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, thought mitigated... 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

Off you pop then chap, best of luck. Pip, pip tally-ho!

Surrealism absent... what? What is missing? Care? Application? Critical judgement? Inspiration? Attention to detracting details, and the artist's "psychological need" to forcefully remove and/or correct those blemishes (for example, the stock "illustration quality" rocks in the foreground, the sloppy starfield)

"The Flight of the Dragonfly" by Michael Gilbertt, 1970. (maybe)

Sensationalism, escapism, aesthetic recreation for selective tastes... Classified ads from Weird Tales, May 1949

 

Ham Radio (www.ham-radio.live)

Talk, listen, connect, any frequency

Introduction HERE

Click the image to access the site:

Cat Purring for 10 Hours

But is it actually relaxing, really? 

Hmm.

A rule emerges:

It's not the purr, it's the purrer.

Maybe.

Countdown to the Equinox

Look into my chromatophores...

The Secret Hide-out

 

Click either image for Amazon description. 

Aesthetically pleasing or aesthetically interesting? And in what ways?

Vigil Finlay for Startling Stories 1952

From Fliegende Blätter (1928)

 Brief Wiki gloss HERE.

Encounter with depth perception (heading-driven, packaged, focus-centring syntax code response - without labelling, can illusionary visual stimuli compare to an utterance?)

Andrea Pavan

Christopher Hitchens - Why Women Still Aren't Funny

Yes and no.

The question remains whether one can or cannot heap so much generalised characterisation upon a distinction (male/female) that is, yes, topological, but also is expressed through so many variations that both conform to and break away from those self-same typologies, and sometimes miraculously?   If Hitchens were still alive, I should suggest he find a woman whom he finds funny--and also very attractive. Such a solution solves all the problems about which he is evidently concerned, though unfortunately introducing a few others...  

The whole thing is obviously of a "promotional" nature--at one point Hitchens seems gently bothered to repress a laugh at the whole thing. 

Though interesting (maybe, I was unable to sit through the entire video, and switched it off).  Highbrow?  Not really.

Highbrow reflections from Emily Brontë (But too sober, too abstract, so as to forfeit the "highbrow" designation? Hmm. Could be. Highbrow is properly of a happy, and, very importantly, of a sociable nature; that is, by its essential character bringing people together to pursue Aristotelian goals unencumbered by distracting metaphysical excursions, Q.E.D.)

                       Lines

I die but when the grave shall press 

The heart so long endeared to thee 

When earthy cares no more distress 

And earthy joys are nought to me. 

Weep not, but think that I have past 

Before thee o'er the sea of gloom. 

Have anchored safe and rest at last 

Where tears and mouring can not come. 

'Tis I should weep to leave thee here 

On that dark ocean sailing drear 

With storms around and fears before 

And no kind light to point the shore. 

But long or short though life may be 

'Tis nothing to eternity. 

We part below to meet on high 

Where blissful ages never die.

                         ― Emily Brontë

More? Please click HERE.

Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë

The Shining, 1980 - a print on the wall of the Overlook Hotel reception office.

Postcard image of the print on the wall of the Overlook reception office. The original was a framed collage by Valentine Hugo titled "Surrealisme," dating from 1932; the B&W print on the wall likely came from the 1978 book What is Surrealism, which collected essays by Breton and was published by Pluto Press in 1978. 

 Why is it on the wall?

"Should we view Wittgenstein as enhancing British Philosophy, or British Philosophy as enhancing Wittgenstein?" - continued

I have received a back-channel response to my September 6 Highbrow post "Should we view Wittgenstein as enhancing British Philosophy, or British Philosophy as enhancing Wittgenstein?"  Here is the substance of that post, the back-channel response, and my subsequent remarks. 

The original post:

Should we view Wittgenstein as enhancing British Philosophy, or British Philosophy as enhancing Wittgenstein?

I support the former, though I should stipulate (specify or "spell out") that in addition to Locke and Bacon, I'd argue the "thrust" of "British Philosophy", as it were, is construed most clearly along a literary line, beginning with the Greek satirists, and from there to Robert Burton, Milton, Swift, Fielding, Peacock, Irving (Washington Irving), Poe, Hawthorne, Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Melville, Huxley, Orwell, Nabokov, Kubrick, and so on. "British" because it is convenient, and has some historiographic validity; though if you look at the historians and the historians of literature past fifty years, they are rather smug and reductive concerning "Whig"  (or "Whiggish") historiography, as they style it. 

As for Whiggish historiography being overly-optimistic in the face of the reality of the Human Condition?  Well, considering "Whiggish" historiography emerged from Calvinism, and small-c Calvinists like Milton, Locke, and so on, I can't for the life of me imagine much optimism or upbeat anticipation being advanced through that view of human nature. But mark this. Is it possible  that what the new historicism actually finds insufferable about Whiggish positions, is the unwelcome Whiggish--or Calvinist, both large-C and small c--habit of shining a bright light on fraud?

Which brings us back to Wittgenstein. He is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to turning on that spotlight.

The back-channel response:

The question seems fatuous to me, but also remarkably un-Wittgensteinian... W stands at a very peculiar (meant positively) juncture between German and British philosophy if (and only if) they are distinctive enough to deserve those labels at all. Two of the most enthusiastic borrowers of his ideas I know were Japanese...

My initial remarks:

Hmm. Do you mean "fatuous qua fatuous", "fatuous, as such", or "fatuous, as it were"? 

On a more serious note, is it not appropriate to review possible interdisciplinary perspectives, and uncover what might be useful--in terms of philosophic and cultural understanding--as such intersections are explored, or are you suggesting that the field of Philosophy and Literature is, erm, "Fatuous"?

 

Meanwhile, if you review what in the past fifty years the historians and literary historians have been doing in respect to the "dismissal" or "mitigation" of "whiggish" historiography (that is, a potted description of "whiggish" historiography), well, things begin to get interesting. I don't think it is at all fatuous to suggest there are ample exemplars in literature (construed along the lines of the list of authors above, as a beginning of a broader survey) that some significant and challenging questions might be raised.

My additional remarks:

"...juncture between German and British philosophy if (and only if) they are distinctive enough to deserve those labels at all." 

Compare: "Are German and English literature distinctive enough to deserve those labels at all?" 

From another direction, something might be made writing up the "German Wittgenstein" and (vs.) the "English Wittgenstein." Another, related project could be surveying the history of philosophy for antecedents, cognates and correlatives to W's thought (for example, John Locke click HERE). 

Millionaires and billionaires are not privy to the important thoughts we are examining and, importantly, recirculating, in the university, and as I might hazard to suggest, that is precisely why they have rounded us up and placed us in the university, where we won't do much harm. cf. Swift in the Preface to A Tale of a Tub. 

Traditionally, though it might not be popular today--and, as one could argue, it is merely a specimen of the English penchant toward eccentricity and enthusiasm--maybe it's the soft nature of the English aristocrat, or some foible of some faulty culture logic under-girding a nation of shopkeepers--but the phenomenon is rooted in fact: English intellectuals have traditionally enjoyed the privilege of talking "like" Swift or otherwise their aristocratic "betters", which has not been traditionally indulged in the more scientific and thus "correct" nations of Europe, where monarchs enlightened by scientific truths (moreover carefully-vetted "scientific truths" advanced by important professors) have so wonderfully kept a lid on people speaking their mind. Thankfully, these days Britain is catching up, ahem. 

Anyway, more (perhaps) persuasive (and less corrosive) than Swift's arguments are found in Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Posey, where the academic magisteria are described, well-ordered and fitted, or one might argue, and I am of the mind Sidney's advice is germane to the question of a "British" (or anyway English) philosophical "type". And while we're in that century, something might be made in a review of Elizabeth's Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, and the Golden Speech. At that time, was anyone in Europe taking like this? 

A few remarks from an historian of literature: 

British Philosophy 

"It is often maintained by historians of philosophy that England has had only one school of philosophy, or rather, that it has had none at all, for its philosophy is a perpetual protest against Scholasticism. A faith in experimental science, based upon empirical evidence of the senses, and a complementary distrust of scholastic and rationalistic a priori speculation, may be said to form the cornerstone of the English philosophical tradition. Although Swift developed no systematic philosophy--this absence, too, seems to be characteristic of the tentative and experimental English mind--a peculiarly English and to some degree Lockeian nexus of assumptions underlies one major area of his satiric technique."

 

Rejection of Mechanism in Nature 

"[Jonathan Swift strikes] at the affectation of those who, by formula and artifice, impose some rigid subjective perception upon the world and then pay honor to this graven image as truth and to themselves as its discoverers. The folly of man's refusal to see things as they really are is thus consistently translated by Swift into symbolic representations of man as a mechanism. Inflexible, blinded to external truth by his own conceit, contentious in his assumption of the infallibility of his subjective responses, man becomes a puppet in life's Punch-and-Judy show of artifice, system and self-delusion." 

Source: Bullitt, John M. Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1953. (124).

Finally, in response to the original post, another scholar writes: "Interesting! Two names I would be excited to see mentioned in relation to your text are Oswald Spengler and Quentin Skinner.

Etching of a Sámi drum from the Dutch edition of Johannes Schefferus’ *Lapponia* (1682).

"Made of reindeer-hide such drums were used to support divinatory, trance-like states, allowing the shaman (noaidi) to leave his body."

More?  Please click HERE.

Antony Williams - Alice falling - Oil on canvas

Mandrake Haiku

ah! ah! ah! ah! ah!

ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! 

ascend please mandrake

Terry Gilliam - Storytime (1968)

Not very interesting? But it's for television, I assume. Does it "work" in that context?

Clever?

Michael Butterworth News

The website of Emanations contributor and International Authors Board member Michael Butterworth has been updated to reflect his 2026 activities, including Mr. Butterworth's work in the recently published Emanations 12:

In its twelfth annual edition Emanations contained ‘The Little Arundalean’, Part 1 of a three-part memoir of my time at St Christopher School. Due to an interest in boarding education, Emanations editor Carter Kaplan virtually commissioned me to write this, although it had always been planned to form the opening of Driven by Anger, the new book length memoir above mentioned. Parts 1 and 2 are scheduled to appear in Emanations #13 and #14.

‘The Little Arundalean’ and its sequels are an exercise of memory in which I try to capture the boarding school St Christopher, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, as it was in 1957 when I first attended sixty-six years ago, and an attempt to describe how its then radical progressive co-educational teaching methods saved me from an unhappy fate in the ‘Army-style’ orthodox school system of the time.

I boarded there for six years from the age of ten. ‘St Chris’ was an unusual school even for its time. Founded in 1915 by Theosophists but Quaker-run when I attended, the school was not as liberal as Summerhill – lessons were compulsory – but it had a democratic foundation, was inclusive of the voice of its pupils, and over the years became the incubator of many who went on to be prominent creatives – Michael Winner, Jenny Diski, Paul Hamlyn, Elizabeth Jenkins, Prince Rupert Zu Loewenstein, to name a few.

From an artistic perspective there may be an interesting conjecture to make. After leaving school and becoming a contributor to New Worlds, Charles Platt then became the magazine’s designer (and finally its editor) and brought with him a certain gestalt. During the later large-format phase of New Worlds he hired onto the team a fellow St Christophean, the late author-designer Nigel Francis (Simon Francis as he became), to help cope with the increased workload. St Chris had a very particular atmosphere, and it could be said that with three practitioners, including me, having been drawn from it, the UK New Wave of Science Fiction owed something to its culture. To an old St Christophean like me, the magazine’s 1967-70 heyday stylistically as a whole is partly infused with the school’s unmistakable voice, at least the voice of St Chris as it was during our time there.

 Click HERE (or the photo of Mr Butterworth) to visit the site.  

 

Should we view Wittgenstein as enhancing British Philosophy, or British Philosophy as enhancing Wittgenstein?

Should we view Wittgenstein as enhancing British Philosophy, or British Philosophy as enhancing Wittgenstein? 

I support the former, though I should stipulate (specify or "spell out") that in addition to Locke and Bacon, I'd argue the "thrust" of "British Philosophy", as it were, is construed most clearly along a literary line, beginning with the Greek satirists, and from there to Robert Burton, Milton, Swift, Fielding, Peacock, Irving (Washington Irving), Poe, Hawthorne, Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Melville, Huxley, Orwell, Nabokov, Kubrick, and so on. "British" because it is convenient, and has some historiographic validity; though if you look at the historians and the historians of literature past fifty years, they are rather smug and reductive concerning "Whig"  (or "Whiggish") historiography, as they style it. 

As for Whigigish historiography being overly-optimistic in the face of the reality of the Human Condition?  Well, considering "Whiggish" historiography emerged from Calvinism, and small-c Calvinists like Milton, Locke, and so on, I can't for the life of me imagine much optimism or upbeat anticipation being advanced through that view of human nature. But mark this. Is it possible  that what the new historicism actually finds insufferable about Whiggish positions, is the unwelcome Whiggish--or Calvinist, both large-C and small c--habit of shining a bright light on fraud?

Which brings us back to Wittgenstein. He is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to turning on that spotlight.

Subject continued HERE

The Wittgenstein family in Vienna, Summer 1917, with Kurt (furthest left) and Ludwig (furthest right) in officers' uniforms

"Satirical and Ironic Dissolutions of Art: Duchamp's Synthesis" by P. Winston Fettner

"From a Hegelian perspective, Duchamp’s place in the development of the contemporary involves a synthesis of the satiric and ironic modes of art’s previous moments of dissolution. A Hegelian understanding of satire and irony, which are the specific forms taken by the dissolution of Classical and Christian art, will allow us to grasp historically, as a replaying and a synthesis of art’s previous dissolutions, the meaning of the peculiar narcissism, hermeticism and emptiness that afflict the contemporary artworld. That reading reworks the theme of art’s dissolution into an analytic tool, and saves the concept of “the end of art” from being a mere slogan, one charged with nostalgia and despair, but of little value as a term of art-historical and aesthetic understanding."

More HERE

Duchamp leaving with his rejected painting by André Raffray

Yes, "neatly done." Shows "craft." But is it highbrow? Is the "theological" title a gimmick? Must a theological title necessitate theological content? Must a theological title necessitate the statement of theological propositions(s)? Or can a theological "utterance" suffice, and to what purpose? Does this purpose attend the title, or does the title attend the purpose? Is it exploitative? Outside of seeking answers to these questions, I can hardly stand to look at this painting for more than fifteen seconds.

La chute de l'ange ~ The Fall of the Angel by Max Ernst, ca1923 Oil on canvas 130,8 cm x 129,8 cm Private collection

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations

Source