Highbrow advice from Voltaire

Micro Poetry Collections from Space Cowboy Books

Little books are wonderful additions to one's library.  They represent alternative experinces and serve to excite the imagination. Here are six little poetry collections from my shelves, all published by Space Cowboy Books. 

  

The poems in this last book are by Miles J. Breuer, who is the subject of the biography Dreaming of Autonomous Vehicles: Miloslav (Miles) J. Breuer: Czech-American Writer and the Birth of Science Fiction by Jaroslav Olša, Jr. From this little book of poems, here is a description of Olša's book, followed by the cover image. Click the cover image--or HERE--to view the Amazon description. 

Points of departure for lingustic recreations, but while the activity can be intellectual is it also highbrow?

Your task is to assign captions, titles, or descriptive "responses" to the following images:

 

 

(More) sensationalism as point of departure for ontological Inquiry

Fiction Vol. 270, June 1976 Illustration by  Philippe Legendre-Kvater

An astronaut fires his blaster even as his space helmet shatters, so that his head is drawn into the vacuum of space, or one should wonder.  The surreal representation of the head--the "immediate" focus of the viewer's attention--suggests a transit to a different realm.  Is this metempsychosis, or merely death, the final moment in a moment of finality, or something else entirely? In any event, inquiry into the purport of the image very quickly exhausts the expiatory possibilities and renders the image inert. Much in the same way is the astronaut's apparent transmogrification rendered uninteresting, moreover underscoring the limited "time-value-appreciation" that is characteristic of sensationalism.

Is there is anything effective remaining after an interrogation of the image?  Doubtful.  Except, perhaps, for the artist's uses of color, shade, form and brushstroke.  The artist's deployment of the sensational remains mundane and, after inquiry, is revealed to be ultimately inane. And I leave it to the citizens of the Highbrow Commonwealth to attach such meanings to ultimately inane as they see fit.

Strong Words on Columbus Day: Prehistoric North America, what was the state of the state?

Much can be made out of a comparison of Rousseau's credulous anthropological notions (in the state of nature man is an honorable and moral "Noble Savage") and contemporary "hippie" narratives describing a native "utopia" that once existed in prehistoric North America.  

Against Rousseau, Hobbes's famous formulation paints a picture of an "ignoble" savage, indeed.  Hobbes famously describes a brutal "state of nature" in the Leviathan:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no Culture of the Earth, no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea, no commodious Building, no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force, no Knowledge of the face of the Earth, no account of Time, no Arts, no Letters, no Society, and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short . . .

                                                             (Leviathan, i. xiii. 9)

I think it is safe to say that rather than an "anthropologically accurate" description of the state of nature, Hobbes is describing the harsh realpolitik that characterized the behavior of the European Monarchs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,  and which saw some violent "ramp up" in the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation; though as for that, medieval Europe was pretty brutal as well. Because of these anthropological and historical "truisms," says Hobbes, human beings are in need of a superintending authority. This was a dictatorship beholding to nothing but the "social contract" that required the dictator to uphold authority and civil order; otherwise, the dictator could do what ever he wanted to do.  Importantly, human nature was such--people were crazy avaricious robots, so to speak--that they had no good in them at all.  Goodness and thus morality had to be imposed upon them from above. And we will set aside the many contradictions in Hobbes for some other discussion. 

Against Hobbes, Locke offered an alternate view of human nature in which the state of nature is marked by "good  intentions" corrupted by greed, human foibles, bad faith actors, malicious intent, institutional "mission creep", and tyrants who do not respect peoples' rights and property.  Human beings naturally recognize other peoples' rights, but corruption and greed lead some people to take other people's property and infringe upon other peoples' rights.  The "social contract," as such, is the effort of people of good faith to create magisterial and legislative powers that can best protect peoples' property and their rights.    

Such anyway is my preface to this interesting passage I saw the other day, and which outlines a fairly sobering picture of the state of the state in prehistoric North America. The following excerpt is from an article by Tyler Durden. No doubt his sketch of life in prehistoric North America is controversial, but also, alas, essentially true.  Indeed, a proper anthropological inquiry of prehistoric North America will confirm these outlines:

When the European colonists came to America, there was nothing.  No nation existed.  No enduring infrastructure, no sweeping societies, no system of subsistence.  There was a scattering of primitive tribes engaged in constant war with each other for centuries.  Genocide was common.  Slavery was common.  Even cannibalism was common.  The "Native Americans" were not "native", they took the land from the tribes that came before them.

In fact, many weaker tribes would turn to the European colonists for help to stop stronger tribes from wiping them out.  

In the old world, colonialism and conquest was required to prevent barbarians from crashing through the gates and simply taking what the colonials had built.  As far as slavery is concerned, every civilization in existence including the "indigenous Americans" participated in slavery. 

    Source

I should be remiss if I failed to point out that the world view and theory of human nature driving Durden's sketch evidently supports Hobbes "dark" views, though Locke also admits that in the state of nature people can be terribly violent, corrupt, and so on. Essentially, however, Locke acknowledges that human beings are capable of reason and that therefore it is human beings and not tyrants who should draw up governments. Locke's views (and Hobbes's?) as well as Durden's compare to Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, 1851; The Confidence-Man, 1850); William Golding (Lord of the Flies, 1954)... History evidently supports Durden's sketch.  As for prehistoric Central and South America? I suspect the situation was even more harsh. Compare Europe--prehistoric, Classical, Medieval, and Modern.

More on Hobbes and Locke?  Please click HERE.

Still from Lord of the Flies (1990)

Innocuous and appropriate cover art

 

Recreational? Entertaining? Uplifting? Stimulating? Ephemeral? Utterance? Proposition? Apostrophe?

Not only are corporations people, now things corporations create are people...

It is reasonable to assume we will be hearing more on this...  I'm not sure what might be considered reasonable in debates where vast amounts of money and tremendous political influence are at stake.

More?  HERE and HERE.

Les Bêtes - stop-motion animation by Michael Granberry - exotic figures, sensational, nightmarish, grotesque, cleverly done... But clever? In what ways? What do we learn from it? How do we benefit from viewing this? In what ways is it excessive? In what ways does it reflect aesthetic "deficits"? What might Aristotle observe, formally and casually? What might Plato say? What might Xenophon advise?

Progress Report

In Emanations 12 I published Part I of my novel:

 Witch Book

 Being that Most Esteemed 

of Literary Forms Yclept 

"A Novel Rex" 

as told to 

Carter Kaplan 

by

A Wizard

The novel is now fully drafted and I am going through the process of revision, as well I am in touch with readers for their suggestions.  

It is a stimulating book. I am using the novel form as a medium for communicating "artistic things," as usual.

Sketch for "Circe" - John William Waterhouse

Sensational(ism): activity, stimulus, drama, emotion, mitigated thought... imagination fed but with what?

Doc Savage Magazine #8 - by Ernie Chan

Walter Grab - "Bild A9DW"

distraction... counterpoint... counterbalance...  

    compare a mobile 

The story of the Watchers and the Nephilim from 1 Enoch

YouTube description:

The story of the Watchers and the Nephilim in this video comes mainly from 1 Enoch (the Book of Enoch), an ancient Jewish text that is not part of the biblical canon of Jews, Catholics, Protestants, or most Orthodox churches. The only major church that accepts it as Scripture is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. 

1 Enoch is pseudepigrapha, meaning it is attributed to Enoch but was written centuries later. It was composed between roughly the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD, and it was widely read in the Second Temple period. Fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament quotes it in Jude 1:14–15. 

The Bible itself (Genesis 6:1–4) only briefly says that the "sons of God" took wives from the "daughters of men," and that the Nephilim, the "mighty men of old," were on the earth in those days. It does not explain who the "sons of God" were, and interpretations have varied over the centuries. The Book of Enoch expands this passage. It describes 200 angels called the Watchers who descended on Mount Hermon, fathered giants with human women, and taught forbidden knowledge to humanity, leading to the Flood. 

This video is a dramatized adaptation of these ancient extra-biblical traditions, not the official teaching of most Christian churches. 

Enoch walked with God for three hundred years — and then, one morning, he simply was not there. Before that, two hundred angels swore an oath on Mount Hermon, took wives among men, and taught the world iron, war and sorcery. Their sons grew five metres tall and ate the harvest of whole villages. And one old man was sent up the mountain to read them their sentence to their faces. 

Genesis 4-6 · Genesis 5:21-24 · Hebrews 11:5 · Jude 1:14-15 · 1 Enoch 1-16 (the Book of the Watchers) ""And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him." — Genesis 5:24" 

The Chronicles of Enoch is a full-length biblical film about the seventh man from Adam, the world before the flood, and the fall of the Watchers. It follows Enoch of the village of Jared — the man Genesis says walked with God and was taken without dying — from the night two hundred angels swore their oath on the snow of Mount Hermon, through the birth of the Nephilim giants, to the vision in the house of crystal and fire where he was given a sentence to carry back down. It draws on Genesis 5, on Hebrews 11, on Jude, and on the Book of the Watchers from 1 Enoch, and it stages every scene in the world it happened in: mud brick on stacked stone, hand-spun wool, hammered copper, and the first iron blades at the forges of the fallen. If you have ever wondered what Genesis means when it says there were giants in the earth in those days, or who the sons of God were, or why one man in the whole line of Adam never saw death — this is that story, told end to end. His son Methuselah lived longer than any man who ever lived, and he was still standing on that hill when the sky closed.

Made with AI-assisted animation, written and directed by hand, faithful to the biblical text.

Russian Space Web

"RussianSpaceWeb.com is a reader-supported independent publication, not affiliated with any government or private institution. First developed in mid-1990s, this site is one of the oldest space-related portals on the web. It is unmatched in its level of detail and visual content by any other publication in the world. In many respects, RussianSpaceWeb.com has been the online face of the Russian space program and one of the few independent voices consistently tracking the Russian space industry for the past two decades."

Click link above or HERE for extensive archive.

"See the fabulous Go-Jos dancing on the Moon" (A question of the Human Condition?)

Allegorical? But what might that allegory import?

"Welcome to Surrealmageddon ..." Diabolyric#1 by Bienvenido Bones Bañez Jr.

M I S C H A L T H E = THE ALCHEMIST (Isaac Newton and Raymond Lull uncover an anagram in Paradise Lost Book I, lines 207-216)

Click the image for video:

Him haply slumbring on the Norway foam

The Pilot of some small night-founder'd Skiff, 

Deeming some Island, oft, as Sea-men tell,

With fixed Anchor in his skaly rind

Moors by his side under the lee, while night

Invests the sea, and wished morn delays. 

So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay, 

Chained on the burning lake; nor ever thence 

Had risen, or heaved his head, but that the will 

And high permission of all-ruling Heaven 

Left him at large to his own dark designs, 

That with reiterated crimes he might 

Heap on himself damnation, while he sought 

Evil to others, and enraged might see 

How all his malice served but to bring forth...

Thanks to John Geraghty.  More? Click HERE.

Interrogating the "Highbrow Moment"

Disruption effects: broken expectations, skewed symmetry, physiological-optical legerdemain