtual assistant second guess customer requests.”
• “The iOS COVID-19 app ecosystem has become a privacy minefield. Nearly 500 COVID-19-related apps worldwide were analyzed.”
• “a href=”https://www.aaronswartzday.org/speakervideos/”>Aaron Swartz Day 2020“—”This year’s hackathon started at 10am on Saturday November 14th and now it will just keep going. We’re sorry we didn’t keep the hackathon jitsi window open as planned; it turns out some of us didn’t have the bandwidth for that – but we’ll pick up on Saturday, November 21 at 2pm pst/5pm est.”
• “Today Marks a Year of Covid-19“—”From that person (and possibly earlier or concurrent cases), the disease slowly and silently spread until it was determined to be due to a novel coronavirus.” “What an awful, humbling, terrifying, ghoulish year.”
• “Pandemic Déjà Vu.”—”If COVID-19 is indeed the United States’ ‘Maria moment,’ it remains to be seen how nationwide protests and the collective awakening produced by state failures of care might open up new political possibilities and bring an end to the violent déjà vu.”
• “Dolly Parton partly funded Moderna Covid vaccine research. The country music icon’s $1m donation supported the latest breakthrough by Moderna and several research papers.” Also “Our Vaccine Fairy Godmother.” Also “Service and Devotion. The enduring songcraft of Dolly Parton.” About Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Lydia R Hamessley,foreword by Steve Buckingham—”Dolly Parton’s success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton’s compositions like “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music.” And about She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Sarah Smarsh—”The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland focuses her laser-sharp insights on a working-class icon and one of the most unifying figures in American culture: Dolly Parton.” Also “Dolly Parton partly funded Moderna Covid vaccine research. The country music icon’s $1m donation supported the latest breakthrough by Moderna and several research papers.”
• “Frozen meat vs. COVID-19 misinformation: The strange case of Steak-umm. Of all the strange things that have happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of a frozen meat company as a source of critical thinking and skepticism regarding COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation is one of the strangest. How did Steak-umm become a champion of critical thinking about the pandemic?”
• Dolly Parton and Steam-umm > Elon Musk. “Space Karen is the burn Elon Musk deserves after his COVID-19 tweets. Elon Musk would like to speak with the coronavirus test manager.” Also “Why Elon Musk is being called ‘Space Karen’ on Twitter. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s recent COVID-19 tweets inspired the trolling. ‘White House Karen’ started trending, too.”
• Science Face Mask from Andrew Yang’s Move Humanity Forward.
• Xylographilia’s Masks by Liv Rainey-Smith.
• “Masks mandates have major impact, study finds. Analysis shows requiring masks for public-facing U.S. business employees on April 1 would have saved tens of thousands of lives.”—”Masks reduce the spread of Covid-19. But just how much of an effect do they have? A study co-authored by an MIT professor finds that if the U.S. had introduced a uniform national mask mandate for employees of public-facing businesses on April 1, the number of deaths in the U.S. would likely have been 40 percent lower on June 1.”
• “Vaccine rumours debunked: Microchips, ‘altered DNA’ and more. News of a vaccine which prevented 90% of people from getting Covid-19 in clinical trials led to a surge of anti-vaccine rumours on social media.”
• The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] selected by the editors of The New York Times Magazine—”A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio’s ‘The Decameron.'”
• “New Research Says ‘Flow’ Is Crucial During The COVID-19 Pandemic. As the virus surges and we face pandemic fatigue, finding activities that put us in a state of mental ‘flow’ may be essential for our mental health.”
• “Lock Yourself Down, Now.”
• “Jeff Bezos is now the biggest climate activism donor—and that’s a problem.”
• “Trump’s effort to overturn the election results may be inept. But it’s still a scandal.”
• “Trump’s New Vote Fraud Theory Is So Much Crazier Than You Realize.”
• “QAnon’s Dominion voter fraud conspiracy theory reaches the president. Joe Biden’s win and the disintegration of the broader QAnon narrative do not spell the end of the broader conspiracy ecosystem it has built.”
• “Lindsey Graham’s controversial call with Georgia’s secretary of state, explained. Amid Trump’s effort to challenge the election, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger went public about a call from Graham.”—”If Raffensperger’s interpretation of Graham’s meaning is accurate, it would be a boldfaced, undemocratic attempt from a Trump ally to overturn the election results.”
• Tweet—”New filing from four PA counties: Trump campaign has now admitted that ‘whole swaths’ of its lawsuit ‘are meritless’ & has ‘struck entirely’ its ballot observer claims. Revised lawsuit removes ‘ALL claims related to the purported denial of Republican election observers’ access.'” Also tweet—”Swaine’s pull-quotes are good but my personal fave is ‘it is not possible to discern what harm the Trump Campaign allegedly suffered and of what conduct they even complain'”
• “Representation in the Electoral College: How do states compare? The 2020 election will be the last of the decade before electoral votes are reallocated based on Census results. See how the current distribution of the nation’s 538 electoral votes compares to the number of people living in all 50 states and Washington, DC.”
• “Trump makes one last effort to cut Social Security, maximize hurt to the disabled.” Also “Trump Administration Rushes To Sell Oil Rights In Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”
• “Biden transition: Why US spy world is feeling uneasy right now. A series of sackings and appointments – with rumours of more to come – has created a sense of deep uncertainty around the US intelligence and national security community.”
• “Obama Says Trump Has Accelerated ‘Truth Decay’ In America. The former president said his successor has fomented ‘the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn’t even matter.'”
• “Monster Makers. Unless Biden fights big money, he could pave the way for someone even worse than Trump.”
• “The Psychology of Orpheus: Why Do We Look Back?”
• No Heroes: Girl Scouts. Being apolitical is not working for an organization I’ve cherished for much of my life.”—”Quotations are tired, so forgive me, but in my research, I came across a quote from Juliette Gordon Low that has been bouncing around in my head: ‘The work of today is the history of tomorrow and we are its makers.'”
• “Boy Scouts deluged with 88,500 sexual abuse claims, dwarfing U.S. Catholic Church’s numbers.”
• “The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life’s Greatest Dilemmas. The design principles for solving the tragedy of the commons can be applied to all groups.”
• “Sean Sherman, The Sioux Chef: ‘This Is The Year To Rethink Thanksgiving’. A member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux, he’s hoping for a national reset that dismantles hurtful narratives and fills our plates with locally sourced food.”
• “Humanity at night. A violinist plays in a concentration camp. A refugee carries a book of poetry. Art sustains us when survival is uncertain.”
• “The Future of Work series: ‘Work Ethics,’ by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. ‘He had earned that rare and elusive acknowledgement, whispered behind his back: He’s a Creative. The Capital C.'”
• “No Internal Monologue is a Thing.”
• “The Battle for Latin: Reports from the front line of research into Latin teaching.”—”If we have an overarching conclusion, however, it is perhaps that the magic lies somewhere in the dynamic interactions between the teacher, students, textbook, teaching methods and class as a whole.”
• “Doctor Who’s sonic pioneers to turn internet into giant musical instrument. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop made the famous science fiction theme tune and worked with the Beatles. Now it is preparing to make history.”
• “Man dressed as giant rat takes subway mask requirement to new heights.”
• More about this: “Come Away.”—”Take ‘Peter Pan,’ add a dash of “Alice in Wonderland,” stir in the poetry of William Butler Yeats and you have the recipe for ‘Come Away’ (Relativity), an intriguing if slightly schizophrenic fairy tale.”
• More about this: “Werner Herzog says I should stop worrying about getting killed by a meteorite. His new film Fireball explores how extraterrestrial hunks of rock define Earth.” Documentarian Herzog, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Meteorite.
• How to Make a Chapbook in 4 No-Nonsense Steps
• Watch “The Birth of Civilisation – Cult of the Skull (8800 BC to 6500 BC)”
• Watch “Star Trek: Acid Party.”
• Watch “Acid Arab – Gul l’Abi”
• Watch “Då Som Nu För Alltid”
• Watch “ASMR How to Care for Your Familiar”
• Watch “COVID Fan Tutte – Finnish National Opera and Ballet“—”On stage, singers are rehearsing Die Walküre, when they are suddenly interrupted. As management has been laid off and the news of a global virus spreads rapidly, the Wagnerians are suddenly instructed to perform a modern satire on the situation.”
• Watch “When Everything Feels Pointless, Ask These Questions.”—”The Questions 1) What can I make right now? 2) Who can I help? 3) How can I improve? 4) Where have I never been? 5) When’s the next solar eclipse? 6) F%$# Why!”

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