Musing out loud

John Schoenherr, 1962

One of the structures of Casa Sperimentale near Rome, photo Oliver Astrologo

Sr.N4 Hovercraft photo essay

Click here for the Wikipedia Article on the SR.N4

Perpareing for the Highbrow analysis of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Act for Religious Freedom

We shall begin our consideration of the law in a week or so. To get the most out of that analysis, please review the following Highbrow posts:

Moral Philosophy in Context

The Declaration of Independence

Philosophical Remarks on the Declaration of Independence: Sections 1 & 2

Philosophical Remarks on the Declaration of Independence: Sections 3, 4 & 5

Declaration of Independence, the deleted passage

American Political Philosophy - The Basics (a variety of related discussions)

Questions to consider:

What are the relationship among St. Thomas Aquinas's concepts (or are they simply accurate descriptions?) of Revealed Theology and Natural Theology and Natural Law?

What  are the political and legal ramifications of considering human beings to be "God's Property" (via John Locke, by way of an exemplar of argumentation along these lines)?

What constitutes a "False Religion" in the Virginia Act of Religious Freedom, according to Jefferson?  

Do "False Religions" under Jefferson's definitions have any claim to protections, exceptions, emoluments, privileges or even a place in American society, law, and culture?

Until we return to this topic, Highbrow posts will continue as usual, exploring the frontiers of ephemera, aesthetic discriminations, and the activity of dispelling Philosophical Credulousness through the clarification of grammar.

Aristotle studying in his youth

A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom

"A BILL for establishing RELIGIOUS FREEDOM" - Thomas Jefferson

 § 57-1. Act for religious freedom recited.

The General Assembly, on January 16, 1786, passed an act in the following words:

"Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishment, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who, being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do; that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, have established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical, and even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the ministry those temporary rewards which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct, are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labors, for the instruction of mankind; that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends only to corrupt the principles of that religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing, with a monopoly of worldly honors and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it; that though, indeed, those are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet, neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he, being of course judge of that tendency, will make his opinions the rules of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere, when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail, if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them:

"Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested or burthened, in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

"And though we well know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the ordinary purposes of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding assemblies constituted with powers equal to our own, and that, therefore, to declare this act to be irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind; and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right."

Source

More

More 

Analysis forthcoming.  Stay tuned.

Raoul Hausmann, 1886 - 1971 Cofondateur du mouvement Dada à Berlin et surnommé le «Dadasophe»

Emanations contributor Marleen S. Barr has a new book: Feminist Science Fiction’s Sartorial Spaces: Fashioning Future Females

 Click the cover image (or HERE) for the Amazon sales page.  Routledge description HERE.

Feminist Science Fiction’s Sartorial Spaces: Fashioning Future Females is a collection of critical essays consisting of established critical voices and cutting-edge new generation fresh perspectives across feminist theory, science fiction, and fashion. This book brings science fiction to bear upon the limiting impact clothing still has upon women. Science fiction literature can envision how yet-to-be-designed clothes can unequivocally signal female power. The contributors argue that it is time to turn to science fiction to lead the way in making empowering female attire real. This book is for scholars and students who are interested in the interplay between fashion and science fiction.

Highbrow Performances: Todd Rundgren "Utopia" (alt. title "Utopia Theme"), 1974

Cover art from a science fiction gaming magazine with an image evidently derived (loosely so) from Lovecraft - sensational, provocative, speculative, surreal (interesting for about fifteen seconds)

Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society 13, 1982

Roger Penrose explains describes Godel's incompleteness theorem in 3 minutes

explains

Occult Material in the Invisible Tower Trilogy?

None.  It is adventure, high fantasy, satire, and an inquiry into the character and nature of the Human Condition.

Click the image to view the Amazon descriptions of the books:

Los Angeles' Occult Past: interview with Ronnie Pontiac

Curious subject, curious ideas, curious sub-culture, curious history... indeed a curious city

An abstract crossing the borders of genre

Richard M. Powers’ (1962) for Conditionally Human by Walter M. Miller Jr.

Sample pages from Fluxus

Source

Fluxus materials and books available at AbeBooks

A review by Richard Kostelanetz: The Fluxus Newspaper 1964-1979 edited by George Maciunas and Fluxus Editorial Council for Fluxus

Fluxus has been the moniker for a group of artists mostly in downtown Manhattan, with compatriots in Europe and Japan, that coalesced in the late 1950s. Coming to know many of them personally a decade later, I realized that I might have been one of them had I been born a few years earlier than 1940 and not been a graduate student at uptown Columbia until 1966.

Their esthetic descended from Dada and John Cage (as did mine, later), as they worked in music, visual art, literature, and especially performances. (Only the last I didn’t do.) Though initially attended by a choice few, some of the last have been memorialized in art writing and eventually scholarship.

Respecting Cage’s demand of freedom in choosing esthetic materials, they eschewed heaviness with innovative work that was initially esthetically acceptable to everyone who cared. Two intentions were audacity and comedy, which are ideals I want for my own art.

Their leader and most brilliant exemplar was George Maciunas (1931-1977), a Lithuanian who’d come to America after WWII and initially trained as an architect at first-rank US universities. In addition to organizing and helping his colleagues, he did many things in his own name, some more brilliantly than others, some ephemeral and others permanent. Among the latter I count his publishing, and the first achievement of The Fluxus Newspaper (Primary Information, 2024) is bringing together scarce issues from nearly fifty years ago, mostly only a few pages long, all bound together in a single book outsized at 10.5” x 14”.

The first departure is that Maciunas as an inventive designer used the larger printed page as a field for various elements both visual and verbal and then in different typefaces. The book’s cover exemplifies his departure.

A second departure was the seemingly unlimited variety of materials on a single page, ranging from abstract designs to pseudo-news clipping to historic photographs to price lists for other items that Maciunas was publishing. Look at the cover. The disparities among the items make many Fluxus pages funny, as indeed was he.

On the front page of February 1964 are these blocks in five vertical columns: a headlined news story about mosquito extermination, “Latest News” above an array of five-digit numerals, more news about the complaints of women wearing girdles at high altitudes, a defaced one-dollar bill, a thumbnail about “knots,” a “curve” street sign, “WOW!,” a short Scottish news article about “yeggs” (burglars) locking themselves in a “Ladies’ Room,” a current price list for Fluxus editions, another vertical thumbnail photo of a 19th century West Coast bean dealer who resembles Maciunas, the reproduction of an ancient patent for a “saluting device” hat, and much, much else, again all within a single page. Otherwise, another whole page of this book is devoted to George Brecht’s legendary conceptual texts, horizontal thumbnails each less than a few lower-case words long, nearly all of them incorporating the word “page”: “spit on this page,” “eat something on this page,” “turn 14 pages slowly,” “hide this page,” “write as much as you can on this page,” “listen five minutes before turning this page,” “astonish someone quickly with this page,” etc. In the middle is a blank thumbnail, literally an empty page, that implicitly enhances the others. 

Another section of this book has first a recto and then a two-page spread with dozens of thumbnails both horizontal and vertical of several Fluxus performances in 1969 and 1970, all accompanied by a numbered sidebar in Maciunas’ signature sans-serif typeface in which individuals and details are identified. 

Therefore, within this book’s 80 unenumerated pages are really 10 times as many distinct blocks of printed matter. As pages offer different configurations, merely flipping from a recto to a verso often offers surprise. Therefore as well, anyone reading through this book for the second time or even a third time will discover marvelous blocks that he or she missed on first reading. 

The customary promotion for this anthology lists all the contributors, many of whose names are remembered a decade later, reminding us that few reprints from any historic periodical can offer such a distinguished exhaustive list: “Ay-O, Carol Bergé, Joseph Beuys, Elaine Bloedow, George Brecht, Christo, Philip Corner, Walter De Maria, Willem de Ridder, Bern Erismann, Nye Ffarrabas [participating as Bici Forbes], Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, Carolyn Krumm, Heinz Gappmayr, Eugen Gomringer, Raymond Hains, Dick Higgins, Geoffrey Hendricks, Jon Hendricks, Alice Hutchins, Tatsu Izumi, Ray Johnson, Joe Jones, Allan Kaprow, Milan Knížak, Alison Knowles, Arthur Köpcke, Takehisa Kosugi, Ruth Krauss, Philip Krumm, György Ligeti, George Maciunas, Angus MacLise, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Hans Nordenström, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, James Riddle, Dieter Roth, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Tomas Schmit, Daniel Spoerri, Christer Strömholm, Yasunao Tone, Stan VanDerBeek, Ben Vautier, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell, Yoshimasa Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, William S. Wilson, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela.” (Yes, I regret not being among them.) I’m not aware of any other periodical, neither in literature nor in art, offering such a comprehensive inventory decades later, simply because nearly all the contributors’ names would have become unfamiliar.

With materials no less deviant than they were several decades ago, this Newspaper book is a treasure, a monument to the continuing life of Fluxus. 

P.S. Regarding Maciunas’ achievement as a highly original arts historian, may I recommend this appreciation by a German scholar writing in English:

© Copyright 2026 Richard Kostelanetz, reproduced by permission. Source: KostelOmnibus on Substack 

Richard Kostelanetz by Leonid Drozner,

Exploiting a Typology?

Wifredo Lam - Rumblings of the Earth, 1950 

Staccato Onomatopoeia (text or typology?)

 

Zzzzzzz... 

First French rigid airship "Spiess" (1913)

 

Будет ласковый дождь - 1984 Soviet animation based on Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains"

A prose poem? An ultimatum? A theological treatise? A schismatist's enthusiasm for an eccentric myth?

"When Man faces doom from outer space, he must choose between escape to other worlds or life in giant cocoons."

Dean Vollmar - "A perspective on life, death, human consciousness, and the eternal nature of the soul"