Monthly Link Dump: February 2025

This is my monthly link dump, a regular monthly series containing a mix of links to interesting blog posts I’ve read from the past month covering arts & culture, myth, folklore, landscape punk, hauntology, anarchism, utopianism, the gothic, neo-fabulism, and the Weird.

From Richard Smith's non-medical blogs - When England was empty, quiet, and beautiful:

It may be that most of the English have inside them an idyllic (if largely false) idea of rural England, and they will find that idea reinforced by W G Hoskins’s (unintentionally?) poetic book The Making of the English Landscape. Published in 1955 and a favourite book of W H Auden and William Boyd, it was the first book to read the English countryside historically and not just topographically, as many, including Wordsworth, had done. It’s been superseded by historically more accurate books, but it’s still read for its originality and the beauty of its prose.

From The Peaceful Revolutionary - A Free Society: What Essential Freedoms Does It Take To Have A Free Society?:

If we want to establish and maintain a free society we need to understand what the requirements and essential characteristics of a free society are. We need to know just not what we are against, but what we are for. Below are what I believe are the twelve essential ingredients for guaranteeing a free society, with the reasons why I believe they are necessary, how these freedoms enable better possibilities, and how a better world cannot exist long without them.

From Jeremy Gilbert at JeremyGilbertWriting - Call for Papers “Grounded Futures: The Poetics and Politics of Soil in a Changing World”:

Rich with past histories of abundance and scarcity, composed of cycles of death and regeneration, the land beneath our feet bears the legacies of the past and portends the futures to come. Soil is both allegorical (used to invoke suspect patriotisms and allegiances) and resolutely material. What would it mean to centre the narratives, temporality, and life worlds of soil in interdisciplinary discussions of sustainable futures?

From Rowan Lee at The Harvest Maid’s Revenge - To Defeat Fascism, We Must Reject Nostalgia:

Aside from being a useful political tool, nostalgia can also be a great driver of profits, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the hyper-capitalist United States. As each generation ages into its disposable income, movie studios mine the childhoods of their audiences for nuggets of IP gold, resurrecting franchises that should have stayed dead and selling toys to adults. For every person who complains about cynical cash ins, there are three more willing to spend their money on reboots and merch. Nostalgia sells.

From M. John Harrison - untitled:

I might count today as the day I finished the new book, even though a paragraph here and there still needs work. No title yet. Otherwise, it’s a novel, and it’s finished. My seaside novel in fact, after all these years. It’s also a kind of Gothic, a road movie, and–obviously–another Brexit novel. Nested inside are various parodies, self parodies, pastiches and political metaphors.

From the Global Blake Network - In Conversation with Jacob Smith – Recording:

Jacob Smith discusses parts of his book, Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind. Bateson began his academic career as an anthropologist in the 1930s, collaborated with Margaret Mead on groundbreaking anthropological research utilizing photography and motion pictures, and participated in the founding conferences on cybernetics. After parting ways with Mead, Bateson embarked upon a series of research inquiries that moved across academic disciplines, culminating in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), a book that brought him a new level of public recognition and influence. Bateson was deeply influenced by the work of William Blake, and the talk will present his thoughts on Blake. This talk also explores an audio visual adaptation of Blake with reference to the soundscapes of David Lynch, which Jacob has used to create an audiovisual essay on William Blake's The Sea of Time and Space.

From Tim at Cultural Snow - About bookshops and GBS:

News from Clitheroe in Lancashire, where another bookshop closes and the owner complains not only of punitive rents and the more general decline of the high street but also our old friend dumbing-down. I’m not sure of Paul Hamer’s logic here, as he appears to blame the insidious intellectual hollowing-out of Western society on the prevalence of vape shops and nail bars, but I can certainly offer some sort of anecdotal evidence.

From Stephen Prince at A Year In The Country - Queens of Evil, Tam Lin and The Touchables – High Fashion Transitional Psych Folk Horror, Pastoral Fantasy and Dreamlike Isolation: Wyrd Explorations 29:

There is a mini film sub-genre of pastoral fantasy, with at times elements of folk horror, wherein late 1960s and turn of the decade high fashion mixes with grown up fairytale high jinks, wayward behaviour and sometimes a step or two or more towards the dark side, all carried out in dreamlike isolation in the woods and pastoral settings.

From Ben Werdmuller at Werd I/O - Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’:

I've also heard voices say that there should have been less discussion of racial equity: less Black Lives Matter, less 1619 Project, less discussion of systemic inequality. It's nonsense, and as Butler says, it's a road that leads us down an inevitably fascist path.

From James A. Reeves - Figure With Meat:

There are many reasons Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat bothers the mind. It’s a crazed smear of flesh, velvet, and bone, but I think it lingers mostly because the screaming bishop inhabits a zone that cannot be determined, a room etched only by a few ghostly chalk lines.

From Gavin Burrows at Lucid Frenzy Junior - ‘SAPPHIRE AND STEEL’:

Creator PJ Hammond has said he wanted to reverse the standard orientation of time travel stories, where it's time which comes to the characters. Rob Young, in The Magic Box commented “each assignment takes place in one location, and rather than emotion or interpersonal drama, it is the space, the architecture of the set and its spatial relationship to time that the characters are most preoccupied with.”