Monthly Link Dump: June 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 - all discovered through my RSS feed reader (another reason why you should get a feed reader too).

Sapphire & Steel, Mark Fisher and Ghosts in the Machine – Nowhere, Forever and Faded Spaces within Cultural Circuitry: Wyrd Explorations 22
by Stephen Prince at A Year In The Country

Sapphire & Steel was a curious choice for prime-time broadcasting; as Mark Fisher says in The Ghosts of my Life, it was science fiction without many of the expected trappings of the genre such as exotically different alien beings, spaceships, gadgets and advanced weaponry and it did not meet its audience halfway by providing thorough explanations for its world, story and characters.

A mighty contagious absence, part two
by Steve Mitchelmore at This Space

The pleasure of writing by hand in notebooks is not in what one writes but in its opening onto possibility, the potential to become something complete. I write one sentence and a world opens. This is not possible on a computer because everything one types can be deleted in a moment (and usually is), whereas one is driven forward by the pen and potential is maintained despite striking out a typed or handwritten sentence; even an eraser leaves the ghost of a pencilled word.

The Dark Room: “The Borderlands” by Matt Sawyer
by Bob Fischer at The Haunted Generation

The Britain of the 1970s now feels like a country undergoing a dramatic transformation. Pulling ourselves away from mid-century austerity, we attempted to embrace new technology, new lifestyles, even a new form of currency – while also, perhaps, harbouring nagging doubts about the tidal wave of modernity rapidly racing inland to sweep away the last vestiges of post-war grimness.

Doggerland in the Age of Anxiety
by John Bostock at Life on the Edge

This is the story of a buried treasure trove of collective memory, a place called Doggerland, with a meaning and resonance for us today, in our age of anxiety and man made climate breakdown, a metaphor for loss and perhaps hope.

Generative AI and the Business Borg aesthetic
by Tracy Durnell at Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden

The Business Borg aesthetic uses technology to signal wealth and power. Generative AI is not the only visual expression of the Business Borg aesthetic, just its most recognizable. The aesthetic is also signified visually by CGI-heavy blockbuster franchises, NFT art, and the Cybertruck; and in text by LinkedIn corporate thirst traps, X braggadocio, SEO word vomit, and generated “answers” to search results.

GenAI is Our Polyester
by W. David Marx at Culture: An Owner's Manual

Humans have no universal faculty to judge aesthetics: Our appreciation of beauty is highly-contextual and depends on factors other than the raw visual stimulus. Most tech-workers are unaware of this fact, and for them, the fact that AI-art resembles human-art means it must be pretty damn good. But AI art is already in very poor taste: not just because it recycles existing conventions in a way that looks outmoded, but because it's already overly associated with less-than-prestigious institutions. GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz.

Land Hoarders
at The Peaceful Revolutionary

So landlords of the past literally stole peoples land and homes, and invented homelessness to make more money and make their employees and renters more reliant on them. This has created the system we have today.

The Genius of Mythago Wood
by Mark Nemglan

Mythago Wood really is not a fantasy work, nor is it folk-horror. If anything, it has more in common with so-called ‘magical realism’ and the works of Calvino, Borges, Eco; and especially Alan Garner. It’s a mesmerising, nourishing book that, despite its seemingly inoffensive nature, gets its metaphorical thorns into your skin. It will stay with you, and ask you to re-read it from time to time. Happily, its sequel Lavondyss remains in the same universe, is longer, better-written, gentler, and even more… uncanny.

Ennui
by Robert Wringham at the New Escapologist

By “the problem of leisure,” Stuart Whatley in the New Statesman (a generally left-wing periodical) refers to the idea that most people wouldn’t know how to spend their time if they no longer had to go to work. Or, worse, that they would spend it deleteriously. It’s the “lotus-eater” theory in which we all become the obese layabouts of WALL-E. I’ve always found this to be a deeply conservative and patronising position. My position is that, after a period of idling, most people will want to act, to help themselves and the world in some way. But what if I’m wrong?

The Living and the Dead – Further Glimpses of Albion in the Overgrowth: Wyrd Explorations 24
by Stephen Prince at A Year In The Country

The BBC television series The Living and the Dead could be considered to be one of the more overt explorations of some of the themes of folk horror and its attendant sense of spectres and patterns beneath the land in recent mainstream broadcast drama

Reflections on Psychick Albion
by Cormac Pentecost at Temporal Boundary Newsletter

In order to avoid the hubris of religion or of humanism it is necessary to ground one’s subjective imaginings in a particular place: Albion. To be explicitly clear, this is not to imply that there is any sort of special significance to this place above all others, except in the sense that (for me) it is here and now and as such it gives a material texture to my experience of being. There is a special significance to Albion but this special significance could be discovered anywhere. So, there is a subjective experience that takes place in a particular setting. In this interaction between mind and place, magick occurs. As TS Eliot put it (meaning something quite different): “Between the idea and the reality…Falls the shadow”.

Orphée posters
by John Coulthart at { feuilleton }

After watching Jean Cocteau’s Orphée again this weekend I went looking for the film’s posters. There was more variety out there than I expected. Nothing as lavish as the posters for La Belle et la Bête but then you’d expect a fairy tale to be presented with more visual flair than Cocteau’s modernist myth.

Through The Cables And The Paisley Underground now?
by Nikolas Vitus Lagartija at I Was A Teenage Sisters of Mercy Fan

It was not only in Europe, however, that the band were seen as heralding a new dawn of psychedelia rather than a gothic apocalypse. Another revered trade paper, this time in the USA, The Gavin Report, was fulsome of their praise of the Sisters’ début album, finding it “hard to hang a label on” (unlike their UK counterparts) in their review which highlighted tracks for radio DJs to focus on.

What Can We Expect? (Pt. 2)
by Miranda Reinert at Step one of a plan

The new cover features Sabrina, in a black mini dress and tall heels, kneeling in front of a man's leg while he has a handful of her signature blonde hair in his fist. You can't see his face. She's touching his trouser clad leg lightly. It's got a sort of film grain and flash look that evokes a sort of 70s or 80s style album cover, except the girl in the photo is the musician not just some sex symbol for a rock band that sucks. If this were one of those album covers, she'd be looking up at the man. Sabrina looks at the camera.

On liminal spaces and cheap Aussie hair conditioner
at Soil, Stone and Bone

It is one of those places you go past every day and never notice. Then when you do notice it, it is a thing of sublime beauty and history. A church, a particularly beautiful yet stubby thing, no soaring spires, squatting between the decaying bed and breakfasts, Victoriana in decline, paint peeling home-made ‘vacancies’ signs blowing in a sudden surprising wind, astroturf yellowing in the salty blow from the sea.

R/revolution
by Oli Mould at taCity

But if the Revolution (with a capital R) is too late, then let us continue the revolution (with a small r). Let us be uncompromising. Let it be wild and ungovernable, shaped not by blueprints but by the burning insistence that this world, this Empire, cannot go on. Let it erupt in the cracks of capitalism and techno-feudalism they thought were sealed. Let it speak in many tongues and genders, refuse their borders and laws, shatter their monuments, and replant the earth with the names of the lost.

The Wild Awake
by Erik Davis at Burning Shore

A specter is haunting our increasingly posthuman world: the specter, or should I say the spirit, of animism.