Downstream from the Meritocracy: 1) The Institution of Expertise, 2) Aspirations of Self-Image Attending Resurgent Metaphysics, 3) Reasserting Self-Value and the Triumph of Private Ownership as the Agent of Production in the Optimization of Access to Goods and Services for One and All

Opening April 6 (tomorrow) at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center: Spring Celebration for the Earth

Click image for detailed view.

Дорога к звёздам (1957)

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, September, 1964

Dear Patty –

Dinner is being served – so far caviar, antipasto & soup – tell Mommy the wine is the same as we serve as home.  Fillet of beef is main course (for me). Service excellent, as usual.

Now finished dinner – skipped the cake – had fresh fruit instead.

Be a good girl for me – huh?  Help Mommy and Gator. Don’t fight with Robby.

Love Dad

The Mare of Steel

But is this highbrow? 

If so, in what ways?  And why does it matter? 

Wallace Martin - Cultural Influences on Ouspensky in Russia

Wallace Martin

 

A point of departure for many interesting considerations. Click HERE for the paper.

Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky

A fifty-second adventure

Having a talk with Jean-Paul L. Garnier (Space Cowboy Books Interview)

The Ziggurat of Ur

Where gods and kings pursued their heart's desire.

Source

Highbrow advice worth repeating

Place this where Locke pivots from his Letter on Toleration to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Meanwhile, check Aristotle for confirmation, HERE.

And see you tomorrow:

Click HERE to register for access.

Free.

T Coronae Borealis, or T CrB

Please click HERE.

It was for all of us

The Vapart Disintegrator

Scientific American, July 31, 1877

Googling the Experts

Clark Ashton Smith Bookplate Design

Seller's description:

ORIGINAL ART BY CLARK ASHTON SMITH. Smith's Design for his own bookplate, ink on paper, 5 ¼ x 5 inches, titled EX LIBRIS CLARK ASHTON SMITH, Signed "CAS" lower right corner. Depicts a strange clawed monster bearing what looks like Smith's own face (a self-portrait?) along with a typically weird flower against a backgroud of hills. Small pinholes at corners, on small hole (by the monster's foot). Very good condition. Unique, and rather amazing. This item came from Smith to Roy A. Squires; Squires used it as the cover image for his Catalogue 7, BEYOND THE BIBLIOGRAPHIES. Unique Items for Collectors who are Not Satisfied with Mere Completeness (Circa 1973), an offering of mostly autographs, manuscripts and association copies of books, mostly pertaining to HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and the Lovecraft Circle. Curiously, the bookplate was not listed for sale in the catalogue; evidently Squires "liked it too much". We agree with him: this is a remarkable piece, certainly one of my all-time favourite pieces of CAS artwork, now offered for sale. $2950.00

It looks like the piece has been sold.  Please click HERE.

What makes your big head so hard!

Proving Grounds or: How I Still Don't Worry About the Bomb But Maybe Should

Proving Grounds by Jean-Paul L. Garnier, Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2023.

We don’t hear much about nuclear proliferation and nuclear wars. If we do, the specter of nuclear war remains an abstraction because it is presented as an ancillary concern to matters that are more central to the committee-written political narratives that these days pass for journalism. Vladimir Putin comes to mind, where the nuclear saber-rattling attending the Ukraine conflict remains a vague bit of stage scenery set well behind Putin’s stalking persona, intentions, lawlessness, and so on. The “monster” is not nuclear war so much as a politician who is defying the will of the “true” international order as defined by the elites controlling that order, and who are competing with the elites that "monster" represents. But nuclear war is itself a monster, and maybe in the consideration of the human condition and the fragility of civilization, we should not lose sight of what nuclear weapons are and what they can do.

As a child of the 1960s, and then as a witness to the successful anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s, I think by the time I was in my late-teens I had become accustomed to the feeling that the threat of nuclear war was a thing of the past. Pink Floyd's pulling the nuclear fear rabbit out of the hat in The Wall (1979) was passé and dull. The dragon had been slain. By the 1980s, even the sometimes-alarming emotions concerning Ronald Regan’s nuclear saber-rattling seemed rather quaint. After all, that fear “long ago” had been drowned in the laughter produced by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  

There was some further worry in the early 2000s when India and Pakistan were squaring off, and I only vaguely recall Donald Rumsfeld flying over to the Indian subcontinent to remind the Indians and the Pakistanis that nuclear war was not an option. Throughout that episode I had assumed, as if it was a given fact, that the human race was thoroughly sane in this matter, and that nuclear war would never occur. Maybe I was right.

Perhaps this is why that among our contemporary cultural artifacts there is a paucity of expressions serving to remind us of the horror of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Jean-Paul L. Garnier’s Proving Grounds helps to fill this gap. A slim, cleverly illustrated, classic paperback-size production, this new book reminds me of the excitement and “relevance” characterizing Marshall McLuhan and Quenton Fiore's very “mod” and remarkably dynamic collaborations: The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village.  Garnier’s slim volume presents us with 29 poems, each accompanied by a detailed, black and white photograph of a nuclear explosion. It has a historical feel—a sort of mal du pays for the atomic age and 1950s science fiction; the combined effect of reading the poems and viewing the fiery images produces curious impressions.  Here are contemporary manifestations of Charles Baudelaire’s flowers-of-evil aesthetic refracted through the lens of our memories of the atomic age and the strange (and relatively unexplored) lens of considering such weapons over three generations later in the 21^st century.

The recent Godzilla Minus One is a strong reminder of what nuclear war means, and how even the most militaristic of societies can transform and abandon war as a means of pursuing foreign policy and then re-direct its energies to the purpose of improving peoples’ lives. The wonderful success of that film suggests that nuclear weapons and nuclear war is a subject that we must continue to consider; it is a subject that still, and with good reason, haunts us in profound ways.

In that spirit, Garnier’s Proving Grounds is a healthy reminder that nuclear weapons are antithetical to civilization, notwithstanding their psychological effects, i.e. frightening whole populations into compliance of one kind or another.  Nuclear weapons remain unacceptable, and we must continue—notwithstanding our sense of security and our sense of the continuum of civilization—to not only overcome the threat of nuclear war, but to also free ourselves from these weapons entirely.

Click the cover image to view the Proving Grounds Amazon page:

Funny, but is it on the mark?

Credit: Existential Comics

Are these good characterizations?  Is this Wittgenstein's place in Western Philosophy?

It's a fair beginning.

Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's activity underscores the point that the task of philosophers remains important because the credulity attending metaphysical speculation and unfit/unsuitable language is an on-going problem that must be reviewed and analyzed by philosophers specializing in grammatical analysis. The sense of new scientific and philosophical propositions driven by on-going technological change, institutional corruption and new political shibboleths requires steady and careful review.

Sahasrara (Crown Chakra) Blues

Archeological Consciousness in Theory and Practice