An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for January 27, 2021

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

• Traces of places: sacred sites in miniature on Minoan gold rings by Caroline Tully.
• ABRAHADABRA: New Dimensions for Occult Science and for ‘The Book of the Law’ with ‘Sepher Aiwass’, the author’s original oracle deck by Frater Iehovah Angelus Meus (David Allen Hulse)—”David Allen Hulse is a lifetime student of the occult sciences and in particular of the relationship between ancient languages, number codes and the mysteries within sacred texts such as ‘The Book of the Law’ dictated to Aleister Crowley in Cairo, Egypt during three days in April 1904. Using his extensive knowledge and experience of this text, David Allen Hulse embarked upon a 40 year study of its secret codes and their relationship to other ancient occult ciphers from the western and eastern occult systems, Hebrew, Greek, Celtic tree alphabet, Latin, Enochian, Rosicrucian, Egyptian, classical Greek, Tantric, Tibetan and Sanskrit. Originally conceived in 1979 and continuously updated with fresh discoveries, the book ‘ABRAHADABRA’ is the single most extensive work in this field, taken together with the hieroglyphical deck ‘Sepher Aiwass’ they constitute the only experimental occult tool of their kind. This book, together with its deck of hieroglyphical divination cards, oracle cards if you will, sets a new precedent in the study of the philosophy of language, of esotericism, of spiritual occultism and the application of that study to initiation in higher dimensions of space and time.”
• The Mega Golem: A Womanual for all Times and Spaces [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Carl Abrahamsson, Vanessa Rawlings Sinclair, &c.—”The Mega Golem is a magical being made of art, dressed in a colourful quantum quilt stemming from an infinite number of creative minds and voices. Is this being invisible? Indivisible? Invincible? Intangible? Whose desires and dreams are incorporated in the sinews and cells of this benign mutation of our inertly causal culture? The Mega Golem is the poetic transcendence of expected transgression, and as such a psychosexual embrace from behind the front-lines. This first Mega Golem book collects ideas, theories and artworks that all constitute its first incarnation. This book is therefore nothing less than a Magical Womanual for any and all who are willing to believe wholeheartedly in the disbelief of psychic prestidigitation and its many emotional pitfalls.”
• “Miracles and Magic. The desire to know one’s fortune seems to be an instinctive human urge.”—”‘Magic today is not a fossil remnant of old beliefs but always exists as part of a triple helix with religion and science,’ Gosden concludes. Especially in times of crisis, we look for any way to control our fate. The pandemic has produced new magical coronavirus remedies, from red soap in Sri Lanka to cocaine in France to violet oil on the anus in Iran. The human desire to believe has never faded.” About 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.”
• “The Business of Books. The high-stakes world of pirate publishing.” About Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Robert Darnton, due Feb 1—”In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the ‘Fertile Crescent’ countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of ‘copyright’ very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged tacitly or openly that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild.”
• I Hate Men [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Pauline Harmange, translated by Natasha Lehrer—”The feminist book they tried to ban in France.” “Women, especially feminists and lesbians, have long been accused of hating men. Our instinct is to deny it at all costs. (After all, women have been burnt at the stake for admitting to less.) But what if mistrusting men, disliking men – and yes, maybe even hating men – is, in fact, a useful response to sexism? What if such a response offers a way out of oppression, a means of resistance? What if it even offers a path to joy, solidarity and sisterhood? In this sparkling essay, as mischievous and provocative as it is urgent and serious, Pauline Harmange interrogates modern attitudes to feminism and makes a rallying cry for women to find a greater love for each other – and themselves.”
• “To Err Is Poetic. The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?” About The Poet’s Mistake [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Erica McAlpine—”What our tendency to justify the mistakes in poems reveals about our faith in poetry–and about how we read.” “Tracing the temptation to justify poets’ errors from Aristotle through Freud, McAlpine demonstrates that the study of poetry’s mistakes is also a study of critical attitudes toward mistakes, which are usually too generous–and often at the expense of the poet’s intentions. Through remarkable close readings of Wordsworth, Keats, Browning, Clare, Dickinson, Crane, Bishop, Heaney, Ashbery, and others, The Poet’s Mistake shows that errors are an inevitable part of poetry’s making and that our responses to them reveal a great deal about our faith in poetry–and about how we read.”
  
• “We Need To Think Broader About Human-Centered Design.”—”I also thought about an alternative universe, one where when a mother is sitting on the floor with a crying baby, it isn’t security guards who approach her but instead design thinkers, who sit down next to her and begin to ask, respectfully, why? I wondered whether—if given the opportunity to ask—they would have generated a whole list of things to try that would have had nothing to do with dragging her out of there. After a conversation with her and others like her, maybe they would have arrived at a list of new problems to tackle and new ideas for doing so.” Excerpt from We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Mitchell Weiss—”Can we solve big public problems anymore? Yes, we can. This provocative and inspiring book points the way.”

• “The ghosts of Mark Fisher. How the cultural critic, four years after his death, became one of the most influential thinkers and writers of our times.”
• “What We Get Wrong About Joan Didion. She’s been canonized for impeccable style, but Didion’s real insights were about what holds society together, or tears it apart.”
• “New York’s radical female and non-binary skateboarders — in photos.”
• “M. Sharkey’s Luminous Photos of Queer Kids in the US” From New Queer Photography: Focus on the Margins [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] edited by Benjamin Wolbergs—”Art, more than anything, opens up the possibility of approaching one’s own sexuality beyond the limits imposed by taboos. Not only does it allow for a risk-free, playful exploration of gender and forbidden desires, but it is unique in capturing its contradictions. In recent years, a young and active queer photography scene has emerged, helped in large part by social media. Indulging their desire for self-presentation, affirmation, and reflection, many photographers portray male homosexuality in particular as a private idyll. At the same time, they shine a critical light on their own and society’s approach to transsexuality and gender roles and expose the corrupting but also affirmative power of pornography. Films, series, and mainstream cultural appropriation suggest that society has largely embraced queer lifestyles. However, a number of documentary photographers provide evidence that being gay or lesbian can still lead to marginalization, isolation, stigmatization, and violence in certain countries and communities. Their works also take the regime of sexuality itself into account and show that many bans on same-sex contact have colonial origins.”
• “The Sexual Double Standards That Led to the Baby Boom—and ‘Girls in Trouble’.” From American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Gabrielle Glaser—”The shocking truth about postwar adoption in America, told through the bittersweet story of one teenager, the son she was forced to relinquish, and their search to find each other.”
• “Sylvia True on the Heritage of Madness. Sylvia True, author of a new novel based on the true story of her family’s struggle in Nazi Germany and the eugenics programs to eliminate those with mental health issues, writes on the heritage of madness this Holocaust Memorial Day.” About Where Madness Lies [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Sylvia True, due Feb 1—”Germany, 1934. Rigmor, a young Jewish woman is a patient at Sonnenstein, a premier psychiatric institution known for their curative treatments. But with the tide of eugenics and the Nazis’ rise to power, Rigmor is swept up in a campaign to rid Germany of the mentally ill. USA, 1984. Sabine, battling crippling panic and depression commits herself to McLean Hospital, but in doing so she has unwittingly agreed to give up her baby. Linking these two generations of women is Inga, who did everything in her power to help her sister, Rigmor. Now with her granddaughter, Sabine, Inga is given a second chance to free someone she loves from oppressive forces, both within and without. This is a story about hope and redemption, about what we pass on, both genetically and culturally. It is about the high price of repression, and how one woman, who lost nearly everything, must be willing to reveal the failures of the past in order to save future generations. With chilling echoes of our time, Where Madness Lies is based on a true story of the author’s own family.”
• “How Do We Write About Political Crisis and Personal Conflict?” About The Mission House [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Carys Davies, due Feb 15—”From the multiple award-winning author of West and The Redemption of Galen Pike, a captivating and propulsive novel following an Englishman seeking refuge in a remote hill town in India who finds himself caught in the crossfire of local tensions and violence.”
• “Of Progressive Bookselling, Past and Future.”
  
• “On Class Warfare and the Perfect Storm of Crises That Got Us Here.”

• “In Defense of Writing Books That May Never Be Read.” Excerpt from Points of Attack [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Mark de Silva—”In this collage of critical reflections, written in the tradition of the short essay running through Francis Bacon and Roland Barthes, the novelist, philosopher, and former New York Times Opinion staffer Mark de Silva looks into matters of both common curiosity and special concern in America today: technological evolution, virtuality, terrorism, the future of the self, the individual’s place in a globalized society, the species’ place in the natural world, the state of the arts, and the animadversions of the sciences. Above all, Points of Attack is a handbook of the ways of the good life in bad times, and an inoculation against presumption in an era when the axioms of liberal democratic life have come undone and the end of history once again appears a long way off.”
• “Free Limited Edition: Artist Whitney Humphreys creates a zine series, ‘Gendered Machines’”
• “Substance found in Antarctic ice may solve a martian mystery.”—”Researchers have discovered a common martian mineral deep within an ice core from Antarctica. The find suggests the mineral—a brittle, yellow-brown substance known as jarosite—was forged the same way on both Earth and Mars: from dust trapped within ancient ice deposits.”
• “A Physicist Has Worked Out The Math That Makes ‘Paradox-Free’ Time Travel Plausible.”
• “‘Spooky action at a distance’ could create a nearly perfect clock. Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that’s so precise, it can detect dark matter.”
• “The First People to Settle in The Americas Brought Their Dogs With Them.”
• “Trove of ‘Ancient Treasures’ Found in Shipwreck Off the Coast of Greece Researchers surveying the seabed surrounding the island of Kasos discovered pottery that holds clues to trade in the Mediterranean.”
• More about the recent finds at Saqqara, which included a scroll of The Book of the Dead: “The Necronomicon Lives? Ancient ‘Book of the Dead’ scroll found in Egyptian tomb.”
• “Physicists Study How Our Universe Might Have Bubbled Up in the Multiverse. Since they can’t prod actual universes as they inflate and bump into each other in the hypothetical multiverse, physicists are studying digital and physical analogs of the process.”
• “Archaeologists Discover Bas-Relief of Golden Eagle at Aztec Templo Mayor. A team of archaeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH) have announced the discovery of a bas-relief depicting an American golden eagle (aquila chrysaetos canadensis).”
• “How one physicist is unraveling the mathematics of knitting. Understanding how knots influence textile properties could lead to bespoke materials.”
• Watch “What can these remains tell us about medieval society?“—”Researchers have analysed the evidence of “skeletal trauma” among over 300 individuals from three very different cemeteries in Cambridge’s historic city centre. The research has revealed varying levels of physical hardship across the social spectrum of Cambridge between the 10th and 14th century.”
• “Pompeii’s museum comes back to life to display amazing finds.”
• “NASA finds ‘Lost Galaxy’ shining out of Virgo’s bosom. This hazy spiral galaxy is one of the largest in the Virgo cluster — a collection of more than 2,000 galaxies.”
• “Oddball ‘neutral electron’ possibly discovered in new state of matter.”
• “The problem with prediction. Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will change how we think.”
• “Enigmatic Star System Has 5 Planets Locked in Perfect Harmony.”
• It’s a carnyx! “Skull of rare dinosaur sheds light on creature’s bizarre hollow head tube. The duck-billed dinosaur Parasaurolophus is best known for the tube that grows out of its head, and the well-preserved skull offers more clues about the crest’s evolution.”
• “How an Astrophysicist and a Painter Stared Down Black Holes.”
• “A Scientist’s Mind, a Poet’s Soul. On the unified cosmic vision of Alexander von Humboldt, the nineteenth century’s great naturalist-adventurer.”
• “Who Said Nobody Read Isaac Newton? It’s a myth that legendary works in science aren’t read.” By Caleb Scharf, author of The Ascent of Information: Books, Bits, Genes, Machines, and Life’s Unending Algorithm [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher], due June 2021—”Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants.” “The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.”
• Bless the Maker and all His Water. Bless the coming and going of Him, May His passing cleanse the world. May He keep the world for his people. “Giant worm’s undersea lair discovered by fossil hunters in Taiwan. Scientists believe 2-metre-long burrow once housed predator that ambushed passing sea creatures.” Also “Is this a fossilized lair of the dreaded bobbit worm? The giant worms hunted in pretty much the most nightmarish way possible.”
• “Scientists Produce Metals Four Times Harder than Naturally Occurring Structures. And the team notes that the technique is fairly simple to execute.”
• “ISS Tool Spots Blue Light Jets Shooting Upwards From Thunderclouds. The weather event can only be spotted from space.”
• From the ROUS dept: “New physics theory postulates the existence of SLABs: Stupendously Large Black Holes.”
• “Oxfam: The megarich have already recovered from the pandemic. It may take the poor a decade to so do.”
• “Meet the ‘Glowies,’ the Online Far Right’s Newest Fear. In the aftermath of the January 6 riot, extremists have become obsessed with the federal agents who might lurk among them.”
• “‘They Were Accidentally Transparent About How Stupid They Were All the Time.’ Olivia Nuzzi on learning to report under Donald Trump, her regrets, and all the very dumb things she saw along the way.”
• “I’ve Said Goodbye to ‘Normal.’ You Should, Too. Climate change is upending the world as we know it, and coping with it demands widespread, radical action.”
• “The best movie about corporate 3D hentai espionage is getting a re-release. Watch the trailer for Olivier Assayas’ recently restored thriller Demonlover.“—”The French director’s 2002 demonlover might take his sharpest turns. Often described as a postmodern neo-noir, the film stars Connie Nielsen (Gladiator, Wonder Woman) as Diane de Monx, a corporate spy hoping to swing control of the global adult animation market to her employer, Mangatronics. To do so, she infiltrates the executive levels of the Volf Corporation, drugs her boss, assumes control of the company’s major clients, and brokers a deal to license a Japanese animation studio’s 3D CG hentai. With the assets secured, negotiations begin with the equally shady Demonlover, an American hentai porn distribution company — but Diane’s deception doesn’t fly under the radar. Her business partner Hervé (Charles Berling), assistant (Chloë Sevigny), and everyone involved with Demonlover have their own secrets. The nature of their product — hypersexual, hyperviolent, hypersurreal — only creates a more crushing effect to the capitalist game of cat and mouse.” Watch DEMONLOVER – Restoration Trailer. Also.
• “Netflix picked the wrong 2004 magical-girl series to adapt for an edgy live-action show. Did Netflix accidentally make a W.I.T.C.H. show?”
• “The frustrating tradition behind Soul’s great flaw. The Pixar film sets out to praise Black life, but winds up selling it out.”—”In grafting a Black lead character onto an initially non-Black story, directors Pete Docter and Kemp Powers and their co-writer Mike Jones portray the comforts of Black life, yet miss its intricacies. They’ve unwittingly crafted what’s known as a “passing narrative,” a story that betrays its Black protagonist in favor of the white good.”

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