An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for November 22, 2020

Whew! Okay! Both TINAHLAA -2 and MMR15 are indeed just now well and fully baked. Preview tracklists and covers now, but you’ll have to wait to listen (Nov 26 & Dec 3 respectively)!

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

• Liv Rainey-Smith is holding her annual holiday sale early with 25% off everything in her Etsy shop, including “cards, stickers, pins, open & limited edition art, & a few unique originals.”
• Matmos Thanksgiving Leftovers, a livestreaming event, November 26, 2020, 8 pm Central/US. “Whether you are alone or swamped with family and friends, Matmos is ready to provide you with Something To Do on the heavily overdetermined day that some in the U.S. call ‘Thanksgiving’, aka Nov 26th at 9 pm Eastern Standard Time. From a tryptophan haze, we proudly present Matmos Served Two Ways: a 45 minute set originally made for a West Coast showcase and a 35 minute set (WITH JAPANESE SUBTITLES) originally made for a Tokyo showcase from the Imaginary Network Topologies series. We think that these sparkling mixtures of musical performance, video art, hapless random shenanigans and unclassifiable acting out will amuse and delight you. Why curse the darkness when you stare into the glowing box and experience 100% Genuine Matmos Family Entertainment in the convenience of your own home? Features extra video material made by David Jude Thomas and Tom Boram and pastoral scenery shot at Pretty Boy Reservoir.”
• Watch the promo for The MST3K TURKEY DAY MARATHON On Thursday, November 26th! Also at the Shout Factory Live page: “Break out the pureed giblets and crack open some canned wassail– it’s time to celebrate Turkey Day Mystery Science Theater 3000-style! This year, give thanks for turkeys of the cinematic variety as Shout! Factory and Alternaversal Productions continue the beloved holiday tradition with a newly curated Mystery Science Theater 3000 Turkey Day streaming marathon, hosted by the cast of MST3K LIVE and special guests from the Netflix series. Starts at 9 am ET / 6 am PT on Thursday, November 26.”
• “Enter to win an A is for Activist library! Social Justice… for kids! Enter to win one of five bundles of books from best-selling children’s author Innosanto Nagara, featuring: A is for Activist, Counting on Community, My Night in the Planetarium, The Wedding Portrait, M is for Movement, and Oh, the Things We’re For!”
• Artaud and the Gnostic Drama by Jane Goodall, on pre-order in a variety of formats, including fine, standard and paperback, from Scarlet Imprint. “In Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, Jane Goodall offers a reappraisal of the importance of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), mythologised as an icon of failure and madness, and examines the intricate parallels between his heretical dramaturgy and the heresies of ancient Gnosticism. The book situates Artaud, as the most extravagant of heretics, in company with the Gnostics whose speculations served to define heresy in the beginnings of the Christian tradition. Artaud subscribed to the Gnostic idea that the sensible world was created by a demiurge who was “imperfect, possibly evil and depraved.” His cosmology is inherently dramatic, setting creature against creator, force against form, matter against spirit, pious knowledge against heretical gnosis. Jane Goodall argues that major post-structuralist critics such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, who have enlisted Artaud in their own anti-orthodoxies, have refused to pay attention to the terms of his own heresy. In this refusal, they display an anxiety towards the gnostic drama and its heresies, which mount an assault that may be more powerful than their own upon the founding tenets of western thought. This work was first published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford in 1994. The text has been lightly revised for this second edition, and is illustrated.”
• “Cunning Folk: A Casual Invocation.”—”This year I finished my annual Machen binge the day before I first heard Cunning Folk’s new album, A Casual Invocation, and the coincidence struck me as deliciously uncanny. Notably, it contains a psych-folk opus, nearly ten minutes long, called Pan To Artemis. It takes the words of an Aleister Crowley poem and attaches them to a lysergic jam that fuses elements of doomy space-rock, bendy trance, a kind of baggy swagger and nimble acoustic guitar. Imagine the Incredible String Band trapped in a Victorian drawing room with The Orb, or Hawkwind with bucket hats, and you might be on the right lines. It is a song about the act of invocation, but it is also an invocation in itself: it’s the kind of music that seems designed to take you to the same tantalising realms as the stories of Machen.” More about About A Casual Invocation [Amazon, Spotify] by Cunning Folk. Also read Pan to Artemis / Uncharmable Charmer at the end of The Rite of Luna, one of the Rites of Eleusis or watch a performance of the piece by Eleusyve Productions from 2005).
• “TikTok creators defend their usage of Baphomet against claims of Satanism. ‘He is a goat man calm down.'” Also “TikTok Is Looking to Baphomet for Inspiration, and Some Folks Are Scared.”
• Vril – The Power of the Coming Race [Amazon] by by Edward Bulwer Lytton, with an introductory essay by Carl Abrahamsson, a new edition from Trapart Books. “Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s cautionary tale of occult super-powers and advanced subterranean cultures have fascinated readers since 1871. Part early science-fiction, part educational tract, part occult romance, Vril keeps spellbinding readers thanks to its wide range of themes and emotions, as well as its thrilling sense of adventure. A curious man descends into a mountain through a mine and experiences far more than he bargained for. Deep inside the mountain lies a completely different world. Its inhabitants, the Vril-ya, are human-like but physically superior and philosophically more advanced. They live in harmony made possible by their wisdom but also by the powerful and potentially destructive magical energy they call ‘Vril.’ The impressed yet terrified visitor is allowed to stay and learn more about their ancient and advanced culture, something very few visitors have – it seems that all the previous adventurers have been mercilessly disposed of by the Vril-ya…”
• A November Miscellany from Midian Books.
• Weiser Antiquarian Books Catalogue No. 256: Hermetica & Mysticism.
• Aca’ib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural, 2020 Vol. 1, an open access journal from GHOST: Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition.
• Freemasonry and Western Esotericism from Handbook of Freemasonry [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] edited by Henrik Bogdan and Jan A M Snoek, part of the Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion series—”Freemasonry is the largest, oldest, and most influential secret society in the world. The Brill Handbook of Freemasonry is a pioneering work that brings together, for the first time, leading scholars on Freemasonry. The first section covers historical perspectives, such as the origins and early history of Freemasonry. The second deals with the relationship between Freemasonry and specific religious traditions such as the Catholic Church, Judaism, and Islam. In the third section, organisational themes, such as the use of rituals, are explored, while the fourth section deals with issues related to society and politics – women, blacks, colonialism, nationalism, and war. The fifth and final section is devoted to Freemasonry and culture, including music, literature, modern art, architecture and material culture.”
• Runa: The Wisdom of the Runes by A D Mercer, available for pre-order from Troy Books, in special and standard editions, with a paperback to follow, due in January 2021. “‘Runa – Wisdom of the Runes’ presents what is, without doubt, the most misunderstood, probably the most cynically abused set of runes in the history of runology. The Armanen runes have been ignored by scholars, abused by right wing extremists, and largely forgotten by students of the occult. Nevertheless, the Armanen runes are in many ways the quintessential esoteric rune row. Originally conceived of by the nineteenth-century German mystic Guido von List, the Armanen runes offer us the most esoterically charged futharks ever encountered. As well as exploring their true history, Runa discusses the deeper significance of the Armanen runes with the intention of returning the runes to their rightful place at the zenith of true runic magic as well as their true meaning as symbols of transformation granting access into the deeper unconscious and what may lie beyond. Runa examines each rune in detail, before embarking on a detailed exploration of the relationship between the Armanen Runes and Yggdrasil, the Germanic and Nordic world tree directly link the two, in this respect Runa is a unique text, as it is the only text to directly link the two, exploring the importance of this connection, which cannot be overstated.” Watch an introduction by the author.
• “Why Harry Houdini DID NOT Like Arthur Conan Doyle.” Excerpt from Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Chris Gosden—”An Oxford professor of archaeology explores the unique history of magic–the oldest and most neglected strand of human behavior and its resurgence today”
• Blavatsky Unveiled: The Writings of H.P. Blavatsky in modern English. Volume I. [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Moon Laramie—”Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, was H. P. Blavatsky’s original occult masterpiece and covered a wide range of topics from ancient Egyptian Mystery schools to the conflict between science and spiritualism. But Blavatsky’s elaborate Victorian prose presents a major stumbling block for the 21st-century reader. Blavatsky Unveiled Vol. I addresses these linguistic challenges by rendering the original text into easily accessible modern English with detailed notes and a comprehensive ‘Who’s Who’ section. All references have been meticulously researched and, where possible, verified from their primary source material. Blavatsky Unveiled Vol. I is a psychedelic rollercoaster ride through a world of Gnostics, Kabbalists, Chaldean Oracles, cataclysms, seances, skeptical scientists, perpetual lamps, phantom dogs and Indian conjurors, to name a few. Along the way the reader encounters such figures as Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Darwin, Schopenhauer, Isaac Newton, Julius Caesar, Plato, Galileo, the spirit entity Katie King, Franz Mesmer, Aristotle, Eliphas Levi and many more. Seekers of hidden knowledge and those interested in the supernatural will find Blavatsky Unveiled an indispensable treasure trove of information and rip-roaring entertainment.”
• “Occult Egypt in the Victorian Popular Imagination: An Interview with Dr Eleanor Dobson.” About Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Eleanor Dobson, due December from Edinburgh University Press. “Unearths a rich tradition of creative flexibility, collaboration and mutual influence between literary culture and Egyptology” Also, although the date is listed for 2020, I presume this a typo and they mean 2021: Scroll down to the upcoming virtual seminar “10 March 2020[sic] — ‘Performing Egyptian Magic’, Dr Eleanor Dobson (University of Birmingham)” on the EHU Nineteen Seminar Series page at Edge Hill University—”The EHU Nineteen Seminar Series combines the Romanticism and Victorian Seminar Series which have run from 2010. The Seminar Series invites research papers from established scholars and emerging researchers on topics as wide-ranging as eighteenth-century Gothic texts and orientalism to girls’ periodicals and Victorian audiobooks.”
• A gallery of examples on the author’s website: Eyeball Fodder: The Art of the Occult Edition. More about The Art of the Occult:A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by S Elizabeth—”A visual feast of eclectic artwork informed and inspired by spiritual beliefs, magical techniques, mythology and otherworldly experiences.”
• The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] edited by Colin McAllister, part of the Cambridge Companions to Religion series. “Jewish and Christian apocalypses have captivated theologians, writers, artists, and the general public for centuries, and have had a profound influence on world history from their initial production by persecuted Jews during the second century BCE, to the birth of Christianity – through the demise of the Western Roman Empire and the medieval period, and continuing into modernity. Far from being an outlier concern, or an academic one that may be relegated to the dustbin of history, apocalyptic thinking is ubiquitous and continues to inform nearly all aspects of modern-day life. It addresses universal human concerns: the search for identity and belonging, speculation about the future, and (for some) a blueprint that provides meaning and structure to a seemingly chaotic world. The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature brings together a field of leading experts to provide a comprehensive overview of the subject.”
• Review by Elliott Piros of The Phantom Image: Seeing the Dead in Ancient Rome [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Patrick R Crowley—”Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.”
• Prophetic Practice for a Time of Racial Reckoning.” About The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets: Then and Now [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Nahum Ward-Lev, foreword by Walter Brueggemann—”In a time of social turbulence, Nahum Ward-Lev mines Biblical wisdom to illumine a way forward. His book explores the rich territory of liberating social change as articulated by the Hebrew prophets and lived by Biblical persons. Ward-Lev examines the development of these Biblical liberation themes in contemporary prophetic writers including Paulo Freire, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Luther King, Jr., and bell hooks. In clarifying practices for the liberation journey, prioritizing reciprocal relationships, engaging in dialogue, exercising social and artistic imagination, and nurturing a love ethic in public life, his book empowers readers of all faiths and backgrounds to see through a prophetic lens and engage in prophetic action.”
• “Treasure trove of Jack B Yeats watercolours discovered. Travel Case belonging to artist had 19 of his original drawings pasted on to the inside lid.” Jack was the brother of library figure William Butler Yeats.
• “A Literary History of the Writerly Love Affair with Bookstores.” Excerpt from Against Amazon and Other Essays [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Jorge Carrión, translated by Peter Bush, part of the Biblioasis International Translation series. “A history of bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter―and, most urgently, a manifesto.”
• “Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait. Sci-fi anthology stalled since 1974 will be produced by executor, screenwriter J Michael Straczynski, adding stories by today’s big-name SF writers.” So, it’s basically a crowdfunding effort, if enough people help fund it on J Michael Straczynski’s Patreon.
• From 2017: ““The Whole Art of Everything Is About Forgetting Yourself” – a Conversation With Alice Oswald“—”It’s really interesting and something I feel very strongly about because people always believe that metaphor is more poetic. But I’ve always loved simile. One of the reasons is that simile keeps both worlds alive at the same time whereas metaphor changes one for another. So you get this beautiful kind of doubled feeling with the simile. You don’t lose anything. It’s like a theatre curtain. You get the feeling of the artifice and reality going on at the same time. And this beautiful pivotal word ‘like’ or ‘as’ allows the thing to exist in two places at the same time. I love that. And I was always, again I’m afraid it’s Homer, but Homer has these extended similes which find a point of likeness and then go on long enough that they become unlike what they were describing, so it turns into a dis-simile half way through and I just love that because it gives you such a feeling of a kind of growth of word form. That’s how language works. It starts off doing something and then it’s still alive and ends up doing something else.”
• “Why Does Facebook Keep Rejecting Our Products?“—”Although Facebook helpfully listed the “Policy Issues” each art-inspired item violated, a number of the reasons provided were absolutely baffling, and to top it off, we’re unable to dispute the majority of them. Oh well.” “Here’s a list of some of our favorite gifts, books, toys, and more that, to our best guess, were simply too hot for Facebook to handle.”
• “On Scientism“—”Scientism: Scientism is the dogma that the sciences have access to truths that hold some essential Truth denied by other organizations of knowledge. It is a secular religion with its own hierarchy of priests, theologians, and secular proselytizers who deny all other forms of truth beyond their own.” “Why do men seek dogmas, seek to ground their stubborn beliefs in systems of thought or inquiry that in their own domain hold great promise, but the moment they assume the mantle of spokesman or preachers of the Real and Reality they suddenly seem superficial navigators of the horizon of thought?”
• From the Nope dept: “Prehistoric Shark Hid Its Largest Teeth. Some, if not all, early sharks that lived 300 to 400 million years ago not only dropped their lower jaws downward but rotated them outwards when opening their mouths. This enabled them to make the best of their largest, sharpest and inward-facing teeth when catching prey, paleontologists at the Universities of Zurich and Chicago have now shown using CT scanning and 3D printing.” But, at least the rotating lower chainsaw jawed sharks aren’t in a tornado?
• “Ancient theory FINally supported.”—”The theory first mooted in the late 1800s, suggested that paired fins evolved from gills, but has since been widely discounted. Now researchers have found evidence to support the original hypothesis.”
• “A Record Close Shave: Asteroid 2020 VT4 Just Skimmed by Earth. Wow. A low-flying space rock set a record last Friday (appropriately, the 13th), when 2020 VT4 passed just under 400 kilometers (250 miles) over the Southern Pacific.”
• “Small finlets on owl feathers point the way to less aircraft noise. Collaboration between City and RWTH Aachen University researchers reveals how these micro-structures enable silent flight.” Also, as an aside, “Tiny owl rescued from Rockefeller Center Christmas tree that traveled 170 miles to NYC. The Ravensbeard Wildlife Center said the Saw-whet owl was rescued after the 75-foot Norway spruce was cut down in upstate New York.
• “Parasite discovery could assist mental health treatments. New research into how a common parasite infection alters human behaviour could help development of treatments for schizophrenia and other neurological disorders.”
• “Scientists defy nature to make insta-bling at room temperature. An international team of scientists has defied nature to make diamonds in minutes in a laboratory at room temperature – a process that normally requires billions of years, huge amounts of pressure and super-hot temperatures.” Also “Scientists create diamonds at room temperature in minutes.”
• Watch “How To Make Ruby in a Microwave.”
• “UW engineers create device to make masks more effective.” And you can make it yourself: “All the designs are available for free online and can be made at home.”
• But check out this awesome simple and cheap tip, via tweet—”If you’re having a hard time with glasses fogging or keeping your mask up over your nose, a simple bandaid does wonders. Learned it in the OR.”
• “The Moral Calculus of COVID-19.”
• “How to Defund the Police.”—”The inconvenient truth of police history in the United States, however, is that police departments were not designed to keep a generic public safe. Rather, they were meant to serve the needs of capital and to uphold racial and ethnic hierarchies. To put it differently, police were designed with power and control in mind, not generalized public safety.” “To know the history of American policing, from departments’ origins to past efforts to reform them, is to reckon with the fact that something more than reform is needed if we are truly to confront and solve the policing crisis in this country.”
• “Defund the Global Policeman.”—”The problem with US foreign policy — represented in the figure of the global policeman — is that it is like a fully resourced police department in a time of dwindling fears of crime: robustly equipped with sophisticated tools to answer any exigency with force, even as the strategic and political value of using such lethal force recedes.”
• “Rebecca Solnit: On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway.”
• “American Brown Shirts in the Streets of the Capital.”
• “The Cassandra Conundrum.”—”Question: What do you do with a Cassandra whose warnings are heeded? Answer: Ideally, you thank them.”
• Weeeeeoooo-weeeeeoooo! Pull over! Pull over! Do you realize you missed a serial comma back there and ran on a sentence? “The Language Police Were Terrifyingly Real. My Grandfather Was One.“—”Our society seems divided between those who want to abolish the police and those who want to abolish the language police. The Left fears people with handcuffs and guns making violent arrests while the Right fears newspaper editors and college teachers canceling offensive words.”
• “The Writer Who Uncovered Crimes Against His Native Ancestors.” From The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Dennis McAuliffe, foreword by David Grann—”The book uncovers the full extent of the crimes committed against the Osages: how white lawyers appointed by Congress to protect the Osages systematically swindled the tribe; how a ring of prominent and envious whites poisoned or shot possibly hundreds of Osages to seize their oil wealth—and then papered over the Reign of Terror with doctored death certificates; and how solving the mystery of his grandmother’s death led McAuliffe to confront the mysteries of his own life. Part murder mystery, part family memoir, part spiritual journey, The Deaths of Sybil Bolton reintroduces us to a people whose story has been literally torn from the volumes of our nation’s history.”
• “Repatriation Activists Acquitted for Removing Ceremonial Spear From French Museum.”
• Euphoria “returns with two new special episodes that pick up in the stunning aftermath of the Season 1 finale.” Part 1 premieres December 6 on HBO Max. “Euphoria follows a group of high school students as they navigate love and friendships in a world of drugs, sex, trauma, and social media. Actor and singer Zendaya leads an ensemble cast including Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Algee Smith and Sydney Sweeney.”
• Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard | EP260 Adam Brody—”Adam joins the Armchair Expert to discuss Jack Parsons and the book Strange Angel” & more.
• Watch “The Mythology of Anti-Sisyphus“—”This is a video essay about the tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) zine called Anti-Sisyphus, created by Jared Sinclair. It’s also kinda about a certain way of looking at/creating art.” Check out the zine.
• “Contact from Unknown is a 2-player role-playing investigation game of dark lunar mysteries, esoteric chatroom weirdos, and gut-feeling horror that’s designed for play via online messaging apps!”
• “Turn Your Feline Into a God With This Cardboard Shinto Shrine for Cats.”

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