Harrisons Art of Generosity - Poetics and Ecology

The Harrisons’ Art of Generosity: Poetics and EcologyMonica ManolescuThis article offers a literary perspective on Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s discourses, texts, stories and voices, and the ways in which they act in performative ways, creating an art of doing things with words. I would like to argue that this performativity is the expression of a strong commitment to the present moment that Camus qualified as "generosity" and that defines the models of authorship, agency, art-m...

Is This Real - An Introdution to Religious Experience

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Some brief reflections on canon and genius

Among the many bees in my professional bonnet is the issue of canon formation: how some works become singled out as being of particular value and worthy of preservation and perpetuation through subsequent generations. The mechanisms of canon formations are usually shared by whatever type of art we are talking about, whether it is pictorial art, the art of writing, or the art of music. There are several factors that can contribute to a work's entry into a given canon, and there are also severa...

Unmasking Prosopological Exegesis - Defining a New and Improved Way to Read Scripture

Prosopological exegesis. Have you heard of it? If not, that’s alright, I suspect this technique for reading Scripture will run its course in the next decade and be replaced by another interpretive fad in the 2030s. In the mean time, however, this way of (mis)reading Scripture will find its way into articles, book, commentaries, and pulpits. And for that reason, students of the Word and especially teachers who rely on the scholarship of others (read: all of us), should be( a)ware of thi...

Celebrating an 11th Anniversary

Four score and seven years ago (less seventy-six years) I started this blog. That makes this Once Upon a Screen’s eleventh anniversary. Who’d ‘a thunk it? While an anniversary is cause for celebration, I admit to feeling a bit guilty this year given I have barely blogged. It has been a tough one, but I am happy Once Upon a Screen is still here for me to movie vent. As is tradition on this blog, I celebrate anniversaries with tributes to the number. Let’s look at the ...

Complicated conversations - Tactics for dealing with conspiracy theorists

The season is upon us, which means you’ll likely be gathering with family members and friends to share a holiday meal, but that can also mean sharing some dubious claim someone has seen on the internet.  So we’d like to offer you a couple of tactics to use over the holidays to counter those claims you might face from your wacky relatives or friends — and to keep the peace. Moon landing Let’s start with a conspiracy theory that is very common. Ever since NASA sent men to the ...

Does Jesus fail to meet expectations in Matthew 11

The lectionary gospel reading for Advent 3 in Year A is Matt 11.2–11, and as usual is rather truncated, so you might want to extend the reading by a verse or two before and after to be fair to its setting. The chapter begins with the second of Matthew’s five summary statements that conclude the five focussed sections of Jesus’ teaching: When Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and preach in their cities (Matt 11.1) The summary ph...

Fantasy - How It Works by Brian Attebery

https://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-How-Works-Brian-Attebery-ebook/dp/B0B5RYQL7Z/ref=strangehorizonsCharles Vess’s stunning cover will be one thing that draws readers into Brian Attebery’s examination of fantasy; another, of course, will be the author’s reputation as a critic and editor, particularly as editor of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. The nine chapters collected here (a tenth summarises the conclusions he has earlier come to, drawing threads together and organising them free fr...

Renaissance science – XLVI

One area that is not usually counted among the sciences is cryptography, lying as it does, in this day and age, between, logic, mathematics, and informatics. In earlier times it is perhaps best viewed as a part of logic. Perhaps surprisingly, cryptography underwent a major development during the Renaissance provoked by an earlier development in the hands of Islamicate scholars.Cryptography means literally hidden writing, coming from the Greek kryptos meaning hidden and graphiameaning write, e...

In Praise of Tears - A Short Intellectual History

Written by Georgia Smith"In Praise of Tears  Pleurer / crying  The amorous subject has a particular propensity to cry; the functioning and appearance of tears in this subject.  …  Who will write the history of tears? In which societies, in which periods have we wept? Since when is it that men (and not women) no longer cry? Why was ‘sensibility’, at a certain moment, transformed into ‘sentimentality’?" Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (1978)  For Barthes "the amorous body is doubled by a hi...

How Scientists’ Misguided Utopian Theories of Biological Selection Defined the 20th Century

For the whole of history, all cultures, all countries, all societies, have considered the principles of who can reproduce, who lives and who dies. Governments, society, biology, tradition and myriad other factors nudge and steer and compel people away from the freedom to reproduce with whomever they want. Biology and culture are inextricably entwined: each sculpts the other. For just over a century, we have referred to the deliberate crafting of society specifically by biological design with ...

Commenting on Hollywood From Within Hollywood

Universal Pictures/Ringer illustration The new movie documenting two female journalists’ investigation into Harvey Weinstein is thorough and at times even powerful. But how do you reconcile the fact that Weinstein’s behavior was enabled by the silence of Hollywood with that same industry’s impulse to make a film about his demise? Once Harvey Weinstein’s crimes—and the larger picture of a system that allowed them to persist—became public, the film industry didn’t wait long to sta...

Hue and cry, or the mystery of red gold

https://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/t/0/_/oupblog/~https://blog.oup.com/2022/10/hue-and-cry-or-the-mystery-of-red-gold/As a student, I read Homer in English and ran into the phrase wine-colored sea. At that time, I did not know that in Old English, waves were sometimes called brown and only wondered what kind of wine the Ancient Greeks drank. No one in my surroundings could enlighten me. Since that time, I have read many articles and books on the history of color perception and in 2014 even reviewe...

How Traveling Booksellers Spread Literature Throughout Ancient Greece

How many books were there in the golden age of ancient Greece? What percentage of the population could read them? We have only shreds of information preserved by chance, blades of grass that float along on the breeze but don’t allow us to calculate the size of the meadow from which they came. And most of them refer to an exceptional place, the city of Athens. The rest remains in shadow.Seeking traces of this invisible literacy, we turn to images of readers represented in ceramic paintings. Fr...

The Lull

"It’s a dead calm, isn’t it?" "It is, sir. But there’s something out of the common coming, for sure."—Joseph Conrad, Typhoon Nothing happens. A dull sea, the color of slate, mirrors the gray skies billowing above. The sun flickers through the mist, its pale disc begging for an appearance, like an old actor whose glory has passed. The wind has slackened. Any sense of direction and purpose has given way to aimless drift. Time seems to have come to a halt. Ennui builds—and yet, the stillness is ...

Reloading Laughter: Žižek and a Theory of Comedy

Despite his reputation for telling jokes and the central role that humor plays in his philosophy, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek does not have a theory of comedy. In his work, Žižek does not just tell jokes or explain the popularity of certain genres such as Holocaust comedy films. He has also made brief interventions in the theory of comedy that include mostly applications of Hegel’s theory of objective humor or Alenka Zupančič’s Hegelian theory of comedy. At the outset of the "The C...

CFP: Exhibition in Crisis, Aniki 10, no. 2

Hi all, Along with my colleagues Ross Melnick and Rafael de Luna, I am co-editing a special section of the July 2023 issue of Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image on the topic of "Exhibition in Crisis." We seek to draw attention to the transformative effect that crises past and present have had on film exhibition as a mode of cultural practice, a set of institutions and actors, and an object of research in film and media studies. In this dossier, we hope to investigate the concept ...

The Rollright Ritual | William G. Gray | download

The Rollright Ritual William G. Gray 0 / 0 0 comments In the early 1970s the redoubtable old occultist William G. Gray bic...

Metalucid Dreaming

Dream Log: March 17, 2001 (idea) See all of Dream Log: March 17, 2001, there are 2 more in this node. I had a dream about lucid dreams. No kidding! Prologue: I had just come home from the bar. It was three AM. While I was brushing my teeth i remembered the e2 node about lucid dreams and tried to levitate the soap dispenser. It didn't happen, as expected. Then I went to bed. Sometime in the early morning I started having these dreams. The first one was about an environmental...

Zombies (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

( attr(href) ) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( attr(href) )  Browse  About  Support SEP ...

James Baldwin on Art, Life, Writing, Reading, and More

Happy birthday, James Baldwin! Here are some quotes from the writer:   "Artists are here to disturb the peace."   "This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art."   "When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."   "Most of us,...

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE, No 34 - a Dual-Content Nonideal Cognitive Semantics for Thought-ShapersSourceURL: https://againstprofphil.org/2022/08/14/the-philosophy-of-the-future-34-a-dual-content-nonideal-cognitive-semantics-for-thought-shapers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-philosophy-of-the-future-34-a-dual-content-nonideal-cognitive-semantics-for-thought-shapers                "FUTUREWORLD," by A. Lee/Unsplash   ...

Authorial Intent - PEL.mp3

Bad Art - and other clips from The Nation 1 Aug 2022 print edition

"The Government must guarantee housing as a public good, and then construct millions of homes."

How to Become a World Historical Figure (Péladan's Dream)

This is a guest post by an IRL friend of mine who wishes to go by the pen name Matryoshka X—you can email him at matryoshka.x11@gmail.com with comments, criticisms, etc. I would also like to note that I have changed the domain name of the blog to www.secretorum.life (my previous domain, rogersbacon.substack.com, forwards to this address automatically now). I. Introduction Erik Hoel writes the following in reference to Roger’s Bacon’s ...