Dominic

I stumbled upon this original 1876 edition in the library mainly because she lived the last portion of her life in my hometown of Fort Madison. This book of poems commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the first official World's Fair to be held in the United States. In addition, several other commemorations of events and buildings in SE Iowa are included as well as poems dedicated to her daughter.

Rebecca Pollard (real name) was also widely known for her revolutionary reading system which was used in every state well into the 20th century. It was one of the first reading systems for children to link spelling and reading and directly led to the development of phonetics-based reading.

Great catalogue of her filmwork in conjunction with the U of Minnesota exhibit. I especially appreciated the preservationist notes from her niece in the section “Uncovering Ana: The Rebirth of Mendieta's Filmworks”. I also enjoyed reading about her relationship with A.I.R. Gallery.

Then there's this, my favorite quote in the section “Forever Young: Five Lessons from the Creative Life of Ana Mendieta” by Lynn Lukkas:

“In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine that the Intermedia Program and its anything-goes environment, which included intimate and sexual relationships between students and faculty and frequent drinking, would be permitted in today's educational climate and litigious society.”

I attended this very MFA program from 1999-2003 and it was still very much permitted. It's important because I'm not sure Mendienta's work would exist if the Intermedia Program at Iowa was a standard MFA factory for professional artists. Intermedia was more a “safe space” for radical creative activity. The University eventually disallowed blood, guns, verbal harassment, and teacher/student relationships, stunting the artwork in the process. University administrators bulldozed a Temporary Autonomous Zone and erected a bland and inconsequential digital media program in it's place. This was inevitable, but thankfully Ana Mendieta's work escaped in time.

Discovering this book is a bit like discovering the Lost City hydrothermal field itself, an underwater vent ecosystem featured in the James Cameron IMAX Disney movie “Aliens of the Deep”. The Lost City is hostile to life but are the conditions in which life began.

In Greiner's lonely poems and short science fiction stories, he seems like the sole poet-scientist encapsulated in his version of Deepsea Challenger, wrapped and co-mingled in technology but threatened by external environmental pressure. Often his writing seems like gifts for friends –
friends who are away. Sometimes his writing seems like memories of some trapped, ancient traveller struggling to recall their adventures in space-time. Often metaphor and buzzword intertwine to create some familiar sense of place not quite of this world but also right next to you.

There was a very, very odd moment I had when reading this book. I was about a quarter into the book and kept being reminded of some Neil Young songs from Rust Never Sleeps. The feeling of loneliness and jumping around in time and emotional juxtapositions. A few pages later the song Pocahontas is referenced and I'm left bewildered and in awe. It felt like for a moment the whole book was operating in a different dimension.

A fun albeit dubious piece of scholarship hung on the framework of affect theory, which itself is wide open to criticism. The premise here being that digital media extends human perception and (re)mediation. Somehow the spectral qualities of language allow a form of “time-travel” through forms of archived data. We might be able to retroactively influence the past through a kind of unquantifiable and un-digitized “psi” force. Haunted data and hauntology only ever really happen at the edges of consciousness where alternative modes of science exist and in fact, anything is allowed to exist in these liminal states. This book would be better if the author focused exclusively on the idea of transmedia archives and the importance that context makes in their readings. However, if you're already down with the somewhat wacky theories of Daryl Bem, you're ready for Haunted Data.

Mark Booth gives a comprehensive history of the world as told and passed down by secret societies and esoteric traditions. It is well-researched, beautifully illustrated, and a master class of creative non-fiction.

The author asks the reader to go on an imaginative exercise through the past. It is a history with real people and real ideas, but full of secrets and mystery. He has done an excellent job finding common structures and teachings among occult traditions, esoteric schools, secret societies, and religious cults. He literally asks us to pretend this is all real at the beginning of the book and ends with “imagination is key”. Just forget what you know and go along with it, it'll make it so much better.

I've read a few bad reviews from rationalist/scientist types who seem to have fumbled the epistemic status of the book. We get it, you don't believe in chakras and the Kabbalah. Trust me, you don't need to in order to adore this material, you only need an artist's mind. Or perhaps they are turned off by the authentic tone. He doesn't throw every crazy idea into this book, but rather expertly curates an authoritative secret history. It makes it feel like the Truth and it would have been annoying and clumsy if the author was constantly winking at the reader. This work feels like the spiritual successor to Maurice Bessy's A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural.

This book is the perfect blend of research and creativity and we desperately need more work like this.

A comprehensive yet accessible tour through the aesthetic category of “sound art”. The throughline here is, of course, Cage and the idea of all of sound as a unifying force. More broadly, the book concerns sonic expression in art, ecology, music, information, nature, and people. An excellent introduction to the topic but extensive in its scope and erudite in its focus.

This hugely influential book has somehow not been translated into English From French. I spent the better part of November 2020 translating a single chapter using a series of deep learning tools trained on older texts, which produced acceptable results. The chapter in question was de Guaita's interpretation of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin's The Crocodile, an allegory of the French Revolution. De Guaita, and his accomplished secretary Oswald Wirth, draw up a connection between The Crocodile's Ourdeck story of discovering the pentagon forms in the Hierophant's underground site with Eliphas Levi's Gnostic blazing star and its inverse. Much of the conception of black magic in late 19th-century ceremonial lodge culture was simply a tactic to divert the Church's scrutiny away from Christian mysticism such as Martinism (and Illuminism) towards their supposed common enemy, the forces of darkness. By inverting this ancient symbol of Light, the dark practitioner would evoke demons or worse upon our world.

The illustration for this inverse blazing star was eventually picked up by Maurice Bessy in his 1964 mass-market book “A Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural” under the heading “The Satanic Sciences”. A French graphic designer decided to grab this particular drawing of the “upside down pentagram” from hundreds of illustrations in the book to serve as the cover image. A copy of Bessy's book floated around Anton LeVey's Black House until LaVey and friends decided the image on this book would be the basis of their new religion called the Church of Satan, scaring far too many people since the publication of The Satanic Bible in 1969. LaVey popularly conflated this symbol with that of Baphomet and perhaps the Goat of Mendes, and is the basis of their ongoing copyright claim to the image to this day.

I was drawn to this story because an edition of Bessy's book was in my grandparent's basement during my entire childhood. I read through it often before and during the 80's “satanic panic” and was quite confused when the symbol became an icon of fear, censorship, and confusion. LaVey seemed to have appropriated this “sigil” and then married it to his counterculture San Francisco experimentations, which attracted anyone looking to somehow buck the status quo.

There are perhaps three or more morals to this story. One, occult fashionistas create new meaning by taking signifiers of yore and pumping them full of their own modern ideas. Two, things are scary when you believe they are true. Three, whether spiritual or secular, question everything you hold to be true because it just might be made up!

An engaging aesthetic theory of Sound Art rooted in a phenomenology of perception. The author goes to great lengths to describe Listening to sensorial material and supplements her investigations with a good curation of sound experiments. There is an inherent tension between subjectivity and objectivity in the emergent properties of listening and traditional artistic boundaries fail to demarcate this. The book chapters themselves seem more like clusters of topics that loosely model this art form. Listening, Noise, Silence, Time, Space, Now describe the listener as much as the sound.

If you are at all wondering how the hell 2016 happened and align even slightly left of political center, I urge you to take a look at this short book of lectures. Philosopher Richard Rorty offers some fairly amazing explanatory and predictive insights about our current American political reality.

I first learned of Achieving Our Country when a paragraph from the book circulated on social media last month (and even made its way into the New Yorker) which almost miraculously predicted the rise of Donald Trump. I immediately ran to the shelves of the research library I work at only to find every copy of this somewhat obscure book was already checked out, so I borrowed the last copy from another library. I now see what the clamor is about.

Rorty is a thinker raised by parents who were members of the New York socialist intelligentsia of the 1920s and 30s. These were socialist workers who were pragmatic but also opponents of Stalinism and the dark side of communism. This biography is important as it builds the framework for how he describes the split of the American Left circa 1964 with the rise of Vietnam War opposition.

Rorty makes a distinction between a Reform Left vs. a New Left (or progressive left vs. cultural left). This new left rose in prominence as a reaction to the horrors of Vietnam. The rationale of breaking from the leftist old guard was that 1) since the Vietnam war was horrific, and 2) the U.S. was fighting communism, then 3) communism must hold some value. This is in direct conflict with the reform left who were raised on economic justice but saw the genocidal tragedies of Stalin's communism. The new left, in his description, has evolved into overly theoretical anti-Americanism as a result of this.

He is admittedly critical of the cultural left for abandoning pragmatic tools of workers' economic justice in favor of elitist imagination about abstract concepts of “power”. He laments the irrelevance of Whitman and Dewey in favor of Foucault and Derrida. He keeps everything grounded in real-world problems of workers wages and economic disparity.

If you're curious about why identity politics are currently center stage, or why the super-rich are capitalizing on populist rage, or why notions of social justice are now couched in highly jargonized terms that seem to dismiss working class concerns, or why the left seems to hate the country they live in, take a look at this book.

Spoiler alert: He gives advice on how to unify the left. He suggests toning down critical theory, having a non-jingoistic pride in America that works for everyone, reaching out to trade unions again, and avoiding the traps set by the super-rich that seek to divide American workers along ethnic, racial, and religious lines.

American pride, he argues, should be like a healthy ego. If you love yourself too much you become arrogant and aggressive to others. If you hate yourself too much you become despondent and useless. The left needs a nudge in the direction of pride in country to help create a plan for real justice.

Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University's Graduate Division of Religion, is an occultist. Or maybe she is a pagan. Perhaps she is a radical feminist Christian – I'm not sure. In “Face of the Deep”, Keller reads Genesis and its Greek translations of “formless and void”, and “deep” as expressions of female sexuality. This project seems related, if not part of, neoclassical theology and imagines a universe full of gods who are potentialities rather than powerful father figures. This is not dissimilar (by my read) to the Victorian fascination with Plotinus, though her conception of “creation” is more informed by chaotic networks than the Eye of Providence. There is a fair bit of insight to take from her work, but at the end of the day it's just more fiction. This is fine, but I'm left with no more explanatory power for creatio ex nihilo than when I started.

This was a difficult six-month, off-and-on slog, but worth it I think. It required a lot more research than I thought it would when I casually started the PDF in March 2017. I eventually moved to paperback and then back to PDF.

To read this difficult work of theory-fiction requires a bit of preparatory reading. You should read Deleuze and Guattari's “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” books. Read all the SparkNotes and Cliff Notes on D&G as you can find. I highly recommend a YouTube playlist called “Deleuze for the Desperate”. It's a 10-part, 5-hour lecture by a retired philosophy professor on D&G's work. After that, read as much Middle East religion, history, and archeology as you have time for. Wikipedia is fine. Read some Lovecraft criticism on top of that.

I'd also suggest reading Cyclonopedia's glossary and citation list first before diving in. It'll help define the key concepts that are used throughout. It's dense, but not impenetrable. It's worth digesting even half of the concepts presented in the book.

A liminal, hallucinatory, dreamlike story that borders on death/life and other/self. Darker than “The Dreams in the Witch House” and more poetic than “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Blind Owl” is rumored to lead its readers to madness or suicide (I thankfully succumbed to neither). It is a book fueled by opium and wine... melancholy and shame, with a narrator occupied by a sexual stupor concocted from memory and imagination set across a bleak Iranian backdrop.

The prose is gorgeous and evocative of imminent insanity, but is also remarkably comprehensible and clear. Hedayat (and translator Costello) slips through the narrator's perceptions effortlessly, managing to avoid the opaqueness of Surrealism. The narrator seems mostly unsure of who he is, where he is, or when it is, but as a reader I wasn't confused by random, out-of-place imagery. At the end of the book it all made sense, but I wanted to read it again to peel back another layer of reality.

“The Blind Owl” is beautiful horror full of delirium and despair in a shadowland of morbid lust. I won't spoil it by reviewing the symbolism, plot, or any interpretation. The reading of this story is its own experience – out-of-time yet hauntingly present.

More than just a collection of programs with poetic code comments, each work in this multi-lingual set experiments with the structure and form of the code itself. Strings are split into prose, variables assignment is used to create English syntax, and function declarations become major plot points. equals=100% PROOF,of,chemical,dumps; wind: across,the,'September'-blue,sky; bending(to,the,RATIO);as:NATURE=fights_back;using:/native-American/-wisps,that,clean-up ALL that,'bad stuff'; employing(a_simple_formula);the,/ancients/;!KNEW;The reader doesn't need to know each language to enjoy the code, though an understanding of it deepens the appreciation. There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in simultaneously reading for poetic meaning and also reading it as valid, compilable code. All of the code-poems are freely available online as well as the demo of it running, but I chose to read it in book form, which accentuates the poetic aspects.

Human behavior is much more complicated than you might have thought. Or maybe you already figured it was complicated. Well, it's still probably more complicated than even that. Perhaps you are attracted to facile descriptions of behavior that are motivated by your political leanings such as genetic determinism or social construction? There's a very good chance it's actually a swirling interplay of the two. Nearly all of our best and worst actions turn out to be some result of gene-environment interaction, and delineating the two takes some solid scientific work to get right.

Much (perhaps too much) of the book is spent on “humans at our worst”. Why are we violent and aggressive to each other? It's a mix of hormones, social interaction, evolution, socioeconomic stratification, in vitro conditions, pollution, genes, gender, political forces, religion, luck, and many other factors. There's just no easy answer here despite many peoples' attempts to pin it on their pet theories. This isn't to say it's not worth trying to figure out because that's how progress is made. It requires an open mind and some scientific curiosity.

Sapolsky builds a moral framework towards the end that I mostly agree with, though he seems to let up on the academic rigor that is evident in the earlier parts of the book. This is the same criticism I have of other science books such as Sean Carroll's The Big Picture. Amazing detail, citation, dispassion, and patience explaining the hard science of their field ...and then a breezy approach to laying philosophy and social science on the table. It's to be expected, though I'm left in serious doubt when he presents the case that the biology is this decades-long battle of competing research but that a single psychology experiment is able to explain a murky aspect of cognition.

In the end his takeaway is valuable. We should be skeptical of the unseen homunculus in peoples' heads pulling the levers of “free will” and causing them to be an evil Other of the out-group. It's easy to heap undue moral scorn on someone who might just be the equivalent of a 17th century “witch” who is actually just suffering from epilepsy. Give your political enemies the benefit of the doubt. Show compassion towards folks with even the most repugnant behavior. You have no idea what they've been through.

One of my very favorite Internet fights is between kooky partisan hacks who intermingle science fiction with real life into a quasi-alchemical style of theory-fiction that is both scary and confusing if you don't know what you're stumbling into. If you're not careful, it's easy to get lost down their rabbit holes of crazy blog-style ramblings and start believing you are pulling back the curtain on some hidden reality. Whether you call it “wokeness”, “redpilled”, or “enlightenment” all depends on your political persuasion and starting assumptions. To the normie reader like myself, it's just literary MMA but with really smart trolls slap fighting. They each seem to think they are landing devastating blows that might permanently cripple all political enemies once and for all. And it's hilarious. Usually this plays out on Twitter or in the comments section somewhere, but here it's conveniently collected into monograph form for easy reading.

Philip Sandifer (now writing as a woman under a different first name I believe) puts up a valiant front against the so-called neoreactionaries such as Yarvin (the fighter in Sandifer's same weight class). Sandifer is still every bit the member of this fringe of writers, but helps make the whole project much more entertaining by offering some real competition. Just like their rivals, Sandifer is far too verbose for their own good. This book in particular is in desperate need of a copy editor as it's riddled with typos, unattributed quotes, and formatting problems. This would all be much more forgivable if played out on Reddit instead of book form. Still, it's a good match-up.

If you enjoy bonkers philosophical fights and culture war political peanut butter mixed with your science fiction realism chocolate, you might find it tasty. If not, stay far, far away from this weird confection.

It should be said up front that this book is a critique of postmodernism as well as an explanation. There is a tone of “postmodernism as failed project” throughout the writing, which will no doubt raise hackles among the far left and academics in the humanities, particularly in critical theory. Because postmodernism is bound to Marxist thought and to anti-capitalism, Hicks will no doubt be painted as some sort of libertarian or devotee of Ayn Rand. This may or may not be fair, though this book is much more rigorous and dispassionate than simple free market propaganda. He indeed uses examples of unsuccessful Socialist experiments, but only to illustrate how this modified philosophical thought into the postmodernism of the late 20th century.

The central theme here is the history of anti-rationalism and the lineage of the counter-enlightenment throughout continental philosophy into postmodernism. To put it very simply, the postmodernists argue that the the Enlightenment project has somehow perverted Reason to fraudulently describe a reality that cannot be described. They argue that there are only competing narratives and the West has allowed a dominant narrative of oppression and power to become ingrained in civilization. The rationalists who favor democracy, capitalism, science, and analysis would argue that nearly every prediction by the counter-enlightenment and postmodernists have not happened. This collision with history puts postmodernism on the retreat, forever modifying definitions to justify their claims.

Setting out to define what is Islam, and what it means to be Islamic, is an act of interpretation. It is the history of meaning, of revelation, of text, pretext, and context. Ahmed does a great (albeit scholarly) job of describing this process. How do muslims parse the paradox of seeking Truth and following Law? How can Islam contradict itself while remaining cohesive?

He uses Islamic wine-drinking to illustrate these points and trace distinctions between the many aspects of Islam. Is it Islamic to drink wine? I'm not sure now. I would ask: Is it Vegetarian to eat fish? There is both a law (or at least literal definition) as well as ethos and culture associated with both. Is civil disobedience American? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Can you be an Atheist and truly appreciate Sufi poetry? The aesthetics and revelation are intertwined yet distinct.

As with all cultures and systems of thinking it is a swirling interplay of upholding perceived values, literalism, tradition, and identity. He claims to not fall into the tautology of “Islam is what muslims do/Muslims do what is Islamic” but I'm not so sure at times. It's hard to exhaustively delineate all of this contradiction without some amount of self-reference.

And of course almost all of this hangs on the hook of supernaturalism. I would argue after reading this tome that Islam is not philosophically materialist. A common thread that runs through the religion of Islam, the culture of Islam, the Law of Islam, and views of Islam is a recognition of transcendence. Ali A. Rizvi, author of ‘Atheist Muslim' might disagree, but ‘What Is Islam' seems to make a strong case.

This is Sean Carroll's personal philosophy of “Poetic Naturalism”. In short, there is no supernatural world and meaning is what we conscious creatures make.

Sean Carroll is a fantastic science communicator and the majority of the book is spent explaining how we can make safe scientific assumptions about reality using observation and Bayesian inference. Larger systems emerge from smaller systems. Quantum fluctuations create atomic structure, which accumulate to form chemistry, which then transitions to biology and ultimately consciousness. At each level we can have different ways of talking and different modes of making meaning. Just as we don't need to invoke the physical properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms to deal with the fluid dynamics of water, we don't need to talk about neurotransmitters and brain activity when talking about free will and love. It's pretty easy to go along for his Poetic Naturalism ride during the naturalism leg of the journey.

Where the ride starts to get a little bumpy is when it veers into the “poetics” portion of the trip. Here, Carroll gets a little too wishy-washy for my taste. Everything is constructed! What ought to be done is purely subjective! What is moral value? Whatever we decide it is! This leaves the poetic naturalist with almost no intellectual tools to grapple with real-world, difficult issues. People disagree constantly, and this book leaves me thinking a poetic naturalist is more comfortable giving the useless platitude “agree to disagree” than actually doing the hard work of constructing meaning.

It's a great book worth reading, but Dr. Carroll needs to be just as rigorous with his poems as he is with his science.

I have to give this 4 stars only because of the dystopian future my 19 month-old apparently finds on the final page. Spoiler alert: after several pages of various cars and trucks making car and truck sounds (driven by people), the denouement of the series is a sleek, self-driving car asking “where you'd like to go today”. My son, after spending a solid 3 minutes pretending daddy is driving mama in a taxi and a monster truck is jumping amazing piles of dirt, is disturbed by the cold lack of humanity presented by the “car of the future”. I'm prepared to accept that my performance of the car's voice is a contributing factor to his malaise, but I suspect there is more here. Ultimately, it is the awkward juxtaposition of engine sounds with the final spoken word that is uncanny. It must be like reading a book about various interesting people and then finally encountering a robot that is programmed to be a father but yet is just a talking lawn mower. I sympathize with his refusal to engage with the “car of the future”, even though I am fascinated with it. After all, the taxi, the jalopy, the monster truck, the police car, the race car... none of these vehicles demand to know where you are going. As the title states: Cars. Go. The “car of the future” does not “Go”. It only asks where you would ‘like' to go, but does not actually take you there.

A Thousand Plateaus frapped in a neural networked Vitamix with a lost Lovecraft manuscript and a forgotten treatise on cybernetic demonology. Hand shaken by hooded chef cultists with professorial day jobs in obscure philosophy departments.

My favorite was the letter from P. B. Carruthers to the producers of the Teletubbies, worrying about the missing fifth teletubby and the occult rituals of the Tzog-Murtha portrayed on the show, among other esoteric concerns.

Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz manage to tackle some very touchy subjects with amazing sophistication and aplomb while remaining intellectually honest about the specific issues in Islamic doctrine. Much of the book is spent carefully delineating the many diverse Muslim interpretations of the doctrine of Islam and how this is a way toward secular, progressive values in Muslim majority countries. At the same time, there is a recognition in their dialogue that the doctrine of Islam is a contributing factor to many horrific human rights atrocities and acts of terrorist violence worldwide.