Monthly Link Dump: January 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 the Sheffield Patrol Group - Crookes Cemetery, 4 May 2024:

She is one of the three main markers in Crookes Cemetery. She occupies a position almost opposite one of the other markers, an angel who points to the sky, or offers directions to the nearest off-licence. Angels are sexless, but depictions of angels in stone possess gender coded form, which dictates that we associate the angel across the way with the idea and reality of the female, despite her ultimate gender neutrality.

From Dr Keri Thomas - The Dark Is Rising:

It is Midwinter’s Eve, and I’m lying in bed about to begin my yearly reading of one of my favourite books, the Susan Cooper classic The Dark is Rising. Having first read it as a highly impressionable 11 year old, the tale of Will Stanton and the Old Ones had an enormous impact on my pre-pubescent brain. Ancient magic, familial ties, time travel, doomed love, haunting music, high drama: there was nothing for me to not love.

From M. John Harrison - Serious Reading:

2024, my “recovering finally from the Booker year” year. Able to face written material again & back to reading for myself. This results in the customary peculiar pick n mix…

From Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain - Alan Moore on Austin Osman Spare:

Born in London's Snow Hill on 30 December 1886, the artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare has long been a beloved figure on those who favour the outer fringes of British art.

From Tracy Durnell - The mindset of more (series introduction):

The modern American lifestyle is a pyramid scheme that, not unlike the American antebellum South, cannot exist without undervalued labor and overexploited resources.

From Ian Holloway at Wyrd Britain - Coil Manifesto:

This reading of the 'Coil Manifesto' by Jhonn Balance was made to open a 4 hour special on Dutch Radio 4 on June 18th, 2001 on the legendary British post-industrial group, Coil.

From VI at Cold Albion - The Tyranny of Anthropocentric Asking:

Maybe it’s today I’ll finally get more bandwidth, the extra light coming into my actual flat — rather than a cabinet down the road — thick with data. So maybe, with respect to the late Leonard Cohen, I should be looking for more cracks — that’s where the light gets-in, right?

From Paul Graham Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board - Nothing was Learned:

It’s become kinda amazing to me lately that a generation of people who proudly talk up their formative years spent on PHPBB forums and IRC seem to have completely forgotten the golden rule about not feeding the trolls.

From Steven Savage - Using Bitcoin After The Apocalypse:

The fall of civilization. You probably don’t have a computer, you probably don’t have the internet, and an entirely electronic currency is your hope for the apocalypse. It was watching faith in gold transferred to faith in the blockchain, completely disconnected from the reality of civilizational crises.

From the Peaceful Revolutionary - Organising Without Rulers: Authority Vs Hierarchy:

Despite there being many successful examples of such communities, and even whole civilisations that lived without hierarchy, it is hard for people to conceive of society working in such a different way than they are used to. But Anarchy isn’t chaos, the O surrounding the A in the famous Ⓐ symbol stands for Organisation. As notable Italian revolutionary Errico Anarchist Malatesta is credited as saying, ‘Anarchism is organisation, organisation, and more organisation.’ Yet it can be a challenge in such a hierarchal world to think of organisation without rulers or representation.

From Professor Oli Mould at taCity - Excess as Resistance: The Panacea of Collective Joy in an Age of Fascism:

Against this fascist obdurateness, I propose an antidote that is as counterintuitive as it is necessary: the embrace of excess. Not the excess of material accumulation under capitalism, which fuels the very rampant commercialism that fascism often cloaks itself in, but the excess of life experiences: those collective, transcendent moments that overflow the boundaries of the individual self and connect us to something greater.

From S. Elizabeth at Unquiet Things - Midnight Bouquets Suspended In Time: Petra Coyne’s Dark Reveries & Spectral Echoes:

I am currently ensorcelled by Petah Coyne’s darkly romantic sculptures, where wax, silk flowers, and taxidermy birds transform into ethereal, baroque-like forms. Her pieces conjure the atmosphere of those moments in gothic paperbacks where the heroine discovers the truth isn’t in the attic after all, but blooming madly in plain sight in the conservatory. Massive chandeliers of black flowers drip with wax, their surfaces catching light in unexpected ways, like something dredged up from the depths but somehow still gleaming.